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A Princeton professor, renowned for his work studying authoritarian regimes, said history teaches that the United States can triumph over the coronavirus pandemic if America doesn't "defeat ourselves."
"I would be cautious about predicting the future, but obviously this is a very serious challenge. And the challenge could get significantly worse as well as significantly better," said Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton and Hoover Institution senior fellow, on Fox Nation's "Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson."
"If you look at overall World War II or the Cold War and the struggle first against Germany and Japan and then against the Soviet Union, you see that democracies are better than totalitarian regimes at mass mobilization of resources," he continued.
From his work studying the Soviet Union, Kotkin concluded that there are two major factors necessary to overcoming national calamity--competent, compassionate leadership and social solidarity and trust.
Compassionate leadership and social solidarity are weakest in authoritarian societies, said Kotkin.
"The advantages are on the side of democracies," he noted.
However, Kotkin warned America runs the risk of failing to rise to the challenge posed by the coronavirus, as well as the threats from authoritarian powers around the world.
"You win because people step up. The leadership actually performs or outperforms expectations. The social solidarity increases. It strengthens over time. You win because you earn it. Not just because you are pre-destined with superior tools at the beginning. This is the challenge for us. We're not going to win this battle unless we rise to the occasion.
"It's very, very important to understand that we have the attributes that nobody else has," said Kotkin, "But we can squander them. We can lose the battle because we're the people who can defeat ourselves. If we have incompetent leadership, if we have non-compassionate leadership, if we lose our social solidarity."
According to Kotkin, shared national purpose and trust in American society have been on the decline.
"Your strength as a society is obviously unity. You want to have a sense of collective purpose. You want to be Americans without hyphens. You want all citizens to be equal before the law. And part of the national community and part of the collective endeavor, we have fragmented ourselves badly," he argued.
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"We've fragmented ourselves in part socio-economically with the maldistribution of opportunity... but also with a kind of identity politics or tribal politics which forgets the 'e pluribus unum,' which forgets the collective enterprise, the unity of purpose.
"Social fragmentation has been deeply debilitating to us, and those are the things that must be overcome because that's what we need now to get ourselves domestically out of this crisis, but also internationally," he concluded.
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