In the aftermath of the U.S. intervention in Venezuela, we explore how rising political divides are leading to bigger swings in America's foreign policy — and what that means for our future in the liberal international order.
In her book "Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Security," Rachel Myrick argues that polarization reshapes the nature of constraints on democratic leaders, which in turn erodes the advantages democracies have in foreign affairs. We discuss how the pendulum swing from one administration to another leads to instability in foreign affairs. As a result, Myrick says the United States loses both reliability as an ally and credibility as an adversary. Myrick also questions the longstanding thinking that having a common enemy to focus on is enough to overcome polarization, as it was during the Cold War.
Myrick is the Douglas & Ellen Lowey Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. Her research explores how partisan polarization affects foreign policymaking in democracies, with an emphasis on U.S. national security policy.
Episode Transcript
Cyanne Loyle
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. I'm Cyanne Loyle.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. We are back for another season and kicking things off with a very timely discussion about polarization and international politics. Our guest this week is Rachel Myrick, who is the Douglas and Ellen Lowey associate professor of political science at Duke University, one of your colleagues, Candace, and she is the author of the book polarization and international politics, how extreme partisanship threatens global stability, and this book and Rachel's work, more broadly, really does a good job of putting into context what's happening here in the US and to you know, we've talked ad nauseum on the show about how political polarization has affected American politics in a variety of ways, but this really takes some of those same problems and Those same forces, and looks at how it's affecting America's role in the world, which is something that I don't think we've really discussed on the show thus far. So happy to have Rachel here for this discussion.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm thrilled that we have Rachel, and I could not think of a better person to talk about this topic with, with her and also with cyan, so in the mix, I'm really excited to hear. So to your point, Jenna, you know, I think in the average American's mind, there is very much a severance between what happens domestically and what happens abroad. And you know, even questions like immigration is understood largely as a domestic issue. What should we do with people who come to the US? What happens to people who are here that aren't authorized to be here? Just as well? You know, the capture of Maduro, the war in and over Ukraine, Nigeria. You know, these are, tend to be understood as issues that are separate and apart from US politics. They are over there. I think, though, that a look kind of just one level below the surface reveals that that's a, you know, just kind of not the right way to think about it. And so Rachel's work really does help us to connect. How seemingly separate issues, American politics on the one side and whatever is going on the other side of the world on the on the other hand, are actually inextricably linked.
Cyanne Loyle
And Candis, I just want to jump in and say that, you know, one of the things that impresses me most about the importance of Rachel's work is, I mean, two things. One, I think this is relatively new, right? So the ways in which polarization is impacting both US foreign policy and international views of the United States is new, in large part, because the polarization that we're experiencing is kind of pushing around foreign policy in a way that we haven't seen before. So these much more kind of radical shifts in the way that the US is operating internationally, from presidential administration to administration is is new, right? I mean, we had presidential doctrines that were foreign policy related, but many of those doctrines stayed the course for long periods of time. We can even think about during the Obama administration, some of the more radical declarations about ending the war on terror didn't result in quick policy changes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, right? A matter of fact, I mean, Obama was often criticized right for not changing policies abroad as quickly as he could have, and so this kind of stay the course has been the status quo for a really long time, and it's made the United States predictable. One of the things we're seeing now with the poor, like the partisan polarization of foreign policy, is that our foreign policy agenda is getting pushed around at the same speed that our domestic policy agenda is getting pushed around. And I do think that Rachel makes a convincing case that some of this is new.
