The Fracturing of Democratic Institutions & the Variations of Autocracy

JOSHUA ACOSTA: Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming to this Global Ethics Day event, hosted by Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in collaboration with the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University.

Let me get through some quick introductions first. My name is Joshua Acosta. I am a Carnegie Ethics Fellow here at Carnegie Council. I am also a non-resident Peace & Democratic Institutions Fellow at George Mason University. I focus on alliance politics, political economy of security, and democratization processes.

Before I introduce my panelists, I want to go over a few logistical notes. This panel will center around the Council’s vision for ethical leadership and good-faith cooperation in a time when international cooperation and democracies around the globe are struggling to adapt to global conflict.

As a disclaimer, each of these three professors’ work has influenced my own, so I am going to be a little biased and plug their work a little bit as I begin.

First up, Professor Paul Poast is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and he is a columnist for World Politics Review. He recently published a book called Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War. Obviously I recommend you buy it.

Our second panelist, Dr. Solon Simmons, is one of my co-researchers at George Mason. I took most of his classes when I was in graduate school. He is a practitioner and scholar of conflict resolution. He is also the director of the Narrative Transformation Lab at the Carter School, and he is the president of the Senate Faculty Committee at George Mason. He wrote a book called Narrating Peace: How to Tell a Conflict Story.

Last but certainly not least is Professor Rory Truex. He is an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. He also founded an initiative called The Civic Forum” His research centers around authoritarian systems and Chinese politics.

I want to give a special shout-out in the audience to Professor Alberto Alemanno, a professor of European law at HEC Paris. Professor, I know you can hear me because you are watching along with me, and I would appreciate feedback after we are done.

Let me explain what we are going to be doing. We are going to be talking about democratic institutions and authoritarian systems for about 45 minutes before I take questions. The goal of this is to have a better understanding of what democracy is going to look like in the future and how we got to a kind of Habsburg multilateral international system. We are going to go through this in two parts: We are going to discuss democracies and the rise of global conflict and in part two how we future-proof democratic institutions.

As a disclaimer as well, this is not going to be a partisan space. This is a space where I welcome all questions, and if you have them, feel free to drop them in the chat. I am not going to distribute them to the panelists until about 15 minutes before we are done. I want this to be a casual conversation, nothing too over-the-top given the topic. We are not going to be that stoic. Let’s try to end on a positive note given what is going on. Let’s dive into questions, and then we will go from there. I am going to do a little bit of an intro for everyone watching.

As the 20th century came to a close, the rise of global democracy was pretty prominent. Ideologically speaking, in the 1990s there was an explosion of democracy. Most scholars know this. Francis Fukuyama said we had reached “the end of history” and that democracy would spread worldwide. That was the ethos in the 1990s. In other words, the nature of governance itself would be democratic from here on out and that authoritarian systems since the fall of the Berlin Wall would not matter anymore.

Fast-forward to today. You have institutes like Varieties of Democracy reporting that now three out of every four persons in the world lives in a non-democratic system or an autocratic system, hardly an explosion of democratic norms, so something happened between the 1990s and today that we are going to be discussing with the panelists. On top of that, 88 democracies remain now, which is not great. I am not going to sugarcoat that. It is not a good thing.

Just a little bit of technical jargon: I don’t like the term “democratic backsliding;” I prefer the term “democratic erosion.” I feel like that speaks more to what is going on in world politics and global conflicts. Democratic backsliding would infer that there is an end state for democracy, and that just goes back to Francis Fukuyama’s “We have reached the end of history.” I think that is a little bit of the issue. I think that ethos is what made the system of global governance assume that it would be democratic from here on out.

A few more statistical points, then I will start asking questions of my panelists, and then we will dive into the conversation. Not only does 72 percent of the world’s population now live in an autocracy, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program shows that conflict is at a historic high on top of this. There is more conflict now than since World War II. There are 59 to 61 state-based conflicts. This is the most since World War II, and 2025 has not altered that fact.

We have two issues now within global governance, the decline of democratic norms and systems, and the rise of conflict. Both of those things create the conditions for autocratic systems to become more normalized in a chaotic, multipolar world.

Speaking of multipolar, this is where we are going to start our questions with the panelists. There has been a clear shift from a U.S.-led international unipolar system to a multipolar one. There is now a growing tendency of countries or emerging economies to no longer want to be part of a single rules-based international order. You now have international organizations like BRICS being led by China and Russia trying to do de-dollarization, and do anything possible to create a new system where there are spheres of influence instead of the unipolar influence.

My first question, and I will start with Professor Poast: In a multipolar system can the United States still say it is the “first among equals?”

PAUL POAST: First of all, Josh, thank you so much for inviting me to participate in this important discussion today.

Your question goes right to the heart of many things, first of all the United States’ position in the world, the changing nature of the world, and of course what that means for the state of the world or whether there is order or disorder in the world.

