The rise of two wests threatens the democratic model
Washington has transformed from the system’s global custodian to treating nations as pliable instruments
Jarosław Kuisz
© Ann KiernanThe American meddling in Honduras’s recent elections may look like a geopolitical footnote.
It isn’t.
When President Donald Trump openly backed the hard-right candidate of the National party, and hinted he would slash financial assistance if his preferred man lost, the message reached far beyond Tegucigalpa.
Even before the controversial new US national security strategy advocating support for nationalist populist parties to prevent Europe’s supposed “civilisational erasure” was released, a pattern had come sharply into focus.
The broader Maga ecosystem that now shapes US foreign policy has taken to steering democratic processes abroad towards ideologically convenient outcomes.
The methods are routine: social-media pressure campaigns, the strategic dangling of aid and other forms of diplomatic coercion.
At times, Trump’s envoys even choose to meet with extremist politicians in opposition rather than with government officials.
A most politically telling example from 2025: JD Vance may have snubbed Germany’s chancellor, but he made sure to carve out time for one of the leaders of the far-right AfD.
In July, secretary of state Marco Rubio went so far as to advise US diplomats not to comment on “the fairness or integrity” of elections overseas — a remarkable instruction from a country that once styled itself as democracy’s global custodian.
It is part of a bigger story: a US administration that increasingly treats foreign democracies as pliable instruments rather than partners — to be pressured, shaped or ignored.
Smaller players understandably feel the need to respond quickly to this new development.
For decades, riding the so-called “third wave” of democratisation, small states and newly independent nations gravitated towards the liberal and democratic west.
They abandoned authoritarian fascism in the 1970s, as in Portugal and Spain, or authoritarian communism around 1989, as in eastern Europe, and looked to western democracy as their model.
In some cases, the motivations were not only down-to-earth and materialistic, but also existential.
For the Baltic states, Ukraine, Georgia, South Korea or Taiwan, choosing liberal democracy was a means of securing their continued existence on the map.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, joining the west promised not only democracy, the rule of law and market economics, but very basic security.
Democracy was a geopolitical shield as much as an aspiration.
In 2025, that calculus has shifted dramatically.
For states under direct threat, it is now no exaggeration to speak of two wests.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Ukraine.
When the US dispatched a Kremlin-flavoured 28-point peace plan to Kyiv, Ukrainian officials knew what to do.
They immediately sought help from the other west.
What is at stake is the future political path of many geopolitically important countries — starting with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.
For decades, imitating the political system of the democratic west was a security anchor for many countries.
Today, emulating Trump’s Washington and following the EU’s accession criteria are two different propositions.
They entail different political models and operational logics and incompatible value systems.
In theory, they still belong to the same west.
In practice, they reflect diverging standards of acceptable conduct, political rhetoric and strategic goals.
One upholds the rule of law; the other shrugs at its erosion.
If security can be purchased at the price of democratic backsliding, some leaders are already willing to make the trade.
Others are making calculations. For many of them, aligning with Trumpism simply pays, as Argentina’s President Javier Milei recently discovered.
Trump’s return to the White House has suspended America’s traditional, post-1945 role as promoter of liberal democracy — the U-turn symbolised by a sequence of events beginning with JD Vance’s Munich speech and the Trump-Zelenskyy bust-up in the Oval Office, to the suspension of Voice of America broadcasts.
Perhaps the US will, in the long run, preserve its liberal democratic character despite the White House’s current occupant.
Yet elsewhere, without a strong democratic model to emulate, the prospects look less certain.
Undemocratic soft power is on the rise and, whatever Washington’s future, it may be too late to reverse the trend.
After the third wave of democratisation, the rising fourth wave is beginning to look decidedly illiberal.
The writer is an associate in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford’s School of Global and Area Studies
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario