Democracy Promotion After DOGE: Soft Power in an Age of Great Power Competition

In recent years, policymakers have generally shifted from extolling soft power methods of pursuing the United States’ strategic aims, often focusing on the more concrete tools of military and economic coercion. But such a narrowing of vision comes just as the country’s adversaries are beginning to expand theirs. As Russia seeks to reassert influence in its near-abroad—a policy deeply rooted in its history but operationalized through very modern methods of gray zone warfare—the United States has turned its back on one of the most potent tools available to it to fight back: democracy promotion. In this new era of competition, older paradigms of U.S. democracy promotion efforts—deeply rooted in the end of the Cold War and the unipolar moment—should give way to a more confrontational, asymmetrical method of cultivating pro-democratic regimes in areas where Russia seeks to gain greater influence. This strategy has a sterling pedigree in modern American history, as exemplified by the success of Solidarity in Poland. 

Russia, Its Near Abroad, and the Rise of Gray Zone Warfare

The term ‘empire’ is one of the most fraught classifiers in historiography and political science. In the year 1914 alone, the term could usefully be applied to Britain’s patchwork of overseas territories, Austria-Hungary’s collection of Habsburg dynastic properties, the recently completed westward expansion of the United States and accompanying spillover into the Caribbean and the Pacific rim, Japan’s expanding conquests in northeast China, and, of course, Tsarist Russia. In the course of the short twentieth century, the European imperial states were largely dismantled, and the United States pursued Britain’s unconsummated dream of a liberal empire, united by military alliances, trade, and, when convenient, a shared commitment to democracy—or at least an opposition to Communism. For many emergent ideological movements in the West, namely the national conservatives currently in power in the United States, Italy, and Hungary, and on the doorstep of government in Britain, France, and Germany, nations are necessarily opposed to empires. In their telling, the necessary diversity of an imperial state makes it difficult for it to craft an identity based on a shared ethnic or linguistic heritage. Yoram Hazony, an influential Israeli intellectual whose works have gained much respect across multiple national-populist movements, asserts that nation-states are, by definition, incompatible with imperialism.¹

This is false. A strong sense of nationalism, or national identity, is just as often an incentive towards imperialism as it is an impediment to it. Some of the largest empires of the modern period, most notably France, Britain, and Japan, were powered by a strong and growing sense of national identity. The Soviet Union simultaneously encouraged the development of a Russian national consciousness—drawing on previous historical tendencies to view ethnic Russians as the first among (not-so) equals in the Tsarist Russian state—while expanding its peripheries to central Europe, central Asia, and the South Caucasus.² 

Russia, in the form of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, took a decidedly different tack. The U.S.S.R. was a federal state in which one Soviet Republic, to echo George Orwell, was far more equal than others: Russia. Even in its waning days, Russia took precedence over other republics, with its laws superseding Union-level laws during the last two years of the U.S.S.R. Additionally, the seven other states of the Warsaw Pact (six, after Albania withdrew in 1968), were, at least most of the time, more satellites than they were allies cooperating in shared areas of national interest. If it is perfectly compatible with the modern notions of national identity that are enabled by mass literacy and electronic communication, what then is an empire? The answer is frustratingly simple. “An empire, in other words, is a center with many unconnected peripheries, a ‘rimless’ hub and spoke system,” writes the political scientist Jeffrey Mankoff in his recent Empires of Eurasia: How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security.³ “The territorial extent of an empire, defined only by subordination to a central authority, is ever-shifting, driven by the logic of perpetual expansion.”⁴

Much of the discussion of Russia’s imperial legacy focuses on how it manages the extensive diversity of the modern Russian Federation, itself a shrunken version of previous iterations of the Russian state. But this shrunken state still includes ethnically and religiously diverse regions and populations, such as the North Caucasus, the Far East, and Muslim minorities in southern and central Russia. This is worth highlighting in order to refine notions of how Russian citizens and elites conceptualize their relationship to the state. Scholarship, like Mankoff’s book, also often discusses the concept of the Russian “near abroad,” an often-vague concept, but one which usually means the former Soviet Republics, which are now at least nominally independent states.⁵ “Moscow continues to regard them as a ‘near abroad’” lacking the full complement of sovereignty reserved for Russia itself and other states in the “far abroad,” writes Mankoff.⁶ This is true. But it also passes over the historical facts of Russian imperialism too quickly. Russia’s ambitions have always extended beyond its near abroad because land-based empires, since they do not possess tightly defined ethnic identities—when they do, it often leads to disaster, as in the creation of the Turkish nation state—and inherently have shifting, unstable borders.⁷ 

