Foreign policy is more determined by consolidated power. And system of government doesn’t determine consolidation of power. The US had a very different global r

Foreign policy is more determined by consolidated power. And system of government doesn’t determine consolidation of power. The US had a very different global role before the world wars of the 20th century. It wasn’t because the US allowed women to vote that it became a superpower, for instance. North Korea is not insular because it’s an autocracy, it’s because it’s a vassal state of China and has no capability to exert its will independently in any meaningful way - arguably they would take the South given the elbow room. Throughout the globe and time you can point to plenty of autocratic nations with expansive foreign policy - not just meddling in other nations with kinetic actions but attempting to subsume entire territories into their own empire/nation. That this happens regardless of governing system seems to demonstrate that there is no strong deterministic bond there. I’m not saying there’s no indirect link - I tend to think that democracies when done right (separation of powers, rule of law, free and fair elections) make a country less brittle in the face of organic seasonal challenges - think agricultural society vs hunter gatherers. Being less brittle to the daily challenges may give them the adaptability to survive longer than the cresting and crashing empires. Maintaining continuity/momentum is beneficial to consolidating power, so there may be an indirect link. TBD. Democracies fall in on themselves too. Pure democracies in particular, implying pure democracy is probably not the ideal end state we should imagine ourselves working towards.