Last year brought the reelection of US President Donald Trump—and the start of the new administration has already had seismic impact. One year after the election, foreign policy is increasingly viewed through the lens of democratic values, with many citizens and leaders asking whether international norms—like free elections, human rights, and rule of law—are being upheld or eroded in US diplomacy.
KRISTIN CAULFIELD: I now turn the event over to Professor Erez Manela, acting director of the Weatherhead Center.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much, Kristin. And welcome, everyone, to the Weatherhead Forum, which is the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs' platform to address pressing topics of the day. The topic of discussion today will be, now what? Foreign policy and the state of democracy one year after the elections in the United States.
So last year brought the re-election for a second non-consecutive term of US President Donald Trump. And the start of the new administration has already, in its first year, had seismic impact around the world. So we thought one year after the election, we should gather and discuss how foreign policy is increasingly viewed by many through the lens of democratic values, with many citizens and leaders asking whether norms like free elections, human rights, and the rule of law are being upheld or eroded in US diplomacy.
So today, we invited three preeminent experts in the field to talk to us about this question. I'll introduce them in just a second. First, a quick note on the format. Each speaker will present for about 10 to 12 minutes. Then I will pose questions to the group, and we'll have a bit of a discussion. And then we'll take your questions from the Q&A feature on the Zoom. So not the chat, but the Q&A. Please draft your questions and put them in there. I will try to get to as many as I can, and may combine questions that are similar.
So without further ado, we are honored to be joined by our esteemed panelists. I'll introduce them alphabetically. The first is Bart Bonikowski. Bart is associate professor of sociology and politics at New York University. His work applies insights from cultural sociology to the study of politics in the United States and in Europe, and with a particular focus on nationalism, populism, and radical right parties. Before moving to NYU, Bart was an associate professor at Harvard and director of the Weatherhead Undergraduate Student Programs. So we're happy to welcome you back, Bart.
Our second panelist is Fredrik Logevall. Fred is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, renamed, I'm sorry, Harvard Kennedy School a few years ago, and Professor of History at Harvard University. Fred is specialist on foreign relations-- US foreign relations, history and modern international history, and he is the author or editor of 10 books, most recently JFK Coming of Age in the American Century 1917 to 1956, which came out in 2020. And I believe the sequel is coming out sometime soon.
Our third panelist is Pippa Norris. She is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for three decades. She is the Paul F. McGuire lecturer in comparative politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, and her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. Her latest book is forthcoming with Oxford University Press early next spring. And the title is The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding.
So, as you can see, really, an ideal panelist of list of commentators on this topic. We'll go alphabetically by last name. So, Bart, please. And thank you for being here.
BART BONIKOWSKI: There we go. Thank you so much for the introduction, Erez. And thank you for having me. It's wonderful to be back among friends and at the Weatherhead-- Weatherhead Center, a place that I care about deeply. I do comparative politics from a sociological angle. So what I wanted to set the stage with is just a discussion of how the radical right is performing similar political projects across very different contexts, and how that might give us some hints about the foreign policy environment that we're in.
So whether the global order is truly eroding or not is to be determined. It's a bit of a sensationalist second half of the title, but things are definitely getting shaken up. Things are changing. And so let's think about what the roots of that might be.
And so the real question that I want to start with is, what do contemporary cases of radical right politics have in common? These are very different countries, whether we think about the United States, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Russia, India, these are extremely different cases with very different studying conditions and different structural conditions. But yet, we see quite similar politics playing out. And that has some hints about where foreign policy is heading.
So that's the question I want to pose to all of us. The fact that these countries are quite different cultures structurally is, perhaps, obvious. And yet, there are similar patterns here. And so trying to hone in on these seems important to me. And so the first thing is that the radical right actors, the radical right parties across these countries rely on very similar political recipes, discursive recipes, in mobilizing their political projects.
So they all draw on some sort of anti-elite rhetoric and opposition to the established order, typically domestically. But that also has implications internationally. They mobilize and activate particular types of nationalism and ethnocultural nationalism, one that is predicated on exclusionary boundaries with respect to religion, language, race, ethnicity, and so forth. And they also involve authoritarian rule.
And so, in some ways, there's kind of a perfect recipe here, kind of a winning formula, to paraphrase Kitschelt, where there's a critique of the established order of the elites that are in place. And part of the critique is that they've abandoned the nation as it ought to exist. And in order to regain that nation-- and you can fill in the blanks. That nation typically is, in the case of the United States or Europe, a white Christian nation. Often there's also a patriarchal dimension to this.
In order to regain that nation, this may require some extraordinary measures, including the running roughshod over democratic institutions and norms. But that's part of the cost of regaining the nation. So these discursive recipes are quite similar across these parties and political leaders. There are also similar reasons why this recipe works, that I've argued in my past work and I want to posit today.
When the nation is sort of framed as having been lost, the real nation, the nation as it ought to be, that often draws on a set of fears and anxieties among the public about rapid cultural and structural change. This is what some of our panelists have written about, and some of the folks in the audience, as well. So when ethnic religious majorities experience a sense of rapid change, that often undermines their perceived collective status.
And the sources of change can be quite varied. They can be economic. They can be demographic. They can be cultural. They can involve national security threats. And I think what's really important to realize is that which threats matter the most varies both within countries, in terms of different pathways to the same voting outcomes, and certainly across countries that start off with very different conditions.
But in all of these cases, across these different countries, the activation of collective status threat allows these radical right actors to mobilize pre-existing nationalist cleavages. Essentially, fundamentally different understandings of what the nation means. And we see this plainly in the United States. A Trump-supporting Republican's view of America is radically different than maybe a center-of-left, mainstream Democrat's view of America.
And these cleavages were already there, but they become activated through the sense of status threat that is drummed up by these actors, which then leads to, in some cases, not in a universal and linear, manner, but in many cases, leads to some version of radical right success. Either increase in the polls, sometimes joining governing coalitions in the United States, the capture of one of the two parties and three branches of government.
Once these parties are in power, to whatever degree they are, often the result is that their supporters are willing to tolerate some range of authoritarian governance strategies that allow the leaders, the radical right leaders, to restore the nation as they imagine it, often, again, counteracting existing norms and counteracting existing political cultural elites. So the recipe is similar. The mobilization mechanisms are similar, despite differences across countries.