This is still a topic of debate amongst international relations (IR) scholars: Are we still in the unipolar moment, which was very much what was happening when Fukuyama made those remarks? Of course his work had a lot of prominence in the 1990s. Are we instead in full multipolarity of rising powers no longer being rising but actually being great powers now? I am thinking about China, Russia’s resurgence, and India’s role in the world.

Are we in that kind of world or are we in a world of uneven multipolarity, where there are multiple great powers but the United States is first among the great powers? My own view on it is that I think we are in a situation like that last case.

We are indeed in a multipolar world. We have actually been in this multipolar world for a while. I always point out to people that it was Secretary of State John Kerry during an interview in [2014] who made the remark, “We are now in a world that is much more like the 18th and 19th century, not like the Cold War, not like the first Cold War.” He already recognized during that time the shifting of the international system.

The argument could be made that that shift was something that you could say was a product of U.S. policy—that is something we could debate, that the United States overplayed its hand when it was in the unipolar moment. Or was it inevitable that eventually you are going return to a system of multipolarity, and what we are witnessing now is just the natural outcome of a process that would have happened anyway? In many ways I think that is the debate of how to understand U.S. foreign policy today, which is, were there things that the United States did that deliberately put us in a position of unipolarity and we could have maintained it but we messed it up? That is one view.

There is another view that says the United States would inevitably decline and we would come into this position of multipolarity again, and if you believe that, that suggests a different set of policies to pursue. Another is to say: “No, wait. There is nothing to worry about. We are actually still the unipolar power and should behave accordingly.”

What I find very interesting is that when I start looking at the policies pursued by the Trump administration I see a conflict within about which of those states we currently exist in. It is very much captured by “America First,” because on the one hand you could look at America First foreign policy and say, “That is a foreign policy that embraces the idea that we are no longer the unipolar power.” Current Secretary of State Marco Rubio made that very clear in his remarks during his confirmation hearing, that we are no longer in that state and should behave accordingly.

On the other hand, you see where President Trump himself makes a lot of comments about the ability of himself but also of the United States to solve all these problems in the world, to, according to his count, bring peace to at least seven conflicts so far. We can debate whether that has actually happened. I would suggest that he still views the United States as being in this position of being the dominant power and at least first among equals.

That is for me a way to be thinking about the current situation of where the United States is. My own view is that we are in a multipolar system. I think on a lot of metrics we are still more powerful than the other great powers, but the system has absolutely changed, and perhaps we can get into this debate about whether that change was something inevitable or was a product of foolish U.S. foreign policies pursued in the 1990s and early 2000s.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: Let’s pick up on that, whether the United States is still great amongst great powers.

Professor Truex, I have a question for you based on your expertise: Is it the United States’ job to “manage” an autocratic system like China, or is its job to go more all-out and try to defeat China, not necessarily militarily but technologically and politically because at the end of the day it is probably an ideological thing, whether a democratic system or a system led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would supplant U.S. dominance. I think under the Biden administration it was more managed. So what should we do now when it comes to powers like China?

RORY TRUEX: I think U.S. China policy was characterized by this idea of engagement, this idea that China could be made a responsible stakeholder in the international system. The Overton window on China policy, meaning the acceptable discourse on China, rapidly shifted in the first Trump administration toward a much more confrontational notion and end of engagement idea, and that line of thinking continued during the Biden administration and solidified this idea of “strategic competition” with China.

I think there was a different flavor to the competition. I think the Biden administration prioritized diplomacy even in tough times. I think they prioritized relationships with allies quite a lot more, but if you look at the broad tenor of U.S. China policy we have been in this new equilibrium since 2016.

The question is: Can we defeat China, contain China, or stop China’s rise? I am not quite sure we can. I do think there is a tendency in American foreign policy to occasionally overestimate our ability to affect China and affect domestic politics in China. There are folks still who think that the CCP’s downfall is imminent and that perhaps we can broker that by squeezing China with tariffs, sanctions, and these sorts of things. I think this reflects a Cold War mentality, the idea that we could bring about the fall of our ideological adversary.

As a scholar of domestic politics in China, I soberly believe that the CCP is going to be around for a long time and we basically have to realize that and figure out some way to coexist with China while also not sacrificing our values and standing up for allies and partners like Taiwan and elsewhere.

I don’t know where I would fall on this, but I am more of a believer in pragmatism with the relationship. There is a danger with excessive confrontation toward China. We have basically pushed them toward Russia, and you could argue there is an alternative universe where we didn’t go down this excessively confrontational path and maybe China would be more willing to work with us on ending the war in Ukraine and other things.