Coupled with this is the history of Russian expansion, which far predates the Soviet experience. Bordered on all sides by relatively few natural obstacles, Russia’s borders have always been under threat. “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them,” said Catherine the Great, whose 1783 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula was re-accomplished by Vladimir Putin in 2014.⁸ This extended well beyond what is now the near abroad and deep into Europe. Russia has engaged in no less than four partitions of Poland, invaded and conquered large swathes of Finland multiple times, incorporated the Baltic states into both the Tsarist empire and the Communist one, and plainly sees the Black Sea and the Balkans as part of its legitimate sphere of influence. The latter case has much deeper roots than modern-day election meddling in places like Moldova or Romania. Russian regional domination dates back to the Soviet era, to the sponsorship of Yugoslav nationalist movements that led to the outbreak of the First World War, and to Russia’s Danube campaign in the Crimean War and earlier in Russo-Turkish wars. The near abroad simply moves outward. How could it not?

Policymakers in both Europe and the United States should draw one main conclusion from this development. Even if a settlement of the war in Ukraine is reached in the near future, Russia is unlikely to stop at the borders of the Donbas, Kherson, and Belarus. Already, Russian forces are conducting probing gray zone attacks on NATO nations in Europe, along with coordinated campaigns of election interference throughout Eastern Europe. This includes aggressive drone flyovers of European airports and airspace, threatening undersea fiber-optic cables, sabotage aimed at European defense companies, cyber-attacks, online propaganda and disinformation campaigns, and covert attempts to bribe voters or provide resources to favored political parties. While an official briefing from NATO acknowledges that such actions have always been part of international statecraft, in recent years they have increased in “speed, scale and intensity, facilitated by rapid technological change and global interconnectivity.”⁹ The exact aims of gray zone warfare are still debated, and possibly unclear even to their authors, but they can harm European security in several ways. At the less harmful end of the spectrum, they may serve to disorient and alarm populations, or to shore up pro-Russian political parties through election interference. At the most alarming, gray zone warfare could soften the ground for an eventual surprise incursion into a NATO state in Eastern Europe, aimed at fully fracturing a NATO/EU alliance that may already be put off-balance by an intensifying campaign of gray zone warfare.¹⁰

As Ariane Tabatabai, a former U.S. Department of Defense advisor and international security scholar, writes in a recent article, these probing not-quite-attacks with drones, sabotage, and the occasional fighter jet flyover serve some purposes directly connected to the war with Ukraine: namely, signaling resolve and forcing Ukraine’s supporters to make hard choices about the allocation of resources.¹¹ Russia has been comfortable with coercive signaling for quite some time, often targeted at the U.S. In the Rand Corporation’s report, Understanding Russian Coercive Signaling, the first public report to take a comprehensive look at gray zone strategies, much, Samuel Charap and his co-authors note that much “of the assertive, dangerous, or unsafe Russian activity appears directed at shaping patterns of ongoing U.S. or allied behavior,” wrote the authors of the first report to take a comprehensive view of these Russian strategies, unfortunately published the same year as Russia went beyond signaling to simple coercion: the invasion of Ukraine.¹² However, Tabatabai also notes that Russia’s gray-zone warfare against NATO’s eastern flank serves other, longer-term purposes.¹³ Its tactics are meant to probe NATO’s weak points, especially smaller nations (such as the Baltic states and Romania) that might be easier to influence politically, or, in a dire case, quickly defeat militarily, before larger allies come to their aid. But, arguably more ominously, they are meant to normalize a constant state of Russian military and political pressure on frontier states (a line which is always shifting). Russia, then, is committed to creating ever-expanding borders. How should the U.S. and its allies respond to this permanent state of conflict below the threshold of war? One answer might come from a field that has fallen out of favor on both sides of the political aisle in recent years: democracy promotion abroad. 