Candis Watts Smith
So I mean to your point, I think that this conversation will also serve to illuminate two things. I mean, more than two things, but two things pop out to my mind immediately is, one is that polarization is kind of like, I'm looking for an analogy where a thing gets bigger and swallows up more stuff over time that, okay, maybe it was, you know, economic issues, and then it was social issues, and now, because you have to feed this monster of, how are we going to differentiate ourselves from the other people, the other party that we have right this, this kind of monster, this. Whatever blob is growing to now include these issues that influence the global world order. We have to, you know, where else you know? Where else can it go? Right? The second thing that comes to mind about, you know, you mentioning about America first. I think that what we see here more clearly is that that is not an ideology that is hinges on logic or consistency. So America first can mean anything. So in the capture of Maduro, that became about America first in drugs, or, you know, bombing people in the Caribbean, that's American first to prevent X, Y and Z, or bombing Nigeria is America first, because we're a Christian nation like so there's all of these ways that we see this particular ideology being used for any and every kind of thing that comes off the top of A person's head to decide this is why we're doing this, or not, but either way, you know, no matter what, what ultimately is occurring is that nobody knows what's next, and nobody can predict you know what is going to be the next major issue or the next confrontation, and that produces its own ramifications, both domestically and on the international stage. And so I think you know, again, this kind of deliberate effort to make a connection between the domestic and the foreign, where we've tended to separate these things, a conversation around that connection becomes ever more important.
Jenna Spinelle
And we also talked too about the sort of the old maxim in foreign policy that having a common enemy is a way to bring countries together. Rachel's not so sure about that, and your mind might be changed too after hearing her argument. So we have a lot to get to. Let's go to the interview with Rachel Myrick.
Jenna Spinelle
Rachel Myrick, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you for having me. So there is a lot to talk about with your book, polarization and international politics. You write at the at the beginning of the book, which I believe you were writing this around this time last year. So at the beginning of 2025 you write that the US seems to be in the midst of a realignment of partisan cleavages in foreign affairs. I wonder if you could say more about what that means, and whether you think it still holds true as we begin 2026.
Rachel Myrick
I mean, I think what we're seeing tangibly is a gradual extension of partisan conflict to various areas of foreign policy. So it's not entirely that the parties are fully reorienting along some sort of coherent cleavage in foreign affairs, but rather that we're seeing certain partisan certain foreign policy issues getting pooled into the partisan divide. So in American politics, this process is often called partisan conflict extension, where you see party activists and ideologues seek to politicize certain issues. And historically, in the United States, we've seen the extension of partisan conflict from economic issues to social issues. And what I propose in the book is that we're starting to see the extension of partisan conflict also to certain areas of foreign affairs that used to be relatively bipartisan. And the book talks about how this is, you know, affecting a certain key sets of areas in foreign policy. I don't know if it would be helpful to mention what some of those areas might be. Yeah, that would be great. So I think the book talks about a few key issue areas that I think are most vulnerable to politicization in foreign affairs. You know, the first one are sets of issues that relate to partisan or politicized social identities. So as I mentioned, of course, the extension of partisan conflict from economic to social issues, we now see social identity as correlated with partisan identity. So identities like, of course, gender, race, religion, socioeconomic. Status increasingly correlated with your partisanship, and so then now we're seeing people link those social identities to various areas of foreign and defense policy.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm sorry, before you go on to any other policy, or can you give an example of what that looks like?
Rachel Myrick
So I think the most tangible example would be like migration and refugee policy, so that that's become an issue area that in the 21st Century has been really interwoven with ethnic and racial identity, which is a more politicized identity area. And so as a result of that, what we've seen is really different policies from Democratic and Republican administrations with respect to refugee policy, migration policy, and that's led to volatility with presidential turnover in that area. Another, I think, set of areas in foreign affairs that's particularly prone to politicization are debates about internationalism and multilateralism, and so with respect to those issues, there's been this, I think, long, long standing undercurrent of skepticism in the Republican Party about these principles, and Trump's America first foreign policy agenda is like a more recent manifestation of that skepticism. And so tangibly, what that means is we're going to see more politicization of issues that relate to global governance and questions about the extent to which the US should engage with international institutions and how that should look. And then the third area in foreign policy that I think is becoming increasingly politicized are issues that relate to non traditional security threats. So security threats that can't be resolved with military force, necessarily. And what we've seen is that the Democratic Party is increasingly championing some of these issues. So issues like climate security, global health security, environmental security, and we've seen Republicans reacted in various ways where those issues have become increasingly politicized. So those are just some examples of where I think we're seeing more polarization and more realignment of the parties, not in all areas of foreign policy, but in some specific subsets of foreign policy,
Jenna Spinelle
And is part of the issue here, just the sort of the greater swings back and forth as the parties move further apart. You know, as you mentioned with with immigration policy, we're seeing, you know, the pendulum is moving quite far, but from one administration to another. So is that also part of this that, you know, we're seeing radically different policies from one party to another?
