Resisting the Third Wave of Democratic Backsliding
How democracy defenders can press their advantage. (Part 2 of 2.)
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In my last piece, I set out the current challenges to democracy across the globe. It will be difficult to mount a credible response to this united front of despotisms without meaningful help from the U.S. government, but it’s by no means impossible. Despite the Trump administration’s closure of USAID and the dismantling and drastic down-sizing of the democracy-support infrastructure that was created over the last four decades, the principal institutions that comprise this field still exist, along with a far-reaching community, both here and abroad, of pro-democracy practitioners, activists, and advocates working in civil society NGOs, independent media platforms, universities, foundations, and other institutions. This community also has allies in many government ministries, development agencies, and multilateral organizations. It is a resource that can be tapped into and mobilized.
The Prague-based Forum 2000, which was created by Vaclav Havel and Eli Wiesel in 1996, is exploring the possibility of building a new global movement to fill the vacuum created by the U.S. withdrawal from efforts to advance democracy internationally. The organization issued the Prague Appeal for Democratic Renewal in 2017, a statement signed by almost 500 intellectuals and activists declaring that “liberal democracy is under threat, and all who cherish it must come to its defense.” The Appeal was followed by the creation of a worldwide International Coalition for Democratic Renewal (ICDR), which is the nucleus of a potentially much larger coalition of democracy organizations and activists. The non-governmental ICDR is also looking into the possibility of establishing a formal partnership with the inter-governmental Community of Democracies (CoD), a global coalition of states headquartered in Warsaw that is dedicated to promoting and defending democracy worldwide.
The CoD was an initiative of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Polish Foreign Minister Bronisław Geremek, who took the lead in organizing the CoD’s founding assembly in Warsaw in 2000. Though the CoD was able to create a Democracy Caucus in the UN, and a UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF) that continues to operate, it was never able to fulfill the hope that Albright had placed in it. President Biden bypassed the CoD entirely when he organized his Summit for Democracy, which itself had little impact; and when Senator John McCain ran for president in 2008, he proposed creating a League of Democracies without ever acknowledging that such a league already existed.
The key question today is whether an effort should be made to revive and reform the Community of Democracies in an entirely new political context, in which democratic governments would take their own initiative and not follow the United States, and adding the weight of governmental commitment to a global nongovernmental support coalition for democracy. A regenerated CoD could be one of the possible new coalitions that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke about in his Davos speech earlier this year when he talked of “middle-power” governments forming “different coalitions for different issues” that would have “the capacity to build a new order that embodies our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of states.”
A first step would be for Forum 2000 and the CoD, working in cooperation with Canada and possibly other governments committed to developing a new democracy agenda, to establish an international commission of leading democracy specialists, activists, and practitioners to examine the lessons learned over four decades of aiding democracy, the last 25 years of which coincided with a period of continuous democratic decline. The commission should also fashion a credible and realistic strategy for a new global coalition for democracy.
One critical issue that will need to be addressed is how to engage countries and organizations from the Global South in the leadership of a new coalition. A recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace cautions that some of the larger Global South countries like India and South Africa have long considered democracy assistance from Western countries and middle powers a form of “imperialistic” intervention, and that some of the smaller democracies from the Global South, many of which have benefited from democracy assistance over the years, would be more likely to play a positive role in a new coalition. Another source of engagement from the Global South would be the very substantial community of activists who have been at the forefront of struggles for democracy and would have a great stake in the success of a new global coalition.
Another important issue would be how to involve the United States in the new coalition at a time when official U.S. policy and some of the ideologues driving it would not favor such an initiative. It’s very significant that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has been able to survive the attempt by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to destroy it. It was the NED’s founding in 1983 that launched U.S. democracy assistance, and though it received only a relatively small part of total U.S. democracy funding after the government entered the field in the 1990s through USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), it was always the flagship U.S. democracy institution and the center of a vast network of democracy activists and intellectuals in the United States and around the world.
Remarkably, its budget has not been cut, and though the administration impounded much of its funding for months during 2025, it was still able to make over 1500 grants totaling $271 million to support groups advancing a comprehensive democracy agenda of countering the ideological influence of authoritarian regimes, supporting freedom of expression and digital activism, combating corruption, fostering democratic governance, and advancing democratic rights and freedoms. The World Movement for Democracy, the NED’s global coalition of democracy activists, was placed on hold during this period of crisis when the focus has been entirely on strengthening the grants program, but the activist networks NED has built over decades are still there and can become part of a new international democracy coalition.
A new coalition could also engage NED’s party, business, and labor institutes that had to close many offices last year after losing USAID and DRL funding, but which still remain vital and globally networked institutions. The International Republican institute (IRI), for example, sent missions to observe the recent elections in Moldova, Cote D’Ivoire, Bangladesh, Ecuador, the Philippines, and Iraq—programs described in NED’s current Annual Report. One of the programs of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) has mobilized a coalition of youth groups in Nigeria to shape constitutional and electoral reforms in the wake of the flawed elections in 2023. The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) worked with local economists and civil-society groups in Bolivia to block two nontransparent deals that would have given state-owned companies from China and Russia disproportionate control over the country’s strategic lithium industry. And the Solidarity Center helped agricultural, garment, and palm sector unions in Guatemala and Honduras protect their ability to organize and fight for decent wages and working conditions, thereby reducing the economic pressures that fuel outward migration.