I personally believe we need to have at least some diplomatic relationship. I think the idea of containing or defeating China is a self-defeating idea. I don’t think that is going to work and is not necessarily in the interests of the American people either. I will leave it there.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: Dr. Simmons, let’s put a narrative thread on this now. U.S. foreign policy is, as Dr. Truex said, a kind of desire to go after enemies instead of taking a more diplomatic approach or this cottage industry within policy that we can export ideology and somehow flip the tide to make something more democratic and more reflective of a U.S.-based international-led order. That is not necessary a bad thing, but I agree with Professor Truex that it is a little self-defeating after a while when it is constant.

How do we undo Fukuyama’s narrative thread that we have reached the end of history to have a more realistic or more pragmatic approach rather than an approach based on assumptions. We are trying to get past the political moment. It does not matter who is elected. We need to get past this moment where we assume something is going to happen because it happened before. How do we change that?

SOLON SIMMONS: I think we have to bring in the concept of public opinion if we are going to start to answer this question, which is not a typical thing that one pays attention to in international relations. From a narrative point of view the public opinion that matters is not necessarily the public opinion of the mass public but of the decision-makers who are proximate to power, what we might call the “conventional wisdom” in each of these major regimes.

I wrote a book many years ago about the development of the American narrative, and the way I did was by looking at Meet the Press, which is one of the earliest television shows. The reason for choosing that program is that you can think of it as an ice core of the political climate and conventional wisdom. Every week their business model is to get the leading newsmakers and ask them questions. What you notice there is that foreign policy is the number-one thing that Washington newsmakers talk about.

The narrative has changed over the years, but the fundamental problem going back to the end of World War II was, how do we spread democracy around the world and how do we spread our ideas around the world? Then it went through various tensions through Vietnam, the big change being Jimmy Carter’s attempt to impose a human rights or moralistic orientation on international politics, which has had interesting and varied results. Then there was Ronald Reagan’s return and the War on Terror and eventually I would say the retreat from soft power altogether under Donald Trump.

But here’s the thing: The world still looks to America for leadership in the realm of ideas. That is, they still look to us in a place like Georgia, that borders Russia, and hopes that maybe we will step in and do something and that maybe eventually with our elections coming and what have you we will be someone who will be able to help them.

There is a great opportunity for what I would call not ideological but intellectual leadership that is still there. The record of spreading democracy around the world has been rather mixed, I would say, if you look at the history of American attempts to do so, and has always been mixed up in two things, but what newsmakers and lawmakers meant by democracy as they tried to spread it around the world was, one, free enterprise. That was the number one thing. This is why the Cold War played out in some ways the way it did, because the Soviet Union was seen as a threat to free enterprise. The other was elections, so it is a very narrow conception of what democracy, freedom, and human rights mean, whereas in the developing world it still means opportunity to be successful.

I just came from a conversation with the president of our university, and the line he is pitching consistently is that talent is distributed but opportunity is not, and if you take a global perspective on that it is glaringly clear that talent is distributed around the world but opportunity is not.

The United States has not been very effective in engaging in this battle of ideas. As one scholar called it, the “return of ideology in looking at China and Russia,” going back to Daniel Bell’s thesis, that we are in a global battle of ideas and thinking of it in terms of interests, yet as David Hume argued, “Interests are the slave of the passions” to some extent, and lawmakers and decision-makers are not immune to this.

We might reframe that as “Interests are the slaves of the passions” as well. I think that goes too far, but it is an important thing to keep in mind that we have to be paying attention to how people frame, but even deeper than that, how they conceptualize what they are trying to achieve in the world.

I think the United States, if it is going to rise to this moment, which it does not appear to be doing, is going to have take seriously what the moral argument is that China is making in places like the Near East? What is the argument for why China should build a port in Georgia as opposed to the United States? How do you conceptualize, “No, you need to stand with us in sub-Saharan Africa because we stand for your interests, we stand for free enterprise and elections,” and people say, “We want something else”? It appears that China at least seems to stand for that, even if we suspect that they don’t.

I think this is an important moment globally for the United States to take a serious look at how it thinks about the world, what it is trying to do, and to take ideas seriously, which is one of the reasons why we focus so much on narrative at the Narrative Transformation Lab.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: Professor Poast, I will send it back to you. You once said, “Great power competition can lead to great power distraction,” in this multipolarity that is occurring at the moment. Going off what Dr. Simmons said when it comes to narrative, does multipolarity lead to further conflict?

For the audience watching—Dr. Simmons knows this—we are practitioners of conflict resolution. Yes, international relations and international affairs are important, but conflict analysis and understanding the root of conflict itself is equally as important because again both of those things are running parallel right now.

There has been a war every year for 200 years, so something is wrong, and we probably need to get to the root cause of that. I am not being naïve and not saying that all conflict can be solved, but what leads to it? Does unipolarity lead to more conflict or does multipolarity lead to more conflict? Before you answer, I am going to assume that the first two World Wars were a result of multipolarity, but you can correct me if I am wrong. That is my proof for prefacing this that I think multipolarity leads to more conflict, but you can answer.

