The ability to project geopolitical hard and soft power around the world begins at home. Democracies should take some very muscular actions to protect themselves and extend their power and influence in a number of ways that play to their strengths in technology and innovation. These measures, however, require that the democracies be strong enough themselves to be able to take and sustain these actions. Put in the vernacular, the democracies cannot run the long Cold War 2.0 marathon, and certainly not against the Chinese, unless they are in good physical, mental, and emotional shape.
The democracies need to spend more money on defense, but at the same time governments must resist corporate interests who argue unreasonably an “AI gap” or “biotech gap” just to get more government money. In order to effectively fend off the autocracies in Cold War 2.0, the democracies need to help their citizens become more digitally resilient. This was useful for a social media–saturated world, but it is now absolutely imperative for an AI-infused world. Moreover, AI should be regulated, but with a light touch that doesn’t dampen the tempo and volume of research and development or build a digital moat around today’s leading AI behemoths. This will be one of the most consequential legislative interventions in the economy in the history of the United States—Congress and the White House, with the help of the courts, should be prepared to course-correct a few times before they get it right. And not to end on an ominous note, but the democracies need to better protect themselves internally from the autocrat apologists and autocrat appeasers—and would-be autocrats—all mingling among their own citizens. Given the assessment of the state of global technology innovation undertaken in this book, it is highly unlikely that the autocracies can win Cold War 2.0 on their own, but their chances improve markedly if it becomes an inside job.
There are several very sobering lessons to be learned from Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, its unjustified invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the resulting Russo-Ukrainian War. Some are big, macro lessons, while others operate at the more specific, micro level. Most fundamental is the realization that the autocracies are willing, in the current era, to pursue territorial conquest by military invasion. Prior to 2014 it was thought in the democracies that this form of state aggression went out of fashion in 1945 with the defeat of Hitler, the Nazi autocrat. Clearly that was wishful thinking. Pursuing territorial conquest by military force, contrary to the UN Charter,1 is again something, practiced and condoned by the autocracies. This expansionist behavior underlies much of the tension and anxiety inherent in Cold War 2.0.
The previous chapter proposed, among other changes, refashioning NATO (which currently comprises only countries in Europe and North America) into GATO, the Global Alliance Treaty Organization, an international collective defense community of democracies. This would bring together a number of democracies in the Asia-Pacific with their counterparts in North America and Europe into a formidable global collective security pact. Whether or not GATO can be made a reality, there remains the critical question of whether, and by how much, GATO members, or existing NATO members and those other democracies, should increase their defense spending in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s stated intention to take back Taiwan, including by military force if necessary.
Table 1 in chapter 10 sets out the size of the economy of each major democracy, and the relative size of their respective defense budgets. Just focusing on the countries that are NATO members, only seven spend the NATO-required 2 percent of domestic GDP on national security, and of these countries four have small militaries in absolute terms: Greece, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. The three larger countries that do meet the 2 percent threshold include, thankfully, the United States, which has a very large military budget (the two others are the United Kingdom and Poland). Still, that leaves twenty-four NATO members who do not meet the 2 percent requirement.2 This has to change, and immediately. Helpful statements have been made in this direction by several governments, including in Germany, but actually turning a pledge into real military equipment ready to deploy in case of conflict is quite a task, and currently many democracies are failing this important test.3 Canada, for example, can and should do more for defense preparedness. Canada is a G7 country, and an important member of the G20, and yet Canada spends on defense only 1.3 percent of GDP. That is just not good enough. For far too long Canadian governments have been content to outsource their defense to the United States. That cannot go on. If Canada hopes to be taken seriously around the world on matters of Cold War 2.0, it has to step up its defense preparedness. (I specifically call out Canada because I am Canadian.)
Even if all the laggard countries (like Canada) stepped up with additional financial commitments for defense spending, currently many of them would be unable to procure new equipment because the most compelling weapons systems are on back order. In short, even if the demand side were corrected, there would remain serious challenges on the supply side.
During World War II the factories of the United States (with important support from Canada’s industrial concerns) became the “arsenal of democracy.” In 1943, at peak production of that war, the industrial base in North America was producing 8,000 planes and 700 tanks each month, and three “Liberty” naval vessel every two days. The cost was high, including in foregone cars for civilians that were postponed until later in the 1940s. The stakes, though, were even higher, and so it made sense to repurpose industrial capacity to the war effort in this high-tempo, urgent manner.
Since the end of Cold War 1 the military-industrial base of the democracies has atrophied. When the East Bloc gained its freedom in 1989, and Soviet Russia collapsed in 1991, the democracies believed they had earned a “peace dividend.” They were delighted that huge sums of money that henceforth didn’t have to be invested in national defense could instead be spent on healthcare, education, and pensions. No one seemed to notice that the factories that used to produce military assets like ammunition were downsized dramatically, and in some cases shut down.
The result is that today in the United States, for instance, only one factory makes 155 mm artillery shells. The plant dates from the 1930s. It can produce 460 shells a day. At the peak of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine was firing about ten times that in order to match the Russians shell for shell. As a result, Ukraine at various times in that war experienced a dire shortage of artillery shells. There are ten (smallish) factories in Europe that produce 155 mm artillery shells, and they are working hard to backfill Ukraine’s requirements, but it will take some time. Bottom line, the military-industrial base in the democracies for the nuts and bolts of war fighting needs to be rebuilt.