And then once in power, these parties play out a very similar playbook. And Kim Scheppele has written about this, among others, the authoritarian playbook. So the recipe is, undermine the independent courts as early as possible. Undermine the autonomy of the media, either by replacing party staff, if the media are public-- or, sorry, replacing media staff with party apparatchiks, if the media are public. If the media are private, then exerting all kinds of pressures to the private sector for aligning them with the radical right party's priorities. Undermining universities, the autonomy of the civil service, and generally the rule of law.
And we've seen this in Turkey. We've seen this in Hungary. We've seen this to some degree in Poland, although eventually reversed, temporarily, I would argue. And we've certainly seen this in the United States. And the goal of all this, and ultimately the result of it, is the concentration of executive power, the suppression of popular dissent, and often part of the pathway is also the incitement of violence among supporters against the political opposition.
Now, often part of this is also targeting of minorities, immigrant groups, and other vulnerable groups, as we know. But there's a kind of a boundary here in the literature between illiberal governance measures, those that essentially undermine rights regimes, and undemocratic measures. And once we slip that last arrow here, once we slip into the undermining of elections, then we get into, essentially, illiberal and undemocratic governance. And we've already seen hints of this in the United States. Whether it's plausible or not is to be determined.
But that's the general outline, right? So these discursive recipes combined with this similar mobilization mechanisms lead to quite similar governance strategies once in power. I'll get to, in a minute, what this has to do with foreign policy.
I'm probably going to skip a diagram of how this all works, but it's here. This is how I think about it theoretically. I think I'm just going to show the last piece here. So within this diagram, what I would have normally given you some detail on is just how this mobilization strategy works by marshaling populist frames and attitudes, nationalist frames and attitudes, and authoritarian frames and attitudes.
But I want to just focus on the last piece here, that once the mobilization strategy works, and once the authoritarian governance measures are put into place, the whole model diffuses quite easily across countries. And this is, I think, really important for the foreign policy questions that we're tasked with answering today.
So the way that this diffuses operates through a few mechanisms. But I think that the key fact to focus on is that we see very similar processes play out in these drastically different places. So if you think about Hungary and Poland, Orban and Kaczynski do not agree on most policies. They don't agree on-- ideologically, one is deeply aligned with Putin. The other's entire raison d'etre is a Russophobia and an opposition to Putin's governance. And yet, they borrow from each other, and they pursue very similar strategies.
So one way in which this happens is through isomorphism, simply looking at what works elsewhere, adapting it to your own purposes, to your own context. And that certainly happens. And I would argue this is probably the primary manner through which this set of practices unfolds and diffuses.
The other one is what some have called the populist international, the authoritarian international. We've got some scholars actually in the audience who've studied this. And that is about networks of direct influence. That also happens, for sure. So we've got Farage doing a tour of the United States, same with Modi. You've got these leaders directly interacting with one another and borrowing ideas, borrowing strategies from one another. So that is certainly at play. How we would weight these two mechanisms, unclear at this point. But both are certainly at play.
I do want to note, though, that you don't need direct ties in order to mimic what others are doing, obviously. But those direct ties increase the speed of diffusion, perhaps. It's also the case that these leaders-- and this is-- we're getting closer to foreign policy-- have common enemies. Those enemies are liberal leads domestically, but also elites within the transnational liberal order. They are also those who subscribe to liberal democratic principles that stand in the way of these radical right actors.
And so to the degree that leaders across very different countries share similar enemies domestically and transnationally, you can imagine how that then creates incentives for alliances across these otherwise disconnected states. They also tend to have similar leadership styles. Rubin has written about this, and others have written about this, the kind of strongman politics, politics of dominance, of zero sum logic, the notion that, really, short-term wins and absolute wins are what matters.
And given that there's also a desire to remain in power for a long time, ostensibly in the interest of the people, however you define that, they all share this interest in basically an authoritarian ethno-nationalist rule and an authoritarian ethno-nationalist order. And so that also aligns their interests across countries in ways that shape their foreign policy and the resulting international relations.
So in terms of the foreign policy itself, and then I'll wrap up-- back to this odd bedfellows metaphor. Again, people who may otherwise have very different priorities and different interests often end up aligning internationally, as a result, around a common desire to reconfigure the liberal order, both in political terms-- that is, to essentially end the liberal consensus and the role of transnational institutions that are led by the United States and the European Union, but also to reconfigure the economic order. And we obviously see this with tariffs in the United States.
There is a desire, as a result, to also abandon established alliances, or at the very least, to erode them in the goal of reconfiguring the entire liberal order. And so countries that were close allies are finding themselves at odds, because radical right leaders, once in power, are not interested in maintaining those relationships. And so I think that the starkest example, in some ways, although how consequential it is, we'll see, is the United States and Canada-- countries that were essentially deeply tied with-- in an unquestioned way for decades. And all of a sudden, they are fundamentally at odds with one another as a result of the Trump administration's policies. And the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, saying, essentially, that relationship is over.
As a result, there's also of the shared interest with authoritarians abroad. Now you get these strange-- perhaps strange, although some somewhat logical alliances between authoritarian leaders from these different countries who are aligning with one another against the liberal order. And that is-- somebody from 30, 40 years ago told you that Trump, in many ways, although not permanent ways, is-- looks up to Putin and to authoritarian Russia, that would have been beyond the pale for most US politicians, and especially Republicans, actually. But again, odd bedfellows.
I do want to point out that to the degree that this generates new alignments. These alignments are fragile, which makes the analysis tricky for a variety of reasons. One is that radical right actors are often novices by definition. They are often populist leaders with limited political experience. They lack durable and ideological commitments quite often, and are driven by the short-term interests of domination kind of domination politics. And so even with Russia, we see on and off again relationship between Trump and Putin. Despite various alignments, it's hard to know how durable these alignments are.
