Thomas Carothers1
From the mid-1990s to the end of 2024, international democracy aid expanded exponentially in size and sources, embraced more flexible methods for empowering local actors, and incorporated new issue areas. Aid providers adapted as democracy’s ‘third wave’ gave way to sustained democratic recession, but the field’s basic trajectory was largely one of iterative evolution. The return of Donald Trump to the United States (US) presidency, however, has triggered upheaval in the aid world, including the near cessation of US democracy aid. While many non-US actors are still engaged in supporting democracy internationally, their capacity to fill the gaps in leadership and funding left by the US is challenged by domestic pressures of their own. As a result, the future of international democracy aid is deeply uncertain.
Democracy aid, US policy, democracy promotion, Trump administration, foreign aid, global democracy.
My article in the April 1995 edition of the IDS Bulletin (Carothers 1995), ‘Recent US Experience with Democracy Promotion’, presented an initial stocktaking of the then emergent field of international democracy aid. Re-reading it now prompts some reflections on how the field has changed since those early days. Have the changes been continuous and evolutionary, or discontinuous and disruptive? If an early activist working on democracy aid programmes had fallen asleep in 1995 and then awoken 30 years later, would she or he recognise the field of today? The answers turn out to depend greatly on whether that activist woke up for a look around at the end of 2024, or slept just a little longer, until after the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency in January 2025.
Looking at the development of the field from the mid-1990s to the end of 2024, several important yet essentially evolutionary changes stand out. To start with, the domain expanded exponentially. The overall budget figures for US democracy assistance cited in the 1995 article – approximately US$400m annually from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and US$40m from the National Endowment for Democracy – had increased nearly tenfold for both of those institutions by the end of 2024. Moreover, although the article did not survey the landscape of democracy aid beyond the US, if it had, it would have charted a relatively sparse scene.
By late 2024, in contrast, it had become a crowded domain. The aid agencies or foreign ministries of most wealthy Western democracies have all built democracy-related programmes and policies, including those of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. So too have various multilateral organisations, such as the European Union and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, as well as numerous non-governmental pro-democracy organisations, such as the European Endowment for Democracy and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (Youngs et al. 2024).
The core strategy that animated most democracy aid also evolved in these years. My 1995 article described the dominant strategy of the time as ‘the endpoint approach’. Aid officials would start with a list of what they considered to be the principal institutional elements of democracy – such as electoral commissions, political parties, legislatures, and judiciaries – and compare the relevant institutions of a target country to idealised models of such institutions. They would then offer training programmes aimed at helping to shape the institutions to conform to those ideals.
This powerful inclination towards institutional modelling, with training serving as the primary method of fostering change, still shapes some democracy aid. But as democracy-building efforts in many countries met with increasing pushback during the past 15 years of widespread democratic backsliding, some aid providers sought to develop more nuanced and flexible methods. These involved a greater focus on how aid can empower people and organisations in the aid-receiving countries who are committed to driving democratic change, viewing such empowerment, rather than training, as the engine of change. They also entailed greater flexibility and variability in the institutional configurations assumed to be crucial for democratic politics.
The evolution of methods made itself felt across the main focal areas of democracy aid. Election observation, for example, adjusted to take account of the ever-more sophisticated forms of electoral manipulation carried out by elected but anti-democratic leaders. In many cases, this involved extending the length of observational missions so that long-term observers arrived in the target country long before the election in question occurred. In this way, they could monitor a wide array of issues of democratic consequence, including key fairness issues such as the exclusion of opposition candidates and bias in state media coverage of the electoral campaign. Civil society assistance, a major preoccupation of democracy aid providers in the 1990s, continued to be central to international democracy support through 2024.
Yet providers of such aid adapted it over the years in response to the manifold efforts of numerous governments to restrict space for civil society and block international efforts to support it (Brechenmacher and Carothers 2019). For example, aid providers have been giving greater attention to the rootedness of local non-governmental organisations, the importance of domestic constituency building, and the need for openness towards more fluid forms of local mobilisation and advocacy. Rule-of-law assistance also steadily evolved across the years, away from top-down approaches aimed at producing technical fixes in national legal institutions, towards more local-level, bottom-up initiatives that sought to reduce injustice and legal abuses through citizen action.
