Is the world condemned to autocracy?

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s famous justification for asking Congress to declare war on Germany in 1917—“the world must be made safe for democracy”—has long been criticized as having pushed the United States down the slippery slope of internationalism and a century of ill-advised foreign interventions.

Often left out is how little democracy there was in the world at the time. Liberal democracies were the exception, and the few that existed aside from the United States, such as Britain and France, ruled colonial empires that were anything but democratic. Wilson’s concern was less a call to spread democracy than a recognition that liberal states couldn’t afford to remain passive in a world overwhelmingly populated by regimes that are threatening to democratic forms of rule.

That insight is newly urgent as the postwar order fractures and democracy recedes. After all, throughout history, the default political form has always been some variant of authoritarian rule—never democracy.

What is at stake today is no longer whether democracy can spread, but whether it can survive at all. Donald Trump’s return to the White House has brought this reality into sharp relief, as he abandons Washington’s role as the main sponsor of liberal democracy in the world. As democracies now confront both internal autocratizing pressures and the erosion of liberal constraints at the global level, they must pivot toward a diplomacy of defense and preservation—grounded in the recognition that regime competition between authoritarianism and democracy operates within states as much as between them.

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The window of time when liberal democracies flourished was a product of unique historical circumstance. While the post-Wilsonian interwar period saw the U.S. public turn back to isolationism, the outbreak of World War II and the need to mobilize allies around the world led Washington to conclude as early as 1941 that planning for a postwar order was imperative. The largely U.S.-designed international system established after the Allies’ victory was chiefly concerned with maintaining peace and security, but it also aimed to prevent the return of militaristic regimes in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan.

Embedding democracy and human rights in the United Nations Charter and its institutions was seen as an important safeguard. In parallel, the Bretton Woods financial institutions reflected a deeply held belief that liberal democracy and capitalism reinforced one another, thereby embedding those preferences into the structure of the postwar order.

This democratic encoding of the postwar institutions did not guarantee that states would always abide by liberal principles. Most European powers quickly plunged into anti-decolonization wars, while the United States adopted an ends-justify-the-means approach to the Cold War. But by and large, it provided a framework that proved exceptionally propitious to democratic regimes. Decolonization led to a surge in the number of democratic states from the 1950s to the 1970s, and a so-called third wave of democratization then spread through southern Europe, Latin America, and Asia—and ultimately reached large swathes of the former Soviet bloc.

By the mid-1990s, roughly 60 percent of the world’s states were electoral democracies. This is not to say that benevolence governed world politics—far from it. But the international system undeniably worked to the advantage of democratic regimes. It enforced gatekeeping mechanisms that limited the influence of non-democracies in key institutions and promoted a set of values—human rights, the rule of law, political and economic freedoms—that could be instrumentalized to undercut rival states. On every continent, democracies proved economically more successful than their authoritarian counterparts. In sum, the postwar system succeeded in one critical dimension: It made the world safe for democracies.

This is no longer the case.

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Following 25 years of continuous democratic decline, nearly three out of four people now live under autocratic rule, the highest proportion since 1978. The number of democratic countries has fallen to its lowest point since 1996, and their share of the global economy is the smallest it’s been in more than 50 years.

What was a few years ago described as democratic backsliding has now evolved into a seemingly unstoppable autocratic wave. Even well-established democracies face powerful internal contestation from illiberal movements that seek to weaken checks and balances and dispense with the constraints of international institutions.

By far the most consequential setback has been the United States’ abandonment of its long-standing policy of favoring democratic allies over autocratic ones. Regardless of whether or not the radical turn of U.S. foreign policy under Trump turns out to strengthen U.S. power, there is little doubt that it is making the world far more hospitable for autocracy. Democracy promotion, support for human rights, safeguards against disinformation, and anti-corruption measures are significantly weakened. Multilateral institutions, the authority of international law, and even military rules of engagement are devalued. Territorial acquisition by force—whose prohibition was the cornerstone of the postwar order—is no longer taboo.

Trump has also conferred new respectability on some of the world’s most notorious autocrats, expressing admiration for leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—even as they pursue policies hostile to the United States and its democratic allies. Trump’s presidency appears to be the first in U.S. history to exhibit overt indifference to regime type when dealing with a country or its leader.

This shift has been best exemplified by Trump’s recent decision to leave untouched the government of Venezuela following the capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro, despite the democratic opposition’s convincing victory in the 2024 presidential elections. The same logic was reflected in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, published at the end of 2025, which puzzlingly declined to identify Russia or China as actors pursuing policies adversarial to U.S. interests. Instead, the document singled out European countries, castigating their “unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition” as an obstacle to ending the war in Ukraine.