If you add to this, what we're starting to see in the United States desire to incite conflict domestically in order to suppress dissent, but also to incite conflict internationally, perhaps with an objective of inducing states of exception that allow for scaled-up authoritarian rule. All of this together, this sort of fragile realignments with other authoritarian leaders abroad, the kind of instability of these alignments, and the potential desire for conflict, despite claims to protectionism and isolationism, all of this leads to tremendous instability, obviously, both at home and abroad. Which makes, in some ways, nailing down the foreign policy of radical right actors, like Trump, a difficult task.
And it also-- I think maybe we'll hear about this later-- potentially leaves the vacuum for other actors who are vying for global supremacy. So, obviously, China is one of these actors. And so in some ways, there's a potential for those actors to sit back and just wait to see where the chips fall. Because those who used to be global leaders are no longer keeping their eye on the ball. And so that is one potential implication that further exacerbates this potential instability.
One thing-- well, I'll mention it here in my last slide. I'm not sure how I'm doing on time, but I should probably stop. I would say that, what's the outlook? Despite yesterday's electoral results in the United States, the long-term outlook seems a little bleak. One of the problems is their usual electoral mechanisms for returning centrist parties to power tend not to work well when you've got a radical right party that's committed to breaking things trying to alternate, potentially electorally, with centrist parties that are just trying to shore things up. It's easier to break things than it is to build things back up.
So elections, to the degree that they are still existing and fair, become less durable. And I worry about this in Poland, where the radical right was, in fact, kicked out through the electoral process. But it's quite likely that it will come back after, inevitably, the centrist party will disappoint the electorate. Because it's hard to build things back up, protect democracy, and ensure the welfare of citizens all in a single term.
We've got weakened institutions, including elections. And it seems to me that a lot of countries, US-- the US included, the existing institutions are wholly unprepared for how to handle this moment. They're still stuck in the old ways of doing things, when democratic, liberal democratic norms applied. And I think what's quite clear is, whatever the electoral outcomes in the short-to-medium term are, the radical right is here to stay. They're not going away. They're part of the political reality. And it's unclear if we have the theories to prepare us for what it means for an alternation of power between anti-democratic, illiberal actors, and those who are trying to preserve democracy against all odds, not to mention the potential for conflict.
So I'll mention-- oh, there was some reason-- some cause for hope, but I'll skip that in the interest of time. Thank you.
EREZ MANELA: Thanks, Bart. Fred, you're up next.
FREDRIK LONGEVALL: Well, it's really nice to be with you. Thank you, Erez. And to follow Bart and his comparative perspective, I'm going to be more focused on the United States. I want to talk about, in my brief remarks, really about power and its forms in international affairs. Suggest to you, as I think Erez said at the outset, that Trump has embarked on a pretty profound shift in US foreign policy. How lasting it will be is maybe something we can discuss when we turn to discussion. But certainly it seems thus far, 10 months in, at least to me, that it's a very profound shift.
And the effect of this, I think, has been to diminish American power in a number of domains Excuse me. What I want to focus on here is the depreciation of US soft power. Seems appropriate with our recent loss of Joe Nye to zero in a little bit this afternoon on soft power. The term, of course, is-- as I think all of you know is, of course-- it's associated with Joe. Huge loss when he left us earlier this year. And I want to talk a little bit about this.
Power, I think, we can define as the ability to get others to do what you want. It's a fairly common definition. I think it works and this goal can be accomplished in one of three ways, through coercion, through payment, or through attraction. The first two, I think, are-- I think we would group under hard power, coercion and payment, and the third under soft power.
And Joe Nye often stressed that soft power is not a substitute for hard power. Meaning, in the case of hard power, military and economic. But he argued, and I have argued myself in a different context, that it's an essential component of effective great power politics. And the reason, I think, is simple it's easier to work with others when you are admired and heard and respected.
Seduction, again, something Joe often said. Seduction works better, is more effective than coercion. And I want to suggest to you this afternoon that many of America's self-professed values, such as democracy, human rights, individual freedom and opportunity, the rule of law, these are deeply seductive to many people around the world. And I think America's post-war presidents understood this long before Joe Nye coined the concept.
America's post-war presidents, Republican and Democrat, were practicing soft power alongside hard power. They didn't have the name yet, but they were doing it. And at least to this Cold War historian, the results were irrefutable. We could look at the very beginning, of course, the Marshall Plan of 1947-- to my mind, one of the outstanding US foreign policy initiatives in the nation's history.
And that plan, as I think you all know, gave Europe, including the defeated axis powers, some $13 billion in foreign aid that, within a decade-- and historians debate how much of the aid was responsible for Europe's recovery. So we can have that debate. But certainly it mattered that the United States provided this aid in the Marshall Plan. No question.
And then if we skip to the end, I would submit to you that what brought down the Berlin Wall, what ended the superpower confrontation, was less bombs and missiles and more CNN, Hollywood films. MTV, the Voice of America, blue jeans. So what happened, I think, is over the course of the Cold War, over the course of these four-plus decades, the United States promoted ideas about democracy and human rights that, even though the United States itself didn't live up to those ideals-- we can talk about that, as well, the ways that America fell short. For example, as a historian of the Vietnam War, I can speak at length about that tragic chapter.
Even though the United States didn't always live up to those ideas, I think people around the world found those ideas much more attractive than those offered by the Kremlin. I'm originally from Sweden, and I can tell you that Swedes always found those American ideas more attractive. And what happened then, of course, is that this allowed successive American administrations to form partnerships with nations around the world and alliances. Bart referred to the fraying of alliances.
And in numerous cases where countries chose to be neutral-- take, again, Sweden as an example-- they leaned much closer in their neutrality, leaned much closer to Washington than to Moscow. They had security arrangements with the West, for example, even if they were not members of NATO. This is true of the Swedes. And I don't have to tell this group that America's open economy outperformed the Soviet economy, especially over time, by leaps and bounds.
Meanwhile, Soviet propaganda cultural projects could never really rival the influence of American commercial popular culture in terms of flexibility, in terms of overall attractiveness. What I'm suggesting then, folks, is that soft power was hugely important, not just during the Cold War, but after. So, let's say, over the last eight decades has been hugely influential and important for US foreign policy.
