Dictators have reemerged as the greatest threat to the liberal democratic world : By Robert Kagan

"Dictators have reemerged as the greatest challenge facing the liberal democratic world. We need to start imagining what it will be like to live in such a world, even if the United States does not fall prey to these forces itself. Just as during the 1930s, when realists such as Robert Taft assured Americans that their lives would be undisturbed by the collapse of democracy in Europe and the triumph of authoritarianism in Asia, so we have realists today insisting that we pull back from confronting the great authoritarian powers rising in Eurasia. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s answer, that a world in which the United States was the “lone island” of democratic liberalism would be a “shabby and dangerous place to live in,” went largely unheeded then and no doubt will go largely unheeded again today."