Rachel Myrick
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the that is, is something that has not been especially common in a lot of these areas of Foreign Affairs previously, when there was sort of considerable bipartisan agreement in lots of areas of foreign affairs, but the reality is that the President has very wide latitude in foreign policy, and so if we see lots of differences between Republican and Democratic leaders on these topics, then we're going to see a lot more volatility With presidential turnover moving forward. And I think, you know, that's not always necessarily a concern, right? Changes in and of itself. You know, volatility isn't necessarily always a bad thing. But in foreign policy, I think what's particularly interesting is a lot of foreign policy making, a lot of successful foreign policy making requires making these sort of long term commitments, and it requires being able to understand what a country's position might look like far into the future. And so if you see these wide swings with presidential turnover, that could potentially be quite problematic for how the US relates to its allies and adversaries. Yeah.
Jenna Spinelle
So as you're saying that a lot of our listeners, might be thinking about what has happened recently with regard to the US intervention in Venezuela and the capture of President Nicolas Maduro. Is that an example of some of what you've just been been describing? Or, you know, how do you think about those events in the context of what you know about this area and your research?
Rachel Myrick
Yeah, I think there are you know. So just just, I'll caveat that, of course, this is a situation that's very rapidly unfolding, but I think that a lot of the initial response is quite consistent with some of the intuitions from the book. And I would point to a few things in particular about the initial response to Maduro is capture. The first thing that I think, is that this the immediate public response in the United States emphasizes how elite cueing and foreign policy has become very influential and very partisan. So. On the face of it, we might think that a Trump America first foreign policy agenda might not necessarily be consistent with overt sorts of regime change in Latin America. However, we saw from initial public opinion polling that about three fourths of Republicans approves of the capture, whereas three fourths of Democrats disapproved. And so we see this very wide partisan split quite immediately in response to this sort of major foreign policy action. I think the second thing which relates to some of what we were talking about earlier, that we could take away from some of this initial response to what the US is doing in Venezuela right now is that this illustrates how constraints on presidential power, especially with respect to the use of force, are becoming increasingly politicized, so to the extent that legislators on the Hill are voicing opposition to what Trump is doing or trying to reassert congressional authority, that opposition is largely coming from Democratic legislators, and we don't really have many Republican legislators willing to say this is executive an example of executive overreach. And so that, in and of itself, illustrates how as as polarization grows, constraints on executive power become increasingly partisan, and it's just harder to check the executive and then, yeah, go ahead.
Jenna Spinelle
You pretty much write that directly in the in the book I copied down the line. So it was a very efficient observation. I know you didn't know it at the time.
Rachel Myrick
Unfortunately, I think, I mean, I think it's like a it's a intuition that that many people share, right? And unfortunately, I do think a lot of the while this book was largely written before the start of the second Trump administration, a lot, in some ways, I think it's almost become more relevant, given kind of what we've been observing with the second administration. And then one other thing I just point out with respect to the Venezuela policies is that this illustrates kind of what we were just talking about with volatility across different presidents. So you know what if it's the case that Republican presidents are increasingly reorienting US national security priorities to Latin America, whereas Democratic presidents are very focused on Europe, Russian aggression in Europe, for example. What happens then if we have these major swings in in the general orientation of US foreign policy across different presidents, right? It makes it very challenging to maintain security commitments that you need to be maintained beyond a single presidency.
Jenna Spinelle
So it was. It was about a year ago when we kicked off the show. Last January. We had some folks from Freedom House on to talk about their annual Freedom in the World Report, which is one of several that sort of measures the health or the stability of democracy in countries around the world. So I'm wondering how you would overlay that work with what you're doing and thinking about the health of a democracy overall, and how that ties into its you know, stability and foreign affairs, right?
