*Originally published in 2023 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

The promotion of both human rights and democratization has long been a feature of American foreign policy. American support for them, however, has been inconsistent. When Washington has judged that cooperating with authoritarian and illiberal democratic regimes to be in its strategic or economic interests, then the U.S. has either ignored or even made excuses for these countries’ human rights and democratic deficits. This is something that human rights and democracy activists both in the West and in these autocratic and illiberal regimes have long pointed out. But while American support for human rights and democracy has been far too weak for these activists, it has been far too strong for the authoritarian and illiberal democratic regimes Washington has been supporting.

These governments have always cooperated with the U.S. more on the basis of shared strategic and/or economic interests, not shared values. For them, U.S. government criticism of their lack of human rights and democracy is not just unwelcome, but threatening in that they believe such criticism can only undermine them internally. They warn that doing so could lead to their replacement by anti-Western autocratic forces, but they have usually been just as unwilling to be replaced by pro-Western democratic ones. Both their reaction to and willingness to tolerate such criticism, though, has changed over the course of the three most recent geopolitical eras:  1) the height of the Cold War (stretching from the end of World War II until the Gorbachev era); 2) America’s “unipolar moment” (from the end of the Cold War through the mid-2000s); and 3) the current era characterized by the apparent decline of America and the liberal world order on the one hand and the rise of China, Russia, and other authoritarian and illiberal powers (from the mid-2000s to the present).

During the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Marxist-Leninist and other “progressive” regimes and movements advocated an alternative vision of human rights and democracy than that offered by America and its Western allies. This Marxist-Leninist/progressive vision encompassed “national liberation” from Western imperialism, “popular democracy” (a euphemism for Marxist-Leninist or other leftist dictatorship), and state-sponsored economic planning minimizing dependence on Western multinational corporations. However inconvenient American and other Western criticisms of their human rights and democratic deficits, fear that the Marxist-Leninist/progressive vision of human rights and democracy would lead to their overthrow served to motivate pro-Western autocracies and illiberal democracies to continue cooperating with the U.S.--and served to motivate the U.S. to continue cooperating with........

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