And I'm also suggesting that soft power derives from a country's society, and culture and its institutions, not just the actions of its government. Let me just zero in briefly on John F. Kennedy, who is, as Erez mentioned, the subject of my current research. Kennedy's interesting. I have to say that, I guess, since I'm writing about it.
Kennedy was a realist in IR terms. Meaning from his reading of history and his own experiences, John F. Kennedy regarded power and the principal forms that power takes-- political, military, economic-- to be the most important elements shaping the international system. He's a realist. But this attachment to realism didn't, for Kennedy, exclude an appreciation for the capacity of idealism to move people. He famously called himself an idealist without illusions.
Nor, in Kennedy's case, did it exclude an appreciation for the power-- for the influence, the importance of soft power. Quite the contrary. Kennedy saw from an early point-- this is well before he became president, 1961. He saw that the Cold War was not merely a military contest with the Soviet Union. It was a cultural and diplomatic struggle, as well, in which America's values must undergird its policy choices.
And I think if Kennedy were around today-- and he'd be, what, 108? So I guess it's not entirely implausible. But I think he would say the same thing is true with the current conflict with China. American values must undergird its policy choices. Soft power matters.
So if victory was to be achieved in the Cold War, Kennedy believed, soft power would be vital. Not as important as hard power for Kennedy, but it mattered a lot.
And then you have, after he becomes president, lots of examples which we don't have time to go into. But examples of his policy decisions that undergirded this conviction. Alliance for Progress, which was, of course, a very large economic development program for Latin America, the Peace Corps, USAID created under Kennedy, much in the news of late. The US Information Agency, Voice of America, the lunar project. All of these, I would suggest to you, are examples of American soft power at work.
Lots of caveats that we could offer here, if we had more time, in terms of the limitations of soft power and how often soft power was politicized, provided to countries according to their political allegiances rather than actual need, how often the foreign aid might be misused by the recipients. Although I would say this was not nearly as common a problem as the critics of foreign aid have been suggesting, including over the last few months. USAID, just to choose one example, I would say to you was extremely effective from its earliest days in reducing child mortality, improving health care access, supporting education initiatives, humanitarian aid, conservation, et cetera.
So that's my tour of the horizon, if you will. It seems to me that in today's Washington, American soft power is out. Hard power is all that matters. By its actions in these first, what's it been, 10 months? The administration really has announced, it seems to me, that the US is out of the business of promoting democracy, nurturing alliances, building international goodwill. It's a very transactional approach to foreign policy.
As far as I can see, the promotion of democratic values really has no discernible role in Washington. There are Republicans in Congress who care about these things, and I think care about them deeply, who understand the importance of soft power, who care about the promotion of Democratic values. But they are, to say the least, quiescent, or have been at least up to this point.
So the president and his aides have concluded that soft power is no real power at all. And I think this is-- as I've suggested here in my brief remarks, is profoundly misguided. Soft power has been central to much of what the United States has been able to achieve over the last eight decades and could achieve again going forward. We can talk about later whether-- what this means going forward. But I do retain the hope that this has not been-- that this can be salvaged.
Again, it's not a substitute for hard power, but a vitally important complement. And I'll end it there, Erez, and turn it back to you.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you, Fred. And I'm especially glad that you brought up Joe Nye and soft power, because that was the topic of our previous Weatherhead Forum last month. Pippa, please.
PIPPA NORRIS: Thank you so much, and it's a pleasure to follow. And Erez said that, of course, at the beginning, we're doing a summary of what we've changed over the last year since the election. But for many of us, it seems a lot longer than a year. So let's think about some of these issues and build on what Bart and Fredrik have said. And what I'm going to focus on is whether there has been a realignment, not just in Washington, DC foreign policy in terms of our perceptions of allies, and adversaries, and the broader end of the liberal world order, but whether it's also there in public opinion. And this is part of my book, which will be coming out next year with Oxford on the cultural roots of democratic backsliding.
So what's this about? Well, what I'd like to do is essentially think about some of these issues and start with a theoretical framework. The theoretical framework basically covers the question about whether the American foreign policy has changed as a result of leadership elites-- primarily, of course, Trump, and others in the State Department and in the Pentagon-- or whether it also reflects a profound and perhaps enduring shift in cultural values in the contemporary Republican electorate and in American public opinion at large.
And this raises classic issues about the role of public opinion. Do people care about foreign policy if it's not on their back door, if it's not a security threat, which is immediate? Do people know about things like tariffs? Are they aware of what's happening in countries, such as Ukraine or in Gaza?
KRISTIN CAULFIELD: Pippa, can I just stop you for one minute? Your presentation isn't on-- you just need to click on Slideshow. We're seeing your notes as well.
PIPPA NORRIS: That's interesting. This is my Presenter view, so it should be working for you as well. Does it not show? This should be on slide 2.
KRISTIN CAULFIELD: We see slide 2, but we also see your notes on the side.
PIPPA NORRIS: OK. I'll end that show, and I'll just do it from the current slide. And that should just be--
KRISTIN CAULFIELD: There, perfect.
PIPPA NORRIS: There we go. Perfect. It just doesn't show me my timer, but you can give me a warning.
KRISTIN CAULFIELD: We'll give you a warning.
PIPPA NORRIS: Thinking about the classic debates-- and I'm going to give you new evidence. We've just completed cleaning the World Values Survey wave 8, which was conducted after the US presidential election. And this is some of the work which we can illustrate. And we'll look at the findings of Trump voters' attitudes and values towards things like the countries they regard as allies and adversaries, how they feel about foreigners and immigrants, some of the issues which Bart already mentioned, how they feel about UN agencies of global governance, how they feel about multilateral institutions and world affairs.
And that, I think, will help to conclude about, has there been an enduring realignment in the American electorate, particularly amongst the Republican Party supporters? What are the broader implications for Democratic backsliding? The big question. And let's emphasize it's work in progress. We have had only 10 months, and the foreign policies continue to evolve. And so we haven't yet got the final shape, obviously, of the Trump administration part two.
So what's the theoretical framework? This was the phrase which Anders Rasmussen said immediately in spring 2025 reacting to some of the statements from Trump. And in particular, he argued that "The security architecture of Europe has depended for generations," and it's gone. "And it's not coming back. We no longer know where America stands. If the mission of defending freedom and democracy in Europe falls solely on us, we must be ready to take it on."