Rachel Myrick
I think these conversations are very interrelated. So really, what I'm interested in the in this book is processes of what I term extreme polarization, where these, which are these situations in which both ideological polarization or policy distance, increasing policy distance between parties or coalitions of parties, and affective polarization, or increasing social polarization or increased social distance between parties, kind of co occur and reinforce one another. And in those sorts of contexts, they're somewhat unique in a few respects. One of them is that in context of extreme polarization, the stakes of winning are really heightened, and that gives leaders incentives to sort of tilt the playing field to their advantage, which is very much associated with the processes that you're describing of of what we might term democratic erosion or democratic backsliding. You know, in addition in these environments, as the book really focuses on, it becomes easier for ideologues to extend partisan conflict to different areas, and also it generally co occurs with the weakening or loosening of constraints on on Democratic leaders. And so I see these processes of increasing extreme polarization and the erosion of democracy as really kind of inextricably linked.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and the effects that we see here at home also extend to relationships abroad. It would seem not just. For the US, but for any country that is experiencing increasing polarization.
Rachel Myrick.
Absolutely, absolutely yes
Jenna Spinelle
So the core of the book is really you talk about three advantages that democracies have traditionally had in foreign affairs, and how extreme polarization impacts each one. I was wondering if we could just go through each of them and talk them through in a bit more detail. So the first is the stability advantage. Can you tell us what that is and how it's threatened by extreme polarization?
Rachel Myrick
Democracies, on average, tend to have pretty consistent foreign policy across time, despite regular leader turnover, and the reason why that tends to be the case is precisely because good foreign policy making requires making long term commitments, and parties recognize that that it's inevitable that they'll eventually be out of office, and so they kind of contribute to what's what's often termed a tacit partisan truce in foreign affairs. What that means practically is is parties often seek ways to kind of insulate areas of foreign affairs and national security from partisan politics, which includes kind of creating and maintaining non partisan national security institutions that help maintain continuity across administrations. But the argument of the book is that as polarization increases, this can really undermine the stability advantage in various ways. One way this happens is that as polarization becomes more extreme, there are incentives for politicians to appeal to the extremes, to try and mobilize and energize their base, rather than trying to persuade voters from the other side. And so you see issues being pulled into the partisan divide. In addition, you know, when there's heightened affective polarization among the public, there are more and more incentives for politicians to campaign on trying to undo the foreign policy accomplishments of the out the other party.
Jenna Spinelle
The second advantage, which I think we've also touched on a little bit is the credibility advantage I can see based on what you were just saying, how that is definitely related to stability. But tell us more about that and how it's impacted by extreme polarization.
Rachel Myrick
Yes, so the credibility advantage comes from the fact that democracies are often able to leverage agreement between domestic actors to credibly issue threats abroad to their foreign adversaries. So the idea is that, you know, during times of crisis, for instance, in the United States, we would hope that Republicans and Democrats would generally set aside their partisan politics to present kind of this unified bipartisan front to a foreign adversary, and that can be an especially credible signal of resolve. But of course, we might think about how, as polarization increases, this becomes more and more challenging. You know, for one these moments of bipartisan consensus are increasingly rare, and also the initial responses to a crisis can very quickly become politicized. So I think a tangible example I often think about is the response to the initial Russians Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine in March of 2022 so at the time, you know, there was actually pretty widespread bipartisan support for the Biden administration's initial response to the invasion, and to the extent that Republicans disagreed with that response, it was more so that they felt that actually the US should be doing more to support Ukraine. But very interestingly, over the course of the subsequent six to 12 months that can that consent is pretty quickly unraveled, and we see partisan divergence and opinion around us, security commitments to Ukraine and so that illustrates how it's going to be increasingly challenging to not only generate that initial bipartisan unity, but then also to be able to maintain those sorts of commitments over time.
Jenna Spinelle
And then the third one, which I think is related to the other two, is the reliability advantage. Tell us more about that, right?
