Yes, liberal democracies do need to build up a cohesive alliance to counter the threats – militarily and in the war of ideas – that are posed by aggressive authoritarianism, but without falling into two dangerous pitfalls – the author of How Democracies Die warns: to inadvertently bring all illiberal regimes into a united geopolitical front, and to think that the threat of personalistic despotism is just somewhere “out there”, and not also within the fragile corps of Western democracies themselves.
