Bob Beck's Foreign Policy Blog

It was a decidedly down year for democracy across the globe. From the battlefields of eastern Ukraine to the smouldering conflicts in south and southeast Asia to the coup-infected states of sub-Saharan Africa to America’s gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean, the putative gold standard of representative government took a beating over the past twelve months. 

In both 2023 and 2024 this observer maintained a modicum of optimism about democracy’s ability to weather the pernicious witches’ brew of expansionist autocracies, simplistic populists, and the dangerous degradation of many international norms that had, generally speaking, kept the world on the straight and narrow over the past 80 years. As 2026 waits impatiently on the horizon, that earlier optimism has vanished.

Starting in Asia, the Middle Kingdom continued its relentless bid for cultural, economic, political, and military dominance with Taiwan clearly in its cross hairs. As this article goes to print, long standing bilateral disputes have turned bloody between Cambodia and Thailand and Pakistan and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the largest democracy in the world, India, is back in the good graces of Moscow, the quintessential anti-democratic state, due in large part to Delhi’s misgivings about Washington’s reliability as a long-term strategic partner. On an upbeat note, Japan—traditionally not a bastion of female empowerment—elected its first woman prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, in October.

Moving on to the Middle East, the depth of the democracy deficit is conversely highlighted by the likely brightest spot in the region, Damascus. The new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, not exactly a poster child for democratic values, has, by and large, managed to put Syria on a tentative road to recovery, despite some troubling eruptions of ethnic violence. North of the Mediterranean, Turkey’s wannabe sultan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is systematically arresting the leaders of the main opposition parties in a callous bid to extend his party’s political dominance in the heartland of the former Ottoman empire. 

Meanwhile, due at least in part to their harmony with the political views of President Trump, autocratic rulers in the Persian Gulf—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar—are expanding their influence across the wider region, in the process contributing to instability in Sudan and east Africa. While the long-overdue cease fire in the Palestinian territories tenuously holds, both sides have a prolonged and difficult road ahead to the promised land of a lasting peace. Concurrently, the embers of hatred in both groups burn just under the surface, threatening a renewal of intercommunal violence at a moment’s notice. 

In the “Old World,” several free and fair elections followed by peaceful transitions of power were overshadowed by the ongoing geopolitical tumor of the Ukraine war. National plebiscites in Germany, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands, carried out democratically with no substantive controversy, resulted in new government coalitions in each. Unfortunately, the baleful shadow of Moscow’s military aggression in Ukraine sowed seeds of discord across Central and Western Europe on how best to guarantee the future security and prosperity of the European Union. 

The African continent, sadly, provided little to cheer about for supporters of democracy. According to a recent report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, only three of ten national polls held in the region during 2025 were viewed as free and fair. The lowlight was in Tanzania where the incumbent president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, channeled her inner Erdogan by barring all legitimate contenders from the elections. She then violently suppressed the opposition-led protests challenging the results. Rounding out the democracy doldrums were successful coups in Madagascar and Guinea-Bissau, and an attempted one in Benin, all in the second half of the year.

Democracy’s decline is being felt most consequentially, however, on the homefront where President Trump is waging a frontal assault on many of this country’s traditional checks and balances of runaway executive power, to include an apolitical military, a free press, an independent judiciary, a professional, nonpartisan federal work force, an active, honest, and free-thinking higher education system, equitable state electoral maps, and a broad-based cultural community that welcomes divergent views. In the process of attacking these fundamental building blocks of representative government, Trump is attempting to create a cult of personality worthy of the most ignominious banana republic dictator, which must have the founding fathers writhing in their graves.

On the foreign policy side, one need only read the administration’s recently-released National Security Strategy (NSS)—a fascinating yet disturbing document—to understand that democracy is not part of the White House’s international agenda. Rather, the NSS calls for re-establishing “strategic stability” with Russia, openly criticizes our erstwhile European allies for perceived cultural decline, and touts America’s destiny to rule the Western Hemisphere (see Venezuela). The document does not include any pretense to, let alone support for, the promotion of democracy as a goal of U.S. international engagement. It is, therefore, difficult to escape the conclusion that, at least in the foreign policy realm, America First equates to Democracy Last.

The coming year will certainly offer ample opportunities for a reversal of democracy’s current downward trend across the globe. At home, the 2026 mid-term elections stand out as a logical litmus test of this form of government’s continued viability as our political system of choice. As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, the world will be watching closely to gauge the future trajectory of the world’s oldest democracy.

Note: This article was published on 30 December by both the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript and the Brattleboro Reformer.