Rachel Myrick
So the reliability advantage is this idea that democracies tend, on average, to be more reliable allies relative to non democracies, and the primary reason why that is is because in democracies making major international commitments usually requires some degree of buy in from domestic actors. So that might be a. Something formal, like a popular referendum, or that might be kind of a ratification process where the political opposition has to effectively buy into some sort of major international agreement. And as a consequence of that, we tend to think about democracies as being more selective about the commitments that they make in international politics, but when they do make those commitments, those commitments should, in theory, be more durable. And now bringing polarization into this, we can think about the fact that as polarization increases, constraints on Democratic leaders weaken, and those leaders are more willing and able to act unilaterally and to just renege on international commitments when it might, you know, benefit their party or their personal interests. And so what, what might happen in the long run is that we're increasingly likely to see democracies making these sorts of major international agreements without bipartisan support, and then in turn, those agreements are potentially less durable. And of course, we can think about a lot of examples of that from from the second Trump administration, where we see not only President Trump, but also a number of other recent presidents increasingly using executive agreements or non binding political commitments, rather than treaties which which would require more formal ratification process.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, you know, something else that I've heard often in the course of doing this show is that your democracies are strongest when they have a common enemy, right? The the example that comes up is the Cold War, right? And in the American context, we were less polarized because everybody was focused on fighting the common enemy of communism. I'm sure that was true in other countries as well. But how do you think about that, the sort of the common enemy and maybe the lack of a common enemy in our current moment in politics?
Rachel Myrick
Yeah, so I find this to be a really interesting question. It's actually the subject of a second book project I'm starting thinking about, you know, how societies, democratic societies, have historically responded to external threat, and whether that's been a force for national unity, or whether that has actually been more divisive. So the conditions under which these sorts of external threats are unifying or divisive. If I were to paint a really broad brush, I guess I would say I'm a bit skeptical of this overarching thesis that inherently, the US needs a new orienting enemy to reduce its polarization domestically, I think essentially, I've written a bit about this, but in another piece I've written for international organization, it looks at how the US has historically responded to different international crises, and demonstrates that the crisis response tends to reflect domestic politics at the time. So if politics is very polarized, a new rising threat is more likely to be politicized. And so that brings us to a potential counterfactual thinking about the case, okay, if the Soviet threat, or something akin to it arose now in a really polarized environment, would it be as unifying? And I think I'm a bit more skeptical that that might be the case. And if we think about an analogy to a threat from a rising China, I'm similarly skeptical that, you know, if a major crisis were to arise with China, that it would inherently be unifying, especially under the current administration and so all that to say, I know that a lot of scholars of Foreign Policy and International Relations think that an external threat might be one way to resolve some of these problems with polarization and foreign policy, but I think we shouldn't be looking to external solutions. We should be thinking more about internal solutions to fixing some of our problems with democracy at home.
Jenna Spinelle
And on the point about finding internal solutions, as opposed to looking to external, common enemies, you do spend some time in the book talking about democracy reform, things like redistricting and term limits and proportional representation, all things that we've covered on this show in one way or another, and I know our audience is very interested in these types of things. Now, other countries in Europe and other parts of the world already have some of these things, right? They do have, you know, different systems of elections, and don't have first past the post voting, and have a parliamentary system, as opposed to a two party system. So thinking about, you know, looking outside the world like, what are, what would you say that the US can take from other countries as we consider, you know, reforms that we may want? To make to democracy here at home?
