Democratic backsliding reaches Western democracies, with US decline “unprecedented”

University of Gothenburg

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Professor Staffan I Lindberg

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Credit: Photo: Johan Wingborg

Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg.

“The fact that many populous and economically powerful countries are autocratizing is especially worrying. Several of these countries have the economic and political weight to reshape international organizations, norms, and trade, effectively reshaping the global order. I think we are already seeing the effect of that,” says Staffan I Lindberg.

Three major trends in democratic backsliding
The report finds three clear patterns in the current trend of democratic backsliding. The first one is the democratic backsliding in some traditionally stable democracies; the second is significant reversals and often breakdown of democracy in countries that successfully democratized during the late 20th and early 21st centuries; and thirdly, the deepening of autocracy in already autocratic states. 

Freedom of Expression, a core aspect of democracy, shows the most drastic global decline, and is the most common target among autocratizing leaders over the past 25 years.

“The second most common target are the liberal aspects of democracy, like rule of law, and checks and balances that prevent the abuse of powers, which are deteriorating in a worrying number of countries. For example, rule of law is deteriorating in 22 countries, including the USA,” says Staffan I Lindberg.

Democracy in the USA deteriorating at unprecedented scale and speed
The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times. Within only one year, the USA’s score on the V-Dem Liberal Democracy index has declined by 24 percent, while its world rank dropped from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.  

The liberal aspects of democracy show the largest decline in the U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term can be summarized as a rapid concentration of powers in the presidency, according to the report.

“The current U.S. administration has been undercutting institutionalized checks and balances, politicizing civil service and oversight bodies, and intimidating the judiciary, alongside attacks on the press, academia, civil liberties, and dissenting voices ”says Staffan I Lindberg.

Since election specific indicators are only evaluated during national election years, there has not been a change in those indicators in 2025 for the U.S.

“The 2026 American midterm elections will be a critical test for the quality of elections, and democracy, in the United States. If election indicators also decline, the U.S. will fall even further,” says Staffan I Lindberg.

The democratizers
On a more positive note, the report shows that 18 nations worldwide (10 percent) are currently democratizing, with large countries such as Brazil and Poland continuing their democratization processes. In the majority of these countries, media freedom is improved. Botswana, Guatemala, and Mauritius are the three new democratizing countries identified in the 2025 data.

The Report

• The report “Unraveling the Democratic Era?” is available for download from the V-Dem website: www.v-dem.net

About V-Dem

• V-Dem produces the largest global dataset on democracy with data for 202 countries from 1789 to 2025. Involving more than 4,200 scholars and other country experts, V-Dem measures hundreds of different attributes of democracy.
• The V-Dem Institute is hosted by the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
• Read more at www.v-dem.net

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Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline “Unprecedented”

Article Publication Date

17-Mar-2026

The Shield of Monroism: The Angry Tide and the Neo-Colonial Order in Latin America

By Carlos Ron

March 17, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Daniel Torok/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

On 7 March 2026, at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami, Donald Trump inaugurated the “Shield of the Americas” summit, convening right-wing leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean’s “Angry Tide” around what he called a ‘counter-cartel coalition’. Washington’s recipe was stated plainly: “The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our military.” Monroism is on the offensive, and the Angry Tide has become its shield—not against cartels, but against people-centered projects of national sovereignty.

The invited leaders—Milei of Argentina, Paz of Bolivia, Bukele of El Salvador, Noboa of Ecuador, Asfura of Honduras, Peña of Paraguay, Chaves of Costa Rica, Mulino of Panama, Abinader of the Dominican Republic, Ali of Guyana, Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad and Tobago, and President-elect Kast of Chile—are all to the right of the political spectrum. Conspicuously absent were the progressive leaders of Latin America’s largest economies: Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Of Mexico, Trump declared: “The cartels are running Mexico. We can’t have that.”

The images from Miami stood in stark contrast to regional gatherings of the last two decades, where Latin American leaders met on equal standing to build frameworks for political coordination and cooperation—such as the Council of South American Defense and the South American Health Council, of UNASUR, for example. In Miami, the assembled presidents competed in a publicity stunt to see who would stand closest to Trump in the photograph or keep the commemorative pen with which he signed the agreements.

Fifty Years of “War on Drug”: A Failed Policy

It is alarming that this coalition commits to deeper collaboration with the United States on fighting cartels, given the balance sheet of US-led drug control. The Addicted to Imperialism study series, co-produced by the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research with the Lawfare Observatory, CEPDIPO, and COCCAM, lays out the record with devastating clarity: after more than fifty years of the ‘War on Drugs’, the DEA acknowledged before the US Congress that the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels alone have ‘associates, facilitators and intermediaries in all 50 states of the United States.’ This is the outcome of half a century of the most expensive and militarized drug control effort in human history.