In some respects, the lack of capacity in the democracies in manufacturing high-end weapons systems like Patriot air defense systems, F-35 fighters, and tanks is even more pronounced. Take the Patriot ADS, the high-performance system that has made such a difference defending Ukraine, including against the Russian Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missile—that’s the great news. The bad news is that building a new Patriot system takes two years. That is simply unacceptable. The two US defense contractors responsible for manufacturing it can only produce eighteen of them a year. This is also unacceptable. And the cost is an eye-popping $1 billion for each one. Again, unacceptable. And each intercept missile that it shoots at incoming missiles costs $4 million. That’s on the border of unacceptable, but still needs to be much cheaper. The weapon, or its successor, needs to be redesigned to make it less expensive. And its supply chain needs to be able to produce many more of them much more quickly.
In the meantime, the current production dynamics (even at the grotesque costs) have to be massively improved, and fast. Taiwan put in an order for $19 billion worth of Patriots and other high-end weapons from the United States in 2019, and (five years later) is still waiting for deliveries to begin. Poland is in the same position. It has recently signed agreements to buy 18 HIMARS, 32 F-35 fighters, 96 Apache helicopters, 250 Abrams tanks, and 6 Patriot systems. But it must get in line behind Taiwan, which in turn is now behind Ukraine, which is of course the customer in the most pressing need at the moment. Clearly American military-industrial capacity is not where it needs to be. Supremacy in high-technology innovation, especially in AI and high-performance SCs, will be necessary for the democracies to prevail in Cold War 2.0, but will not be sufficient if the industrial capacity of the democracies is inadequate to build in a timely manner the physical weapons systems into which all that high-tech innovation excellence is integrated.
When it comes to the procurement of weapons systems, the democracies should not underreact to the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, however, notwithstanding the two previous sections of this chapter, neither should the democracies overreact. US president Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 (fifteen years after he stepped down as the supreme commander of allied forces at the successful conclusion of World War II), when leaving office after eight years, warned of the “military-industrial complex,” and the danger in simply deferring to defense companies on the critical question of how much of the government budget to allocate to national security. Arms manufacturers will always argue that the democracies are behind the autocracies in military capability because these companies are always striving to receive yet more government spending on military equipment. In democracies, though, governments cannot allow the fox to take the hens to market.
This has happened numerous times since World War II. In the 1950s (when Eisenhower was president) some proponents who wanted more military spending argued there was a “bomber gap,” namely that the Soviet air force had many more large bomber aircraft than the US, thereby allowing Russia to deliver atomic bombs against targets in America more effectively than the Americans could do against Russia. A decade later it was the “missile gap” that had many arguing for increased US military spending. (The “missiles” referred to the intercontinental ballistic rockets that were used to deliver nuclear warheads to their targets half a world a way.) In both cases, though, when the facts were looked at clearly and dispassionately, there was neither a bomber gap nor a missile gap.
Currently, some commentators argue that the Chinese have surpassed or will soon surpass the US in artificial intelligence technology and innovation.4 These claims should always be carefully considered and tested. Currently if there is a “technology gap” (including in AI) it is in the favor of the democracies, especially if the contributions of all the major democracies are considered in the aggregate (and not just those of the United States). Accordingly, as long as all NATO members manage to spend their 2 percent of GDP target amount, that should be sufficient to pay for defense for the foreseeable future. Poland, perhaps not surprisingly because it is so close to Russia, is calling for this spending target to be increased to 3 percent of GDP. This should not be required, so long as the industrial capacity blockages referred to above can be fixed. If all NATO members hit their 2 percent requirement, an additional $200 to $700 billion will flow into military spending in the near term,5 and that should be plenty to deal with the threats posed in Cold War 2.0.
In other words, government decision makers should not simply take as gospel the claims about optimal spending on the military made by certain persons in the relevant industry who are under severe conflicts of interest. Rather, governments must always be prepared to make their own assessments of the facts on their own merits. This process begins by determining what objective threats actually face a democracy, and then deciding how best to counter them. Then and only then can a sensible defense budget be prepared. For example, if each leg of the American nuclear triad (bombers, submarines, land-based missiles) were simply reduced, serious financial savings could be achieved without sacrificing operational effectiveness.6 For smaller democracies, should the emphasis be on procuring very expensive fighter jets, like the F-35, or are they better off buying more missiles and drones? At the end of the day, they might be able to perform virtually all of the functions of the fighter jet required by the smaller country, particularly when deployed in a predominantly defensive capacity. This is precisely the debate currently being waged in Taiwan about its defense spending plans, particularly as the small island nation considers the wisdom of implementing a “hedgehog” approach to fending off a likely Chinese attack. This debate in Taiwan has been turbocharged by the war in Ukraine, where early on, after the invasion by massive Russian forces, the smaller country (Ukraine), to everyone’s amazement, was able to perform well against the behemoth Russian army using just such hedgehog tactics.
A further, somewhat related lesson can be gleaned from the Russo-Ukrainian War. Notwithstanding Putin’s multiple threatening statements about the potential use of nuclear weapons, at the end of the day the Russian autocrat has not used them. It appears China’s leader Xi Jinping reinforced with Putin a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons. Perhaps for any armed confrontation over Taiwan a similar understanding will be reached, namely that the US will not bring nuclear weapons to that battle, nor will China use them against Taiwanese or American (and allied) forces, so long as the defenders use their conventional missiles only against Chinese military installations. It appears the modus operandi is developing that nuclear weapons, even so-called tactical ones (intended to be used on a battlefield against troops rather than against civilians in a city), are to be contemplated only as second-strike weapons, essentially in response to an enemy that has violated the no-first-strike rule. That would be a useful doctrine coming out of the Russo-Ukrainian War, and would help ensure deterrence through mutual assured destruction (but no other use of nuclear weapons). Confirming such an understanding between both sides of the Cold War 2.0 conflict, or realizing that logic simply compels such a conclusion, would allow democracies and autocracies with nuclear weapons to spend less money on them over the years to come.
