Arshad Mahmood Awan
There was a time, not so long ago, when the United States presented itself to the world as the definitive model of democratic governance. Whatever the distance between its ideals and its actions — and that distance was often vast — the institutional architecture of American democracy carried a certain credibility. Checks and balances, freedom of expression, an independent judiciary, and a political culture that at least paid formal tribute to the rule of law. That architecture is now cracking in ways that independent observers around the world are finding increasingly difficult to ignore.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has accelerated a transformation that many analysts believe represents the most serious democratic regression in American history. Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, one of the world’s most authoritative monitors of democratic health, has reached a conclusion that would have seemed unthinkable a generation ago: the United States can no longer be classified as a liberal democracy. The country is undergoing a process of autocratisation. This is not the language of partisan critics or ideological opponents. It is the measured assessment of scholars who track democratic indicators across every country on earth and apply the same standards uniformly.
The American NGO Freedom House has arrived at similar findings through its own methodology. According to its assessments, freedom in the United States has fallen to its lowest recorded level since the organisation began conducting evaluations in 2002. Two independent institutions, working from different frameworks and different data sets, have converged on the same diagnosis. The symptoms they identify are consistent: executive overreach that systematically weakens other branches of government, attacks on freedom of expression and the press, and a progressive erosion of the checks and balances that were specifically designed to prevent any single individual from concentrating unchecked power.
The visible manifestations of this shift are no longer subtle. Images of masked federal immigration agents hauling away residents without due process circulate across social media and international news. Law enforcement crackdowns on students peacefully protesting against the violence in Gaza have drawn comparisons to the tactics associated with authoritarian governments. These are not scenes that most Americans of an earlier generation would have associated with their own country. They are scenes more commonly reported from places the United States itself has historically lectured about human rights and democratic standards.
It is worth acknowledging honestly that America’s democratic credentials have always carried a measure of hypocrisy. Across the decades, the United States attacked, destabilised, and economically strangled nations far weaker than itself, often in the name of freedom and democracy. Before the Civil Rights movement, its treatment of Black Americans and other communities of colour represented a systematic and brutal denial of the very rights it proclaimed universal. The gap between American ideals and American practice has been a recurring theme in the country’s history, a wound that activists, writers, and ordinary citizens fought hard to close.
Progress was made, imperfect and incomplete, but real. Institutions were reformed. Legal protections were extended. The political culture shifted, however unevenly, toward a broader recognition of rights and dignity. Whatever one’s assessment of how far that progress fell short of genuine equality, the direction of movement mattered. Under the current administration, that direction has reversed. The V-Dem Institute’s characterisation of what is happening as the most severe democratic backsliding the country has ever experienced is a serious claim. The evidence on the ground makes it difficult to dispute.
Beyond its borders, Trump’s America has withdrawn from the international architecture that, whatever its imperfections, represented decades of accumulated cooperation on shared human challenges. The United States has exited major international organisations and agreements where its resources, expertise, and diplomatic weight once contributed meaningfully to global efforts. It has walked away from the World Health Organisation at a time when global health coordination has never been more necessary. It has abandoned UNESCO, cutting its support for education, science, and cultural preservation across dozens of countries. In January, the United States formally withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, with the president dismissing the scientific consensus on climate change as a fabrication. These are not tactical retreats. They are declarations of disengagement from the responsibilities that accompany global power.
What the rest of the world is watching is the painful and disorienting transition away from the unipolar order that defined the post-Cold War decades. The age of a single dominant power setting the rules for everyone else is drawing to a close, not because of any conspiracy or sudden collapse, but because history moves and power redistributes over time. A genuinely multipolar world is emerging, and that emergence is accompanied by the friction and uncertainty that always accompany major structural shifts in international order. The United States, and the broader Western alliance it has long led, has not yet found a settled way to navigate this transition with grace or strategic wisdom.
What is required from American leadership at this moment is a serious reckoning with these realities. The reversal of democratic backsliding at home is, rightly, the business of the American people and their elected representatives. Legislators who have watched the executive accumulate power and have responded with silence or complicity bear a heavy share of responsibility for where the country now stands. The cultural and political divisions that make this reckoning difficult are real, but they are not permanent features of the landscape. Societies have found their way back from darker passages than this when enough people chose to demand better.
From the perspective of the wider world, the ask is simpler. If the United States under its current leadership cannot contribute constructively to the changing international order, it should at minimum stop doing damage. Stop launching destructive wars in the name of interests that serve the few. Stop undermining multilateral institutions that took generations to build. Stop meddling in the political affairs of sovereign nations while its own democratic foundations are under active assault. And above all, restore the credibility that genuine democracy requires, not as a performance for international consumption, but as a lived reality for the people who actually inhabit this country. The world is watching, and what it sees today is not a model worth emulating.
