Der Tod der Demokratieförderung

Despots and human-rights abusers can rest easy now that America has gotten out of their way, Brian Klaas argues.

In 1999, precision-guided NATO bombs tore through two defense-ministry buildings in Belgrade—a message to the country’s authoritarian government, which was engaged in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia’s minister of information at the time, is now Serbia’s president, and is dragging his country quickly toward authoritarianism, Klaas writes—and “until recently, he might have expected that his authoritarian style would make relations with Washington rocky.”

That time is past, Klaas argues. Instead of harshly condemning Serbia’s abuses, President Donald Trump will build a Trump Tower Belgrade on top of the defense buildings’ ruins.

“The authoritarians who govern small countries such as Serbia no longer need to fear the condemnation, much less the bombs, of the American president when they crack down on their opponents, enrich themselves, or tighten their grip on power,” Klaas writes. “On the contrary—the American flirtation with similar practices emboldens them. With Trump’s unapologetic foreign policy in his second term, American democracy promotion is effectively dead.”

President Ronald Reagan once celebrated the United States as a “shining city on a hill,” a “magnet for all who must have freedom.” That, Klaas writes, “is apparently no longer the aspiration of the American government, which now sends its foreign pilgrims to a dehumanizing prison in El Salvador, arrests judges, and suggests that following the country’s Constitution may be optional.”

According to data from Freedom House, the world has become more authoritarian every year since 2006. Trump’s second term may provide the most potent autocratic accelerant yet, Klaas continues.

Read more: [https://theatln.tc/sbDeV5XJ](https://theatln.tc/sbDeV5XJ) 

— Jesse Convertino, senior editor, audience and engagement, *The Atlantic*

I will never understand what people want from us:

US intervenes in country to push democracy = imperialism

US doesn’t intervene in country to push democracy = enabling authoritarianism