These new geopolitical realities present autocratic states with an opportunity to refashion the international order away from the preferences of its architects and self-interested stewards of the last 80 years. As Western hegemony wanes, so-called endism has become fashionable among policymakers and commentators alike as they decry (or celebrate) “the end of the rules-based order,” “the end of multilateralism,” “the breakdown of international law,” “the end of the age of NGOs,” or “the end of human rights.” Predictions for radical changes include “a return to great-power diplomacy,” “the law of the jungle,” a “Chinese world order,” or even a tripartite globe.

The reality is likely to be less dramatic, though no less challenging for democracies. International orders tend to unfold through gradual erosion rather than abrupt rupture, for political institutions are inherently sticky. The U.N.—the institutional core of the postwar order—is likely to remain central because it validates the most precious attribute of statehood: internationally recognized sovereignty. While the organization’s authority and relevance are likely to decline further as U.S. support recedes, none of the permanent members of the Security Council has an interest in seeing it displaced from its position at the apex of the international order.

Likewise, international law will endure as the shared language through which states justify their actions, condemn those of their rivals, and craft agreements with each other, regardless of compliance with its norms. The grammar of diplomatic practice among sovereign states—who meets who, when, and where—is even more deeply entrenched and will persist well beyond any particular world order. The most likely scenario is that core postwar institutions and their practices are here to stay, even as they risk increasing debilitation and contestation.

Nor are autocracies poised to construct a durable rival world order. For one, they share very little in common aside from what is essentially a negative agenda: rolling back the rules, mechanisms, and institutional dispositions that structurally favor liberal democracies. And, crucially, the capacity of authoritarian powers to erect or sustain international institutions is limited by structural features.

First, they struggle to form lasting alliances. Democracies tend to coalesce easily thanks to the openness of their political and economic systems and the relative transparency of their institutions. But autocracies are idiosyncratic and have few common points beyond their repressive character. Their political systems rest on unique foundations that are specific to their national context: Iran, China, Venezuela, and Eritrea have little in common—intimate knowledge of one offers no meaningful insight into the functioning of the others.

Second, autocracies are inherently distrustful of anything that could tie their hands domestically. Secrecy is the hallmark of authoritarian rule, and unpredictability is central to its functioning. These conditions are hardly conducive to dependable cooperation between states. Indeed, the risk of conflict among nominally aligned autocracies is never remote. Georgia’s membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States did not dissuade Russia from invading in 2008; shared membership in the Gulf Cooperation Council did not prevent a Saudi-led blockade of Qatar in 2017; and decades of membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations did little to prevent deadly border clashes between Cambodia and Thailand last year.

Democracies, by contrast, almost never go to war with one another. As a result, democratic partners can afford to invest more in each other, which makes them more interdependent over time.

Third, autocracies are hampered in providing the glue for building and maintaining global or even regional orders. They are structurally reluctant to submit to the constraints of international agreements or international law, which ultimately rely on a willingness to subject state power to institutions such as international courts and arbitration and dispute-settlement bodies. Autocratic states also struggle to develop effective global organizations, since no member can allow another to assume real leadership, fearing that such authority could come at their own expense.

Finally, succession issues make autocratic regimes unpredictable. Transitions inevitably trigger questions about loyalty and direction, leading to score-settling, purges, or abrupt policy reversals. These conditions are not conducive to building rules-based systems among sovereign states.

This does not mean that autocracies cannot cooperate, coordinate, or come to one another’s aid when their interests align. Yet much of what is cited as proof of their ambition to build new world orders is little more than a growing ability to frustrate Western-led global governance—by evading economic sanctions, shielding wayward regimes, trading outside established systems, and using multilateral forums to denounce the inequities and failures of Western hegemony.

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The case of China is instructive. It undeniably has the attributes of a superpower: It is the world’s largest military power, the second-largest economy, a science and technology leader, and a manufacturing juggernaut. Beijing’s capacity to challenge Western democracies and coerce smaller neighbors is growing, and its diplomacy has become markedly more assertive. It has cast itself as a champion of the global south at the U.N., and it can no longer be sidestepped in multilateral negotiations on climate, debt relief, or emerging industrial standards in space and artificial intelligence. And although China’s partnership with Russia may have begun as a marriage of convenience, it has hardened into a consequential alignment.

China has established a range of international institutions that parallel existing ones, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, modeled after the World Bank, and the newly created International Mediation Court, which is positioned as an alternative forum to the International Court of Justice. Above all, China is the driving force behind two groupings challenging Western hegemony: the BRICS+ bloc and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, whose membership stretches from China to Iran.

