 Our rivals’ challenges are profound and mounting. Their problems, at both home and abroad, are associated with the pathologies inherent in highly personalized autocracies and are less easily remedied than ours. Conversely, the United States has a tradition of transforming both domestic and foreign challenges into opportunities to spur reform and rejuvenation at home. This is one reason that prophecies of American decline have repeatedly been disproven in the past—and why it has never been a good bet to bet against America. We have always succeeded when we embrace an affirmative vision for the world that addresses shared challenges and combine it with the dynamism of our democracy and the determination to out-compete our rivals. The Nature of the Competition Between Democracies and Autocracies The range of nations that supports our vision of a free, open, prosperous, and secure world is broad and powerful. It includes our democratic allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific as well as key democratic partners around the world that share much of our vision for regional and international order even if they do not agree with us on all issues, and countries that do not embrace democratic institutions but nevertheless depend upon and support a rules-based international system. Americans will support universal human rights and stand in solidarity with those beyond our shores who seek freedom and dignity, just as we continue the critical work of ensuring equity and equal treatment under law at home. We will work to strengthen democracy around the world because democratic governance consistently outperforms authoritarianism in protecting human dignity, leads to more prosperous and resilient societies, creates stronger and more reliable economic and security partners for the United States, and encourages a peaceful world order. In particular, we will take steps to show that democracies deliver—not only by ensuring the United States and its democratic partners lead on the hardest challenges of our time, but by working with other democratic governments and the private sector to help emerging democracies show tangible benefits to their own populations. We do not, however, believe that governments and societies everywhere must be remade in America’s image for us to be secure. The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy. It is their behavior that poses a challenge to international peace and stability—especially waging or preparing for wars of aggression, actively undermining the democratic political processes of other countries, leveraging technology and supply chains for coercion and repression, and exporting an illiberal model of international order. Many non-democracies join the world’s democracies in forswearing these behaviors. Unfortunately, Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) do not. Russia and the PRC pose different challenges. Russia poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order today, as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown. The PRC, by contrast, is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective. Just as the United States and countries around the world benefited greatly from the post-Cold War international order, so too did the PRC and Russia. The PRC’s economy and geopolitical influence grew rapidly. Russia joined the G8 and G20 and recovered economically in the 2000s. And yet, they concluded that the success of a free and open rules-based international order posed a threat to their regimes and stifled their ambitions. In their own ways, they now seek to remake 8 NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY