By Nic Cheeseman*, Matías Bianchi*, and Jennifer Cyr* – Foreign Affairs
Authoritarian Cooperation Is Reshaping the Global Order.
During the interwar years, support for revolutionary, anticapitalist parties by the Soviet-led Communist International laid the groundwork for the expansion of communism after World War II. Following the end of the Cold War, the U.S.-led international order promoted liberalism and democracy, albeit unevenly, enabling waves of democratic transitions worldwide. Today, political cooperation across borders is advancing autocracy. The momentum lies with a mix of authoritarian and illiberal governments, antisystem parties—typically but not only on the far right—and sympathetic private actors that are coordinating their messaging and lending each other material support.
What links these actors is not where they sit on the political spectrum, but how they relate to democratic institutions and liberal values, including constraints on executive power, safeguards for civil liberties, and the rule of law. From illiberal leaders within historically democratic states, such as U.S. President Donald Trump, to fully established autocrats, such as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko—often referred to as “Europe’s last dictator”—they share a readiness to personalize power, weaken checks and balances, and deploy disinformation to erode accountability. By hollowing out pluralism and delegitimizing their opponents, these leaders, to varying degrees, roll back political rights and civil liberties. And by pooling resources, amplifying disinformation, and shielding one another diplomatically, they participate in cross-border illiberal networks whose growing capabilities and influence are tilting the global balance in favor of autocracy.
This “illiberal international” was perhaps most visible in Beijing in September 2025, when three of the world’s most prominent autocrats—Chinese leader Xi Jinping, North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose countries cooperate closely on economic and security matters—stood together, projecting defiance of liberal norms. But that summit was just the tip of the iceberg. In 2024 alone, the Authoritarian Collaboration Index published by the U.S.-based nonprofit Action for Democracy tracked more than 45,000 high-level meetings, media partnerships, and other such incidents of coordination among “authoritarian regimes, authoritarian-leaning governments, and authoritarian-leaning opposition parties” around the globe.
Cooperation among democracies, meanwhile, is faltering. Twentieth-century Western support for democracy was often self-serving and inconsistent, but at its peak, it encouraged political liberalization by using economic incentives, a powerful ideological brand, and coordinated diplomatic pressure. After the Cold War, conditions on aid, trade access, and diplomatic engagement continued to reward reform and isolate repression. Yet the funding, energy, and capabilities of the democratic alliance have declined as the institutions of the liberal order lose their potency and the conviction of remaining members wavers. Some former champions of democracy—most notably the United States under Trump—are actively enabling or legitimizing illiberal networks. Even countries that have remained proudly democratic have become more cautious and reactive, taking steps to mitigate interference in their own affairs but stopping short of taking the fight to illiberal regimes.
As the capability gap between authoritarian and democratic networks widens, authoritarian rule has become easier to sustain and democratic backsliding harder to combat. This development should be worrying not only to those who care about political rights and civil liberties. Authoritarian countries are more prone to conflict, instability, and repression than democratic ones, and most of them perform poorly when it comes to inclusive development, producing a world that is less safe, less free, and less prosperous. And as long as democratic coordination remains less bold and less inspired than its authoritarian counterpart, there is every reason to expect that autocracy will continue to spread.
A world safe for autocracy
Liberal democracy has become an endangered species. The world is a quarter century into a democratic recession; according to the widely cited Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Index, 45 countries shifted away from democracy and toward autocracy in 2025. Only 29 countries can now be considered full democracies.
Digging a little deeper, the outlook is even worse. For much of the twentieth century, democracies typically managed to recover after backsliding. In Uruguay, a democratic restoration followed less than ten years after a 1933 coup; in India, 1977 elections ushered in a rocky but durable democratic revival after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s centralization of authority in the 1970s. In recent decades, however, rebounds have become rare and precarious. In research published in the Journal of Democracy, we found that since 1994, of the 19 countries that experienced a period of autocratization and then successfully recovered their previous level of democracy, 17 began backsliding again within five years. Instead of snapping back into shape, democratic institutions remain damaged.
One of the biggest changes in the past three decades is the rise of the support network that autocrats and would-be autocrats now enjoy. There are historical precedents for cross-border coordination among autocrats, from the fascist axis of the 1930s to Soviet-backed networks during the Cold War. But the authoritarian alliance that has emerged since the early 1990s, when autocracy was in recession worldwide, is different in form and content from those that came before.
First, it is increasingly well resourced. There are now roughly as many authoritarian countries in the world as democratic ones, but autocracies collectively have more people and are growing wealthier. Today, governments on the authoritarian spectrum (including many that hold elections, such as India) together represent more than 70 percent of the world’s population. They also enjoyed a 46 percent share of global GDP (measured by purchasing power parity) in 2022—up from just 24 percent in 1992—according to V-Dem data. That number is expected to rise further. Authoritarian states’ willingness to manipulate politics across borders has grown with their economic and military power, and their ability to do so has expanded with advancements in digital technology. A new tier of regionally influential middle powers, which includes countries such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, has lent additional strength to authoritarians’ global influence. And whereas the years after the end of the Cold War saw new democratic regional bodies established or existing ones, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, strengthened, for the past few decades most new regional organizations, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2001 and the Alliance of Sahel States in 2023, have been formed among authoritarians.
Today’s illiberal international is not directed by Beijing or Moscow, the way the Soviet-led Communist International, or Comintern, and later the Warsaw Pact structured ideological and military coordination during the Cold War. Instead, it operates as a collection of overlapping networks that provide fertile ground for the construction of a more authoritarian world. The disparate elements of this system—Russian mercenaries, money from the ruling dynasties of the Arab Gulf states, Chinese and U.S. surveillance technologies, and far-right political parties in Europe and North America—are not organized from a single command center, nor do they always work toward the same purpose. But their activities often reinforce one another. Authoritarians in the Central African Republic and Mali, for example, have received security assistance from Russian private military companies, which in turn were financed by illicit gold deals between companies in these countries and the UAE. Meanwhile, the UAE has used Russian mercenaries to funnel arms to its allies in countries such as Sudan. Together, these relationships entrench authoritarian control.
Collaboration takes several forms. One involves direct cooperation among nondemocratic powers, most notably China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. These countries often share military intelligence and extend diplomatic protection to one another. Through vetoes at the United Nations (in the case of China and Russia), joint statements in multilateral forums, and defense and trade agreements that lack oversight measures, they help create a permissive environment in which repression is normalized and accountability diluted. By offering economic lifelines to sanctioned countries, they reduce the effectiveness of Western efforts to foster democracy and deter repression. And by defending each other’s human rights records and promoting institutions such as the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization as alternatives to Western-led groups, they signal to would-be autocrats that authoritarian governance can command legitimacy and support on the global stage.
These five countries also interfere across borders to varying degrees. Despite regularly invoking sovereignty to deflect criticism of their own human rights abuses, they do not hesitate to intervene in other countries’ political systems and civic institutions to empower groups aligned with their worldviews or to discredit critics and pro-democracy forces. Russia, for example, has covertly funded sympathetic political parties, spread disinformation through state-sponsored news outlets such as RT and Sputnik, and launched social media campaigns and cyberattacks to distort public debate and influence elections in countries including France, Moldova, and Romania. Similarly, China has used its network of Confucius Institutes (organizations promoting Chinese language and culture), diaspora associations, and state-linked media to shape political discussion and suppress criticism abroad, including by pressuring universities, intimidating journalists, and supporting pro-Beijing candidates in places such as Australia and Taiwan. In effect, these efforts extend authoritarian influence into democratic arenas while eroding the norms of transparency and pluralism on which democracy depends.
Authoritarian middle powers are also deploying military and financial tools to entrench illiberal governance and suppress democratic openings abroad. Turkey’s supply of Bayraktar TB2 drones to incumbent strongmen in countries at war, such as Azerbaijan and Libya, has given those leaders decisive battlefield advantages and reinforced military regimes resistant to international accountability. The UAE has likewise supported repressive actors across Africa and the Middle East, including Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, one of the belligerents in the country’s civil war that the UN has accused of committing horrendous atrocities. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has backed autocratic leaders and counterrevolutionary movements since the Arab Spring, most notably giving financial and diplomatic aid to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s regime in Egypt since the 2013 military coup that brought him to power—and that put a definitive end to Egypt’s short-lived democratic opening.
