How democracies compete with autocracies to bias international order in their favor—and why democracies are losing   Winner of the 2025 Grawemeyer Award for World Order   “Owen makes a powerful case that the fate of American democracy hinges on the health and welfare of other democracies.”—Foreign Affairs   It is well known, and much discussed, that liberal democracy is in trouble worldwide. Much of this discussion focuses on conditions within individual countries: their inequalities of wealth, political polarization, media environments, and dominant ideologies. In this book, John M. Owen IV sees the failures of democracy as failures of “ecosystem engineering.”   Like beavers, nesting ants, or (most intensely of all) humans, nations actively reshape their environments to make them more favorable for their own species—this, for Owen, is the true meaning of Woodrow Wilson’s phrase “to make the world safe for democracy.” However, liberalism has evolved in ways that are no longer