It’s hard to imagine Washington taking a more heavy-handed response to the prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was recently sentenced to 27 years in prison for having led a coup to stay in office after his 2022 loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. U.S. President Donald Trump has characterized the conviction as a “witch hunt” and retaliated with a 50 percent tariff on many Brazilian goods. The U.S. Treasury Department has hit Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice overseeing Bolsonaro’s trial, with some of the harshest sanctions in the U.S. toolkit, including those intended for human rights abusers. 

Even U.S. military action against Brazil, which Trump designated a major non-NATO ally in 2019, appears to be on the table. When asked about the possibility of a Bolsonaro conviction, White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt warned: “This is a priority for the administration, and the president is unafraid to use the economic might, the military might of the United States of America, to protect free speech around the world.” 

The harsh U.S. response to Bolsonaro’s prosecution represents a tremendous irony: the conviction resulted from the work of institutions that the United States fostered for decades by pushing for reforms to strengthen the independence of the Brazilian judiciary. Put simply, the Bolsonaro trial was a triumph of U.S. democracy promotion. 

At the moment, democracy promotion is anathema in Washington. The Trump administration has made unprecedented cuts to democracy, human rights, and governance programs, including dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, slashing the State Department’s democracy bureau, and freezing nearly $5 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign assistance. Trump has said that “there’s no reason for USAID,” which he has called a “left-wing money-laundering scam.” These positions represent a wholesale retreat from the bipartisan post–Cold War liberal consensus positing that democracy promotion as a form of soft power could both benefit foreign countries and advance U.S. interests and principles. 

U.S. democracy promotion can rightly be criticized for its misplaced idealism and its excesses. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the George W. Bush administration tried to carry out nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq on a scale not seen since the aftermath of World War II. Bush’s disastrous campaign to democratize the Middle East soured the American public on such policies, which in turn allowed Trump to position himself as an opponent of democracy promotion and foreign assistance more broadly. And even in Latin America, U.S. democracy promotion has a checkered history, beginning with President Woodrow Wilson’s moralistic crusade to impose democracy on........

© Foreign Affairs