During the interwar years, support for revolutionary, anticapitalist parties by the Soviet-led Communist International laid the groundwork for the expansion of communism after World War II. Following the end of the Cold War, the U.S.-led international order promoted liberalism and democracy, albeit unevenly, enabling waves of democratic transitions worldwide. Today, political cooperation across borders is advancing autocracy. The momentum lies with a mix of authoritarian and illiberal governments, antisystem parties—typically but not only on the far right—and sympathetic private actors that are coordinating their messaging and lending each other material support.

What links these actors is not where they sit on the political spectrum, but how they relate to democratic institutions and liberal values, including constraints on executive power, safeguards for civil liberties, and the rule of law. From illiberal leaders within historically democratic states, such as U.S. President Donald Trump, to fully established autocrats, such as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko—often referred to as “Europe’s last dictator”—they share a readiness to personalize power, weaken checks and balances, and deploy disinformation to erode accountability. By hollowing out pluralism and delegitimizing their opponents, these leaders, to varying degrees, roll back political rights and civil liberties. And by pooling resources, amplifying disinformation, and shielding one another diplomatically, they participate in cross-border illiberal networks whose growing capabilities and influence are tilting the global balance in favor of autocracy.

This “illiberal international” was perhaps most visible in Beijing in September 2025, when three of the world’s most prominent autocrats—Chinese leader Xi Jinping, North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose countries cooperate closely on economic and security matters—stood together, projecting defiance of liberal norms. But that summit was just the tip of the iceberg. In 2024 alone, the Authoritarian Collaboration Index published by the U.S.-based nonprofit Action for Democracy tracked more than 45,000 high-level meetings, media partnerships, and other such incidents of coordination among “authoritarian regimes, authoritarian-leaning governments, and authoritarian-leaning opposition parties” around the globe.

Cooperation among democracies, meanwhile, is faltering. Twentieth-­century Western support for democracy was often self-serving and inconsistent, but at its peak, it encouraged political liberalization by using economic incentives, a powerful ideological brand, and coordinated diplomatic pressure. After the Cold War, conditions on aid, trade access, and diplomatic engagement continued to reward reform and isolate repression. Yet the funding, energy, and capabilities of the democratic alliance have declined as the institutions of the liberal order lose their potency and the conviction of remaining members wavers. Some former champions of democracy—most notably the United States under Trump—are actively enabling or legitimizing illiberal networks. Even countries that have remained proudly democratic have become more cautious and reactive, taking steps to mitigate interference in their own affairs but stopping short of taking the fight to illiberal regimes.

As the capability gap between authoritarian and democratic networks widens, authoritarian rule has become easier to sustain and democratic backsliding harder to combat. This development should be worrying not only to those who care about political rights and civil liberties. Authoritarian countries are more prone to conflict, instability, and repression than democratic ones, and most of them perform poorly when it comes to inclusive development, producing a world that is less safe, less free, and less prosperous. And as long as democratic coordination remains less bold and less inspired than its authoritarian counterpart, there is every reason to expect that autocracy will continue to spread.

Liberal democracy has become an endangered species. The world is a quarter century into a democratic recession; according to the widely cited Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Index, 45 countries shifted away from democracy and toward autocracy in 2025. Only 29 countries can now be considered full democracies.

Digging a little deeper, the outlook is even worse. For much of the twentieth century, democracies typically managed to recover after backsliding. In Uruguay, a democratic restoration followed less than ten years after a 1933 coup; in India, 1977 elections ushered in a rocky but durable democratic revival after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s centralization of authority in the 1970s. In recent decades, however, rebounds have become rare and precarious. In research published in the Journal of Democracy, we found that since 1994, of the 19 countries that experienced a period of autocratization and then successfully recovered their previous level of democracy, 17 began backsliding again within five years. Instead of snapping back into shape, democratic institutions remain damaged.

One of the biggest changes in the past three decades is the rise of the support network that autocrats and would-be autocrats now enjoy. There are historical precedents for cross-border coordination among autocrats, from the fascist axis of the 1930s to Soviet-backed networks during the Cold War. But the authoritarian alliance that has emerged since the early 1990s, when autocracy was in recession worldwide, is different in form and content from those that came before.

First, it is increasingly well resourced. There are now roughly as many authoritarian countries in the world as democratic ones, but autocracies collectively have more people and are growing wealthier. Today, governments on the authoritarian spectrum (including many that hold elections, such as India) together represent more than 70 percent of the world’s population. They also enjoyed a 46 percent share of global GDP (measured by purchasing power parity) in 2022—up from just 24 percent in 1992—according to V-Dem data. That number is expected to rise further. Authoritarian states’ willingness to manipulate politics across borders has grown with their economic and military power, and their ability to do so has expanded with advancements in digital technology. A new tier of regionally influential middle powers, which includes countries such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, has lent additional strength to authoritarians’ global influence. And whereas the years after the end of the Cold War saw new democratic regional bodies established or existing ones, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, strengthened, for the past few decades most new regional organizations, such as........

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