Democracy Promotion’s Recent Decline

Neither of the major American political parties is currently inclined to support the work of earnest evangelists for liberal democracy in far-flung locales. Democrats, although possessed of a reflexive sympathy for non-military intervention, NGOs, and charitable work, have been disillusioned by what they view as the profound failures of the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. One might also credibly accuse the party of a profoundly self-critical attitude to its own country that makes it hard to muster up the enthusiasm to export its politics abroad. Republicans are similarly fed up with the projects of globalism, along with any hint of government spending not narrowly tied to hard power, American businesses, or bare-bones emergency aid. 

Not least among the reasons for this disillusionment is the seeming failure of many democracy-building projects. While many post-Communist states are relatively healthy democracies, like the Baltic states, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Croatia, many others have seen the hopes of a vibrant democratic culture fade. In Hungary, Romania, parts of the Balkans, and Georgia, there are worrying signs, and in some cases blaring red alarm signals, that these countries are backsliding into authoritarianism.¹⁴ The White House’s decision to cut nearly all of the United States’ support for democracy assistance programs in 2025 merely brought the third era of democracy promotion to an unceremonious end. Historians and practitioners, like Thomas Carothers, tend to trace the history of American democracy assistance in three phases. The first, beginning in the 1960s, was often extremely focused on the sociologist Eugene V. Rostow’s modernization theory, leading democracy promotion programs to often focus mostly, if not exclusively, on economic development. Then, after the administration of President Jimmy Carter began to focus American foreign policy on human rights concerns, democracy promotion became a key part of the Reagan administration’s anti-Communist agenda, coinciding with the creation of public-private partnerships like the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI).¹⁵ When the Cold War ended, democracy promotion entered a triumphant third phase, as U.S. funding and personnel fanned out across the post-communist world to spread the political system and values of the only remaining superpower. 

Triumph in the Cold War coincided with what the famed political scientist Samuel P. Huntington has referred to as the “third wave” of democratization: the spread of democracies in many parts of the post-communist world, Latin America, and some of the developing world.¹⁶ But Cold War victory and the third wave also helped to obscure the gradually heightening tensions between the United States’ democracy-promotion community and American foreign policy. The analyst and writer Lincoln A. Mitchell identified these in his 2016 book, The Democracy Promotion Paradox, writing that “U.S. democracy promotion seeks to peacefully and gradually expand democracy in countries that, as the years go by, look less like transitional governments and more like consolidated authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes.”¹⁷ Mostly ignoring the fact that much of the United States’ democracy-promotion paradigm relied on largely unchallenged American military might, expertise, and international prestige, democracy promoters were largely unable to help build movements that successfully fought back against rising authoritarianism. Fundamentally, they struggled to “win” when on the side of the underdog. 

Georgia is a representative example. Hailed in the mid-2010s as an example of a post-Soviet state that had emerged from a disastrous transition into a promising period of reform, many in the West expected it to join the European Union, if not NATO, in the near-to-medium term.¹⁸ However, “neither Tbilisi nor its friends in the West can afford to be complacent about Georgia’s progress,” wrote the journalist Dennis Sammut and Joseph D’Urso for Foreign Affairs in 2016.¹⁹ Of course, that is exactly what happened. As the Georgian Dream Party, initially led openly by billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili as Prime Minister, then led by him behind the scenes as an eminence grise, gradually became more authoritarian, Georgia’s fractured opposition seemed powerless to stop it. That impotence has come to a head in recent years, as Georgia transformed from a reasonably healthy democracy with a bright, European-oriented future, to an increasingly oppressive one-party state that is increasingly dependent on Russia.²⁰ Russia has also waged a highly successful soft-power campaign inside Georgia, first by infiltrating the leadership of Georgian Dream, and then by providing oil exports, a market for goods transshipped through Georgia, and, reportedly, large flows of cash.²¹ However, unlike the U.S., which has spent roughly $1.3 billion in Georgia in the past decade, Russia, as a popularly reviled national enemy, had almost no institutional presence in Georgia proper.²²  Abkhazia and South Ossetia, of course, are an entirely different matter.²³ In fact, Georgian Dream politicians were, in some cases, trained in areas like communications and party organization by U.S.-funded groups like the IRI.²⁴

