What Democracy Brings

And What the Cuts to the National Endowment for Democracy Take Away

A guest essay by John K. Glenn.

I asked John, who is senior director at the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy, to help us understand how the disabling of that organization affects the world around us. His reply makes a strong case for democracy as such, and for cooperation among democracies.

We need to renew the story of why freedom and democracy matter: not in the abstract but here and now and why it matters for the world we hope to build for our children. We cannot hope the facts will become obvious and naturally prevail. As one former policymaker put it recently, “democracy has become the incumbent in an age of anti-incumbency.” We need to show that what could be lost is vital.

People living in democracies are more secure, prosperous, and safe than those in unfree settings – and declines in freedom lead to declines in prosperity and security, and create a more dangerous world.

The evidence is clear:

Democracies are more secure: A large body of research supports the democratic peace axiom that democracies do not fight wars against each other. They are also less prone to civil war compared to autocracies because they are better at absorbing and channeling discontent through legal and institutional means.

Democracies are more prosperous: The link between freedom and well-being is well documented. Countries with greater freedom in 1995 tended to be more prosperous decades later. The reverse holds as well. Venezuela’s decline in freedom since 1999 under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro has resulted in one of the steepest economic collapses in the world, rivaled only by Syria, Belarus, and Russia.

Democracies are safer: As Amartya Sen observed, there are “no famines in democracies,” because free societies are better equipped to make course corrections that dictatorships cannot. The Freedom and Prosperity Index shows that democracies consistently outperform autocracies on all human development metrics, including health and education. Notably, this holds among low-income countries as well: democracies rank seventeen places higher than autocracies on the Human Development Index, with 25% lower infant mortality rates and children attending two additional years of school on average.

Consider what we might call “natural experiments” where neighbors around the world have taken different paths. Since 1995, Russia has continually scored far below Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in the Atlantic Council’s Prosperity Index. Similarly, China has consistently ranked well below its neighbors since Taiwan lifted martial law in 1987 and South Korea held its first democratic presidential election.

This is evidence from societies with various histories from around the world. It reminds us that democracy is not a Western concept imposed on others. Nor is democracy only possible in wealthy societies. People in Costa Rica are more secure and prosperous than their neighbors in authoritarian Nicaragua. People in Botswana are more secure and prosperous than their neighbors in authoritarian Zimbabwe.

What happens if democracies no longer do the work of supporting other democracies?

The consequences of a failure to make the case for democracy will be felt by citizens in open societies confronting illiberal challenges. But they will also be suffered by the many brave – and vulnerable – people who risk their lives demanding freedom, democracy, and civil rights in difficult settings like Russia, Iran, China, and Venezuela.

People like Vladimir Kara-Murza, recently freed from the Russian gulag, journalist and Nobel Peace Laureate Maria Ressa from the Philippines, Felix Maradiaga, arrested for running for President in Nicaragua, and many others like them urge the same thing: that their fellow citizens deserve the right to speak and gather, the right to choose their leaders freely and fairly, and the right to have courts that uphold these freedoms. If we have any doubt about the value of democracy, we need only listen to the Ukrainians who have been fighting and dying for three years to preserve the right to choose their own leaders.

If we stop making the case for democracy, we fail them. Unfortunately, this is what we are now failing to do. The United States is ceasing to support democracies.

Last week, the National Endowment for Democracy – an independent non-governmental organization founded over forty years ago with bipartisan leadership in the U.S. Congress and inspiration from President Ronald Reagan – announced it has been forced to suspend its support to nearly 2,000 civil society partners in over 100 countries around the world because it was unable to access funds that Congress had appropriated for that purpose.

The Endowment noted the disruption to its activities “is hitting hardest in highly repressive environments, where dedicated frontline organizations have been forced to lay off staff, curtail operations, and, in some cases, face increased security threats.”

The disruption also impacts our ability to understand what’s coming at us – which can be difficult to see when authoritarians work hard to obscure their efforts in secrecy. The suspension of the Endowment’s activities also includes the work of the International Forum for Democratic Studies, which serves as a bridge between policy experts and civic activists to accelerate learning on rapidly evolving challenges to democracy.

Even before Congress directed NED to tackle emerging challenges in 2017, the Forum sounded alarm bells about China and Russia’s intentional, targeted efforts to undermine democratic movements in other countries using “sharp power.” Well before the rise of ChatGPT and DeepSeek, the Forum warned of the risks from China’s export of emerging technologies used for greater surveillance and control. And, especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Forum has warned about the national security implications of illicit finance for empowering autocrats and undermining democracies.

These challenges aren’t going away. They’re becoming even more difficult and complex.

If we say nothing, we leave a vacuum to be filled by others. All too often people in democracies fail to challenge the spurious claims of authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping that democracy leads to “chaos” and “misery” – even as their vision of “order” requires chilling costs and silencing the voices of their people. Indeed, Putin’s rise to power in 2000 was built around his claim that Russia in the 1990s suffered from democracy’s chaos and that he could return Russia to greatness.

We must renew the positive story of democracy and its advantages, and we can do so humbly and with respect for cultural differences. We must elevate and support the vital voices of people around the world fighting for their freedoms and their rights. We must challenge authoritarian narratives and create new opportunities to work together in common cause.

We must make the case that when people around the world live in freedom, they can build more secure, more prosperous, and safer societies for themselves — making the world more secure, more prosperous, and safer for all of us.

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