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If liberals control the institutions, they won't be able to prevent infiltration and Long March-style assimilation. How can they expect to survive if they're not suppressing enemy ideas, if they reject the concept of enemy ideas? I don't just mean 'we're going to abolish freedom of speech once we win and put you in camps' which obviously opposes liberalism, I mean 'we deserve/need all the power' ideas that are functionally identical to the above. Once you have all the power you can do whatever you like.
Liberalism is inherently unstable. It's useful for a very specific circumstance, where you have a frozen conflict or a stalemate. But conflicts don't stay in this equilibrium for long, power shifts unpredictably. Eventually you'll get a victor and a loser. This is much more stable. The victor can use their superior power to entrench dominance over the loser. Maybe their dominance will break in some unexpected disaster. Then you simply flip it around so the loser becomes the winner.
So how did liberalism get so far? Luck of geography. The British got a moat to protect them from all the European armies, this let them indulge in noncompetitive governance and ideology. They were free to invest heavily in seapower which turned out to be hugely effective for wealth creation and ideological propagation. And they were given huge deposits of easily accessible coal as the cherry on top.
America got a ridiculously strong starting position, facing not a single strong enemy in their entire hemisphere. They got to take the bulk of a rich, temperate continent virtually for free. The English-speakers ran away with the world because of our favorable geography, not because our ideology actually works. If there was a land bridge from Britain to Europe, liberal democracy would not exist. Napoleon or Hitler wouldn't even have had a chance to thrash it, it would've never even made it that far. There's a reason liberals tend to be vaguely anti-militaristic, suspicious of standing armies. Only countries privileged enough to be anti-militaristic can afford to be liberal.
The Dutch and Polish tried liberalism and vaguely democratic systems of governance. The Athenians tried it. It didn't end well for them. They were on the continent, playing on hard-mode. The Dutch and Athenians could sort of pretend to be islands with their floods and walls, that perhaps explains why they did better than Poland, by far the biggest loser of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Swiss got to be an island in the mountains and that worked out for them.
So my conclusion is that of course appreciation for liberalism will decline over time. It took a lot of luck to get this far, we shouldn't expect it to last. Ceteris paribus (and this is a very important qualifier), illiberal countries are stronger than liberal ones. Illiberal ideologies are stronger than liberal ones. Just look how the liberal system struggled to beat Bolshevism. They were tied down by an economic system that does not work, devastated by WW2 and controlled only the poor, weak countries and East Germany while the liberals got all the rich, strong countries! The liberals could shoot themselves in the foot several times and still win, it was ridiculously lopsided.
So liberalism defeating communism is evidence that illiberal ideologies are stronger, because liberalism won too slowly? How quickly should communism have fallen? Can you give a specific number of decades? And justify your chosen parameter value?
This seems a bit like arguing that basketball teams from the East Coast are better than the Chicago Bulls, because the Chicago Bulls had to go into overtime in order to beat the most successful (in the modern era) East Coast team.
As for riches, we can compare what happened when e.g. Finland and Estonia ended up on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Note that, unlike West Germany, Finland did not receive Marshall Aid. Similarly, Czechoslovakia was more prosperous than Italy or Spain prior to World War II:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_People's_Republic#Economy
True, liberalism had the advantage of an economic system that worked better than socialism, but it's not clear how far liberal economics and liberal politics can be disentangled. For example, censoring private media is a political and economic intervention. Modern capitalist but undemocratic and authoritarian regimes like Pinochet's Chile or the East Asian Tigers were not able to last for very long before becoming democratic (except in the special case of Hong Kong).
As I see it, the 20th century saw two extremely important defeats for illiberal ideologies. Firstly, fascism was defeated militarily, despite being an ideology whose principal appeal was military virility. Secondly, communism was defeated economically, despite being an ideology whose principal appeal was economic prosperity. At the end of the 20th century, the only non-liberal ideology worth worrying about was Islamic fundamentalism, and that has proven to be unable to spread beyond Muslims in the modern world - there just aren't huge numbers of people converting to Islam in the way that large numbers of people rapidly became fascists or communists in the 20th century.
Liberalism, broadly defined to include things like American conservativism (which accepts all the fundamental postulates of liberalism) and progressivism (which is less individualistic but still at least nominally accepts ideas like democracy and civil rights) today in the West is like the air: it's an ideology so entrenched in every facet of public life that people barely notice it until the rare occurrence of a problem, like covid lockdowns.
Fascism was defeated by the greater resources of the Allies, stemming from aforementioned lucky geography. If it were a test of pure military/strategic efficiency, there's no contest. Imagine if Germany had an extra 60 million citizens, just to match the US! Imagine if Germany was the world's biggest oil, steel or automobile producer (like the US was). Imagine if Japan's economy was a few times larger, if they had much coal, iron or oil on their home islands! Don't you think these material factors would change the outcome of the war?
