US isn’t key to democracy

As noted above, one of the more disappointing trends of the last fifteen years has been the apparent erosion of democracy and human rights. According to Freedom House, “nearly 75 percent of the world’s population lived in a country that faced [democratic] deterioration” in 2021. These setbacks have even occurred in established democracies, and close US allies and partners, including Hungary, Mexico, and Turkey. Even the United States is counted among the twenty-five countries that suffered the largest decline in democracy from 2010 to 2020.37 But it would be a mistake to blame US relative decline for the democratic backsliding of the last decade. After all, while the United States has often encouraged the spread of democracy globally, it has also occasionally thwarted it, either by overthrowing or undermining elected governments, or colluding with autocratic regimes to put down pro-democracy movements. Even US allies and partners have been subjected to US interventions, including everything from election interference to assassinations and coups d’etat.38 Such efforts often conflicted with the United States’ supposed commitment to liberal values and respect for self-determination. In her study of covert regime-change operations during the Cold War, for example, political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke observes that forty-four of sixty-four, or more than two-thirds, supported authoritarian forces, “including at least six operations that sought to replace liberal democratic governments with illiberal authoritarian regimes.”39 Even as the United States was engaged in such behavior, however, democracy spread around the world. From 1945 to 1989, for example, the number of autocracies fell from 137 to 105 while democratic states rose from a mere twelve to fifty- one. By 2001, according to the Varieties of Democracy Project, the number of democracies equaled the number of autocracies (eighty-eight each).40 The expansion of democracy globally from the late 1940s and into the 1990s produced several generations of men and women empowered and inclined to challenge leaders when they lie, mislead, or otherwise behave in ways contrary to the interests and wishes of their people. This has important implications for the global order, and the US role within it. At the height of its power, the United States might have been forgiven for occasional hypocrisy when it talked about supporting democracy even as it subverted it. During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, for example, the US role was clearly seen as preferable to the alternative, or a “necessary evil” to thwart a presumably revisionist power. In the present era, however, the United States is being held to account by its longtime allies and partners—and especially by the publics in these countries. The durability and resilience of the current order, including the ability to resist pressure and intimidation by dominant powers, could be made stronger by the continued growth of democracy. Democratically elected governments that ignore their own citizens in order to maintain faith with a foreign patron risk being voted out of office. The general election in Spain in March 2004, for example, ousted the ruling People’s Party (PP). Many factors explain the upset, including bloody terrorist attacks just days before the vote, but the PP had strongly supported the US war in Iraq, despite the war’s unpopularity in Spain, and the winning Socialists pledged to remove Spain’s troops from Iraq.41 And US officials have sometimes struggled to work with new democracies—even those that they had a hand in creating. In successive parliamentary elections since 2005, Iraqi voters have chosen representatives who did not support US policy objectives, with many elected officials openly hostile to the presence of US troops on Iraqi soil, and supportive of close ties with Iran. In the Maldives, meanwhile, challenger Ibrahim Mohamed Solih defeated President Adbulla Yameen in elections held in September 2018, on a promise to review all infrastructure deals negotiated with China.42 While US elected officials from John Quincy Adams to George W. Bush have celebrated the growth of democracy around the world, the evidence does not support the claim that the United States has been a leading driver of such trends. And there is reason to believe that democracy can grow again, as it did in prior eras, so long as people around the world believe in its relative advantages over undemocratic alternatives.