Still, one would be hard pressed to find instances in which China does not couch its actions within the confines of the existing world order, affirming the central role of the U.N., emphasizing respect for international law, and appealing to principles that on paper differ little from those enshrined in the postwar order. Take China’s most recent position on global governance reforms: “The purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter are universally recognized basic norms of international relations. They must be upheld unwaveringly,” it reads. “Staying committed to international rule of law [is] the fundamental safeguard for global governance.” Beijing also insists that it does not seek to displace the United States.

Should China’s reassurances be taken at face value? Probably not. But neither should one accept the frequent claim that Beijing’s revisionist intentions are plainly visible in its official pronouncements, if only one knows how to decode them. Such decoding rests on analytical cherry-picking: Statements that can be read as challenging the West are treated as revealing China’s true intentions, while language that is cooperative, forward-looking, or norm-affirming is dismissed as deceptive propaganda. A simpler explanation is that China does not seek to overturn the architecture of the international order but is instead intent on challenging its liberal elements and its hierarchy. In this, it is likely to find a growing number of supporters.

This is where the danger to democracies lies. The threat is not the wholesale replacement of the system but the evisceration of its liberal components by increasingly assertive autocracies. These components, often overlooked as insignificant factors in international relations, are essential to democratic survival in an undemocratic world.

Among the three pillars of the U.N.—peace and security, development, and human rights—the last has become a primary target. Though it accounts for barely 5 percent of the U.N.’s budget, the human rights pillar represents a profound challenge to autocratic rule and repudiates absolute sovereignty. Violations of human rights are illegitimate even when committed by a legitimate state authority, making them effectively a supranational matter.

Under Chinese and Russian leadership, efforts to weaken the U.N. human rights machinery are beginning to bear fruit. In the U.N.’s Fifth Committee, which oversees the organization’s budget, a coalition of autocracies and compliant allies has worked to cut the budgets of both the Human Rights Council and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Meanwhile, China and Russia routinely vote against or obstruct resolutions addressing acute humanitarian and human rights crises, from Sudan to Myanmar, and block Security Council items with rights-related components.

Authoritarian regimes also seek to limit the participation of civil society organizations in intergovernmental processes—both because such groups represent autonomous political forces and because they serve as independent channels of information. The same logic drives their attempts to delay or derail international agreements on global governance issues ranging from climate change to arms control. To preserve maximum political agency, autocracies resist broad binding accords that might compel changes or impose costs for non-adherence.

This insistence on sovereignty is paradoxical given that authoritarian regimes are more likely than not to be willing to violate those principles in pursuit of their interests. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a telling example of how sovereignty is invoked in principle but breached in practice. When collective action might protect sovereignty—such as defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity—or preserve peace and security by preventing conflicts from festering, these same states oppose intervention, citing respect for domestic jurisdiction.

The result is a system in which autocracies claim to defend sovereignty while hollowing out its meaning. Reflecting its own authoritarian aspirations, the Trump administration has brushed aside traditional deference to territorial sovereignty in discussing the acquisition of territories including Canada, Gaza, Greenland, and Panama—not to mention the claim to be running Venezuela.

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Democracies face an unsavory dilemma. They can choose to defend multilateral institutions that, while increasingly obsolete and often ineffectual, still serve democratic interests better than autocratic ones. Or they can opt to relinquish the liberal elements of the system to accommodate non-democratic powers—preserving the architecture, if not the spirit, of the postwar order. Put differently: Could the price of preserving the international liberal order be to make it less liberal?

The pragmatic appeal of accommodation is undeniable. But it risks unintended consequences back home for democratic governments. The tension between democracy and autocracy is not merely an external feature of international competition. No democratic country is entirely free of autocratizing pressures, and no autocratic regime is without latent or overt demands for democratization. Domestic and international politics are therefore inseparable: They continuously shape one another, influencing not only how states act, but also what they seek to achieve.

Autocracies must constantly mobilize against the risk of democratization—hence their relentless suppression of political opposition and the press, manipulation of the judiciary, and control over civil society. Democracies must guard against the gradual drift toward autocratization, often advancing through corruption and the capture of public institutions by private interests. These domestic dynamics inevitably extend to the international arena, where opposing states are bound together in mutual dependence yet locked in systemic rivalry. Democracies seek to insulate their political systems through investing in international institutions, mechanisms of international accountability, and promoting democracy and human rights. Though such efforts may appear modest, they are perceived by autocracies as profoundly subversive.