That shock has somewhat faded, but it still is a very real perception, particularly in the European Union. And it's argued, as Fredrik has said, that America is experiencing a radical break in the post-world World War II foreign policy paradigm and the rules-based liberal world order.
Now, again, the elements of this started, I think, in the first Trump administration, but it's clearly accelerated and really radically changed just in the last 10 months. This raises three questions. What exactly is the emerging American first doctrine? What drives this realignment? And what are the implications, particularly for liberal democracy and autocratization abroad?
Now, when we think about these issues, we can think, what is the nature of this rift? And again, as we all have known about the rules-based liberal world order, it's a doctrine based on liberal ideas and values respecting principle of open free trade, liberal Democratic governance, universal human rights, collective security, national sovereignty, international institutions and treaties, and the rule of law. And it's very familiar. It's about the principles of cooperation, values of democracy, importance of alliances, free trade, and human rights.
And I just think it's worth looking at the foreign policy which dominated in terms of democracy under the Biden summit in 2023, not that long ago. These were the declarations that the countries agreed to. And it just seems like a different age. Protect human rights. Rule of law. Ensure accountability for violations. Support people who stand for freedom, and reject sovereign-- violations of sovereignty through acts of military aggression. Combat all forms of discrimination. Strengthen women's rights. That's certainly gone at the White House. Prevent and combat corruption. That's gone even further at the White House.
Advanced technology. Maybe that's going on, but not much. Defend transnational threats. Yes, well, we're not too sure about America's role in that unless you pay us. Support free and fair elections. That's gone by the board. And address global challenges of things like climate change, global health, food security. And again, that's Biden's agenda on democracy in 2023.
And what's changed, we're all familiar with the developments. We've been living through them, whether it's the immediate curtailment of USAID, any defunding on democracy, withdrawal of the UN agreements on trade, and the imposition of tariffs, which then, of course, spread throughout the world. Half of our-- half of the countries are now paying excessive tariffs. The purge of the military. Changes in imperial ambitions haven't yet been followed through in Canada, The Panama Canal, and Greenland, but they may. And Canada certainly reacted very strongly.
Changes in our support for NATO. Although, again, that's been an erratic policy, along with our policies towards Ukraine and Taiwan. And support for Israel has strengthened, blocking UN resolutions-- the only country on the Security Council on a number of resolutions to end the war.
And the emerging America first doctrine, I do think, has a series of different principles behind it, and I list them here. I won't go through them in detail. But again, I think they're really critical. And I think they need working through as the policies emerge. They're not all consistent. Sometimes they're exaggerated through the rhetoric in terms of the actions. They're much less. But nevertheless, these, I think, are part of the new doctrine.
So that raises the question. Clearly, most of the media, when they cover these issues, focus on leadership, elites, the institutions of governance. Today, for example, whether the Supreme Court is going to decide against Trump's legality of tariffs. And that's a plausible explanation. But is public opinion actually important in catalyzing or constraining the realignment?
The traditional theory in public opinion has been that the public has very little effect. Why is that? Because, clearly, foreign policy is something which is quite distant from most people's lives and experiences. Public opinion towards international affairs has been thought ever since the American voter to be usually uninformed, inattentive, incoherent, or inconsistent, and volatile. So it can't have a big impact compared with the role of, for example, both the diplomatic circles, the military brass, the donors, the think tanks, and everybody else who's playing a role in foreign policy.
And even when there is issue voting, foreign policies are usually thought to have a low salience. And so the most important problem is always the economy, stupid. But there is a pushback amongst cultural arguments, amongst those who look at public opinion. in our own work, we suggest, as Bart has emphasized, that many ordinary Republican voters endorse the values, if not the policies, in detail underlying the America first doctrine.
In other words, values of things like patriotism, nationalism, nativism, isolationism, xenophobia, mistrust of global governance, and USA. And so there are some arguments about that. And in the longer term, after all, public opinion is thought to respond thermostatically to major shifts in foreign policies-- for example, the growth of economic globalization-- often by going against what's happening in DC.
And in the shorter term, the public opinion may well react also to foreign affairs which have direct impacts in our experience, whether it's American boots on the ground in Vietnam, direct security threats-- for example, European public opinion towards Russia, major acts of terrorism, like 9/11, or long-term effects of globalization, like changes to domestic policies and jobs or migration. So in that view, in the public opinion argument, Trump does have a popular mandate. And it was rooted in Republican voters in the 2024 election.
Most important problem, however, if you look at the 2024 election, suggests skepticism about public opinion. These are the most important issues in the most recent poll I found, which is The Economist's YouGov. And clearly, it remains inflation and prices for those who voted for either Harris or Trump. Jobs in the economy, bread and butter concerns, healthcare, particularly for, obviously, Democrats immigration, particularly for Republicans. National security, 4% overall think it's an important issue. And foreign policy, 2%. So that gives us grounds for skepticism that foreign policy played a role. But let's look at some data and evidence.
And I'm going to, as I said, use the 2024 presidential election in particular for this presentation, using the most recent data from the eighth wave. I'm using measures of a wide variety of different attitudes towards foreign policies. For example, trust in international institutions like the UN and its agencies, favorability towards a range of six countries, like China and Russia, preferences for US engagement or isolationism, feelings of xenophobia. For example, trust in foreigners. And nativist attitudes, for example, attitudes towards economic and cultural threats from immigration.
And I'm going to control for a variety of factors, ideological values, and sociodemographic factors. And my dependent variable is whether somebody voted for Trump or Harris in the November 2024 presidential election, with data which was gathered by NORC immediately after that election. So in November 2024.
This is a summary model which just shows you what goes into it. But I'll show you the visualizations before I come to my conclusions. This looks at what predicts the Trump vote as 0, 1 predictor versus Harris in the full model. I control for lots of different ideological values. For example, whether or not people see themselves as conservative or liberals, whether they approve of democracy, whether they approve of authoritarian practices, a new battery I've put into the world value survey. Whether they believe in traditional child rearing, authoritarian values, an old measure that's been around since the '50S. But nevertheless, we still try to look at the trends-- populist attitudes and fears of being left behind economically.