The aggregate data confirms the verdict. In 2023, 316 million people consumed illegal drugs worldwide—a 22 percent increase from a decade prior. The US government has invested over $10 billion in counternarcotics efforts in Colombia since 1999, yet cocaine production more than tripled between 2013 and 2017. The study shows that between 2016 and 2022—a period of intense US-Colombian cooperation—potential cocaine production in Colombia rose from 1,053 to 1,738 metric tons, while seizures and forced eradication also increased simultaneously. More eradication, more production. More cooperation, more cocaine.

Ecuador: A Dramatic Example

No contemporary case illustrates this more starkly than Ecuador, whose president Noboa stood prominently at Trump’s event in Miami. As the Addicted to Imperialism studies documents, Ecuador has been subjected to a process of foreign interference since at least 2017—producing marked deterioration of the social rule of law and a progressive militarization of public security across four structural axes: foreign interference, economic liberalization and external debt, institutional deterioration, and the the securitization of social problems.

Under Moreno (2017–2021), Ecuador restored US security ties suspended by Correa, rejoining Southern Command exercises. Under Lasso (2021–2023), a Memorandum of Understanding was signed, modelled explicitly on Plan Colombia, with a projected budget of $3.1 billion over seven years—repositioning Ecuador as the top recipient of US Foreign Military Financing in the region, with $310 million between 2022 and 2023, surpassing Colombia.

Under Noboa, after presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated during the 2023 campaign, General Laura Richardson of US Southern Command traveled personally to Ecuador to agree a ‘joint plan’ including the deployment of US military personnel with full immunity from Ecuadorian justice—the same conditions applied in Colombia, immediately dubbed a “Plan Ecuador”. The homicide rate reached 47 per 100,000 in 2023. Noboa’s Plan Fénix deployed armed forces in city streets, built mega-prisons modelled on Bukele, and sought a constitutional reform to permit foreign military installations—such as the base in the Galápagos. The militarization of public security has not resolved the crisis. It has deepened it, while subordinating Ecuador’s sovereignty to Washington’s hemispheric agenda.

Two Hundred Years After Panama: The Amphictyonic Compass

The militarized drug war framework does not protect populations from narco-trafficking. It protects political elites from democratic accountability and normalizes authoritarianism under the banner of security. Addicted to Imperialism documents that in 2008, 35 percent of Colombian senators and 13 percent of House representatives were under investigation for links to paramilitary groups that simultaneously ran drug trafficking operations. The “War on Drugs” did not dismantle these networks. It provided them with political cover.

This is not surprising when we recall the framework’s origins. Nixon’s chief domestic policy advisor admitted decades later that the 1971 declaration of drugs as ‘public enemy number one’ had a different target:

“The Nixon White House, after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

On a regional scale, from Plan Colombia to the Shield of the Americas, the alleged combat against cartels has consistently served as a pretext for military spending, interventionism, and the displacement of populations from their territories. The most recent illustration is Venezuela: the abduction of its sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, was framed as an anti-drug operation—but swiftly revealed as a mechanism for reinserting Venezuela into Washington’s oil economy.

In 1826, Simón Bolívar convened the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama with a vision of extraordinary clarity: a confederation of Latin American republics acting collectively, guaranteeing their independence, and negotiating with great powers from a position of sovereign equality. The Angry Tide is today’s antithesis of that spirit. At Miami, Trump declared: “we will not allow foreign hostile influence to establish itself in this hemisphere—including the Panama Canal”—while Panama’s president Mulino sat in the audience and listened in silence. It is Monroism at its most undisguised.

Latin America and the Caribbean—its movements, parties, and progressive governments—needs a renewed regional agenda of sovereignty and concrete cooperation, including institutions capable of coordinating a sovereign response to the drug economy. The price of a kilogram of cocaine rises from approximately $1,500 at the point of production in Colombia to $20,000 in the United States. The producers—the peasant farmers—capture less than 1 percent of the global cocaine market’s value. Meanwhile, over 70 percent of the weapons fuelling cartel violence in Mexico are manufactured in and flow from the United States. The drug war, in its hyper-militarized version, creates the institutional framework for precisely the kind of health concerns, corruption, and impunity it claims to be fighting.

The first quarter of this century offers proof that a different ambition produces results. Operación Milagro restored sight to over 3 million people. The ALBA literacy programs eradicated illiteracy in Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Ecuador. Regional unity with a true purpose of reaffirming sovereignty and guaranteeing a dignified life for the population must not be abandoned for failed policies and publicity stunts.