Rachel Myrick
I mean, I think unfortunately, as sort of the discussion in the book talks about there isn't an easy silver bullet solution here, right, even setting aside the sort of feasibility questions. So the book kind of walks through a couple different buckets of potential ways to mitigate the problems of polarization for foreign policy, and one of them starts with thinking about how to strengthen horizontal constraints on executive power, and specifically how to how to strengthen congressional checks on on power. And so I think where that you know, is particularly relevant, maybe for things that your listeners are well familiar with, are all these sorts of different types of institutional reforms that might reduce congressional polarization. What not? I don't want to paint too broad of a brush, but I think you know, a lot of the things we just mentioned, they're very objectively good for democracy, but it's, but it's not necessarily clear cut that they would reduce congressional polarization, or, more specifically, mitigate the harmful effects of polarization and foreign policy making. And that is, I think, broadly because, as we we talked about at the outset of the podcast, the President has a lot of de facto authority in foreign policy. And so I think there, there are some potential proposals there that I'm quite interested in, but the effects on foreign policy making are a bit indirect. I mean, other other buckets of solutions focus, not so much on reducing congressional polarization, but more so on strengthening vertical accountability by reducing affective polarization generally, or improving the public's knowledge and attention to foreign policy making. And so with respect to reducing affective polarization, there's been all sorts of interesting studies on different interventions that like perspective taking that might help reduce a polarization in society writ large. And while there, I think are a lot of promising results in that space, they also broadly require a rethinking, like a fundamental rethinking, of the social media landscape, and so they're often quite difficult to scale. So as the book discusses, actually think you know, kind of a third set of reforms may be the most direct approach, which is to think about how to insulate different aspects of foreign policy from partisan politics. And when I talked to a lot of folks in the in the process of writing this book, and people working on the Hill that were observing changes in congressional polarization over time, I think where people are most optimistic is about thinking about how to build cross partisan legislative coalitions in specific areas of foreign policy where there have historically been still some some degree of bipartisan consensus. So I'm thinking, just to be kind of provide some tangible examples. I'm thinking about things like promotion of human rights and civil liberties abroad, thinking about things like I can like increasing US economic competitiveness that has received a fair degree of bipartisan support, sanctioning specific adversaries, has received a fair degree of bipartisan support movements to reassert congressional authority in areas of foreign policy. And so there are specific pockets of foreign policy that I think are, you know, very ripe for recreating some of that partisan truce.
Jenna Spinelle
I want to just maybe close here with one last question about what you said about legislators and people on the Hill, right? So I guess is there a way that they can have their cake and eat it too, so to speak, and that they can have these bipartisan, you know, coalitions on very specific issues, as you outlined, but also still, like go on social media and post about whatever the polarizing social issue of the day is, and you know, that is its own set of problems. But we're not, you know, we're not talking about that here and now, I just, I wonder if there's, there's a way to kind of have it both ways, right?
Rachel Myrick
I mean, I do think that that, that that is a potential compromise, right? So can you essentially reinvigorate a sort of tacit partisan truce in areas of foreign and defense policy, while still allowing for normal partisan politics in other areas? And so I think you know that would stem from individual legislators, you know, both taking initiative to to build bridges in areas. Is where there is kind of common agreement, but also increase in kind of making these larger commitments to keep certain areas of national security out of the partisan fray. And I think you know that could, in practice, be a tall order, but it seems more feasible to me than some of these other larger institutional reforms, which I think you know, given how our politics is currently structured, will would be very fundamentally difficult to change.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, well, we'll certainly see how that plays out as we head toward the midterms and beyond. Rachel your your book gives us a lot to think about, especially as we continue to see changing action around the world, and then the US is place in the world and our relationships with other countries. So I highly recommend that listeners pick it up and give it a read to learn more about this area that we don't typically talk a lot about. So thank you for your work, and thank you for joining us today to talk about it.
Rachel Myrick
Thank you so much for your time and engagement. Thank you.
Candis Watts Smith
Thank you Jenna, and also to Rachel for that really enlightening and thought provoking interview. As I said before, I'm really excited about asking science so many questions, and maybe that also reveals my own way of being an Americanist, that I know everything about American politics and less about international politics. But one of the things that Rachel brought up was, you know, just kind of talking about how this, how our polarization and kind of threats to all sorts of credibility and stability influences not just the kind of security, you know, threats that we tend to think of, but also non traditional security threats. So but I was hoping sayin, that you could maybe kind of unpack these non traditional security threats, climate security, global health security. Rachel also discussed environmental security, like, what exactly are these threats? And you know, how do they influence national security?
