Authors

Discussion

Supporters of “democratic peace theory” postulate that the US interacts non-coercively with its post-Cold War allies because they are developed liberal democracies (Doyle 2024, 1). They have vested their respective collective interests in the rules-based international order and functionally assume that each accepts the obligation to maintain it . Beijing has also benefitted. Critics note that the one-party totalitarian state aims to redraw territorial boundaries, acquire much of the Pacific under its sovereignty, and extinguish liberal democracy in Taiwan. They infer that it has these aims significantly because the Chinese Communist Party collectively has vested its interests in the perpetuation of this totalitarian system. The authorities justify totalitarian control as tactically necessary to rectify past foreign imperial acquisition of Chinese territory and to reassert China’s regional and global prestige (Esarey and Han 2024). The legitimation claim includes pervasive, constant vigilance against subversive, neo-colonial threats from economic and cultural trends. The challenging great power encourages and manipulates the corporate and civil society organizational vehicles to generate subversive, malevolent political influence. This influence is malevolent because it purportedly threatens to undermine the national sovereignty and international status aspirations which resurgent China and Russia claim. These aspirations are justifiable both because of perceived historical roles and current capabilities and the US and its allies wrongfully seek to deny these aspirations. As democratic peace theory suggests, the nature of the regime in Xi Jinping’s China and Putin’s Russia incentivizes them to be inherently revisionist towards the US-led order in the post-Cold War world. To achieve Kelsen’s recommendations for maintaining liberal democratic regimes, state borders need to be readjusted to provide self-determination for aspiring nations. Liberal democracies may collapse under the strain of failure to liberate and unify with irredenta, thereby changing the regime amidst. e.g., a state of emergency. The archetypical case is Mussolini’s march on Rome to disrupt interwar Italian liberal democracy (“March on Rome” 2024). Current critique of Kelsen’s thought emphasizes the importance of the function of tolerance in a polity for a democratic polity to be exist substantively as opposed to legally. The shared alliance perception that the commitment to liberalism is innate among the allies is the foundation of the belief in bona fides. In the ideal-typical liberal model, the government is representative of the national citizenry. The liberal alliance has strong domestic constituency commitment within in its members.