From Democracy Digest:

Today’s authoritarians are increasing their mutual collaboration in new organizations and through long-established intergovernmental agencies, a trend sketched out in the Journal of Democracy, notes Marc F. Plattner, a distinguished nonresident fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies and author of Democracy Without Borders? Global Challenges to Liberal Democracy (2008).

But a coordinated response from democratic states raises the question, Who Belongs in the Club of Democracies? and suggests that the foreign policy of the liberal democracies needs to proceed both at the level of geopolitics and the level of ideas in confronting the authoritarian challenge, he writes for American Purpose:

For the most part, the defense of our security interests and the defense of democracy complement each other. But there are sometimes serious tensions between them. ….Dealing with the issue can require unpleasant compromises. Nearly everyone accepts that when the survival of democracy itself is ultimately at stake, it may be necessary to swallow our revulsion at partnering with abhorrent regimes. 

Read the full article here.