Collectively, the NATO countries can field the largest military force on the globe, particularly if properly funded by all its members (see above). With the poor performance of Russia’s army on the fields of Ukraine, there may be a temptation on the part of NATO to deploy its much stronger military forces into theaters where they should not be sent. For example, there is a terrible civil war unfolding in Sudan. International journalists based in Khartoum generate a constant stream of awful images of the fighting and the vast suffering of civilians. As terrible as these pictures and videos are, the democracies should resist intervening in Sudan. If anyone decides to send in peacekeepers once there is a reasonable hope that the belligerents have had enough of the fighting, it should be the African Union. This is a civil war between two autocratically oriented camps and is no place for troops from democracies. On the other hand, Botswana is a democracy in Africa that is situated in a very dangerous neighborhood. Were Botswana to ask for help, including military assistance, from the democracies, they should respond favorably. Democracies everywhere should assist other democracies, wherever they might be. Other democracies in Africa are threatened by al-Qaeda and other militant Islamist militias. Again, these countries deserve military support from democracies.
By contrast, the US and certain other democracies should not have invaded Iraq in 2003, notwithstanding that Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s autocrat, was odious in the extreme. In a similar vein, the US and other democracies were justified in going into Afghanistan in 2001 to clear out al-Qaeda training camps, but this took only about ten months to accomplish. After achieving this goal, the armed forces of the democracies should have left Afghanistan. Instead, they stayed on to attempt to “bring democracy” to this country. After eighteen years, sacrificing much blood and spending huge amounts of treasure, the democracies in August 2021 pulled out ignominiously. Incidentally, the embarrassing manner of their exit invariably factored into Putin’s decision to launch his invasion of Ukraine six months later.
In short, the democracies should not try to “bring” democracy to another country or region that has not previously been a democracy. That is an incredibly daunting, high-risk task. In an appropriate case, the democracies might send some help that can “amplify” the efforts of a large group fighting for democracy, but it cannot supplant them. Put another way, if only a small group of local people want democracy enough to die fighting for it, then most likely sending troops from the established democracies cannot do much to help the campaign. This seems like a harsh conclusion, but the alternative is worse, namely the quagmire in Afghanistan. Ironic as it sounds, democracies should not be in the business of planting the tree of democracy in some foreign land. What the democracies can do, though, is help water and nourish a democracy tree for a limited period that was previously planted by a solid majority of the local population. Ultimately, though, it is up to the local population to take over the care and maintenance of that democracy, and if they fail, that will be a sad day, but not one that should prompt the intervention of armed forces from the democracies.
At the same time, though, while extreme care must be taken not to send troops from the democracies into war zones where only a bloody quagmire awaits them, neither should the democracies shy away from using military force where clearly it is called for and it can be dispatched with relatively low cost, both in treasure and blood. In 2013, the US government made it clear to the ultra-autocratic Syrian regime that use by Damascus of chemical weapons against its own people would be a redline for Washington and would result in a military response by the US armed forces. When the Assad dictatorship nevertheless dropped chemical bombs on its own people, the Obama administration failed to follow through on its prior redline warning. This was a major mistake, and gave the Syrian dictator even more rein to sow deplorable violence on his own people.
One of the great strengths of democracies is their openness. That very openness, alas, is also one of their principal weaknesses. The openness allows the autocracies to pump social media into the democracies that is full of disinformation. The Mueller report described in great detail how Internet troll farms in Russia conducted a concerted campaign to undermine the 2016 elections in the US. Moreover, the quality of the disinformation propagated by the autocracies is getting increasingly more sophisticated. The Mueller report makes the point that many of the messages from the disinformationists didn’t simply say “vote for Trump.” (Putin did not want Hillary Clinton to win the election, as she was very tough on the autocrats, especially him, when she was US secretary of state.) The tactics of the autocrats on social media are more devious, but highly effective. A Russian operator would sign up to, say, a Facebook group, and over the course of months he would slowly, but surely, insert messages into the conversation that turned members of the group very anti–Hillary Clinton. What can be done about this and related problems where the autocrats, as a core strategy of Cold War 2.0, steadily work to undermine democracy in the digital space of the United States, Canada, and other democracies?
One answer is not to become a closed society (as autocracies are doing), but rather to remain open, but then to become very resilient. Two avenues compel themselves. First, the social media companies must step up and delete social media accounts of the most obvious nefarious foreign agents. They have started to do this, but much more effort has to be expended on this. The social media companies in the democracies have significant financial resources, and more of that wealth, generated from their online services (including related advertising), has to be reinvested in making them safer.
An interesting analogy can be drawn with the meat processing industry 120 years ago. When they were first operating in America, large, unhygienic meat factories shipped a great deal of tainted meat.7 Many consumers of this bad meat were getting sick, and some were dying. The government finally decided to step in and impose standards on the meat-packers, coupled with inspections of their operations by government regulators. The meat processors responded that it was unreasonable on the part of the government—simply too onerous—to require that no meat leaving the plants could be tainted. The government remained firm. It effectively said, “If you are making profit from a slice of meat leaving your plant, you have to make sure no one eating it will get sick from it.” Within a few years, the US meat-packing industry cleaned up its act, and the rate of sickness and death from tainted meat dropped dramatically. Today, tainted meat in the US consumer market is very rare indeed. This is what needs to be done with disinformation. American social media companies are very profitable. Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft together had combined profits of $255.7 billion in 2022.8 Clearly, more of these earnings must be reinvested in the safety of their products or services.