Georgia still has elements of a strong democratic culture, with a cultural expectation of freedom of speech, an attachment to liberal institutions, and a robust ability to generate mass peaceful protest.²⁵ But its political system’s inability to combat the rise of a Georgian Dream-led one-party state is due in large part to the persistently weak, fractious nature of its democratic opposition, which can inspire large-scale street protests but rarely translates democratic passions into institutionalized democratic politics.²⁶ Even as protestors confront a burgeoning autocracy, skepticism about the viability and desirability of opposition politicians and parties remains pervasive.²⁷ Ironically, the political party that has been savviest about political campaigning, the use of media, closely monitoring public opinion, and building coalitions has been Georgian Dream, on its way to creating a virtual one-party state. In Georgia, American democracy promotion, although far from the only culprit, has failed to help create a creative, organized, and resilient opposition movement. 

Georgia is a textbook example of what political scientist Sarah Sunn Bush has referred to as “the taming of democracy assistance.”²⁸ By this, she means the worrying tendency, over time, for democracy assistance projects to focus on relatively nonpartisan goals such as media training, election observation, and local governance. In the twenty-first century, despite “the overall growth of democracy assistance, the confrontational programs of yesterday have been replaced—even in countries that have remained authoritarian—by international programs that conform more closely to their host environments,” instead of confronting dictatorships, writes Bush.²⁹ She attributes this change largely to the operating procedures of democracy assistance groups. To oversimplify an impressive work of scholarship, in Bush’s telling, because of their status as non-state actors, international NGOs have increasingly prioritized maintaining steady streams of donor funding, along with physical access to the countries they aim to help, rather than aggressive confrontations with undemocratic regimes or practices. 

This sort of drift is also a manifestation of an over-reading of the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that after the Cold War, the world had entered a period of unchallenged ideological dominance for liberal democracy.³⁰ In this view, the primary twentieth-century ideological threat to liberal democracy, Communism, has been defeated, outside of China (to say the least, a notable exception) and a few isolated basket cases.  Democracy assistance, then, might logically simply entail assisting the assumed natural aspirations of all, or at least most, nations for a democratic future. But that viewpoint ignores how Russia will always attempt to spread a relatively non-ideological, yet thoroughly non-democratic, system of patronage, corruption, and foreign dependency in its border regions due to its imperial view of statecraft.  

The principled answer, however, is not for the United States to promote its own version of imperialism. Luckily, another solution to this problem created by ideological drift lies in very recent U.S. history: the experience of United States support for the Solidaritymovement in Communist Poland. In that case, United States democracy assistance took on an entirely different character than the ineffectual form now being practiced across much of Eastern Europe. While viewed with much more skepticism by local governments and with much less funding, U.S.-supported pro-democratic groups waged a successful decade-long campaign against the abuses of the Polish People’s Republic.

In his Empowering Revolution: America, Poland, and the End of the Cold War, the historian Gregory F. Domber draws on largely Polish sources to show how this was accomplished.³¹ As the U.S. government, stung by the declaration of martial law by the Polish regime, prepared a new strategy against Poland, NGOs were critical, and also mission-focused. Congressional support for creating the National Endowment for Democracy provided crucial funding for an already existing international support network for Solidarity.³² Additionally, the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw very deliberately, although quietly, picked sides in the country’s political conflict, gathering networks of opposition members and potential sympathizers, serving as a crucial meeting point for these people.³³

Reflecting on his efforts aiding Poland’s transition to full democracy in 1989, former diplomat John A. Cloud, with Kenneth Sandler, noted that democracy promoters must, in an important way, be more reactive than proactive. In 1989, world-historical events moved so quickly, they wrote, that the George H.W. Bush administration had to have the institutional capacities, like the option to quickly lift sanctions, that could move faster than Congress.  They also wrote the “recipient may drive the process—not the United States,” as when Solidarity leaders first made the economic reforms necessary for America to trust Poland with expanded aid.³⁴ 

But the flexibility and speed of the American aid response in 1989 had roots in the Reagan administration. A mix of NED funding, covert CIA grants, and State Department aid, often organized and supplemented by diaspora organizations and labor groups, like the AFL-CIO, flowed into Poland.³⁵ Importantly, there was little wrangling over which agency or group was doing what (or, it might be better said, arguments did not stop the money and intelligence from flowing). This was likely due to Poland’s democratic movement coinciding with the early years of America’s human-rights era of democracy promotion, when strict bureaucratic barriers were either still nascent or contested. Compared to today’s bruising fights over whether the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), or even the U.S. Department of War or U.S. Department of Agriculture should administer foreign aid, the experiences of the Reagan and Bush administrations in focusing on outcomes over process should remind policymakers and legislators of a more effective mindset with which to approach international engagements. 

