International Security, Prosperity, and Cooperation

The Foundation promotes international peace, security and cooperation based on the use of deterrence as an essential underpinning to diplomatic engagement and dialogue.

In the briefly unipolar “end of history” era that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union many Western thinkers came to believe that the last serious threat to the Western liberal order had been defeated, that Western liberal democracy would become a globally dominant order, and that, as a consequence, the need for hard power deterrence in support of diplomacy would fall away.

Four decades after the "end of history" era the briefly unipolar world order has become a multipolar one in which Western liberal democracies are increasingly challenged by their global rivals. For Western governments a deterrence strategy based on a willingness to bring hard economic, military, and diplomatic power to the forefront of international engagement is essential to securing a balance of power within the multipolar global order where rogue nations and malign actors threaten global peace and stability.

Effectively executing hard power deterrence strategies requires Western democracies first to demonstrate confidence in the inherent moral legitimacy of their political systems and secondly not to cede national sovereignty to multilateral global institutions. Such institutions have a role in facilitating diplomatic engagement, but they are, by force of numbers, dominated by states that threaten the values underpinning the Western liberal order by using multilateral majoritarianism to threaten and weaken the economic and security interests of Western democracies.