So did people vote for Trump because of these? And you can see that most of them turn out to be significant, particularly your left-right-- sorry, your liberal-conservative self-identity. That's very strongly related to whether you voted for Trump. other things, approval of democracy, negatively related. And you can see for yourself the kind of figures, including an interesting economic question. We have a battery on feelings of being left behind economically, which many people assume is important. We find it's slightly negative. It's slightly significant, but it's not as important as your broader cultural values.
What about attitudes towards foreign policy, the focus of today's presentation? All of them are significant. If you have very little confidence in the institutions of global government, things like the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the WTO, the battery of items we have of confidence and trust in these institutions, that's important, and it's significant. Do you approve of an isolationist role for the United States in the world?
Yes, very important. People who were voting for Trump didn't want foreign policy adventures in Venezuela, let alone in Nigeria. They said, no, take America out of those engagements and those everlasting or endless wars. Anti-immigrant attitudes? Yes, that's significant, as you might expect, both cultural and economic. Trust in outgroups, foreigners? It's significant, but it's a small effect. Unfavorable feelings towards six other countries. As I said, Russia, China, Europe, and a number of other major players in the world. That's important, and that counts.
And we control in the models for gender, which is important, of course, age, which is important, household income, and education. So out of all these factors, what we're saying is that there is an importance in foreign policy attitudes for the American electorate and whether you voted for Trump. Here's the visualizations. And again, if you're interested, I'm very happy to share them. But this just shows you immediately what jumps out.
Those to the right are the coefficients which are most strongly associated with the Trump vote in the model. Those to the left are those which are most strongly associated with the Harris vote. And you can see the things which jump out. And again, I wouldn't say in any way that it's only foreign policy issues which are important or the values underneath that. Clearly, many factors are significant here, both strong and significant.
But the factors of in particular-- let's mention the isolationist role of the US in the United-- in the world. That's a very strong factor, along with some anti-immigration standards, and so on. And I can break it down by looking at different countries. And I can look at, for example, attitudes towards Europe. Sorry, towards Israel. That was a very strong predictor. Attitudes towards Russia, which were positive amongst Republicans.
A major interest, a major question, is it simply Trump, or is it a broader change in the philosophy of the post-war era? Pro-Saudi, pro-isolationism. And then if you're in favor of Europe or China, interestingly, you're more likely to vote for Harris. And I won't go into this, but these are predictors. It's a robustness test to see whether they predict not just whether you voted for Trump, but whether you see yourself as liberal or conservative in the election. Similar patterns. They don't make a great deal of change in terms of the overall relationships.
So conclusions. Has there been an enduring realignment in Republican foreign policy? It's clearly too early to tell in terms of the events in Washington. All sorts of things are changing. And trying to make sense of it-- for example, America's relationship with Russia and Ukraine, or how we're thinking about tariffs, they're changing daily. We should not be journalists. We should not predict.
But we can look at the World Values Survey as an indication of whether the electorate has endorsed or may constrain many aspects of Trump's agenda in the 2024 election. What you certainly see is growing US party polarization over foreign policy issues. Going back a decade or so, you'd see a much closer alignment. The shift in the world order may well endure, if there's a shift in the Republican Party in the grassroots.
And the broader implications. Does this reinforce and accelerate Democratic backsliding and autocratization? All of this is work in progress, and we have to essentially gather more information. We can compare some comparisons over time. But we're gathering the field work for many diverse countries. For example, the impact of these changes in some former allies and adversaries. We always include China and Russia. We try to include many developing countries. And so once the complete data set is assembled, and it'll be released to the public, then we can look at these questions in a much broader and more reliable way.
But I'll finish with my cumulative model. This is my model not of foreign policy attitudes, but of Democratic backsliding. And it's a broad model with many different factors. And what it basically says in the book is that international drivers obviously impact on the rise of authoritarian populism, as Bart mentioned, the way in which political institutions work. For example, party polarization, the media environment, and, of course, en masse society on the mass culture.
But they're not the primary drivers. It's the domestic factors which primarily lead to regime transitions, Democratic backsliding, and processes of autocratization. But international drivers also influence the environment in which each country works.
And so from that broad pattern, it's cultural drivers as much as the leaders who play a role both in regime transitions and in our eventual patterns of foreign policy. Thank you very much. I hope that wasn't too long in what we're-- in our-- so we still have opportunities to discuss all these questions. Thank you very much.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much, Pippa. And Fred and Bart, if you can rejoin us, turn on the camera and the mic if you like, as well. We'll take maybe 5 or 10 minutes for brief discussion, and then we'll turn it over to the audience. If you're in the audience and you have a question, please put it in the Q&A section of the zoom interface. It's at the bottom. And once I see questions accumulating there, we'll go to audience questions.
But for now, actually, I have-- these were really three fascinating and really generative presentations. And I have many questions. But I think I'll start with probably the one that'll be most useful and interesting to our audience, which is to give each of you an opportunity to extend just a bit your presentation in the direction you hinted at the very end. So, Bart, you said, well, there's hope.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PIPPA NORRIS: --be visible, where all of our relationships that we've built up with USAID and where our work on democracy, about which I was a little part in UNDP when I headed up the democratic governance practice. Those attitudes and informal norms and formal institutions, when they get destroyed, and you can't build back that expertise-- for example, in diplomacy, and in the role of senior military staff who've been leaving or have been forced to leave, and the ways in which we've changed so much of our relationships just by these last 10 months. And we've got four years-- three more years to go. At least that's grounds for hope.
All of those institutional changes aren't going to be able to be reversed automatically, or even in the medium term, I think. And by the way, that also would assume as grounds for hopes that there's going to be a Democratic presidency in 2028. And I'm just so gloomy in my own interpretation of what's happening in terms of domestic politics here. So is there grounds for hope? Well, the election yesterday gave us some optimism, hopefully, especially in New York for that.
But nevertheless, overall, I look at the changes. And I see that institutions are at a tipping point. And institutions are not secular. They cannot just come back immediately under any sort of presidency no matter how popular they are, no matter what sort of landslide they have. And I also think that the election is going to have real problems in 2028, because we're already seeing evidence in 2026.
