Aside from how you define what a real democracy is, or how the US has never had a policy of supporting democratic forces all the time as was shown in the Third World during the Cold War, I would suggest this comment is very wrong and is more a political statement of patriotic sentiment and not much else.

The heaviest lifting of the First World War was done by the armies of Britain and France, and even if they had lost its a pointless hypothetical to speculate whether or not democracy would have died as a concept. The Second World War was won by a coalition of powers including but not limited to the United States, including the worlds largest colonial empire and an authoritarian Marxist-Leninist state, both of whom arguably were critical to any decisive victory over Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.

The Cold War statement varies far too close to politics for my liking but simply put the statement assumes that Western European democracies and other democratic states in the world for some reason would all cease to exist without the USA; the tone of the comment also seems to buy into the triumphalist perspective of the end of the Cold War which is rarely taken seriously by scholars such as Gaddis or Sakwa.

So in short, he is wrong, though it would be less wrong to suggest the USA has played a big role in the growth of something alike liberal democracies in the world since the start of the last century. My last comment on this would be to not treat Musk's word as gospel because he's a successful entrepreneur like some people do because he will never be a historian.

AskHistorians really isn't a place for hypotheticals.

I would say Musk is largely wrong, although a lot of this comes down to various schools of political science and political economy, more so than history.

One issue is to what extent the United States was actually a legitimate democracy, as we currently understand the term. In 1950, 10% of the population were denied basic democratic rights on racial grounds.

Another, larger issue is the role that the United States actually played globally with respect to support for liberal democracy. US support played a large role in the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, and the creation of their liberal democracies; but independent movements toward democracy were on the upswing in much of the rest of the world, independent of US support, and indeed often in opposition to US military and political maneuvering.

As detailed in India's Revolution: Gandhi and the Quit India Movement, pro-democracy nationalists were successfully undermining British rule in the second most populous country in the world, and succeeded in 1947. However, India's neutrality irked the US establishment, and according to Stephan Kinzer's The Brothers, there was interest in toppling Nehru's government.

This phobia toward India's non-aligned democracy was part of a much larger phobia of the US establishment toward nationalist movements emerging across the Third World against European colonial regimes--regardless of whether these movements were pro-democratic or not. This resulted in operations and hostility toward a variety of democratic governments, the most well-known being the operations against the nominally democratic governments Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1961, Chile in the early 1970s, and Nicaragua in the 1980s. There was also a great deal of support for dictatorships who were battling pro-democracy rebels, a notable example being during the Salvadorean Civil War; according to Cynthia McClintock's Revolutionary Movements in Latin America, US aid played a decisive role in the survival of the Salvadorean regime in the early '80s against what was a social-democratic pro-democracy coalition of leftist rebels.

As such, my perspective would be that the US government should not be credited for being a bastion of democratic preservation; there were many independent pro-democracy forces on the upswing during the Cold War, that were often opposed and defeated by the US.

I think to properly counter Elon Musk's assertion, you'd have to know what he thinks democracy is in the first place. Is Great Britain's government a democracy? They had a noble family, and even suspended elections during the war. Was the Soviet Union a democracy? They had elections; though, they may have been corrupted, but then again who's isn't? And so on.

It's worth mentioning that at the time of WWI, women couldn't vote in America, and at the time of WWII and the early Cold War, many minorities couldn't vote. So, America was defending a sort of limited representativ democracy. In addition, we have to ask ourselves -- did the Federal Government get involved in these wars for purely genuine/ideological reasons, or did they believe they stood to gain financially/economically from having a place at the bargaining table when all was said and done?

This is very much an opinion based question, so I don't exactly know how to answer it objectively. However, during the period in question the US was involved in destabilizing several democracies in Central America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. If they truly cared about protecting democracy, why did they violate the sovereignty of Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, &c &c (the list is literally too long for me to replicate here). In addition, why did they make deals with the USSR, allowing them to essentially conquer eastern Europe in the name of authoritarian socialism?

Overall it's a very ideologically loaded statement that bears a lot of unpacking. At the risk of editorializing, I think Ol' Elon has been effected quite a bit by contemporary American propaganda.

There were democratic revolutions happening independently of the US in WWI, such as the Russian revolution and the socialist uprising in Bavaria and later the declaration of the Weimar Republic, so I find the sentiment wrong here. I do think that the US was influential in the post war period in pushing for democracy in the newly created states in Europe though. In WW2, there is definitely some truth to the "arsenal of democracy" argument, and the European states the US liberated became multi party parliamentarian republics, as opposed to the Russians setting up single party republics in the countries they reconstituted. Considering the kinds of puppet governments the US set up in the cold war, I can't see how that period shows the US as preserving democracy. Although the Soviet Union is not innocent here either.

I think it depends on how thin and broad you want to make the discussion. Democracy would of popped it's head back up if it had fallen as do dictators. The US was never truly neutral in either war. One of the reasons the US entered WWI is because it lent France and the UK billions of dollars and if they lost the war then the US would of most likely lost the money. One of the reasons the Germans ended the war with Russia was because it wanted to move the troops to the West in hopes of beating the French/UK before the US troops got to Europe. What would of been the fate of the alliance if the US had with held war material and money from all sides?

I think the Germans or maybe the Soviets would of won WWII had the US stayed neutral at the start of the war.

I think the statement is only vaguely defensible with regard to World War 2- every major axis regime was an authoritarian state (although still democratic Finland also fought as a co-belligerent against the USSR) and Nazi Germany imposed authoritarianism to greater or lesser degrees in countries they occupied, often empowering domestic fascist movements in the process - while the major axis powers were turned into democracies after western allied occupation. Yet even there, the opposition to the Axis contained colonial powers which were only democratic in the metropole, along with the Stalinist Soviet Union, and the occupation period itself saw no shortage of dirty tricks to keep communists from winning elections.

With regard to the cold war, many US allies were not democracies, and many movements aligned to a degree with the USSR believed more in democracy than the regimes they were fighting, and were more popular with the people at large. The democracy/dictatorship divide Musk describes played out to a degree in Europe - but quite often the opposite was true in Asia, Africa, or Latin America.

World War I was motivated by nationalism and alliance systems, not democracy at all. Imperial Germany was a lot closer to democracy than Tsarist Russia - none of which stopped the Third French Republic (which, while having no monarch involved in the political system and no political roles formally reserved for the wealthy or nobles, still denied the vote to women and people in the colonies) from choosing Russia as an ally. There were elements of democratization in the European war's aftermath, but also "plebiscites" like in Eupen and Malmedy which were much less than free and fair, and Austria and Germany were not allowed to unify, no matter how much the people there wanted it - and German colonies and non-Turkish Ottoman territories only traded one master for another.

(With regard to the question of whether the US role was decisive, that's a hypothetical and it's arguable Germany was losing WWI either way. But adding the world's largest industrial and nuclear power to one side of any conflict makes an enormous difference. And of course, while non-universal suffrage "democracies" and outright dictatorships are very different regime types and laws varied from state to state, many Americans were barred from voting in the period - legally because of poverty and illiteracy, in practice typically but not exclusively because of race - especially in the south.)