Alongside the evolution of long-time areas of engagement, democracy aid providers added issue areas to their portfolio in response to new political developments. For example, various technology issues relating to democracy – from combating digital repression and digital disinformation to facilitating civil society use of technologies that aid citizen mobilisation – became critical preoccupations for democracy aid (Feldstein 2021). Additionally, democracy aid providers gradually integrated anti-corruption – which had become an important element of governance work more broadly, starting in the late 1990s – into their programming. In 2021, the US government put forward its first integrated international anti-corruption strategy as part of its democracy and governance work (White House 2021).
Looking back at my 1995 article, it is striking how little discussion it contained about the international context in which the field of democracy support was emerging. At the time, an interrelated set of four comfortable assumptions about that context widely prevailed within the growing democracy support community, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly: (1) that democracy was on the march internationally, fuelled by a rapidly spreading demand by citizens around the world for a say in their governance; (2) that democracy was the most desirable political system in the world; (3) that no significant ideological rivals to democracy existed; and (4) that democracy in the donor countries was thriving and thus a good model for others.
By late 2024, all these assumptions had either been obviously overturned or were at least seriously in question. The dramatic spread of democracy known as the ‘third wave’ of democracy was replaced by a sustained period of democratic recession that started in the mid-2000s, marked by democratic erosion or stagnation in many of the countries once known as ‘transitional democracies’. Deep debates emerged in many quarters about whether democracy was the best political system and whether it faced a fundamental crisis of legitimacy and value. Increasingly assertive and self-confident autocratic rivals, especially China and Russia, challenged the value of democracy as a governance system while promoting their own political ideas in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. And democracy experienced serious tremors in multiple long-established democracies due to the rise of illiberal political actors, the increased political alienation of many citizens, and the growing weakness of mainstream political parties.
These changes carried with them major implications for international democracy support. Trying to sustain democracy in a country that is sliding back away from an attempted democratic transition is a much harder challenge than supporting a country’s post-authoritarian passage. Making a positive case for democracy to sceptical and alienated citizens frustrated by their experience of several decades of troubled democratic transition requires new narratives and methods. Carrying out democracy support in contexts where assertive authoritarian powers are assiduously undercutting such efforts – whether by bolstering anti-democratic politicians and parties, funding illiberal civil society actors, disseminating political disinformation, or training local politicians to follow autocratic models – is daunting. And, of course, democracy aid efforts lose force when recipients witness democracy flailing in the very countries that claim to have political answers for them.
Looking at the field in late 2024, a likely judgement would have been that the near-term future of international democracy aid would be defined by an iterative process of trying to catch up to these changed realities. But while the field’s methods and goals might need to evolve, the basic trajectory of democracy aid seemed predictable. Yet when Donald Trump returned to the US presidency in January 2025, cataclysmic change to the field arrived almost overnight.
By the end of its first month in power, the Trump administration had shut off more than 90 per cent of US democracy assistance (Carothers 2025). This included essentially all the assistance coming from its two main sources, USAID and the US Department of State. It also included most of the global broadcasting funded by the US government, such as the Voice of America. One source of US democracy assistance, the National Endowment for Democracy, survived, although with reduced funding and significant uncertainty about its future prospects.
This cessation was carried out with extreme rapidity and only involved the hastiest of reviews of existing programming. It devastated the wider ecosystem of people and organisations who have long relied on this funding. It resulted in drastic reductions of staff and, in some cases, possible organisational demise for the many US non-governmental organisations that were implementing such programming – such as the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, the International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Institute. It also undercut the budgets and activities of hundreds of local partner organisations in the countries where such assistance was carried out, including human rights groups, electoral monitoring organisations, women’s rights groups, independent media organisations, civic education groups, anti-corruption organisations, and others.
The Trump administration has preserved a few areas of foreign aid – primarily humanitarian and global health programming – and has said that it intends to set up a new, more focused aid programme under the auspices of the State Department. It is possible that when it does so, it may include some small amounts of democracy aid within it, but this prospect remains uncertain at best. It is also possible that a later administration may try to revive democracy aid as part of a wider reconstruction of foreign assistance, but this too can only be speculative. And even if some effort of this type does eventually come about, rebuilding the decimated ecosystem of people and organisations committed to such work would be a time-consuming and difficult process.
This radical reversal of more than 40 years of US commitment to democracy aid has two main roots. First, it reflects the animus that President Trump and his foreign policy team feel towards US foreign assistance generally. The cessation of democracy aid was just one part of the overall dismantlement of USAID that was carried out in the first two months of the new administration. In Trump’s ‘America First’ outlook on the world, foreign aid has no logical place and is, in fact, antithetical to his core instincts. In his view, most other countries have been taking advantage of the US for years and thus are not deserving of aid from America. This hostility towards foreign aid is hardly new to the Trump administration. US conservatives have long evinced deep scepticism about the value of aid, seeing it as an international extension of the idea of domestic welfare programmes that they strongly dislike. Yet under Trump, these deep roots have come to the surface and gained force in unprecedently strong ways.
Second, the reversal is also part of another, larger, policy change – a fundamental shift on the part of Trump and his team away from the long-standing bipartisan commitment of the US government to support democracy globally as an integral part of its foreign policy. Although this commitment was upheld only patchily along the way and was often articulated in hypocritically grandiose ways by multiple US presidents and senior officials, it was nevertheless a meaningful part of US foreign policy from President Jimmy Carter onwards. But as with aid, supporting democracy has no apparent place in Trump’s America First vision – a vision centred around the idea of ultra-pragmatic transactionalism (whether the transactions pursued are one-sided efforts to impose America’s wishes on others or two-sided deals of mutual benefit).
Even with these two explanations, many individuals in the US foreign policy community and beyond have still been asking how a field as broad and apparently well rooted as US democracy aid – which involved tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of organisations, tens of thousands of people, and innumerable projects and initiatives in approximately 100 countries across 40 years, and was supported by multiple US administrations from both parties – could be almost entirely eliminated in the space of one month. The answer lies in the arrival of radical political change in the US under the second Trump presidency. This is sociopolitical, economic, and foreign policy change that falls far outside the conventional bipartisan consensus that had held in all these domains for many decades. In this context, the cataclysm that has befallen US democracy aid can be understood as just a small part of a much larger story of attempted radical change occurring in the US.
Even though the US government has largely left the field of democracy aid, at least for the foreseeable future, the many other actors that have become crucial players in democracy aid over the past 30 years are still engaged. Some are quietly contemplating how they can or should step up to fill the void left by the US, at least in parts and in certain places (Youngs 2025). Quietly, many people still active in the field are starting to discuss how this moment of loss can be turned, even if only partially, into a moment of positive transformation. This might involve some serious stocktaking about shortcomings of previous approaches, a broad-ranging search for how to do better and how to move the field fully beyond its Western-centric roots towards a more genuinely global endeavour.
But any such transformation will have to reckon with pressures beyond just the changed US situation. With foreign aid budgets among European countries generally declining – in some cases sharply – less money is available for what already only makes up a small slice of the aid pie. When aid budgets are reduced, a strong tendency prevails to safeguard those areas of aid that are most appealing to the public, such as humanitarian aid, at the expense of other, less apparently charitable areas, such as democracy work. In addition, the new ethos of intensified nationalism and realpolitik pervading international politics will cause policymakers in many democracies to ask more pointedly why they should worry about democracy’s fortunes in countries far from their borders if the global superpower is not similarly engaged. Self-interested transactionalism by one can quickly become self-interested transactionalism by all.
In short, the future of international democracy aid is very much up in the air. The US government may not return to a significant role in supporting democracy globally any time soon. The rest of the democracy aid domain may be unable to step up to fill the resulting gap in leadership and funding, and end up fragmenting into a hodgepodge of relatively minor efforts by other democracies uncertain about their own commitment and capacity. Or a spirit of regeneration may bubble up from the many democracy activists around the world who have been partners in democracy aid over the years, have ideas about how to rebuild the domain in innovative ways, and are able to garner support from those funders and policymakers who are still engaged. This deep uncertainty about democracy aid’s future is a modest but meaningful factor in the much larger uncertainty about the trajectory of democracy globally.
Brechenmacher, S. and Carothers, T. (2019) Defending Civic Space: Is the International Community Stuck?, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Working Paper, Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (accessed 23 May 2025)
Carothers, T. (2025) ‘Does U.S. Democracy Aid Have a Future?’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 3 March (accessed 12 May 2025)
Carothers, T. (1995) ‘Recent US Experience with Democracy Promotion’, IDS Bulletin 26.2: 62–9 (accessed 12 May 2025)
Feldstein, S. (2021) The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology is Reshaping Power, Politics, and Resistance, Oxford: Oxford University Press (accessed 12 May 2025)
White House (2021) United States Strategy on Countering Corruption, White House Working Paper, Washington DC: White House (accessed 23 May 2025)
Youngs, R. et al. (2025) European Democracy Support Annual Review 2023, Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (accessed 12 May 2025)
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