So I'm afraid. I wish I had-- most of my talks end in a kind of stunned silence, when we all kind of gloomily look around and say, well, I wish I could hope. But I can't, not realistically. But your thoughts on these things?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
BART BONIKOWSKI: I'm not very good at this, but I'll do my best. First of all, just to follow up on Pippa and Fredrik, I agree. It's very hard to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I mean, that's the bottom line. It's just easy to break things. It's very hard to build them. It took decades of concerted political will to build these institutions. So that I 100% agree with.
And Fredrik, I think you're right also that, despite everything that's happening, liberal democratic countries and their economic success continue to be attractive to the majority of the world. But it is quite shocking to see how quickly that itself has gotten eroded, and how, in some ways, that status of the liberal democratic order is hanging by a thread. And I think we're already seeing it. We're going to see more of it with fewer international students coming to US institutions with less interest in coming to the US for whatever reason. And not just the US itself. But to the degree that that order is eroding further, I think the moral status of the West is going to deteriorate, potentially. But hold on. OK.
So let me come back to public opinion, actually. So I do think that in many liberal democracies, the public is quite split. And to the degree that radical right parties do well, they do well by small margins. And this comes back to Fredrik's point. I think it was Fredrik who mentioned this, or maybe Pippa-- that last election, Trump's victory was in large part of an anti-incumbent wave that swept across many countries in response to inflationary pressures and other quite urgent grievances felt by the public. So it could have easily gone the other way.
And, of course, Democrats are really great at hand-wringing, and what did we do wrong, and Harris was the wrong candidate. The election was relatively close in the grand scheme of things. And what that means is that once radical right actors are in power, and they actually start being the incumbents, and they start pursuing a variety of policy directions, those policy directions tend to be deeply unpopular, actually, with the public.
And so the Trump administration's actions over the last 10 months, as we know from polling, are themselves deeply unpopular. This is not what Americans want. So that's potentially some good, a sign of hope. And I think last night's electoral results-- certainly, New York, but beyond New York-- Virginia and beyond-- point to the fact that, in some ways, thermostatic mechanisms are at play, but also a deep concern with what's happening in Washington.
And in some ways, small things, seemingly in the grand scheme of things like the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, actually quite salient for the public. And the fact they point to just the kind of destructive nature of this administration, on top of everything else that it's doing that's, in some ways, more meaningful because it hurts people directly. So all of that suggests that if there were a fair midterm election held soon, which hopefully there will be, there's a good chance that the Republicans will get trounced.
Now, that depends on a few things. There are already attempts to redistrict many states in the United States in order to prevent a fair election from happening in the midterm. So there's that. There are all kinds of other possibilities, states of exception, and so forth. I think the one thing that many Americans and American Republicans have been banking on is that elections in the United States are decentralized. So it's hard to capture them fully for the administration.
But nonetheless, this administration is quite creative in undermining institutions. And I do worry about just how fair-- and, by the way, when I say fair, against the baseline of fairness from years prior, it's not like US elections were always perfectly fair by any means, or even in the recent past. So there's that.
But I think the one thing I do want to mention as maybe a slight caution, is kind of what I referred to as this downward ratchet effect. In Poland, the radical right Law and Justice Peace Party was kicked out at the last moment in the 11th hour by a mass swelling of public resistance. That political participation just rose through the roof in an unprecedented manner, and the party got kicked out.
And so everybody saw this great news. It's over, freedom. We're back to normal. But, of course, the difficulty is what happens in the ensuing period when some sort of a centrist, center left, center right party gets back into power. And this is what I talked about with expectations. The expectations are that they will govern well. They will represent the interests of the people. They will make everyone's lives better. And at the same time, they will protect democracy, shore up the institutions, and make sure that the bad stuff doesn't happen again.
And those expectations are just impossible to meet for anyone. And so what happens typically is the centrist parties will be in power for a term or two. Inevitably, they disappoint. And they get kicked out. And who comes back? Well, the radical right. This is now the thermostatic process is between pro-democracy, liberal centrist parties, and anti-democratic, illiberal radical parties. And when they come back, they come back with a vengeance. Because, A, they've tooled up. They've learned how to do things better during the break. They also have already destroyed the institutions partially before they come back, and they continue their work.
And this is what's happened with Trump, too, but it's also what happened with Orban. We've seen it in other cases, where it's the return of the radical right that is more dangerous than the initial election. And so I worry about that. Let me just end on that.
EREZ MANELA: OK thank you very much. We have a bunch of questions now in the question and answer section, and apologies in advance. I can already tell we won't be able to get to all of them. But one that jumped out at me is one that actually relates to something that I was thinking about as you were all talking. And this is a question by Jed Schwartz. I think instead of reading it, because there's a number of different posts here, I'll summarize it.
The question is, in what way-- how is Trump, and his rise, and I assume, by extension, the rise of other authoritarians around the world, related to the neoliberal order? Jed thinks that Trump may be reinforcing neoliberal order. And it occurred to me that there's a conversation. All of you, I think, mentioned the term liberalism, but none of you mentioned the term neoliberalism. Although there's a conversation, as you know, among many of our colleagues about that.
And one hypothesis that's out there. And our history colleague, Sven Beckert, just published in The New York Times' op-ed section about this, I think, just yesterday is that a lot of what's going on here, a lot of the political stuff that we've been talking about is, perhaps, if I'm allowed to use a Marxist term, "epiphenomenal," to the collapse of a neoliberal economic order, global neoliberal economic order that's been in place roughly since the 1970s and is now falling apart.
I think it's Jed's point that Trump may be trying to save the neoliberal order, perhaps unwittingly, is interesting, and not perhaps not the way that most people would think about it. Or maybe it is. But I'm wondering how you see that broad structural argument as pertaining or not pertaining to the conversation that we're having into the way you're understanding the topics we're discussing, the political phenomena that we're discussing. I know it's a big question, but. I'm throwing out there to see what you want to make of it.
BART BONIKOWSKI: Who wants to go first?
FREDRIK LONGEVALL: I guess you do, Bart.