NED’s large bipartisan support base in the Congress is potentially an important political ally in the United States for a new international democracy coalition and offers a useful bridge to the current administration. The IRI board is chaired by Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan, who was preceded in that role by his friend John McCain, one of America’s leading democracy advocates. Lindsey Graham, Joni Ernst, and Tom Cotton are other Republican senators who sit on the IRI board, and Marco Rubio had been a board member before becoming the Trump administration’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. He had also been one of NED’s core supporters in the Congress and would likely welcome a new pro-democracy coalition. Not least, Robert C. O’Brien, the last and longest-serving National Security Adviser in the first Trump administration, is also a member of the IRI board. Aiding democracy abroad, of course, also enjoys great support among Democrats, who voted unanimously in favor of NED’s budget.
There are other private U.S. democracy institutions and research centers that could play a leading role in a new international coalition. These groups include Freedom House, which since 1973 has produced the world’s leading survey of political and civil rights; the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which under the leadership of Thomas Carothers has produced influential analytic studies of democracy promotion; and the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University, which is home to leading democracy scholars like Larry Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and Michael McFaul, and also manages the Leadership Network for Change, which brings together almost 2,000 scholars and activists from around the world who are alumni of several practitioner programs based at Stanford. The Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush presidential centers in Atlanta and Dallas, respectively, also have very substantial democracy programs and could be valuable partners of a new coalition.
In addition to mapping out a strategy for building a coalition of democratic states and nongovernmental institutions from both the Global South and the world’s established democracies, a planning commission would also need to identify the principal democracy challenges that would need to be addressed. The first is how to support the struggle for freedom against the world’s dictatorships. These regimes not only repress their own populations, but seek to aid illiberal leaders and parties elsewhere and also to divide and weaken established democracies and fragile developing countries through disinformation campaigns and other tactics. Supporting dissident and opposition forces in repressive dictatorships, and countering the autocracies’ malign interventions in other countries around the world, will need to be a priority for a new pro-democracy coalition.
A second priority will be aiding democratic groups in a wide range of hybrid or semi-authoritarian countries and backsliding democracies where a protracted battle is underway between liberal and illiberal forces. The former use whatever tools they have to defend rights and keep the political space as open as possible, from protest and even flawed electoral processes to international pressure and support. The latter systematically constrict freedom of expression, human rights, the rule of law, and fair electoral competition behind a front of captured or compromised democratic institutions. Effective political, technical, financial, and moral support to democrats will have to be adapted to the specific circumstances of each battle and responsive to the needs of the local actors. What is essential is that the activists should know that they are not alone.
The world has changed drastically in the nearly fifty years since President Reagan delivered his Westminster Address, above all in the third area of priority, which is what Reagan called “the competition of ideas and values.” The ideological battle is much different today than it was during the Cold War, when the U.S.-Soviet rivalry dominated global political debate, but it does exist, and fighting it effectively is of critical importance.
The speech delivered last December by Jørgen Watne Frydnes at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honoring María Corina Machado was a model of how to fight this battle today. “Democracy is more than a system of government,” he said. “It is also the basis for lasting peace [and] the most effective system we have to prevent violence and conflict.” When the history of our time is written, Frydnes said, it won’t be the names of the autocrats that will stand out, but those of fighters like Andrei Sakharov, Nelson Mandela, and Maria Corina Machando “who stood tall in the face of danger” and whose resistance “can change the world.”
As powerful as the speech was in defending democracy against its authoritarian opponents and their apologists, it actually presented only part of the argument that needs to be made in favor of democracy. As Maya Tudor notes in the Journal of Democracy, scholarship shows that in addition to promoting peace, democracy also delivers better health and education and greater prosperity. It’s associated with longer life expectancy and lower rates of infant and child death. It provides more years of schooling across regions and time periods and more rapid and less variable levels of economic growth. Tudor didn’t mention the economic comparison between the two Koreas, one democratic and the other totalitarian, but it’s telling that the per-capita GDP in South Korea, which was smaller than the GDP in North Korea until the mid-1970s, now exceeds it by more than 55 times.
These are among the functional advantages of democracy, and there are others. There’s also the principle of freedom, which Reagan called “the inalienable and universal rights of all human beings.” Speaking at Independence Hall in 1861, Abraham Lincoln said that he “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence [...] which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country but, I hope, to the world, for all future time.” It is the principle of freedom and democracy that is being challenged today and needs to be defended.
Following President Trump’s first phone call in his second term with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a glowing report appeared in Russia Today describing the new U.S. policy toward Russia as being “more pragmatic, stripped of the pretense of universal values.” But for Americans, supporting freedom and democracy is not a pretense. It is part of our identity as a country. An opinion survey conducted last year by the Ronald Reagan Institute found that continued funding of programs that aid democracy abroad is a policy that “resonates” with over 70% of the American public, not only because such programs are seen to combat extremism and mitigate threats to the United States, but because they also strengthen freedom, protect religious liberty, and aid dissidents in authoritarian countries.
A turnaround of the current U.S. policy is inevitable. In the meantime, building an international freedom coalition will keep the groups active in this work connected and moving forward, and it will make it possible for the United States to hit the ground running when the time comes to reengage. Whether it will be possible during this interim period to reverse the democracy recession is less clear. But establishing that as a goal will kindle a new spirit of hope—and that’s no small thing.
Carl Gershman retired in 2021 after 37 years as the founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), where he oversaw the NED’s grants programs in Russia, China and some 100 other countries.
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