Paywalled, so I can't get at it. But how does "maintaining a lead" translate into preventing non-democracies for using it for their non-democratic stuff, even i

Paywalled, so I can't get at it. But how does "maintaining a lead" translate into preventing non-democracies for using it for their non-democratic stuff, even if they get theirs a few weeks or years later? Assuming the human race continues for another hundred or more generations, delaying something by one generation in some corner of the world is not very consequential.