Cynical Means Lead to Illiberal Ends

What does the U.S. get when it “wins” this poorly-defined contest?

Janan Ganesh wants lots of dubious compromises with abusive governments, and he wants them now:

If the US made moral accommodations at the all-time peak of its powers, how much more expedient will it have to be now?

Too expedient to avoid domestic rancour, it seems. The cries from the left (“sellout”) and right (“appeasement”) are distinct, but amount to the same constraint on foreign policy. The US, Nixon included, squandered resources and intellectual effort in the early cold war on the mistaken notion of “monolithic communism”. It shouldn’t fall for monolithic autocracy. Eventual victory lies in sensing then exploiting the cracks within illiberalism. While ethical squeamishness is natural, the higher ethic is to win.

Ganesh’s column is very strange. He refers to “the authoritarian world” and says that it will “fracture first,” but then by the end he is admitting that there is no such thing as an authoritarian world to be fractured. Exploiting divisions between rivals makes some sense in the abstract, but why does the U.S. need to be exploiting “the cracks within illiberalism” in the first place? Ganesh refers to “eventual victory” as the goal, but this is its own species of folly. What victory does Ganesh imagine that the U.S. is going to win? What does the U.S. get when it “wins” this poorly-defined contest?