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This article was produced by Globetrotter.Email

Carlos Ron

Carlos Ron is Co-Coordinator of the Nuestra America office of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. He is a former Venezuelan diplomat

Blood “Democracies” Bomb Iran

By Khalid A. Afsar

March 17, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by L. Prang & Co, Boston/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

The US has again illegally bombed the Islamic Republic of Iran during negotiations. While agreeing to give up entirely its nuclear enrichment, making every concession to avoid war, Iran couldn’t prevent the bombing of over a hundred cities by US and Israel. The genocidal US-Israel alliance murdered Iran’s spiritual Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei, killing his wife, daughter, grandchildren, and 40 Iranian officials during the holy month of Ramadan in a single strike by Israel with CIA’s help.

The deadly February 28 attack on Iran has received broad support from western governments for another war of annihilation in West Asia (the Middle East). Canada, Australia, New Zealand (settler-colonial supporters of Israel, like the US), along with most European allies (except for Spain), have either condemned Iran, or simply looked the other way. NATO chief during his visit to North Macedonia also endorsed the war, saying, Iran poses “an existential threat to Israel.”

As with most Israeli wars across West Asia, European and N. American leaders remain defiantly Zionist. The compelling reasons for wars in the region always point to Iran’s support for Palestine and opposition to US and Israel since 1979.

However, since 1776, a constitutional democracy founded by a slave-owning elite, the United States, has brought people across the region and the world unprovoked wars and genocide, expanding its territory and global military bases. Similarly, Israel since 1948 has brought destruction, ethnic cleansing, and genocide to Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, with “Greater” Israel’s wars of expansion in an explicit colonial objective to rule over the Arab world as another European settler-colonial state. What do western democracies represent when they fund and enable wars and mass killings of civilians overseas, decade after decade, especially across West Asia, and North and East Africa?

Blood Democracies

Stained with the blood of non-Europeans, western democracies are blood democracies. The book, American Holocaust, outlines in detail the “glorious” voyages of Christopher Columbus (a fanatical, racist, greedy entrepreneur, and eerily similar to Donald J. Trump), who paved the way for centuries of genocide and bloodbath against non-Europeans. Germany, France, England, Belgium, and countless European powers, barely representing 7% of the world, spent centuries subjugating and bleeding the rest of humanity in the name of capitalism, only to emerge as so-called liberal democracies.

Blood democracies will continue to spill blood around the world, because the racist, fascist politics at home have empowered their ruling elite to continue the colonial racist subjugation of the global South into the 21^st century. The very existence of these blood democracies can and will mean only more death and destruction to come. If any type of government poses a threat to the world, it is these western blood democracies that owe their existence to spilling the blood of non-Europeans for gold, silver, oil, diamonds, precious minerals, land, and enslaved workers and taxpayers.

Blood Politics

The US has made war now for 25 years in the 21^st century against Arabs and Muslims, costing over $8 trillion and nearly five million lives. Iran and its handful of allies in the region have come nowhere close to the US-Israel deadly achievements, often facilitated by many American proxies and client-states in the region (Israel, Saudia Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Türkiye, and now Syria, which shows Al Qaeda’s historical connection to blood democracies).

Since its founding in 1776, the settler-colonial United States has made war for most of its glorious 250 years: genocides against natives to steal land and resources; enslavement and violence against black bodies; an unprovoked war of annexation with Mexico, grabbing land consisting of Utah, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and California; wars with Spain; the forceful and deadly annexations of Puerto Rico and Hawaii, along with Guam and a number of island-nations in the Pacific; war and occupation of the Philippines; the pillaging and destruction of Haiti; and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki using nuclear bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. But it didn’t stop there.

Since WWII, the US war on Korea killed nearly 3 million Koreans; the Cold War spread across South and Central America toppling many socialist governments; war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, killing 3.1 million people in Vietnam alone; support for deadly anti-communist military regimes around the world, such as Indonesia that killed a million people, and hundreds of thousands in Latin America; the 1989 invasion of Panama to kidnap Noriega; recent attack and kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife; the 8-year proxy war against Iran in the 1980’s through our friend Saddam Hussein, extinguishing the lives of one million Iranians and over half a million Iraqis; war in 1991 against Iraq, then devastating sanctions killing half a million Iraqi children, accompanied by continued weekly bombings until the invasion of 2003, killing a million Iraqis (a carbon copy of sanctions-then-invasion in action currently targeting Iran); the invasion and 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, taking the lives of a million poor people; the wars in Somalia, Syria, Libya, N. Waziristan (Pakistan), and Yemen that killed about 400 thousand impoverished Yemenis; under Trump, the assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani; proxy genocidal war against Palestinians through American funding and arming of Israel supported by all western governments; and the 12-day war against Iran in 2025.