Governments in the democracies, including through their schools, colleges, and universities, must also educate their public to identify and handle disinformation. To push the meat analogy a little further, when a consumer is shopping for a steak or a pork chop at the grocery store, they need to be able to spot at least the visible signs of tainted meat by taking a good hard look at the package they take out of the cooler. Is it discolored in any way? Is it past its best-before date? Does the cellophane wrapping have a rip in it? Yes, the meat processor, and the grocery store must take their measures as well, but so should the consumer. With disinformation, there are many artificial intelligence filters that need to be applied by social media companies to remove problematic accounts and false or problematic content. Certain sophisticated disinformation has to be reviewed by human content moderators employed by these companies. Still, some disinformation will get through these filters, and that’s why a discerning content-consuming public is required as well.
Taiwan and Estonia are democracies that have been particularly successful at educating their citizens about disinformation. Both live beside huge autocracies that deluge their smaller neighbors with waves of problematic messages over the Internet, as well as large-volume hacking and malware attacks. Taiwan and Estonia have done a good job of defending their computer systems against the professional hackers that China and Russia, respectively, either employ, enable, or condone. Estonia’s expertise has been recognized by having it host NATO’s permanent anti-disinformation and cyber-hacking center. Impressively, Taiwan and Estonia have also coached their citizenry, including children, to recognize disinformation so they are not as easily duped as millions of citizens are in other democracies. All students in elementary and secondary school in all democracies should be taken through the training that these two countries give their students. It is important that the democracies inoculate their people at a young age against pernicious social media tactics and other software-based attacks on their country, including the various ways that autocracies try to debase the truth. In Cold War 2.0 all the citizens of the democracies are frontline troops in the struggle against disinformation and weapons of hacking destruction, and citizens of all ages need to be given the proper weapons and training so they become resilient against them.
There is a further challenge for the democracies in the digital world of disinformation dissemination: high-quality journalism must be saved in many information markets, especially some cities and smaller centers where currently there simply is no local journalism. Different funding models need to be explored, and they may well include some financial assistance from the social media companies calibrated to the number of users they have in any given region, particularly if its efforts at minimizing disinformation are not working very well. In that case, the more money the social media platform makes from the disinformation the more it should pay to fund independent journalism in that region, so that at least some of the worst effects of the disinformation that it enables can be countered by the high-quality journalism (which presumably would be made available for citizens in the region at no cost rather than only behind a forbidding paywall).
The four accelerator technologies profiled in chapters 5 to 8 are so powerful that their use, and certain aspects of their development, will require some government regulation and oversight. For example, the owner of a concert venue in New York City is using facial recognition software to ban entry to people to events simply because the owner doesn’t like them.9 This, and similar use of digital technology that offends a broad sense of morality and ethics in the democracies, must be regulated. How this is done in the democracies will be very different from how it is attempted in the autocracies. Importantly, the mechanisms employed in the democracies for ensuring suitable protection of the public through regulation must be sensitive to the dynamic of competitive displacement. Regulations must not become barriers to entry that make it practically impossible for smaller, late-to-the-game “improvers” from competing against larger “first movers” in the marketplace. When large tech companies with virtual monopolies in the marketplace lobby governments for specific types of regulation, proponents of open markets should start to worry.
Mindful of the foregoing admonition about the need to regulate carefully, three sets of rules should be contemplated. First, the democracies need a privacy law that protects the reasonable expectations of users of technology regarding their own personal information, whether provided for some online transaction, or collected by a service supplier as part of a service or product, or provided to a medical center as part of a biotech procedure, just to name three of the literally hundreds of ways personal information is increasingly being collected, stored, used, and shared in a modern tech-oriented society.
The democracies around the world now have enough experience with privacy and technology that under the auspices of the OECD all the democracies should come together and agree on a single format for such a privacy law. The starting point would likely be the European Union’s privacy rules, the so-called General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) as they have been adopted by all twenty-seven countries of the EU, but then they would be tailored to allow the United States, Canada, and other democracies to adopt them as well. The result would be a single set of common privacy laws that would apply wherever an individual happens to interact with an online or offline service based in a democracy. The law’s enforcement, though, would be done locally by the data privacy regulator in that specific country.
Two other laws would be required, one for artificial intelligence (AI) and one for biotechnology (BT). The privacy aspects of these two domains would be governed by the privacy law discussed in the previous paragraph. Several other laws found generally in democracies that set out norms of behavior for the entire society would also cover these two technologies. For example, suppliers of products and services who advertise to consumers cannot make false claims for their offerings. This general law would already apply if a merchant used an AI that wrote a misleading advertisement.
The specific laws for AI and BT, by contrast, would address risk aspects unique to these two novel domains of technology. On AI, the European Parliament is ahead of the rest of the democracies in this regard and as of June 2023 adopted legislation on AI that regulates with a fairly light touch, at least initially, and only those AI applications that present material risk to users or the public at large. The logic here is that it makes a big difference whether the AI software is being used to generate fan fiction among a club of writers (a low-risk activity), or if it is being used to fly a plane in autonomous mode without a human pilot (high-risk). Only the latter software would have to go through rigorous testing, and possibly even certification, before it is allowed to be released into the stream of commerce.
A similar risk-based approach could be taken relative to BT, but presumably just about any BT application that touched human health would have to be preapproved by a regulatory body for at least safety and possibly efficacy (like pharmaceutical drugs), especially if its supplier would be making claims about the ability of the BT to achieve specific medical results. Services related to human reproduction, especially anything along the lines of an artificial uterus, would require very extensive testing by the relevant government medical device regulatory agency. The ectogenesis machine will also attract broader scrutiny. For example, the prospective parents of the EGM baby might be screened for “suitability,” just as if they were parents adopting a child, but there is a counterargument as well, given that “natural parents” are not screened in such a manner. There is some precedent to build on here in the medical field when it comes to ethics for in vitro fertilization, but there will also be some uncharted territory to explore in respect of EGM babies, in which case revisiting “the first principles of democracy” will be important.