Indeed, no matter how close a partnership a democracy may forge with an authoritarian power, its security would ultimately be better served if that partner became a democracy—as Latin America’s transitions in the 1980s and Eastern Europe’s in the 1990s suggest. Autocratic regimes are aware of this ever-present peril and deploy disinformation, corruption, coercion, and destabilization to weaken democratic states and lower the risk of so-called color revolutions and democratic contagion.

Regime competition is not a binary contest; it is a tension that runs through every type of political system, orienting it in one direction or the other depending on which of the two forces predominates at that time. U.S. President Joe Biden was correct to warn in 2021 that the world is standing at an “inflection point” in the struggle between democracy and autocracy. Yet his administration’s failure to recognize that this struggle is as domestic as it is global meant that his democracy agenda quickly ran aground: It proved impossible to draw clear lines between those belonging to the democratic camp and everyone else, while inescapable geopolitical trade-offs between interests and principles—from cooperation with Saudi Arabia and Egypt to support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza—exposed the policy to charges of hypocrisy and double standards.

To navigate an age of democratic decline, liberal democracies must urgently shift to a diplomacy of preservation—anchored in a defensive posture that recognizes the continuum between the international and domestic dimensions of the authoritarian threat. Hard power remains indispensable, but it can be matched by autocracies. Democratic principles—and the protection they afford individuals and economic agents against state predation—cannot, and therein lies their enduring strategic advantage.

Democracies should reinforce the rules-based system through like-minded coalitions: issue-based partnerships on technology standards, supply-chain resilience, anti-corruption enforcement, and global public goods. Strategic coordination with non-democratic but rule-abiding states should not be taboo when it serves to uphold openness and restraint in the use of power. Democracies should also reinvest in the connective tissue of the liberal order—development banks, multilateral funds, and trade regimes—and ensure that participation rewards transparency, accountability, and adherence to agreed norms. In practice, this means coupling value-based alliances with pragmatic outreach, recognizing that preserving a liberal system requires working with authoritarian powers—but with a view to operating under liberal rules.

Above all, democracies must resist the temptation to trade away the liberal entry barriers of international organizations and decision-making centers to non-democratic regimes in the hope that this will yield smoother coexistence. They should instead be confident that no “axis of autocracies” can assemble coherent, attractive alternatives to existing international institutions. And while the era when democracies believed they could out-moralize autocracies has passed, they must nonetheless elevate human rights, democracy, and the rule of law as their most enduring strategic assets. The world runs better on democratic software, and this is true for all participants.

Democratic societies must also shed their illusions about the extent to which autocracies are able to exploit interdependence asymmetrically through corruption, disinformation, and political disruption. Governments must abandon naive informational laissez-faire, establish funds for public media, and prevent the over-concentration of media ownership through anti-trust mechanisms. As long as such measures are supervised through democratic oversight, they are far less dangerous than leaving the door wide open to autocratic manipulation. They should also be understood as constitutive elements of a realist foreign policy, not as marginal or purely domestic concerns as they are now.

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In his confirmation hearing last year, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio flatly declared that the “postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us.” This was more than a complaint that the international system no longer served U.S. interests; it was an implicit admission that the liberal international order does constrain non-democratic behavior—and was therefore viewed as an obstacle to the Trump administration’s goal of autocratizing the U.S. political system. (Trump aide Stephen Miller’s recent assertion, following the attack on Venezuela, that the United States has the right to override “international niceties” with its use of force should be understood in the same light.)

The Trump administration’s conduct has in many ways offered a reverse illustration of the defensive strategy liberal democracies should adopt to preserve themselves. In the last year, the United States has alienated traditional democratic allies, undermined collective-security norms, and upended global trade and multilateral cooperation. It has withdrawn from the U.N. Human Rights Council, rolled back domestic anti-corruption and transparency safeguards, disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, dismantled the State Department’s framework for countering foreign information manipulation, and pressured allies against regulating U.S. social media companies. The fact that democratic regulation of Big Tech has itself become an object of autocratizing pressure underscores that these measures lie at the very core of democratic self-defense.

If the 20th century was about making the world safe for democracy, the 21st is about making today’s democracies safe in the world. For all their flaws, postwar institutions remain the scaffolding on which democratic resilience still depends. Their inadequacy lies less in their design than in the political will of their members, and no credible alternative is likely to emerge anytime soon.

It is even more likely that the United States—after its current experiment in retrenchment from liberal norms—will once again recognize that its own interests are best served within the community of democracies, if only to balance its sole true geopolitical rival, China. In the meantime, democracies must resist surrendering their comparative advantage by colluding in the dilution of the very standards that allow democracy to endure in an undemocratic world. “Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles,” Wilson famously argued. Abandoning those principles would be the surest way to abandon democracy itself.