Illicit or criminal networks are often integral to these international collaborations. Shell companies, covert donations, and opaque real estate ventures launder money that bankrolls political actors abroad. These flows exacerbate corruption and represent a direct threat to democracy as they infiltrate legislatures and parties in the very countries that still aspire to defend liberal norms. The “Laundromat” corruption network in Azerbaijan, for example, spent nearly $3 billion in bribes to people, including European lawmakers, who would mute criticism of the country’s human rights abuses and whitewash its record at the Council of Europe, a regional human rights organization. In Spain, the far-right party Vox, which advocates restrictions on minority rights and opposes gender equality legislation, confirmed that it received a loan of around $10 million from MBH Bank (then MKB Bank) in Hungary for its 2023 electoral campaign. According to reporting by Reuters and Politico Europe, MBH Bank is partly owned by a close ally and former business partner of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Although the loan’s legality is contested, the occurrence of a transaction between a far-right campaign and a financial institution embedded in Orban’s patronage network is significant. With this kind of funding available from illiberal regimes, would-be autocrats and defenders of authoritarianism can more easily keep their causes alive and gain a financial advantage over their pro-democracy rivals.
Trust busters
Another key part of the illiberal project is the diffusion of authoritarian-friendly ideologies. Illiberal governments, politicians, intellectuals, and civil society groups around the world design and share narratives that reject democratic norms and values. They rarely hold the same worldviews—illiberal and autocratizing leaders can sit at opposite ideological extremes—but their messaging tends to have features in common. It often includes calls to roll back women’s rights and limit protections for LGBTQ communities, for instance. In Europe and the United States, right-wing parties and organizations typically frame these rights as threats to traditional family structures, religious freedom, or national identity, whereas their counterparts in Russia and parts of Africa and Latin America often portray gender equality and reproductive rights as foreign, Western impositions that undermine cultural sovereignty. More important than these variations, however, is the shared aim of the messaging: to sow doubt about democratic institutions, the universality of human rights, and the legitimacy of Western morality and government.
Such attempts have become ubiquitous. The European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic agency, has compiled since 2023 an annual Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats that documents efforts by actors such as China and Russia to spread harmful and divisive disinformation. The third report, released in March 2025, analyzed a sample of more than 500 incidents of information manipulation that were promoted through more than 38,000 channels. Many of these information campaigns boosted messages associated with right-wing politics and populism, but their broader effect is to erode trust in democratic governance and normalize illiberal or antidemocratic speech.
A 2024 campaign in France, for example, saw five coffins draped in the French flag and marked “French soldiers in Ukraine” placed near the foot of the Eiffel Tower, a stunt designed to generate both offline and online attention. French authorities suspect that Russian-linked actors planned the display to inflame public anger at the French government over its policies in support of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s 2022 invasion. Earlier, in a Russian operation known as Doppelgänger, first exposed in late 2022, actors linked to Moscow created cloned versions of major European media outlets. These websites circulated pro-Kremlin disinformation about Ukraine, the Paris Olympics, and other topics in European politics. The stories they produced were then picked up by Russian diplomatic accounts in countries such as Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Slovakia, as well as by far-right media outlets and online influencers in Europe and the United States, extending the reach of the campaign.
Some narrative diffusion is more closely coordinated. The Make Europe Great Again rally in Madrid in February 2025, co-hosted by the right-wing European party Patriots.EU, gathered far-right parties from across the continent. The Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservative activists and politicians, began in the United States but has been staged in Hungary and Poland in recent years, too, drawing in thousands of participants from countries across Europe, Latin America, and beyond. Attendees endorse each other in speeches, cultivate networks of contacts, and share ideas, building international connections that provide visibility and legitimacy for domestic movements. And because these events include both conventional conservative discourse and outright disinformation, they can blur the boundary between the two, making authoritarian messaging appear more palatable to mainstream audiences.
Sometimes, the promotion of illiberal visions of governance and development is even more overt. The Chinese Communist Party, for example, has increased the training programs it provides regularly for party leaders and government officials in African countries including Namibia, South Africa, and Tanzania. The sessions have been described, by at least one participant, as teaching government officials what can be achieved “without the messiness of democracy.”