Most contentious will be the rules surrounding “designer babies.” There might be the threshold issue whether the particular democracy even wants to allow prospective parents to have the option of requesting the health care system to attempt genetic changes that could impact personal traits, particularly if they can only be effected in a manner that makes them inheritable. Assuming the answer is in the affirmative, the really heavy ethical lifting will be to scope out the parameters of what traits are permitted to be modified and which are not. This area will be contentious, for sure, but the way democracies approach these questions will be superior to that adopted by the autocracies, at least in terms of matching technological progress with human values and ethics at each phase of the scientific/technological journey.
The goal with these three legal regimes is to construct for the new technologies of the Cold War 2.0 era a set of values, ethics, and norms that people in democracies will be comfortable with and proud of. These “Standards of Democracy” technology norms will be consistent with the underlying principles of democracy itself: the importance of significant input from everyday citizens in their formulation, the role of personal freedom, the operation of the rule of law, and press and media scrutiny as the process unfolds, to name some of the major ones. The objective is to build in each democracy a consensus in the big middle of the social spectrum; presumably persons at the two margins will not be able to be accommodated. (Some left-wing pundits will argue for a complete ban on the particular activity, and some right-wing pundits will argue for “anything goes.”) The sensible middle ideally will result in “moving ahead steadily, but always working to minimize unreasonable risks and personal and social harm.”
This prudent approach to mitigating technology risk with sensible ethical norms should become the hallmark of technology innovation and deployment in an advanced democracy throughout Cold War 2.0. If designed and managed with standards of democracy always animating the exercise, it will be far more attractive to individuals exposed to these new technologies than what is on offer in the autocracies, namely anything goes that a particular enabler is capable of sliding past the autocrat on any particular day. Over time, the superior culture for developing and regulating technological progress in the democracies will prove itself, particularly as the technological horror stories seep out of the autocracies. This distinction, between technology regulation in the democracies that assists people in their daily lives, as opposed to the less humane technology environment in the autocracies, will be an important positive differentiator of the democracies in Cold War 2.0.
Democracies derive strength from openness. This is true across many fronts, including open debate and criticism (this is why freedom of speech and press are so important) and an open market economy that allows competitive displacement to flourish. A further area where openness is of paramount importance is immigration, combined with proper controls and rules. Openness always has limits. Freedom of speech does not include shouting “fire” maliciously in a packed theater when there is no actual fire. The open economy operates in an environment of public regulation that establishes rules that all business owners must observe concerning employment, protection of the environment, the payment of taxes, etc. Likewise for immigration. Each democracy requires a firm border, and entry into the democracy is not a right. The border, though, must also have gates through which certain people (including bona fide refugees, entrepreneurs, and other designated categories of legal immigrants) can pass, if and when they qualify, as determined by the rule of law. Immigrants, like all citizens of democracies, also have obligations and duties, one of which should be to relinquish their former citizenship when they become citizens of their newly adopted country (i.e., dual citizenship should not be allowed in democracies).
Democracies profit immensely from immigration. This is particularly true in the domain of high-tech innovation, for the simple reason that literally hundreds of perspectives on science and technology are required to achieve broad progress across today’s multitude of disciplines in modern science and technology. This is certainly true in the domains of the four accelerator technologies (artificial intelligence, semiconductor chips, quantum computers, and biotechnology). Considering the computer industry for a moment, it is a stunning reminder of the value of immigration that the current CEOs of IBM, Google, and Microsoft were each born in India. Or, going back to the invention of the semiconductor chip (SC), consider that the MOSFET (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor) version of the SC, the one most commonly used currently, was invented by Mohamed Martin Atalla and David Kahng in 1959. Atalla was born, raised, and received his first degree in Egypt, and then went to the United States for graduate work at Purdue. He then joined Bell Labs, where with Kahng, he invented the MOSFET in 1959. As for Kahng, he was born, raised, and earned his first degree in South Korea, immigrated to the United States, where he earned his doctorate in 1959 from Ohio State University, then joined Bell Labs, where he collaborated with fellow first-generation American Atalla.
The list of immigrant contributors to American technology supremacy is a long one. Kahng later invented the floating-gate MOSFET with Simon Min Sze, who was born in Nanjing, raised in Taiwan, and educated at the National University of Taiwan; immigrated to the US for his masters degree in 1960 at Washington State and doctorate in 1963 at Stanford; and then joined Bell Labs, where he collaborated with Kahng. Or consider David K. Lam, who made his immense contribution in another phase of the SC value chain. Lam was born in China; his family moved to Vietnam and then to Hong Kong. As a student Lam moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto (engineering physics, 1967), then on to MIT in Boston for his masters and doctorate. He worked at Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard before striking out on his own, founding Lam Research Corporation in 1980, which went public in 1984 and today is one of the world’s leading producers of etching machines used for making high-end SCs. It is also the second-largest manufacturing company in the San Francisco Bay Area after Tesla. And speaking of Tesla, Elon Musk was born in South Africa, spent a couple of years as an undergrad in Canada at Queen’s University, then on to MIT, and then Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neurogenesis, Twitter, etc., etc.
All democracies, not only the United States, benefit hugely from immigration. With respect to AI, Geoffrey Hinton is a professor at the University of Toronto and is often referred to as the founder of the current model of AI technology. He was born in the United Kingdom and emigrated to Canada in 1987. Or consider the two key principal researchers who developed mRNA vaccine, Ugur Sahin (who was born in Turkey) and Özlem Türeci, born in Germany but whose father had immigrated to Germany from Turkey. Drs. Sahin and Türeci’s company BioNTech developed the leading mRNA vaccine for the COVID-19 virus, then did a deal with Albert Bourla (a Greek immigrant living in the United States and CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer) to distribute BioNTech’s vaccines worldwide.10 The fact that Sahin and Türeci are of Turkish origin and Bourla is of Greek origin is somewhat ironic because of the historic enmity between Turkey and Greece. The joint venture between BioNTech and Pfizer illustrates what wonderful collaboration can happen in a democracy when people look forward to a bright future aware of but not mired in the dark moments of the past.