Cyanne Loyle
Yeah. I mean, I think when we think about national security, and kind of a traditional, more kind of historical sense, we think about the ability of other nations to attack the United States, right? So this is, this is the bombing of Pearl Harbor, right? This is the ability of for other nations to to either threaten us, citizens threaten us territory and at the more maximalist level, right, the ability to overthrow the US government. We haven't had to worry about those kind of security threats for a long time. And following September 11, we really started to reconceptualize how we thought about us security as something that was less about other nations attacking the US and US interests, and more about other types of actors and other types of threats. So September 11 got us thinking about rebel groups and terrorist groups that were potentially non state based, right? So they weren't coming from China, they weren't coming from Russia, right? They could become or the Soviet Union, but they could be coming from other places, in this case, strongholds in Iraq and Afghanistan that weren't directly tied to the Iraqi or Afghani government. So those are kind of how we started to think about non traditional security threats. We can think about economic changes. We can think about political changes and instability.
Candis Watts Smith
I think that brings me to the next issue, which is about power and Tim, as I as it seems to me, we're talking a lot about the kind of changes in the, you know, political, the global political order, but also there seems to be a kind of change in the orientation toward those questions. So, you know, like, one of the things I noticed is that, you know, previous administrations, they were going to do a thing it was driven ostensibly or not. I mean, you know, what people say matters. They say outwardly does matter about, you know, values of democracy and allyship. And there does seem to be a shift toward, you know, focusing on, say, regional powers, which is really, you know, or regional focus, which was really about power, like sheer dominance, with that partisan pendulum swing. We are also seeing a change in, say, more of a focus on regional we are also seeing a change in in ideas about power and how to maintain or build power. Am I not? Am. I is that almost correct?
Cyanne Loyle
So you're getting there. Let me. Let me start by by saying that there are, there are real debates about how power is structured and should be structured in the international order, and it's one of the things that the second Trump administration is really pushing back against. So whereas in the past, we would have said that America as a global superpower is dominating all of these organizations and is holding the most power. The second Trump administration and their foreign policy doctrine is saying that there's been huge inequities and imbalances in the international order, that the United States has been paying too much into NATO, that Europe needs to cover more of its own security interest, that we're paying too much into the promotion of democracy and human rights, which is the justification for shutting down USAID, and that many of these programs were not working right, so that democracy promotion was not strengthening US national security interests. There was a question when USAID was shut down about what was going to replace that in the Trump doctrine, what we've seen is military intervention. So we were thinking before about democracy promotion as a hearts and minds campaign, that providing Election Assistance, medical assistance, and things like that to other countries was winning favor for the United States, and we were strengthening our soft power what the Trump administration is doing now, particularly in South America, is is asserting hard power, right? They're they're blowing things up, and that's another way of showing might, right, and showing strength. Some of the negotiating tactics, from an economic perspective, that the Trump administration is showing is about hard power, right? Saying we're going to withdraw all of our economic interests in your country, if you don't agree to these, these tariffs, or these trade agreements, or, you know, whatever the component of the negotiation is, all right, so then you talked about this pendulum swing. This is the thing that I think Rachel has correctly identified, that I see as unique, not unprecedented, but really kind of new. It's the way in which domestic politics is pushing the international agenda for the United States more quickly than it normally moved. There was always a swing. There's always been new doctrine. There's always been new agendas. But it's moving faster, which is creating this instability and this insecurity.