PAUL POAST: This is great. We could very much get into the weeds of this debate. This is very much at the core of IR theorizing, and that has been a longstanding debate: Is multipolarity, bipolarity, or unipolarity more stable? Of course, because of that there is an abstract way to answer that question and a very practical way to answer that question.

What I would do is start with the very practical way. Regardless of maybe what happened in the 19th century or the early to mid-20th century, which were times of multipolarity so you could see where these conflicts arose, I think it is the case in the international system in the 21st century the “world at war” that we currently are in—a phrase I used in a piece in The Atlantic in 2023; we are not in a world war, but we are in a world at war—is very much captured by the statistics that you shared at the beginning. A big driver of that is being in a multipolar system and the emerging one that was happening. The reason why is because of the phrase you just used.

My view is that great-power competition by itself leads to conflict because you will have the powers engaging either directly in conflict with each other or engaging in proxy wars with each other, which can lead to frozen conflicts thawing due to the great powers wanting to use those conflicts as ways to be able to gain advantages over one another, but it can also lead to this great-power distraction, and that great-power distraction is where conflicts that maybe didn’t have anything to do with the great powers and were not due to a proxy war erupting because the great powers were intervening but is a war that if the great powers were not distracted may have been able to take steps to intervene and possibly mediate or prevent the crisis from breaking out or at least shorten the crisis and shorten the conflict. When you are in a world of great-power competition and these conflicts start to multiply, then you are in a situation where they cannot step in to be able to address these issues.

This is one of the reasons why Armenia and Azerbaijan had a conflict. Of course, now President Trump claims, “Well, I solved it,” but we will see what happens again. Part of the reason why their most recent conflict broke out I would argue is because Russia typically was the country that would step in and try to mediate between the two, and of course it was distracted by its own conflict in Ukraine.

You could also argue that the belief of distraction is what also fosters conflict, and what I mean by that is in part the war in Gaza. I think a key reason why the current war in Gaza broke out and a key reason that October 7 happened—this is by comments by the Hamas leadership themselves—they said: “No one is going to intervene. The United States is too distracted to be able to help out Israel.” I think it was the second-in-command of Hamas who commented that the international system was primed for this and referenced the idea that: “There is just too much going on; now is an opportunity. There is a window.”

I think they misjudged with that, but the point is that that is an example of where there is distraction actually leading to major powers not being able to step in to play a conflict-mediation role, but there are also other actors who believe that the distraction will prevent them from stepping in, and therefore you will see these conflicts break out. That is the way I think multipolarity is affecting the current international system.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: I want to shift a little bit more to the idea of electoral accountability. I agree with you, Professor Poast, but also when it comes to autocratic systems specifically I see this idea of speed, that they can handle something better than a democratic system can because everybody knows democracy is very imperfect and it takes a while sometimes to get to the idea of democratic consolidation if that even exists or is possible. It is difficult for post-conflict countries to democratize over time because it is difficult for economic integration, it is difficult to join international organizations, and difficult in general in the world of conflict.

Professor Truex, part of this panel is about democratic backsliding in general. On your Civic Forum initiative—correct me if I am wrong; I think we agree on this—I prefer the term “democratic erosion,” which I think speaks more to the moment than “democratic backsliding.” I want to talk about those two terms for a second. What is your thought on democratic backsliding in general? Do you think that is an appropriate term to apply to democracies in general, or do you think we need to have a better term like “democratic erosion.”

RORY TRUEX: “Democratic backsliding” is the term of the field, the term of political scientists. It is not a term most people think about beyond the political science community, although it is starting to make its way into some of the popular discourse. I had a conversation with Brendan Nyhan, who is a political scientist at Dartmouth, about this, and he has been doing some writing about it. One of the issues with both terms, “backsliding” and “erosion,” is that they are passive. Erosion in particular also makes us think of a cliff uprooting because of a river, something very slow and geological.

In some sense they do not capture the true dynamic, which is that democratic backsliding is often the result of someone being assertive and engaging in an authoritarian power grab. In a way it is too lenient and does not call out the actors who are engaging in that power grab, so increasingly I am starting to use that term relative to even “erosion,” which is also passive. I think that is a helpful distinction, and it names the actors who are participating in this type of power grab.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: There is no uniform set of power grabs. President Bukele of El Salvador did something different than what will go on in China.

I agree with you. I think the idea of uniformity, autocratic consolidation of power looks different in each place, so I feel like that is an important point.