Democracy Promotion After the End of History: More Strategic, More Covert, More Confrontational

In short, a revitalized U.S. regime of democracy promotion will need to go beyond assisting countries uncritically or supplying neutral aid. It will need to pick sides, identifying (even if under-the-radar) those parties and institutions in Russia’s borderland who are most opposed to Russian geopolitical aims, and supporting them at the expense of others. This, of course, runs the risk of committing the same sin as Russia and interfering in a sovereign country. But sadly, that bridge has already been crossed, and not by the United States. In that case, the cause of liberal democracy and containing Russia will only be aided by aggressively and preferentially aiding movements opposed to Russian influence: a form of non-military action also oriented towards strategic competition, but one that does less to degrade American values. 

It will also need to abandon some institutional sacred cows, most importantly USAID’s traditional exclusive remit for long-term assistance, as well as the recently shuttered State Department bureaus focused on transnational issues. Secretary Rubio’s reforms may actually serve as a springboard that a more creative administration can use to combine interagency capabilities—intelligence, financing, operational expertise, and personnel—that have traditionally been cabined into separate civilian, military, and USAID-specific fiefdoms. A more ad-hoc approach, focused on regional specialists from across agencies and led from the undersecretary level, would be more effective. 

How, then, might U.S. policymakers begin to think about developing a democracy assistance strategy for the twenty-first century? The first step is to choose good targets. U.S. policymakers, along with members of the intelligence community, should devote a significant amount of effort to identifying which countries targeted by Russia are best situated to resist anti-democratic encroachment. In the Polish example, that country was aided by a large U.S. diaspora with active links to the home country, a counterweight to the regime in the form of Solidarity, and deep ties to a powerful transnational institution, namely the Roman Catholic Church.³⁶

These conditions do not obtain everywhere. For example, it is not obvious from the current academic work on the country that Georgia possesses many of these strengths. It is a small country with a comparatively small diaspora, essentially nothing in the way of a seriously organized opposition movement, and its most important civil-society organization, the Georgian Orthodox Church, has little transnational reach and possesses a hierarchy that is overwhelmingly supportive of the ruling party. These conclusions are debatable; however, if policymakers deem them to be true, money and, more importantly, attention should be focused on comparatively softer targets. This is an unpleasant conclusion, but it is likely to deliver more concrete results, both for the U.S. and for recipients of its aid. It should be noted that it also does not preclude the delivery of aid for humanitarian purposes. 

What might be a better target for U.S. democracy assistance? One country that currently may or may not be entering a period of regime change or instability: Venezuela. The relationship of the U.S. to the still-intact dictatorship of the country could be a positive test case for successful democracy promotion efforts. The strategic case is clear. Until very recently, Venezuela also served as a willing host to Russian military deployments and an enthusiastic customer of Russian arms. Its pro-democracy forces are also strong. Venezuelan opposition figures are highly organized, forming a government in exile under the leadership of a charismatic figure, Maria Corina Machado. Venezuela also has a recent tradition of democracy, with institutions like elections still carrying real weight in the minds of its citizens. And Venezuela, like Poland, also has a strong civil society, with a large Catholic majority and a growing Protestant minority (often with ties to U.S. groups). 

The opportunity for real democracy promotion, then, in Venezuela, should be obvious. A version of the Chavista regime, led by Delcy Rodríguez, that simply allows the U.S. access to oil would only offer limited gains for America, make the U.S. look like it was simply re-engaging in nineteenth-century imperialism, and likely continue to generate crises of drug smuggling and migrant waves across the Caribbean and Central America. Maintaining the structures of Venezuela’s authoritarian regime, most notably its politically powerful and repressive security services, while failing to cultivate and support the efforts of Venezuelans for reform would also be a major strategic mistake. Through its recent history, Venezuela has already demonstrated that it is vulnerable to authoritarian takeovers and resulting alignment with each of the U.S.’s three major adversaries: Russia, China, and Iran.³⁷ A future United States administration, preoccupied with other countries in Latin America or another region of the world, may simply devote less attention to Venezuela, allowing a figure like Rodríguez to begin to reestablish the web of cronyism and repression that set Venezuela on an authoritarian path in the first place. The United States’ enemies would likely be only too glad to help. A stable, democratic Venezuela, in which millions of its most capable citizens return and which feels some sort of gratitude towards the U.S. for removing a dictator and enabling the return of pro-democratic forces, would likely become an invaluable ally, one that is far more wary of Russian and Chinese encroachment. Luckily for Americans who are still idealistic believers in the democratic experiment, the argument that democracy promotion is not compatible with American strategic interests has yet to be won by either side.