Candis Watts Smith
So one of the things that you brought up cyan was about you were like, oh, unprecedented. Well, not unprecedented, right, which, in, you know, in reference to Maduro. So, you know, like, we're all, we all wake up on the third year, the third day of the new year, and we're like, oh, oh, did we take a president and his wife and, you know, then we, you know, people say really quickly, actually, you know, on the same day in 1990 we did the same thing with Noriega and so, you know, maybe this is not unprecedented, but one thing that is unprecedented, perhaps, is, one, a national the response that average Americans gave to it, one, that they were Paying attention to it. And two, that there was a partisan, a partisan difference in the response to that action. And so, you know, one of the things that Rachel brought up was, well, maybe we, we do want to think about what it would mean to have a common enemy in a moment of polarization. And, you know, in comparison to kind of theory that, like, oh, a common enemy will serve to unite. And she brings up this, you know, she argues, it's all contextual. I was convinced by that argument. And I think that in some ways, you know, the, you know, we kind of got a sense of that, you know, what is now, 10 days ago, in the US, where we are complete, in complete disagreement about the meaning and the necessity and whether it was right or wrong, and whether it was legal or illegal, and we can go on and on, on partisan lines in a way that we would not have, might not have, and probably if we just, you know, do some Quick, you know, research on, you know, attitudes about, about this situation, a similar situation 30 years ago, we would see quite a difference in that, or even like at 911 right? There's a moment of, there's a moment of of unity, um, and at that time, and we also know that at that time, we weren't as polarized as we are today.
Cyanne Loyle
I mean, so we're getting to your your area, Candace. But, I mean, I think you know, one of, one of, what I understand to be the truism. In American politics is that voters don't care about foreign policy. There are very few moments in which the American electorate gets mobilized around foreign policy. Maybe September 11, right being one of them, but there's not too many. And so to see anybody having strong opinions, you know, whenever I look at opinion polling around foreign policy, there's a ton of do not knows or right, missing responses. And so to have people have real strong opinions about Venezuela is interesting to me. Now, I love that, right? I think we should all have really strong informed opinions about us, foreign policy. Not sure that these are informed opinions, but they're certainly wrong opinions. But the So, I think that that is interesting.
Candis Watts Smith
The last thing that really pinged me in in the interview is that Rachel mentioned that the erosion of liberal international order is coming from democracies themselves. And that stood out to me, because what it reminded me of is how democracies democratic decline and democratic backsliding often happens from the inside out, that there is a use of democratic mechanisms to produce illiberal policies. It's counter intuitive on its face. But when you kind of, you know, sit there and think about how that could work, you're like, Oh, yeah. Like, there's a danger. I mean, de Tocqueville was like, Okay, you guys have a democracy. There's, there's a lot of challenges that you guys have. I'm curious to know if that stood out to you, and you know, coming from your perspective and your expertise.
Cyanne Loyle
What we don't know, and what I think Rachel problematizes, in a really positive way, is, what are the implications of this in the long term? There's been a lot of talk about the complete collapse of the liberal international order. I don't know that that's what we're going to see. And I'm increasingly convinced that there are components of democracy and human rights promotion that are working even for the most illiberal countries. So we can think about authoritarian or hybrid regimes that still hold elections, because elections are an important signaling mechanism about the support of the regime. We can think about things like the promotion of independent media, even in places where countries are actively repressing their citizens. And that's done because it allows an escape valve, an off valve for different types of protests. It allows the regime itself to kind of track and monitor what's going on in its population. And it's a way to kind of signal that you're playing nicely with other actors in the international community. I don't think illiberal regimes are going to we're not going to revert back to the most aggressive forms of repression during the Soviet Union in the next couple of years. If I can end on a positive note, it's that I think many of the international institutions that we have built since World War Two actually are benefiting regimes across the board, even if they are not promoting at their core, the democratic and human rights values that the most liberal of us, myself included, would want them to promote. I think they're still serving enough function that they're going to stick around long enough for us to rehabilitate them later, or at least that is my hope.
Candis Watts Smith
Well, let's end on that high note. And the other high note, I think, is that I was right, which is that this conversation with Rachel and with you combined would produce an opportunity for perspective expansion and really just kind of sharpening our antennae around an area that we don't tend to think and talk about as Americans, which is foreign politics and international politics. So I am pleased to say that Rachel is, you know, my colleague and cyan thank you for giving us a master class on this topic. I'm Candis Watts Smith for Democracy Works,
Cyanne Loyle
And I'm Cyanne, Loyle, Thank you for listening.