Dr. Simmons, since we are on the topic of democratic backsliding and great-power competition, in this age of transactional diplomacy is there really such a thing as alliances even amongst democracies? Can there be a narrative thread for that? Can there be an argument to be made now, because again we have covered the fact that we are probably shifting toward unipolarity? Yes, the United States economically and militarily is stronger than most countries still and is still great amongst great powers, but there is still more conflict than ever before since World War II and there is an issue of multilateral fracturing, an issue of international organizations assisting democracies not being as efficient as they once were, so can the concept of alliances even amongst friends be a thing now compared to what is going on?

SOLON SIMMONS: Great question. I think what is new about our current moment which is different from the entire history of the conversation I have witnessed before is that the Republican Party, in particular led by Donald Trump, has put us in a situation where it is not clear which side we are on. For example, in conversation with an influential figure in Milan who was trying to wrap his head around what was happening with the United States and Europe, there is a way in which the European Union project is not something that Donald Trump would naturally sign on to in the same way that Vladimir Putin would not necessarily sign on to it. Although there are unstable alliances—there is not a clear bifurcation between where the United States stands on these issues in the way that it did in the past and where it will in the future. This is one of the reasons I am so interested in the history of ideas and arguments, in particular as they play out among influentials. This is not an appeal to mass public opinion but to the opinions and ideas articulated by those people who are influential in their respective systems.

One of the things I like to talk about in this “bizarre” moment, in some sense—I think it is a bizarre moment, where people are very much lost—is what our intensions are. I don’t use the word “authoritarian” anymore, or I do, but it is a framing device. No one wants authority for its own sake; they always say they want it for something else, in the same way libertarian is a pursuit of liberty. The word I use instead is “securitarian,” because the ultimate goal is purported to be security: “Why do I”—Bukele—“take power in the way that I do? So that you can come home and visit your grandmother because you haven’t been able to do so, and now you can. Isn’t that great?” You will hear that in the coffee shops when you talk to people from El Salvador. The goal is security. This helps to explain what Donald Trump’s message is and why he is successful in domestic politics but also what is happening I think with respect to democratic backsliding globally, which is that people want security.

What does that mean? They want it from a moral point of view. Security can be, “I want to be protected from invaders and foreign armies,” but it could also be, “I just want to be protected from internal political divisions,” which is very important on the Democratic Party side too, or “I want to be protected from agitators, mobs, disruptions, and chaos,” which is a Hobbesian argument. “I want that domestically and I also want it internationally.”

The race for security is out there. China is very powerful in this, and I think they have a good argument to suggest that their system is more stable, that they can offer you what you need. It might not be this moralistic human rights agenda based on a libertarian orientation, but it is the thing that you ultimately want and that people have wanted throughout history.

I think our alliances are in question because the United States has always been uncomfortable with let’s say rapprochement with this securitarian imagination. We were born of a revolution against a king, liberty has always been at the core, and yet we have been overseeing a world order and Pax Americana for decades. I think alliances feel unstable because the influentials in those various systems are confused about what their objectives are and are figuring it out as they go.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: That’s good. Let’s pick up on security.

Professor Poast, you and I have talked about security in the past. In the current moment is it still the job of the United States to be an “indispensible” nation? Is it our job to be the police force to provide that kind of security and say, “No this system still works,” or should we be pulling back and focusing on what is at home?

To be honest, politically speaking, even if you go back to the 2024 election I think both parties in their own way believe that the United States is an indispensible nation. Sure, if you want to bring up Kamala Harris, she was probably more human rights-based and Trump was more America First-based, but it still had that kind of thread that, “Yes, the United States still is that kind of nation.” What should the role be now? Should we be policing the world or should we take a step back?

PAUL POAST: I think your question goes back to that tension that I talk about within the idea of America First foreign policy, that tension being that on the one hand, if you go back to—and I already referenced this—the remarks of Marco Rubio when he was going through his confirmation hearings and he also echoed these remarks in subsequent interviews, he actually brought up this point exactly. He said, “At the end of the Cold War and into the 1990s the United States operated as a bit of a ‘world police force,’” and there was a time when maybe that was necessary or at least we had the ability to do it.

He went on to say, “We don’t have the ability to do that anymore.” He actually went on to make a remark that stood out to me: “There are a lot of horrible things happening in the world and horrible things happening in the world that are actually in our interest to solve, and we should focus on those.” That would absolutely be saying that the United States is not in a position to be able to solve all the world’s problems anymore. That would be consistent I think with how people understand America First foreign policy.

On the other hand, I think you are exactly right in that there is this tension that is drawn out in part by Trump’s own interests. What are those interests? He wants a Nobel Peace Prize, for example. That might be part of his interests, but there is this idea that I think Trump still views the United States as the indispensible nation through him, that he has the ability to go around and solve all of these issues. You see that not just on the security side, where he will make claims like he has a number of times and just did at the United Nations of: “I have solved all these wars. The United Nations did not do anything. It required me to step in to do this, using American power.”