In his 2016 book, Mitchell writes that phasing “out democracy promotion would be part of a process suggesting that the United States views itself as no longer interested in or able to effect political outcomes in much of the world.”³⁸ His diagnosis may or may not currently apply to American political culture, but adversaries of the United States have only increased their efforts to project power through non-military means, even as the United States has disdained such tools of statecraft. Compared to the vigorous efforts of the United States under President Ronald Reagan, it is a stunning act of unilateral self-disempowerment, then disarmament. However, if the United States’ policymakers and its NGO community can overcome some of the prejudices of the past—that it can or should attempt to promote democracy everywhere, that such efforts should be in some sense neutral, and that programs should be oriented toward assistance for fundamentally healthy political systems—the country will gain a weapon that will likely be able to outfight any acts of sporadic gray zone sabotage. 

James Sutton is a reporter at The Dispatch, where he writes for the Morning Dispatch newsletter. He graduated from Swarthmore College with a bachelor’s degree in history, and holds a master’s degree from the University of Oxford (Wolfson College) in military history. James is an alumnus of SSS Russia.

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Image: Solidarność logo FoP, April 14, 2010, from Eastern Europe 1990 (4523741715).jpg. Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solidarno%C5%9B%C4%87_logo_FoP.jpg.

[1] Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

[2] Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

[3] Jeffrey Mankoff, Empires of Eurasia: How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022), 15.

[4] Mankoff, Empires, 15.

[5] Elias Götz, “Putin, the State, and War: The Causes of Russia’s Near Abroad Assertion Revisited,” International Studies Review 19, no. 2 (June 2017), 228–253, 

[6] Mankoff, Empires, 42.

[7] Mankoff, Empires, 10.

[8] Glenn Chafetz and John Sipher, “Why Putin’s Russia Cannot Accept Its Borders,” Atlantic Council, August 11, 2023, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/why-putins-russia-cannot-accept-its-borders/.

[9] North Atlantic Treaty Organization, “Countering Hybrid Threats,” last updated January 29, 2026, https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/deterrence-and-defence/countering-hybrid-threats.

[10] M. Chris Mason et al., Russian Threats to NATO’s Eastern Flank: Scenarios, Strategy, and Policy for European Security (Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2026), https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/russia-nato-baltics-scenarios-europe-security.

[11] Ariane Tabatabai, “Russia and China in the Gray Zone,” Lawfare, November 14, 2025, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/russia-and-china-in-the-gray-zone.

[12] Samuel Charap et al., Understanding Russian Coercive Signaling (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2022), https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA100/RRA198-9/RAND_RRA198-9.pdf.

[13] Tabatabai, “Russia and China in the Gray Zone.”

[14] Marina Nord, David Altman, Tiago Fernandes, Ana Good God, and Staffan I. Lindberg, Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era? (Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute, University of Gothenburg, 2026), https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026_lowres.pdf. 

[15] Thomas Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999), pg. 29–32. 

[16] Samuel P. Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,” Journal of Democracy 2, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 12–34.

[17] Lincoln A. Mitchell, The Democracy Promotion Paradox (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2016), 186.

[18] Atlantic Council, Georgia’s Path Westward (Washington, DC: Atlantic Council, 2018).

[19] Dennis Sammut and Joseph D’Urso, “Georgia’s Western Turn: The Elections and After,” Foreign Affairs, September 21, 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/georgia/2016-09-21/georgias-western-turn.