This list could go on for an entire book of its own, focusing just on immigrants to the democracies in the tech sector. I’m particularly sensitive to this open dynamic because in Toronto, 50 percent of residents were born outside of Canada. Currently, with a population of just over 40 million, Canada is taking in 500,000 immigrants a year. About 10 percent of the newcomers are refugees, and the rest come in under a very discerning system where potential applicants have to meet specific criteria. They are allotted “points” for different skills and attributes, and they have to achieve a certain point level to be considered for entry. Another route is to come to Canada as a university graduate student (like Atalla, Kahng, and Lam mentioned above, vis-à-vis the United States). Then, if the student is successful, they can apply to remain in Canada permanently, and eventually apply for citizenship.
Some newcomers find themselves in the new world because of romance. Tobi Lütke met his future Canadian wife while the two were snowboarding in Europe. He followed her back to Ottawa, where she lived. He started making snowboards, and when he went to sell them on the Internet he found that there really wasn’t an easy way to do that, so he developed some e-commerce software himself. After a while he noticed other merchants had an interest in using his software, and he started selling the software instead of snowboards. Today, his company Shopify has sales over $5 billion and a market capitalization of $82 billion. Toby and his wife still live in Ottawa, and they still enjoy snowboarding.
While controlled immigration under a rules-based system is a true asset and strength of democracies, very large-scale uncontrolled economic migration is not. It is simply not viable to have an unlimited number of migrants approach the gate and force entry without any limits, vetting, or controls. Democracies do themselves and their citizens a disservice if they allow this sort of mass immigration. At the same time, with low fertility rates and declining populations, most democracies will require significant levels of immigration across a broad range of people with very diverse skills, including personal support workers for the health care system, construction workers, service workers, and technology entrepreneurs as previously highlighted. Still, democracies must be on the lookout for autocracies that try to destabilize democracies by encouraging illegal migrants to flood into one or other democracy, as when Belarus’s autocratic leader flew migrants from the Middle East into Belarus only to then force them to cross into Poland (a democracy), in an effort to cause political tension within a neighboring country. This is one of the more outlandish geopolitical tactics used by an autocrat in Cold War 2.0.
At the same time, the inability of autocracies to be open and inviting to potential newcomers is a huge handicap for them. The unwillingness of China and Russia to explore meaningful levels of immigration as a response to their declining population numbers will eventually impact their economies significantly. Already millions of job vacancies are going unfilled in both countries. They might consider the ectogenesis machine (EGM) concept, but at best that technology is ten years away, and then the early EGM cohorts would not appear in the workforce for another twenty years; between now and then the population declines in both countries will be severe. Controlled, planned immigration is the only immediate to midterm solution for them, short of forcing on women a totalitarian Handmaid’s Tale–type fertility system,11 but presumably even the autocracies will find that a nonstarter. But then many people in democracies thought another major land war for territory in Europe was unthinkable, too, and then Russia invaded Ukraine. Therefore, the ability to craft immigration systems that work both for immigrants and host countries will be a net plus for the democracies in Cold War 2.0, so long as governments in the democracies approach immigration with resolve, compassion, and a rules-based system of selection, screening, and entry.
Democracies have any number of major public holidays, where some form of remembrance is celebrated by giving the populace a day off work, typically a Monday or a Friday, so that people get a three-day weekend. Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, and Labor Day are good examples in the US. There are many others. In the UK they are called “bank holidays.” There will be a number of new ones made over the next decade or so as the workweek continues to shrink—perhaps one of the finer benefits of enhanced productivity brought about by the deployment of enterprise-level AI in the economy. One of those new Fridays or Monday holidays should be designated “Democracy Day.” Or, better yet, and showing some urgency, why not relabel New Year’s Day as Democracy Day? After all, what is the point of calling the first day of the new year New Year’s Day? Sounds like it is just stating the obvious. Feels like this day is just waiting to be rechristened to a moniker of more import.
The United Nations has dozens of “international days” designated by the General Assembly.12 June alone has thirty of them, including Global Day of Parents (June 1), International Day of Yoga (June 21), and International Asteroid Day (June 30). The UN celebrates International Day of Democracy on September 15 each year. As with so many other things emanating from the UN, the intent is laudable, but the execution is poor. That day needs to be repositioned as a real holiday, and some excellent, meaningful programming should be created to commemorate and reinforce a foundational institution. It will also highlight a deep asymmetrical advantage of the democracies over the autocracies. Presumably not even Putin and Xi, as brazen as they are, will rev up a holiday called Autocracy Day.
If New Year’s Day were rebranded, not much would happen on the morning of Democracy Day given the revelry from the night before. A Democracy Day brunch, though, would generally kick off the day’s activities. There is nothing like sharing a marvelous meal with friends and family, and then weaving in some discussion about what makes democracy special, and what the current threats are to the continued vibrancy, perhaps even survival, of our greatest political institution and its many necessary constituent components, like freedom of expression, freedom of the press (including the protection of journalists), and the rule of law (including the independence of judges). For the more competitive around the table, quizzes could be crafted from sources like The Economist’s “Global Democracy Index”: name the top ten democracies in the world, which democracies fell into the “flawed democracy” category the year before, which are the top twenty (i.e., worst) autocracies in the world (spoiler alert, this all-star sublist of the most awful autocracies includes China and Russia). And so on.