He has also made this remark with respect to economic affairs in that there are these global imbalances and problems that have hurt the United States but are also a problem for the world, “and my tariff regime is about trying to fix that,” and we are in a position to be able to fix it.

This tension is interesting of America First being: “Well, America just needs to pull back. We are not in the same position we were at the end of the Cold War and we have to acknowledge that and maybe even pull back to becoming again almost a 19th-century foreign policy,” which I can go into, focusing on our own hemisphere, but there is still this tension and desire to be the indispensible nation.

My own view is that there is still truth to that, that the United States oftentimes has to play a critical role to be able to address these problems, and I think that is an instinct Trump still has, but again it points to this tension of wanting to do that but also wanting to pursue a more quasi-isolationist approach.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: Professor Truex, do you want to add to that? I am curious to hear your thoughts about the idea of the United States from an ethical perspective too because at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs we are doing Global Ethics Day. Is there an ethical obligation for the United States to be an indispensible nation in this current context?

RORY TRUEX: I think it would be a shame if the United States retreats from a position of global leadership. I think we do not always get it right, but I think our value system is important to have in the international arena, and I think every time we take a step back powers like China and Russia take a step forward. As that kind of a high-level matter, I think it is important for us to continue to exert global leadership.

I think the reality is that the American people are a bit war weary. There is a feeling that our excessive focus on foreign conflict has led to the degradation of public good provision in this country. We have bad infrastructure and underfunded schools. You see a weird linkage between people on the right and left wings of the foreign policy spectrum both adopting these ideas of restraint or even isolationism because of that. I think again it is about pragmatism.

I struggle with things like Taiwan. I am a believer in Taiwan. I visited Taiwan this summer, but the reality is that the military balance of power continues to shift. Most Americans do not want a war with China, and according to simulations if there were a great-power war with China, it could escalate to nuclear conflict and according to the simulations 20 to 30 percent of the time would entail a huge American loss of life.

I think these are some of the difficult things: How do we stand up for our allies and partners? How do we stand up for the Ukraines and Taiwans of the world while also being aware of the limitations of our own power?

One of the more compelling answers I heard this summer when I was in Taiwan—I asked this question to folks: What are we supposed to do? How can the United States best support Taiwan?

The answer I got which made me a little misty-eyed was that we need to reinvest in our own democracy. So there is this idea of beaconism in Taiwan and in China as well, that the United States is a beacon of an alternative model to China, and when our democracy is dysfunction, when we cannot build trains and cannot educate our students, that erodes support for democracy in China and in Taiwan itself.

There is an argument, and it might sound a bit cheesy, but reinvesting the United States in reinvigorating our own democracy and our own economy actually has ripple effects throughout the world in a way that cannot be accomplished with military power. That argument is not something that is always front of mind, but it resonated with me.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: Dr. Simmons, what is your opinion on America as an indispensable nation?

SOLON SIMMONS: I just want to pick up on something that Rory said that is very powerful and gets back to the ethics of this conversation, which is that the beaconism is really important. The more that I travel and talk to other people there is a sense of concern and questioning: “What is going on with you? What is happening there? It just seems so different.”

In that sense there is an inherent discomfort with the Chinese alternative. Although I am using this other term, “securitarianism,” to make it somewhat neutral, obviously there are authoritarian tendencies that are pretty clear there, and many people want to get away from that. In some sense Europe is an alternative, but Europe does not have the ability to channel its will in the same way as the United States, especially when it comes to military affairs, and that has become obvious around the world.

I do think that there is an indispensable role that the United States plays, but the challenge I would say to this reinvigoration of democracy that we have that Rory was talking about is that there is a tension we have in the United States, and I want to bring up the term “populism” because there has been a kind of confusion about what does this populist moment mean. I think we can get some leverage on this from a narrative point of view: What is the story? Why are people gravitating to this?

I think this confusion about the idea of what is a democracy and what is a republic goes back as far as the French Revolution. We have both these parties: Why do we have the Republicans and the Democrats? Democracy speaks to Rousseau’s “general will.” It speaks to the demos, the people, having a voice, which I always like to say could mean that the 51 percent kill the 49 percent. We tend to not talk about that, but there is a sense in which there is an unforgiving nature to the demos that Plato made a big deal of.

Then there is the republic, which is at its root freedom from domination, a sense that you have individual rights, that you ought to be protected from certain sorts of extreme utilitarianism, for example, and that there are duties we have to one another. I feel like we have a challenge in addressing the demands of the demos, which typically have been “social” demands, that the demos wants to have certain kinds of opportunities to be successful, which is a class struggle kind of mentality, but it also can turn that energy against foreigners and against bureaucrats and elites, and we are seeing that in the United States, which means that if development is a critical piece of this—

I saw a question about Sudan and sub-Saharan Africa. What is appealing in east Africa about the Chinese model? It is development, stupid, we might say. That is what is appealing about it. Is the United States engaging in a way especially under an America First doctrine to promote development in the Global South?