The Allies behaved incredibly stupidly and made mistakes that should've cost them the war, only they used their resources to bludgeon their way to victory. In 1933 onwards, they let him remilitarize when they could easily have invaded and used the fact that they had a much stronger army to defeat him. In 1936, they let Hitler remilitarize the Rhineland. They gave up an alliance with Italy over their invasion of Ethiopia. Few now remember the Stresa front where Mussolini was aligned against Hitler. They let Hitler annex Austria. They let him annex Czechoslovakia, a well-defended country. They let him invade Poland without pressuring Germany in the West, refusing to support the ally they joined the war for. The Allies pointlessly gave up the incredibly strong starting position they had vis a vis Germany in 1933. Why? Precisely because of stupid liberal principles like non-aggression and pacifism. They refused to do advance their interests because they thought it might be morally wrong to defeat Germany while it was still weak, or work with Mussolini, or get an alliance with Stalin before Hitler did. They did everything wrong.
The British somehow failed to prevent a German naval invasion of Norway! Germany was dependent on iron ore shipped over this long, vulnerable route. Somehow the entire British navy failed to block off this route or prevent the Germans landing in Narvik, despite the German fleet being much smaller. The Allies somehow managed to fail defending Benelux and France, despite having had decades to prepare for that very invasion. They chose not to develop the weapons they needed to defend their own countries, they were dysfunctional.
Germany alone managed to thrash two and a half global empires! They conquered Poland, Benelux, Denmark, Norway and France in quick succession. They clearly knew what they were doing. At any rate, the mistakes they made were subtler and smaller in scope than the Allies just doing everything wrong from 1933-40.
It was only that the US intervened, bailing out the British when they faced complete disaster. The Soviets were preparing manically when the Germans invaded - note also that the Soviets possessed the largest army and airforce in the world when Germany invaded. The longer Hitler waited the stronger they got. Yet Germany had them on the ropes for a while, invading a much larger country while also fighting other global empires in Africa, the Atlantic and in the skies over Europe.
The US had a nuclear monopoly from 1945-9. They could've destroyed the Soviets then, while they were maximally devastated from WW2. Better yet, they could have avoided having a fanatically pro-Stalin president in FDR, a guy who literally said: "I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace."
A less pro-Stalin president would've provided more conditional aid to the Soviets, tapering it off as they began to win the war. A less pro-Stalin president would have negotiated with the Germans to bring them on side against the Soviets. FDR pumped out all this propaganda about the lovable Uncle Joe Stalin, limiting US options postwar. FDR slow-walked US counterintelligence into the massive Soviet espionage campaign, his administration was full of Bolshephiles. FDR introduced the policy of unconditional surrender precisely to persuade Stalin he wasn't going to sign a separate peace, to increase his confidence in the US. This was a stupid move that got many Allied soldiers killed fighting a defeated Germany. Why not retake France and Benelux, provide Germany some reprieve from incinerating their cities and start bombing the Soviet Union? Let Germany do the bulk of the fighting, with some support as necessary. Then nuke the Soviets into the ground!
It would take one decade for communism to be defeated, at most. The entire Cold War was a huge error.
They were all in the US sphere of influence. All the East Asian Tigers and Chile, Brazil, Indonesia... were all heavily influenced by the US due to US size and power. America launched coups in these countries or propped up their dictatorships, they had huge power there. In China, the US had only limited power due to Chinese size and power. Lo and behold, China hasn't adopted US ideology! Nor has Russia for that matter. I think it was very silly that people assumed a wide range of weak, small US puppets/dependencies adopting US ideology was some kind of impartial law of the universe tending towards liberal democracy. It reflects the fundamental flaw of liberal democracies just hoping that things will go their way, hoping against all evidence that their problems will just disappear. The UK and France hoped Nazi Germany wasn't a threat. The US under FDR hoped Stalin was a nice guy. The US hoped that China would democratize.
Ok, so when you say "liberalism", it includes non-aggression and pacifism? So was the post-WWII US a "liberal" country?
I'm also confused by both your condemnation of Britain and France for underestimating the Nazi threat in the 1930s and your confidence that FDR could have negotiated an alliance with the Nazis in the 1940s against the USSR.
As for defeating communism by nuclear war in the late 1940s, post-WWII, this would have been good in many ways, but it would not have been the drastic ideological defeat that was inflicted on communism in the Cold War. The communists failed by their own criteria of success, just like the fascists. Sadly, there are still communists, but there are far, far fewer than there were in the 1940s and 1950s. If communism had been defeated militarily, far more communists could argue "Well, in the brief period of the USSR, it grew rapidly and it was going to provide tremendous prosperity for everyone as those growth rates continued." The stagnation of the Soviet economy since the 1960s, as well as repeated economic failures everywhere that communists held power for a prolonged period, has created a huge wealth of simple empirical evidence that has reinforced what sound economists have always known.
