Under Trump, the U.S. Has Adopted an Autocracy Promotion Agenda
By Daniel Drezner, Professor of International Politics at The Fletcher School
There was a lot going on in the “Houthi PC small group” chat, in which top officials of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration used the Signal messaging app to discuss imminent attacks on the Yemen-based group, while inadvertently including the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in the chat. One thing that got lost in the scandal, however, was the sincerely held belief by the Trump administration’s foreign and defense policy principals that the U.S. remains the world’s unparalleled hegemon.
At one point, for instance, national security adviser Michael Waltz messaged that “it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes,” referring to the Red Sea approaches to the Suez Canal, where the Houthis have targeted commercial shipping to protest Israel’s war in Gaza. Echoing that sentiment, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth texted, “[W]e are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close.”
Trump officials are not necessarily wrong in these beliefs. Despite ongoing debates about whether we now live in a bipolar or multipolar world, the hard data points toward persistent U.S. structural power.
In theory, this should reassure those concerned about the democratic recession currently on display around the world. One of the traditional benefits of U.S. hegemony has been its ability to facilitate the spread of democracy. In “Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century,” University of Toronto political scientist Seva Gunitsky argued that the emergence of a democratic hegemon was likely to lead to a subsequent wave of democratization elsewhere in the world. This occurred through three mechanisms. First, the hegemon could use its military to impose democratic regimes during moments when the use of force was permissible. Second, the hegemon can use networks of trade and patronage to alter the incentives of domestic coalitions in other countries. Third, a successful hegemon can inspire emulation from other states, which will attempt to adopt the tropes of the hegemon’s regime type in an effort to curry favor with it. As Gunitsky concluded, “For better or for worse, the future of global democracy is tied to the future of American power.”
However, Gunitsky’s research also warned that the democratization effect could work in reverse should power shift away from a democratic hegemon. After the 1929 stock market crash, for example, U.S. power declined abruptly compared to Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. This resulted in a counterwave of authoritarianism over the course of the Great Depression. While the U.S. has experienced a relative decline in power over the past few decades, the key for how much of an impact such a shift has, Gunitsky explains in Aftershocks, is its abruptness.
For Gunitsky—indeed, for all international relations scholars—abrupt power shifts historically resulted primarily from great power wars. Financial meltdowns like the Great Depression and the global financial crisis can have a similar effect. However, there is another way there could be an abrupt shift in the system that could favor the spread of authoritarianism: if the democratic hegemon itself experiences a domestic regime change.
Trump and his team are decidedly uninterested in promoting democracy. But they are very interested in promoting populist rulers.
This would be an unprecedented event in world politics, but it can no longer be dismissed as a purely hypothetical question. Trump’s campaign for the 2020 presidential election, as well as his behavior during the post-election transition period and his first 100 days in office, have prompted concern among political scientists that the U.S. can no longer be coded as a liberal democracy. After Trump’s inauguration, the Center for Systemic Peace’s Polity project—a comparative governance index of the world’s powers—revised the United States’ democracy score from +8 to 0, describing the U.S. as experiencing an “adverse regime change.” The center’s homepage features a warning in red font, stating, “The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy.”
In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way reached a similar conclusion. “U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties,” they wrote. “What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism.”
In some ways, this might not seem to matter for the global spread or contraction of democracy. After all, some of Trump’s supporters might counter that, contrary to the woolly-headed liberals of past administrations, his brand of transactional diplomacy is uninterested in the domestic regime type of other countries.
But the data from the past two months flatly contradict such a claim. Multiple high-ranking policy principals, including senior Trump adviser Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance, have vocally expressed their opinions about other countries’ domestic politics. Indeed, days after Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk made a remote appearance at a campaign rally for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party.
And in February, when Vance addressed the Munich Security Conference, he barely mentioned external security threats like Russia and China, other than to say he does not worry about them. Rather, he pointed to the effort by mainstream European parties to keep the AfD and other populist, far-right and often illiberal movements from power as the greatest threat to Europe’s fundamental values. In other words, Vance was far more interested in European countries’ domestic regimes than any foreign policy matter.
Indeed, the closer one looks at the second Trump administration’s policy moves to date, the more they begin to resemble the process sketched out by Gunitsky of how a democratic hegemon exercises influence, but in reverse. Trump and his foreign and national security team are decidedly uninterested in promoting democracy, as evidenced by their efforts to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, as well as Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and the National Endowment of Democracy. But as Vance’s rhetoric made clear, they are very interested in promoting populist rulers—and also eager for those leaders to foster a patrimonial relationship with the United States.
Furthermore, the Trump administration appears to be relying on all three of Gunitsky’s mechanisms to push for regime transformations. The administration is clearly willing to leverage the reliance of others on its military hegemony to push for its preferred kind of rulers, as evidenced by Vance’s use of Europe’s foremost security conference to make his pitch. There are also reports that Trump officials have held secret talks with the Ukrainian opposition in the hopes of bolstering their chances in the next election against President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And the Trump administration has refused to rule out the use of force to expand direct U.S. control over Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada, which would immediately shrink the map of territories coded as liberal democracies.
On trade and patronage networks, the Trump administration has not been shy about playing favorites in its discussion of foreign economic policy. The occasional threat aside, Trump officials talk optimistically about opening up access to the Russian market. At the same time, the Trump White House has taken pains to punish liberal democratic allies like Canada, Mexico and Europe with tariffs.
As for emulation, the number of global politicians copying Trump’s brand of populist nationalism has been on full display in recent weeks. Perhaps the most obvious example is Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has bragged on social media about his cooperation with the Trump administration in facilitating the deportation of undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers from the U.S. to Salvadoran prisons rife with human rights abuses. According to the Washington Post, Bukele agreed to imprison more than 200 Venezuelans—as well as 23 deported Salvadorans the Trump administration alleges to be gang members—in return for $6 million. While Bukele’s transformation of El Salvador into a personalist autocracy preceded Trump’s return to the White House, he is clearly reaping the benefits of the new administration’s new priorities, while serving as a model for how other leaders stand to do the same.
Could the Trump administration succeed in using Gunitsky’s mechanisms to foster a more populist and less liberal democratic order? It is possible, but it is worth noting that its efforts in this arena might be backfiring. Trump’s pressure on myriad U.S. allies has not necessarily rebounded to the benefit of local populists. In Ukraine, Zelenskyy’s popularity rating shot up after Trump upbraided him in the Oval Office last month. Canada’s Liberal Party has experienced a dramatic recovery in its political fortunes after Trump came to power, making newly inaugurated Prime Minister Mark Carney the frontrunner in snap elections he just called.
The next few years will be tough for the spread of democracy. The Trump administration has made its disdain for democracy promotion abundantly clear. The signs are also there that Trump’s team will be willing to use its carrots and sticks to reward like-minded leaders and parties around the world.
It is possible, however, that Trump has overestimated the appeal of his brand. It turns out that for many liberal democracies, standing up to Trump is the best political medicine available.
(This post is republished from World Politics Review.)