Robert Kagan is senior fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. His books include The World America Made (2012) and The Return of History and the End of Dreams (2008). Politics follows geopolitics, or so it has often seemed throughout his- tory. When the Athenian democracy's empire rose in the fifth century B.C.E., the number of Greek city-states ruled by democrats prolif- erated; Sparta's power was reflected in the spread of Spartan-style oligarchies. When the Soviet Union's power rose in the early Cold War years, communism spread. In the later Cold War years, when the United States and Western Europe gained the advantage and ultimately triumphed, democracies proliferated and communism collapsed. Was this all just the outcome of the battle of ideas, as Francis Fukuyama and others argue, with the better idea of liberal capitalism triumphing over the worse ideas of communism and fascism? Or did liberal ideas triumph in part because of real battles and shifts that occurred less in the realm of thought than in the realm of power? These are relevant questions again. We live in a time when dem- ocratic nations are in retreat in the realm of geopolitics, and when democracy itself is also in retreat. The latter phenomenon has been well documented by Freedom House, which has recorded declines in freedom in the world for nine straight years. At the level of geopoli- tics, the shifting tectonic plates have yet to produce a seismic rear- rangement of power, but rumblings are audible. The United States has been in a state of retrenchment since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. The democratic nations of Europe, which some might have expected to pick up the slack, have instead turned inward and all but abandoned earlier dreams of reshaping the international system in their image. As for such rising democracies as Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Africa, they are neither rising as fast as once anticipated