BART BONIKOWSKI: I don't, but I can. I just think it's a really complicated question, and I'm not sure I have a very good answer in the sense that because Trump and other leaders like him are not particularly deeply ideologically oriented and rooted, they tend to listen. I think, for much-- for most part, to whoever happens to be in the room last. And they do have some orienting kind of dispositions.
And so, obviously, Trump ran on protectionism to some degree, and bringing jobs back, restoring manufacturing, and so forth, which was obviously not Republican dogma or neoliberal dogma, for that matter. He's instituting tariffs worldwide that are upending free trade as we know it. At the same time, he's is strengthening the executive, not just in terms of political governance, but also economically, purchasing shares in companies, exerting direct control over free enterprise.
It has a strange-- and this was another question, I think, from somebody in the audience-- a complicated relationship with Silicon Valley, but increasingly a cozy 1 through a variety of economic and political incentives. So while at the same time, of course, there's no interest in shoring up the welfare state by Trump or anybody in his group, in his coterie. So it certainly seems like a breaking moment.
The question-- I guess Erez asked a question about whether this is epiphenomenal or not. What came first? Was it the neoliberal kind of eroded and threatened in the first place, and Trump is some sort of a result of this? Or is he the prime mover here, and other-- and that's a little harder to say.
But I think we are seeing a pretty massive realignment of business as usual, both politically, obviously, which I talked about, but economically, as well. I think what's less clear is, what is the end result, right? And where this is heading in terms of neoliberalism. So I'm sure that's not a satisfying answer, but because we're in the middle of it. So it's hard to zoom out and know exactly where.
PIPPA NORRIS: So I'd just add, Bart, I agree very much. But you can see it as a case of, essentially, a step shift, which is going on and has been going on for many decades. These things didn't start with Trump coming down the golden staircase by any shape, or form. For example, if you look at patterns of spending on democracy and human rights under the Obama administration, they already being cut quite a lot from the overall budget.
And they were being cut, by the way, in many other countries where you wouldn't have imagined it, like Norway and Sweden. Because, of course, there were other priorities from immigration. So the money was being transferred. Other changes in terms of globalization also slowed down, if you look at the KOF index. And you can think about a number of other indicators of the old liberal world order.
But nevertheless, I think it's just accelerated. And it started-- but was obviously with the adults in the room. It was curtailed during the first administration. But you can see the same historical patterns there in terms of the attempt at tariffs, and the attempt at protectionism, and the focus in the rhetoric on certain countries, and the change in terms of relationships with Russia. But it's obviously got worse.
And I think that, again, is something which is very, very common. And again, I like the fact, Bart, when you mention that it's-- when they come back, when radical right or authoritarian populist parties come back. I do a little graph where I look at the first term of a number of leaders-- Orban, Modi, Trump, et cetera. And then you look at the second, third, and fourth. And, of course, it just kind of plummets down.
So if one looks at things like Democratic backsliding, it goes down under. Trump, comes back a bit under Biden, but doesn't actually get all the way back, and then goes down again further when we get the 2025 figures.
So it's not a linear pattern. It's a step shift, as you would expect, from elections and from institutional changes. But it is one which is going against the accelerating-- accelerating the neoliberal decline, not starting.
FREDRIK LONGEVALL: I would just say that-- and I'm looking at the clock. And we should probably go to another question, if we can. But if I were to address this, building on Bart and Pippa, the experience of, again, my native Sweden and the debate in Sweden about neoliberalism, which is less-- in some ways, less pronounced than it is here, in part because the concentration of wealth is not as pronounced in Sweden. But nevertheless, even there, you're seeing some of these debates. But I think, Erez, I'm guessing you might have another question we should address.
ERES MANELA: We have about three minutes, so not a great deal of time. Maybe we can expand. Some of you have already touched this, but there's a question from Ekrem Karakoc about the relationship between high technology and rising authoritarian tendencies. In particular, to what extent does strategic competition with China shape the decisions of both Republicans and Democrats to postpone bills for regulating AI and other advanced technologies? And how might this competitive context lead political elites to become more accepting of authoritarian tools of governance within the United States?
And we do only have now two minutes to respond to that. So if anybody has any quick thought on that, please.
BART BONIKOWSKI: Maybe very quickly-- Oh, go ahead Pippa.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PIPPA NORRIS: You go on.
BART BONIKOWSKI: I'm just going to say, this is one of the most interesting questions, I think, in the current moment in the United States. You see a large-scale right wing shift and authoritarian shift within Silicon Valley leadership. That community has gone from right to left, and back to right. And that's for a variety of reasons. But part of it are the regulatory breaks they're getting in Washington.
And I think the cozying up of Washington to the tech elites is partly about domestic social control. It's about controlling the conversation, controlling social media, and surveillance technologies, which a lot of these companies are providing. And so I think there is an international dimension to this, in terms of the kind of tech arms race with China. But I think they're also just domestic incentives for social control that are driving a lot of this. Sorry, Pippa. Go.
PIPPA NORRIS: No, I just said much the same, that basically the tech brothers have sold out on the grounds of profit. Not that they've actually managed to get that much from all their gold trinkets, which they've managed to put into the White House. But nevertheless, they've tried to be on the right side. But then so have others. I mean, it's not unique, obviously, to IT, technology companies, or big tech. It's also there in law firms. It's also there in corporations, and even in the university sector, the most liberal of those institutions, with the exception of Harvard, we'll be happy to say, for the time being.
So there's lots of pressures domestically to go along, to get along, basically. And the pressures of civil society-- basically, everybody's fragmented. And there's very little collective bonding. I do hope that this current elections and the 2026 bring people together more on a collaborative basis. But it's unlikely, when profit is going to Trump over other considerations and democracy.
EREZ MANELA: I was just going to say, Pippa, that this would be a hopeful note to end on. But then you said it's unlikely.
[LAUGHTER]
So maybe not. In any case, warm thanks to the three panelists for a really terrific conversations-- conversation and set of remarks. And thank you to all of you who joined us for this Weatherhead Forum. I believe this is the final Weatherhead Forum for this semester, but there will be more Weatherhead forums and interesting conversations to be had in the spring term. Thank you all very much.