[20] Freedom House, “Georgia: Nations in Transit 2024,” Freedom House, 2024, https://freedomhouse.org/country/georgia/nations-transit/2024; Thomas de Waal, “Georgia’s Dangerous Moment Is a Challenge for the EU,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 31, 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2024/10/georgias-dangerous-moment-is-a-challenge-for-the-eu.

[21] “Georgia Is Dousing the Last Embers of Democracy,” The Economist, November 9, 2025, https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/11/09/georgia-is-dousing-the-last-embers-of-democracy.

[22] PMC Research, Georgia and the United States of America: Profile of Bilateral Relations (Tbilisi, Georgia: PMC Research, October 2024), https://www.pmcresearch.org/publications_file/8276671762eeaca4a.pdf. 

[23] Jeanne-Mây Desurmont, “Abkhazia’s Naval Base: Russia’s New Foothold in Georgia,” Bloomsbury Intelligence and Security Institute, October 1, 2024, https://bisi.org.uk/reports/abkhazias-naval-base-russias-new-foothold-in-georgia; Olesya Vartanyan, “South Ossetia’s Loyalty Remains Unshaken Amid the War in Ukraine,” Italian Institute for International Security Studies, November 12, 2024, https://www.ispionline.it/en/publication/south-ossetias-loyalty-remains-unshaken-amid-the-war-in-ukraine-189554. 

[24] U.S. Embassy in Georgia (statement by Ambassador Kelly Degnan), reported in Civil Georgia, May 11, 2023, https://civil.ge/archives/541922; International Republican Institute, “Twining Discusses Accusations from Georgian Leadership,” December 5, 2019, https://www.iri.org/news/twining-discusses-accusations-from-georgian-leadership-with-voice-of-america/.

[25] Elene Panchulidze and Richard Youngs, “The Source of Georgia’s Democratic Resilience,” Journal of Democracy 36, no. 1 (2025): 123–134. 

[26] Archil Gegeshidze and Thomas de Waal, Divided Georgia: A Hostage to Polarization (Carnegie Europe, 2021), https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2021/12/divided-georgia-a-hostage-to-polarization.

[27] James P. Sutton, “A Georgian Dream Deferred,” The Dispatch, July 16, 2025, https://thedispatch.com/article/georgia-democracy-europe-russia-protest; German Marshall Fund, “Checking Georgia’s Anti-EU Drift,” February 3, 2026, https://www.gmfus.org/news/checking-georgias-anti-eu-drift. 

[28] Sarah Sunn Bush, The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

[29] Sunn Bush, Taming, 5.

[30] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18.

[31] Gregory F. Domber, Empowering Revolution: America, Poland, and the End of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

[32] Domber, Empowering Revolution, 89.

[33] Domber, Empowering Revolution, 262.

[34] John A. Cloud and Kenneth Sandler, Five Lessons from 1989 Poland for U.S. Support to Transforming Countries, Orbis, 66, no. 1 (2022),9–13, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2021.11.002.

[35] Idesbald Goddeeris, “Lobbying Allies? The NSZZ Solidarność Coordinating Office Abroad, 1982–1989,” Journal of Cold War Studies 13, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 83–125.

[36] Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002 [orig. 1983]); Madalena Meyer Resende and Anja Hennig, “Polish Catholic Bishops, Nationalism and Liberal Democracy,” Religions 12, no. 2 (2021); Joanna Wojdon, “Polish Americans’ Reception of the ‘Solidarity’ Immigration Cohort,” Studia Migracyjne – Przegląd Polonijny 44, no. 4 (2018).

[37] Javier Corrales, Autocracy Rising: How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism (Brookings Institution Press, 2023); James Kynge, “Attack on Venezuela Highlights Growing US–China Rivalry in Latin America,” Chatham House, January 16, 2026, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/01/attack-venezuela-highlights-growing-us-china-rivalry-latin-america; Sergey Sukhankin, “Russia Leverages Venezuela to Expand Influence in Western Hemisphere,” Jamestown Foundation, January 15, 2026, https://jamestown.org/russia-leverages-venezuela-to-expand-influence-in-western-hemisphere/; Kyle Gunn, “Inside Venezuela’s Growing Arsenal of Iranian Weapons,” Task & Purpose, December 17, 2025, https://taskandpurpose.com/news/venezuela-iran-united-states-caribbean/. 

[38] Mitchell, The Democracy Promotion Paradox, 24.