Departures With Robert Amsterdam

The United States has enjoyed a position of relative primacy in the international system since the end of World War II, but are those days numbered as China and other powers continue to rise? Or does Washington still have a few more decades left in the tank? Matthew Kroenig, a political scientist and the Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, has a decidedly more optimistic view of the capacity of American democracy to help the country prevail in the new rivalries with China and Russia. On the podcast, Kroenig discusses these questions by taking a critical look at the strengths of weaknesses of democracies vs. autocracies by highlighting seven different confrontations between rivals, from from ancient Greece to the Cold War. In his new book, "The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China," he argues that although democracies do not always win wars, they do have outsized strategic advantages in compariso