Sympathetic business leaders have also grasped new opportunities to amplify illiberal narratives for global audiences. For instance, since taking over Twitter (now X) in 2022, Elon Musk has used the platform to spread right-wing disinformation about politicians and candidates he opposes. He has dismantled safeguards against extremist content, too, and relentlessly attacked the mainstream media. These highly visible interventions into politics both inside and outside the United States amplify hate speech, endanger the freedom of the press, empower politicians and citizens who target minorities and marginalized groups, and impede citizens’ ability to make informed choices at the ballot box.
If the goal of illiberal messaging is to reduce popular confidence and trust in democratic institutions, it appears to be working. According to the political scientist Will Jennings, trust in national parliaments in democratic countries has declined by around eight percent since 1990, reflecting a “public discontent with politics” that “has expanded in terms of its scope and intensity.” In turn, the erosion of trust has weakened the social contract that sustains representative government, leaving democracies more vulnerable to populist demagogues, institutional paralysis, and the gradual normalization of authoritarian alternatives.
Man to man
A final way that autocratic and authoritarian-leaning leaders support each other across borders is through personal relationships. When former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro faced prosecution over an alleged plot to overturn the result of Brazil’s 2022 election, for instance, Trump publicly condemned Brazil’s judiciary, and the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the lead judge in the case. Trump also imposed an extra 40 percent tariff on Brazilian goods, which Brasília interpreted partly as punishment for the government’s pursuit of Bolsonaro.
Personalized engagement is not always reliable. Orban and Putin once shared a close working relationship, grounded in energy deals and mutual illiberalism. Their cooperation made Hungary heavily dependent on Russian gas and gave Moscow a channel for influence within the EU. But the partnership soured after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when EU sanctions and funding freezes forced Budapest to quietly seek alternative energy sources, leading to tensions in its relationship with Moscow. A similar marriage of convenience connected Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the UAE in the early 2010s, when Emirati investments helped Erdogan entrench his patronage networks and centralize power. But Turkey’s relationship with the UAE soon collapsed during the Arab Spring protests over Erdogan’s support for political Islamists the Emirati government opposed. Authoritarian cooperation may be expedient, but it tends to be brittle. Cooperation is not always successful in protecting authoritarian figures, either. Brazil’s Supreme Courtconvicted Bolsonaro in September for his role in the coup plot, despite Trump’s taunts and tariffs.
Still, these informal ties matter. Having backers abroad gives illiberal leaders financial lifelines, diplomatic cover, and evidence of external legitimacy—advantages that can blunt domestic pressure and help them survive sanctions or internal dissent. In turn, this transnational support raises the stakes for potential challengers, who have less reason to think the government will hesitate to retaliate against them. Resistance to authoritarian creep thus becomes riskier and less likely to succeed.
Out of the fight
For decades, democratic networks had the upper hand. Democracies shaped the twentieth-century global order by creating and upholding institutions such as the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, and a wider constellation of international financial and legal bodies that embedded liberal norms, provided collective security guarantees, and demonstrated the material benefits of belonging to the democratic alliance. Yet democracies have failed to preserve their advantages. Democratic institutions’ preference for procedural neutrality and consensus has allowed illiberal actors to test the limits of—and often bend—those institutions from within. Democracies, moreover, are struggling to recruit other countries to their side. In regions such as Latin America, where the United States spent much of the twentieth century supporting military rule, many countries were already skeptical of Washington’s post–Cold War pivot urging governments to democratize. Across Africa and Asia, leaders who are regularly asked to “choose democracy” see fewer and fewer reasons to do so as their citizens grow dissatisfied with electoral systems that do not deliver desirable economic results.
Even the pro-democracy narrative, which inspired citizens and movements throughout the twentieth century, has become stale and uninspiring. Some major democracies have begun to avoid the term “democracy” altogether. In the United Kingdom, for example, successive governments have described their foreign policy in terms of promoting “open societies,” deliberately deemphasizing the defense of democracy so as not to embarrass authoritarian partners. And attempts to reinvigorate the democratic brand—such as the Summit for Democracy, which U.S. President Joe Biden convened in 2021, 2023, and 2024—instead reveal its shortcomings, generating little enthusiasm from civil society and drawing even less public attention.