After a western-backed CIA’s successful regime change operation in 1953 against Iran’s democratically elected government, to facilitate the theft of Iranian oil by British Petroleum (BP) over 26 years, Zionist West has continued to seek regime change following the popular revolution of 1979. Western oil companies and governments, losing their strategic and lucrative control over Iranian oil, have remained locked in a forever war against Tehran. The late Robert Fisk in his magnum opus, The Great War for Civilization, shows US’s planning and initiation of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88): the US helped Saddam Hussein build chemical and biological weapons factories; Germany provided the chemicals for the weapons; and Saudia Arabia and Kuwait funded it to the tune of $250 million. The war killed over a million people in Iran.

Fisk also details the downing of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988 by USS Vincennes, killing all 290 civilians, including 20 members of a family attending a wedding in the Gulf. Vice President George H. Bush defiantly said, “I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the facts are.” That longstanding jingoism of the US continues under a fascist Christian supremacist administration, which torpedoed an unarmed Iranian naval ship engaged in routine maritime exercises with other countries in the Indian ocean. In this context, one must understand why Iran’s enduring patience has run thin with blood democracies and their allies in the region.

Moreover, the attack on Iran and killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader has been called “historic” by the US. One finds nothing historic about another unprovoked deadly American war unleashed on Muslims fasting during the month of Ramadan. Israel and the US have done that repeatedly to Palestinians and the region over the last 25 years. Indeed, the war on Iran could be historic if the US hadn’t spent 250 years engaged in wars of expansion and domination. Only an absolute and habitual distortion of history would render the war on Iran as “historic.”

The history of American war-making, regime change, overthrow, and the assassination of political leaders and opponents has marked America’s glorious 250 years of history, which the settler-colonial blood democracy will proudly celebrate on July 4, 2026.

“Only [Blood] Democracy in the Middle East”

Since the founding of another blood democracy in 1948, Israel has followed in the footsteps of its great patron-saint, the US, who has since the assassination of JFK, armed and funded Israel, making it the most powerful military and only nuclear power in the region. Israel’s founding paralleled America’s post-Independence violence: the many wars of expansion and annexation, which began with the forced removal of 700,000 indigenous people in the land of Palestine, an undeniable resemblance to the Trail of Tears the American blood democracy let loose on the natives in N. America.

“Our friend, Israel,” has forced Palestinian off their land throughout its history, deploying armed Israeli settlers, backed by US and Europe. Israel has and continues to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians across Gaza, assassinating Palestinian leaders, massacring women, children, aid workers, refugees sheltering in tents, using highly explosive MK-84 bombs that evaporate bodies, all supported by western blood democracies.

Israel’s egregious violations of international law and human rights have never elicited condemnation, let alone intervention or sanctions, from western democracies. Israel bombed and assassinated the president of Yemen in 2025. It bombed and assassinated Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon, preceded by 3,000 pager bombs let loose on civilians, which the UN condemned. It bombed and assassinated Iranian leaders in Iran which later started the 12-day war in June 2025. Israel and US have now bombed an elementary girls’ school in Iran, killing over 165 children – an enormous crime against humanity foreseen by the IDF killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab and her family in Gaza during the ongoing genocide.

The murderous Israeli operations that have carried out the 3-year-long ongoing genocide against Gaza and bombings and killings across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Qatar, have once again expanded to Iran, globalizing Zionist genocides aided and abetted by blood democracies. Iran will continue its resistance, as the anti-colonial struggle of the global South against blood democracies continues across Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and West Asia.

Our Last Hope

Blood democracies, riddled with divisive politics of mutual hate, racism, classism, elitism, and sexism, have given way to national borders, militarism, wars, poverty, climate catastrophes, and a deadly world marching swiftly toward a nuclear holocaust.

We Americans, living inside a blood democracy, have gained a clear understanding that the coterie of corporate elite (the Epstein class, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Meta, Oracle, Tesla, Amazon, Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Trump Organization, etc.) will starve the people here at home and massacre people abroad, committing genocide and ecocide, as their corrupt rule lays waste to the world in search of endless profit and lucre. (How little things have changed since the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.)

Our only hope lies in our humanity, that final refuge, that messiah, which unites us across nations and religions against war and mutual annihilation. A new internationalism, with many movements of people of conscience around the world resisting war, fascism, greed, and genocide will continue to fight back in solidarity with the oppressed everywhere (Gaza, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, et al.).

May this holy month of Ramadan bring peace and justice to the world.Email

Khalid A. Afsar

Khalid A. Afsar is a writer and educator.