The free enterprise model suggests that, yes, in the long term a free enterprise system will be better at generating their economic development, but in the short run there is a lot of pain, and you see this throughout Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, and we are seeing it perpetually in the 20th and 21st centuries. Therefore, I think the United States is going to have trouble defending its “no pain no gain” attitude toward economic growth.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: We have about 15 minutes left. I will ask some questions from the audience and some of my own.

Just as a disclaimer, my last semester when I was doing my graduate work I used Professor Poast’s work about international organizations and how they assist new democracies. One of the questions from the audience is: What role do you see for international organizations? Can they play any kind of role in democratic backsliding at the national level, and can their own decision-making be democratic in and of itself?

PAUL POAST: Big question. That is an element we have not talked too much about today, so I am glad this question was raised. We talked about institutions within countries, the international system and how these things might interact, but institutions at the international level is of course the other angle to this, which was very much on display last week at the United Nations and thinking about how the United Nations operations and Trump’s criticism of the United Nations, which, by the way, is something that a lot of folks, myself included, said that is like par for the course. People were like, “Oh, my goodness, he is criticizing the United Nations for being ineffective.”

Actually, no, that is something we all can agree on. He had his own way of saying it—“All they do is send out a nasty letter,” which I think was a reference to Team America: World Police—but the point is that this is a longstanding criticism and it relates to this idea of, if it is a longstanding criticism, if it is something we all recognize, first, how far does that travel, meaning is that just uniquely a criticism of the United Nations but other international institutions are quite effective and work very well, or is it a criticism of international institutions in general, and they don’t really do much?

What is interesting is that that debate was playing out even during the 1990s during the same time as the Fukuyama “end of history.” There was this whole debate that my colleague John Mearsheimer was part of of the false promise of international institutions, and part of his argument was that international institutions don’t do anything in and of themselves. They are ultimately reflections of the balance of power. If that is the case and you are moving into a multipolar world, then you can’t expect too much of international institutions because they are ultimately going to just do what the balance of power allows them to be able to do.

An example that might be in favor of that would be going back to COVID-19 and thinking about the World Health Organization (WHO) and the fact that the WHO was not able to respond in a way that people would have hoped it was able to respond. My analysis of that is because the WHO was basically hamstrung by the competition between United States and China. On the one hand, it couldn’t take certain measures with respect to data because it did not want to upset China, but because it was not upsetting China it was also leading to the Trump administration getting irritated, and we saw the culmination of that not so much during his first term but at the beginning of this term when he pulled out of the WHO.

That would be an argument to say that these international institutions ultimately cannot change things absent the distribution of power in the international system.

On the other hand, you can say that in a system where diplomacy seems like it is in greater need than ever they offer an avenue for that, and the fact that these leaders are showing up for forums, whether it is at the United Nations—think about all the different meetings that were happening there, if you think about when a Trump administration official or Trump himself goes to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit—those create opportunities for diplomacy, which in the current international system is something that is needed, and international institutions can help provide that.

There is a lot that we can unpack with this, but I would say those are the ways I look at this, that on the one hand you can absolutely see the limits of international institutions because the extent of what they can do is going to be a reflection of the distribution of power; on the other hand, they do provide these forums that allow for diplomacy to be happening in a world where it seems like there is not enough of it occurring.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: Do international organizations provide some legitimacy? In a post-conflict setting, new democracies want to join them. That is what happens. They cannot always join them right away because it takes time, but isn’t there a link between legitimacy and international organizations? Even though sometimes they are a little frozen, I feel like they serve a purpose even if legitimacy is not a great reason, but it is something.

PAUL POAST: That is absolutely right, and that is consistent with the research I had done previously about why do, say, smaller states like new democracies and so forth, benefit from joining international organizations or even forming their own international organizations. Even then a key part of what makes international organizations desirable is that they can be avenues through which you can gain benefits and even signal—it goes back to that beaconing point that was brought up earlier—“Look, we are part of this club that the United States is the leader of, and therefore we should be deemed that way, and we want to be protected by you and receive resources from you.”

But if the great powers themselves are moving away from these institutions, then that does leave the question of, well, how much can they actually benefit from forming their own organizations? There will be some benefits, but it is going to be highly limited.

I do think this is again where part of me is saying, if you are in a situation where the great powers are themselves questioning the utility of these international institutions it is not going to completely eliminate but will put dramatic constraints on the extent to which those institutions are also going to be helpful for smaller states.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: That is a good point.

Dr. Simmons, there is a question for you from Kevin: “In a post-truth political environment, how has the traditional relationship between narratives and policy shifted in the realm of U.S. foreign policy?”

SOLON SIMMONS: Studying narrative is a bit of a fraught thing because people always want to say: “Well, what about the truth? Shouldn’t we just talk about what is actually going on?”