If there are kids around the Democracy Day brunch table, this might be when some civic education gets imparted to them. School-based learning about democracy can be a hit-and-miss thing. Simple but thoughtful booklets aimed at children could be circulated by their school or the local government. Reading these together after brunch would be a good way to spend thirty minutes. Democracies don’t do enough (anything?) to commemorate the heroes of democracy, past and present. The democracies are all in Cold War 2.0 together. It would be a good idea to get everyone in a democracy up to speed as to why it’s a contest worth fighting, and winning.
Sadly, not all leaders in democracies are committed to the ideals of democracy. Some of them actually would prefer to be autocrats themselves. A prime recent example of an autocrat within a democracy is former US president Donald Trump. In or out of the White House, he never cared for the rule of law. Many of Trump’s actions showed little or no regard or respect for the United States Constitution, although at his inauguration as the 45th president of the United States on January 20, 2017, he swore an oath to uphold it. His contempt for democracy and its norms and rules became apparent early in the primaries for the Republican nominee for president in 2016. Trump was asked to disclose his tax records, as has been customary in US presidential electoral politics in the previous fifty years, and as all other Republican primary candidates had done in 2016. Trump refused to do so, and he never did disclose them voluntarily. Later, as the GOP’s nominee for president, he was asked in one of the candidate debates whether, if he lost the election, he would accept the result. He said he wasn’t sure, thereby putting in doubt one of the most sacred practices in democracies, the peaceful transition of power.
A similar autocratic posture was repeated when, as president, he was running for reelection in 2020. He crafted a canny autocratic narrative, arguing that the only way his opponent could win is if there was election fraud, and when he clearly lost the vote, voilà, he rolled out the big lie, that the election had been stolen from him. This was an incredibly brazen move, and one that shook the American democratic system to its core. If voters do not believe their election was run fairly, then the legitimacy of the entire system of democracy can come into question. It was telling that in the sixty court cases that Trump’s team brought alleging voter fraud, they were not successful in a single one. Judge after judge threw out the fabricated claims for a complete lack of evidence. And still, even after sixty defeats in court, Trump continued to appeal to his base, propagating the big lie that the election was stolen, and asking for money. Between his election day loss in November 2020 and the removal of his account from Twitter (for inciting the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021), Trump raised a total of $200 million from his malleable fans who, it seems, would believe anything spouting from Trump’s mouth or social media posts.13
Trump’s encouragement of members of his base to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and his other efforts to subvert the election of 2020 are the clearest evidence of his autocratic tendencies. Trump kept insisting that Vice President Mike Pence overturn the election results in a few states, and thus allow the House of Representatives to vote to retain Trump in power. Thankfully, Pence had the backbone to stand up to this craven attempt at an autocratic coup. A week earlier, another politician, Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, also showed great courage in the face of enormous pressure from Trump and threats (including against his life from Trump supporters). Trump lost the electoral college vote in Georgia by about 11,000 votes. On January 2, 2021, in what is now an infamous telephone call, Trump was recorded demanding of Raffensperger, who had overall responsibility for the conduct of the presidential election in Georgia (including recounts), “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” To his great credit, Raffensperger refused to give in to Trump’s illegal demands; he subsequently also ran successfully for reelection against another candidate strongly endorsed by Trump. His rationale for running again and having to put up with threats to his life: “If the good walk off the field and leave the field to the bad, then the bad wins.”14 This statement sums up the courage required of people when they stand up to the autocrats among us.
What then should have happened to prevent Trump’s autocratic attack on the US electoral process and democracy more broadly? Right at the very beginning, during the 2016 primaries, when Trump didn’t release his tax returns voluntarily, the Republican Party should have insisted he do so. If he continued to refuse, he should not have been allowed to continue in the Republican Party contest. The GOP should have kept his name off primary ballots. Likewise, in the 2020 election, once Trump exhausted his sixty legal challenges, and it was crystal clear there was no fraud at the level Trump was arguing (i.e., enough to change the outcome of the election), Twitter and all other social media should have terminated his accounts right then and there if he continued perpetrating what at that point was clearly a massive fraud. (His lawyer for a number of these cases has since been censured by a Colorado judge after she admitted to making false claims in these cases—she said they could show there was fraud in the election results when the Trump legal team knew there was no such fraud.)15 Equally, Trump should have been prevented by the legal process, presumably criminal prosecution, from raising money based on a fraudulent claim that he now (after the results of the court cases) knew to be false. At that point, his continuing to spout lies about his losing the election through fraud should have been dealt with as the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission deal with any other misrepresentation used to make money: prosecute the con man for earning money on the strength of false claims.
At the same time, the Republican Party leadership should have come out loud and clear to condemn Trump and deliver him into the custody of Washington, DC police. When the full history of the Trump presidency and the 2020 election is written, including the dangerous and disgraceful attack on the US Capitol, a significant portion of the blame will be heaped upon the leadership of the Republican Party. Leaders like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham will be judged as “enablers,” men who refused to stand up and push back on the autocrat. We have seen this movie before. There was a coterie of businesspeople and other respectable establishment figures in Germany who thought Adolf Hitler would serve as a useful implementer of many of the objectives of the enablers. And Trump did deliver a massive tax cut for McConnell, Graham, and the other Republican Party stalwarts. Then, as happened with Hitler, the GOP grandees lost control of Trump, and unconstrained, he nearly single-handedly brought down the federal government system in the United States. Next time when an autocrat or a would-be autocrat appears on the US scene, those of both parties who believe in democracy must step up and fight for immediate expulsion of the would-be autocrat. Luckily Joe Biden’s winning margin in 2020 was sizeable enough to dissuade most GOP foot soldiers from joining the insurrection; will the US be so lucky next time?
