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Few hypotheses in international relations are more influential than democratic peace theory-the idea that democracies do not go to war with one another. The idea, the political scientist Jack Levy wrote, "comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations." It has motivated U.S. foreign policy for nearly a century. In the early 1900s, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson embraced democracy promotion as a means to peace. During the Cold War, successive administrations spoke of the standoff with the Soviet bloc using grand ideological terminology. No distillation was grander than President Ronald Reagans address before the British Parliament in 1982, in which he claimed that the West exercised "consistent restraint and peaceful intentions" and then proceeded (seemingly without irony) to call for a "campaign for democracy" and a "crusade for freedom" around the world.
Democratic peace theory became especially influential once the Cold War ended, leaving the United States truly ascendant. In his 1994 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton claimed that "the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere." His administration then surged aid to nascent post-Soviet democracies. Clintons successor, George W. Bush, was equally vocal about the need to advance liberalism in order to promote peace, telling the 2004 Republican National Convention, "As freedom advances, heart by heart, and nation by nation, America will be more secure and the world more peaceful." As president, Bush even used democratic peace theory as one of the justifications for invading Iraq. In a speech on the war in November 2003, he declared, "The advance of freedom leads to peace."
The idea that democracy breeds peace, however, is at best half true. The United States has repeatedly attacked other countries. Europe's major democracies also have a long history of intervening in other regions, such as the Sahel. And rather than marking the permanent triumph of liberal democracy, the post-Cold War period is now defined by growing divisions and conflict. As is now plain, the spread of liberalism does not by itself curtail fighting.
Yet the proliferation of wars carried out by democracies does not disprove democratic peace theory wholesale. Liberal states may not act peaceably toward everyone, but...