I think the study of narrative, which, by the way, I have been doing for my entire career, has become hot now in part because of the way that political conversations are happening and the way in which arguments can be made that seem liberated from facts.

Oddly enough this is one of the reasons why I think we are in a period of the return of ideology and why we need to be thinking about “beliefs infused with passion,” as Daniel Bell called it as opposed to “policy clusters,” which is the way that the political science literature under Converse often thought about it at the end of the Cold War. In this environment, when anything you look at—and I like to think of the classic Gestalt image of the rabbit and the duck—the same stimulus is coming to you, but what you see is radically different based on what you bring to the picture. That is what is happening in the political environment, even without fragmented media environments, that is, even without TikTok versus FOX News versus MSNBC. As we know, young people don’t even watch cable, so the way in which people are getting their information is so different than it ever has been. That is going to exacerbate what I will call the “importance of narrative” and the way in which we formulate and conceptualize problems.

This is important to say too. I am not just talking about media framing here, because that is what we often go to when we talk about this issue, like the frame around a painting. What I am talking about are fundamental ways in which we see the elemental antagonisms that are in play. For example, even the notion of backsliding. Backsliding comes from a 1778 lecture from John Wesley. This is a Methodist principle. We are actually talking about a very ideological conversation here about a fundamental elemental antagonism between security states and liberty states, those people who are “promoting democracies,” as we call it, by which we really mean democratic republics, and those people who promote something else.

In this post-truth environment, oddly enough the concept of narrative is hot, but I think we have to do it in the right way. We have to look at how narratives work. I call it “formal narrative design,” that is, it is not just one story after another, anecdotes, and whatever, but you can see how these things are structured. There is what I call a “story grammar.” There are things we can learn systematically about these arguments, even something like a concept that seems very scientific like democratic backsliding.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: We are almost out of time. Professor Truex, I want to leave the last word to you because you know I have been following your Civic Forum initiative. Let’s talk about the idea of future-proofing democratic institutions, democracy versus autocracy. I know it is a big question.

What in your opinion is needed to negate or have the foresight to where democratic erosion/democratic backsliding can maybe not be stopped but leveled off a little bit because it can’t continue as is. Yes, governments come and go and leaders come and go, but there will reach a point—even I am of the opinion that just because democracy in general is at a low point does not mean that it will be—where if 88 democracies are left in the world that is not good either. For the future of democratic systems itself, should they focus on polarization, domestic policy, foreign policy, or all of the above? What do you think is needed foundationally to negate the negation?

RORY TRUEX: So how do we save democracy in three minutes? That is a tough one.

I don’t have a great answer to this. I would say a few things. One is that human progress is nonlinear. We have seen cycles like this before, where democracy is on the back foot, certainly in the interwar period. We also saw a lot of democratic backsliding in the 1960s and 1970s. Things don’t all neatly flow in one direction, and I think we are in an authoritarian moment that hopefully will be corrected in time.

I would point to a couple of things. First, I think there is a need to think about political reform. In China ironically, political reform is always talked about and there is never actually any political reform, but the idea of reform is something that is central to thinking over there.

We don’t talk about it that much in this country, but it is quite clear that the democracy we had or perhaps had in a stronger fashion prior to Trump wasn’t quite working for people. I think there was a dissatisfaction with the two different political parties. We see partisanship actually declining, more and more people are identifying as independent, and I think there is a fundamental distrust in the system itself. That is not going to be remedied just by the Democrats getting into power.

It needs to be thought through: What are some of the political changes that can be made that would restore faith in the system? Why are congresspeople still allowed to trade stocks? Why aren’t we toying around with the idea of proportional representation a little bit more? Is there a way to reinvigorate and rejuvenate our political system? That is my irrational optimism, that I hope this moment energizes our democracy after it is over and gets people thinking more creatively about ways we can make it better.

The second part of this is a focus on polarization and inequality. There are many different works in political science that point to economic inequality as bad for democracy. It empowers these populist authoritarian figures who are able to appeal to the working class. It also creates incentive among the hyper-elite, the wealthy, to side with authoritarian powers that curb redistribution. Inequality is bad for democracy as is polarization, and both of those things are through the roof right now in the United States.

I would like to see politicians explicitly talk more about healing and more about empathy with the other side and taking down the temperature. James Talarico is an interesting politician running for the Senate in Texas. I think there will be this idea of reducing polarization as a political platform and ditto for inequality.

What we need is for democracy to function a little bit better. We need to not be tearing at the seams like we are. Only in that environment will backsliding be arrested.

JOSHUA ACOSTA: I want to thank my panelists for going through all this. I know it was a lot. Thank you to the audience for joining us. In the audience we have follow-up questions, and I am sure the Council is happy to answer them.

Thank you to the three of you. I appreciate this.