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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.

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.

German prisoners at a special POW camp in England are taught about democratic politics on April 6, 1946. Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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.

U.S. President Donald Trump greets Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as he arrives at the White House on Nov. 7, 2025. Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

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........

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