It's true that liberal democratic politicians often make this mistake, but you would need evidence that they do so at a higher relative frequency than illiberal non-democratic politicians. Even if we just look at the 1930s and 1940s, Hitler and Stalin had their own disastrous moments of wishful thinking.
There are more and less liberal countries. Modern day Denmark and Iceland are more liberal. Post-WWII USA was less liberal, it's gotten more liberal since then. But the US then and now was supposedly fighting for peace, freedom, human rights, defending the international order, enforcing the will of the UN... It's strategic moves were outwardly justified by liberal ideas. Some liberalism crept into the US's actual operations and strategy. That's the problem, why such a strong country has struggled against such weak opponents.
Well FDR couldn't because he was best buddies with Stalin. But the Germans by late 1944 weren't stupid. They knew they were losing. It was FDR's demand for unconditional surrender that kept them fighting. That was what glued them to Hitler. That and the Morgenthau plan was grist for Goebells' mills. He could fairly reasonably say that it was a war of annihilation, that any German who opposed Hitler in this darkest hour was betraying the fatherland. And so they fought on. The Germans were sending out peace feelers to the UK in 1940, they were trying to negotiate the whole war and especially towards the end.
Both errors are of the same fundamental type. Britain and France weren't reading the situation correctly and working to advance their interests. They abandoned the Czechs, failed to ally Germany or Russia. Allying Hitler in the late 1930s wouldn't have been such a bad idea, all things considered. Allying with Russia was another option. Almost anything would've been better than what they actually did, which was appease Hitler when he was weak, declare war on him when he was strong (but not actually attack when he was distracted in Poland), while spurning Russia and Italy.
The US didn't read the situation in 1944-5. They could've allied with Hitler against the Russians, or negotiated with German generals for a post-Hitler Germany. There was a lot of plotting going on in the German General Staff in 1944-45! Why let the Russians get so far into Europe? Why keep assisting them with lend-lease? Why not try to undermine them now that they were the primary danger, now Germany was out of the running? FDR genuinely believed in the United Nations, in this liberal utopia of peace and joy that Stalin could help achieve. That was the problem.
Absolutely, but these had some kind of reasoning behind them. Hitler knew Stalin was a major threat, he was perilously close to Germany's main oil supplier in Romania. They were ideological enemies and Hitler wanted their land. Hitler thought the Red Army was much smaller than it was, that's just an intelligence failure. Based on what he knew at the time, invading Russia was a good idea.
The US was fighting an undeclared war in the Atlantic and providing significant aid to Britain. Roosevelt was known to be a Germanophobe, it was pretty obvious the US was militarizing and would soon come after Germany. Declaring war would let them sink more convoys while the US was less prepared. They were not aware of how quickly the US would be able to train and field a large force, the Germans thought it would take them several years more to be seriously effective. There were costs and benefits, it's not a massive blunder.
Stalin thought Hitler wouldn't invade so soon, that the British were trying to lure them into war with false intelligence. That's a reasonable perspective. There's also the idea that Russia was preparing for an invasion of Germany, they had stationed huge forces on the border that Germany swiftly destroyed in Barbarossa. The Soviets were making light wheeled armored vehicles that would be pretty poor at defending Russia but useful for good German roads. The Germans crowed about capturing huge ammunition stockpiles on the border and German phrasebooks. This is revisionist history that has been contested but is fairly persuasive IMO.
Imagine if Stalin or Hitler had the upper hand against a disarmed, demilitarized Allies. Do you think either of them would let the Allies rearm and annex several small European states? They'd never make errors of that type. There are errors of faulty intelligence and miscalculating short term gains vs long term harms. But then there are errors of not knowing what you're doing, of living in a liberal fantasy land.
About the only example I can think of illiberal politicians messing up in such a ludicrous way was when the Khwarizmis killed the Mongol ambassador.
Main goal of unconditional surrender policy was to avoid the botched end of WWI, avoid situation where the enemy will try for the third time. Allies were interested in victory, not negotiation and were beyond caring about German feelings.
It was successful, Germany hadn't waged any wars for 70+ years and isn't going to in the foreseable future.
LOL. Aside of political impossibility, why would you want to do it? Why keep around the Nazis (who were anything but "reliable allies"), when you can rebuild the country from point zero as you wish.
Again, you cannot deny it was succesful. West Germany was far more useful to US/NATO than any Nazi or "reformed Nazi" state would even going to be.
West Germany served as a hypothetical meatshield against the Soviet Union. I'm talking about making it an actual meatshield against the Soviet Union. Note that nothing stops a US with a nuclear monopoly then turning on Germany again after its purpose is served.
"Oh you helped us beat the Russians? Well we're now going to reorganize your country anyway!"
If so, then it was a silly idea. They could simply decide to enforce the treaty they sign. How precisely you get to a treaty doesn't matter so much as whether its enforced or not. Furthermore, the balance of power was against Germany after WW2, you can't think that West Germany or modern Germany would be in a position to wage any offensive wars.
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