The Democratic Party became seized with a somewhat similar problem when Robert Kennedy Jr. entered that party’s primary race in June 2023. Kennedy’s basis for running is his belief in a series of conspiracy theories that he peddles on social media.16 Many of these theories have been debunked, such that Instagram had deplatformed him. The Democratic Party should do the same. Kennedy can run for president as a third-party candidate, but the Democratic Party should not allow candidates whose primary occupation is to traffic in disinformation to do so under the Democratic Party banner.
Trump shows his autocratic tendencies in many different ways. In the 2024 primaries for the Republican Party nomination for president, Trump is calling for the United States to stop providing assistance to Ukraine, which country, having been the victim of a heinous invasion by the Russians, is fighting for its very existence. Although Ukraine receives assistance from some fifty nations, the military equipment and financial support from the United States is key, and without it Ukraine would have ceased to exist in the spring of 2022. Trump is of the view that this support for Ukraine serves no American interest, and that, effectively, Putin can have his sphere of influence in the countries surrounding Russia even if it means extinguishing a democracy of 38 million people to get it. The other leading candidate in these Republican primaries, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, echoes this Trumpian view, and then goes even further. In a statement DeSantis released in March 2023, he argued that Russia’s war in Ukraine was simply about a “territorial dispute.” In sync with Trump, DeSantis argues there is simply no American interest served by supporting Ukraine.
This position of these two candidates for the Republican nomination for the presidential election in November 2024 is reminiscent of the way two great democracies of the 1930s, namely France and the United Kingdom, tried to deal with the autocrat extraordinaire of the day, Adolf Hitler. Hitler came to power legally in Germany in an election in 1933; but once in power, he immediately went about dismantling the checks and balances first of the German state, and then of the European security system. By 1936, Hitler’s autocratic powers within Germany were virtually complete. He then proceeded to take over Austria, and then parts of Czechoslovakia. The French and British governments were terrified of what Hitler was doing, and they met with him in March 1938. They got Hitler to sign a written agreement that after digesting Czechoslovakia, the Nazi leader would pursue no further designs on his neighbors. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain thought this a great result, and when he returned to England he proudly waved the document signed by Hitler in front of the press and stated that he (Chamberlain) had secured “peace in our time.”
Chamberlain was (understandably) channeling a huge desire on the part of the people in Europe (outside of Germany) to avoid a war in Europe, which would actually be another war, given that essentially the same nations had been engulfed in World War I just twenty years previous. (That war was referred to at the time as the “war to end all wars” because it was so horrendous, with some 10 million soldiers having died fighting in it.) Chamberlain was hailed as a hero for negotiating a deal that would (apparently) keep Hitler in his place. As events would later prove, Chamberlain was fundamentally wrong about Hitler, who proceeded to invade first Poland, then France, and then bombed England and a dozen other countries in Europe before the end of 1940. This new war, World War II, would ultimately claim the lives of 70 million people. So much for “peace in out time.”
Autocrats like Hitler, and today Putin and Xi, know that their success in growing their physical empire, and imposing their autocratic regime on others, relies heavily on there being plenty of appeasers talking up “peace in out time” within the democracies. If the appeaser comes to power, then the autocrats can easily bully him into a bad deal because politicians like Chamberlain, and Trump and DeSantis today, are willing to trade away the political independence and freedom of a small democracy such as Ukraine (like a sacrificial offering of tribute to the autocrat) in return for getting a plush position in the new order. Therefore, if the democracies don’t support Ukraine now in defending themselves against the Russians, Putin will continue his crazed plan to rebuild the Russian Empire, country by conquered country, even though decades ago all relevant parties signed agreements confirming the various former republics of the Soviet Union (including Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) were independent countries with inviolable borders.
As for what the Chinese think about peace agreements, treaties, and other niceties of democracies like the rule of law, in April 2023 the Chinese ambassador to France Lu Shaye was interviewed on French television. In response to the question whether he thought the Crimean peninsula was wrongfully annexed in 2014—when Russian troops forcefully yanked it from Ukraine, and since then populated it with 600,000 Russian colonists—the ambassador replied that not only did Crimea belong to Russia, but all the territories of the “new” countries created back in 1989–1991 out of Soviet Russia were not recognized in international law, and hence they were open to having Russia retake them, presumably by force, as Putin was doing with Ukraine. It was astounding to see the mask slip just for a moment and to see the real, visceral view of the world as exercised by the autocrats: “We can basically do anything we want because we are stronger than you.” In effect, the appeasers among the democracies who supported Putin’s false narrative that the Baltic states should never have been allowed to join NATO should finally have the scales fall from their eyes. These three countries (Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania), Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and most recently Finland, in 2023, have joined NATO because it is only through collective self-defense that the democracies can keep the rapacious autocrats at bay, including Xi Jinping, the boss of Ambassador Lu Shaye, when he looks to extend the Chinese empire to include the small island of Taiwan.
From a practical perspective, the narrow answer to Trump and DeSantis and others of their ilk of appeasement is that if the United States and the forty-nine other democracies stopped supporting their fellow democracy, Ukraine, then no democracy on earth would be safe from the rapacious appetites of Russia and China, least of all Taiwan. In essence, the fight against the autocracies in Ukraine, in Taiwan, in the South China Sea, in Xinjiang (against China’s using sophisticated technology to oppress the Uighurs), against Chinese geopolitical and economic coercion, and the many other violations that the autocracies make against the rules-based international order are certainly matters for all democracies to take very seriously. It’s why the democracies are supporting Ukraine, Taiwan, and the rules-based international order wherever the autocrats start a new front in Cold War 2.0.