The current U.S. administration has also forfeited leadership of the democratic alliance. In July 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed American diplomats to “avoid opining on the fairness or integrity” of foreign elections and on “the democratic values” of foreign countries. And the administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development has removed essential funding for investigative journalists, human rights monitors, election observers, and other pro-democracy groups around the world. Europe, where austerity measures and mounting fiscal constraints have tightened foreign aid budgets, is unlikely to pick up the slack. Groups that might otherwise act to defend democratic norms are therefore scrambling to cover core costs, leaving a clear lane for authoritarian governments and movements.
Democrats are playing by the rules of a game that no longer exists. They are relying on sterile communiqués, predictable conferences, and cautious diplomacy while their opponents have become more ruthless, more imaginative, and better networked. Halting the expansion of the illiberal international will require democracy’s defenders to rethink their approach.
The first step is to reclaim the narrative. Pro-democracy actors need to make democratic values culturally relevant, meet citizens where they are, and show them how democracy improves everyday life. A recent example in France illustrates the potential for such a strategy: ahead of the 2024 legislative elections, a WhatsApp network of 130 activists, influencers, and grassroots organizers—figures trusted within their communities—produced short videos, memes, and message templates that explained the stakes of the election, countered misleading information, and encouraged people to vote with a tone that was personal, hopeful, and creative. Participants in the network also created an open group on Telegram to share tips for getting involved in the campaign, including ways to volunteer on election day, with more than 30,000 users.
Democracies must also address authoritarian disinformation more effectively. The EU has made some progress: its 2022 Digital Services Act required large platforms such as Meta and X to remove illegal content swiftly, disclose their content-moderation algorithms, and curb the amplification of disinformation through recommendation features, and European diplomats regularly call out Chinese and Russian state-linked media and troll networks for spreading fabricated stories. But one regional effort is not enough. Just as authoritarian governments share tactics and amplify one another’s messaging, democratic governments must pool resources and intelligence and jointly establish clear standards for online platforms to promote information integrity.
Financing is key. Democratic governments must expand and protect funding channels to ensure that activists, independent journalists, and civic organizations can investigate corruption, expose disinformation, and mobilize citizens without fear of financial retaliation. They can offer tax deductions, matching grants, and public-private partnerships, for instance, to encourage the private sector to channel corporate social responsibility funds toward media freedom and civic innovation. Democracies must also shut down the illicit financial flows that fill authoritarian coffers. This requires intelligence sharing, cross-border asset tracing, and greater enforcement of legal tools such as EU anti-money-laundering directives, sanctions like those of the United States’ Magnitsky Act that target human rights abusers, and anti-bribery and asset recovery provisions under the UN Convention Against Corruption. The EU has begun to make progress in these areas and may take further steps under its recently announced “Democracy Shield” initiative, but democratic governments overall need to do much more to cut authoritarian actors off from the financial and diplomatic systems that sustain them.
Finally, today’s democratic alliance needs diverse leadership. European and North American countries should not be the only ones to set the agenda. Democracy promotion requires a broad coalition with new ideas and new energy, and this momentum is likely to come from other parts of the world. In July, for instance, participants at the Democracia Siempre (Democracy Always) summit, hosted by Chile and attended by leaders from Brazil, Colombia, Spain, and Uruguay, agreed to assemble an international network of government and civil society members to work toward the goal of building inclusive, responsive democracies.
Democracy is being contested in every arena, and it must be defended in each and every one. This will require democratic governments—and pro-democracy civil society groups, media, and international institutions—to not only strengthen their political systems at home but also take on the illiberal networks that are empowering authoritarian movements around the world. Superior coordination is giving autocracy an edge. Until the remaining members of the democratic alliance update their own strategies, all they face is further decline.
*Nic Cheeseman is Director of the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability, and Representation at the University of Birmingham.
*Matías Bianchi is Director of Asuntos del Sur, a think tank in Buenos Aires.
*Jennifer Cyr is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires.