President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have slashed U.S. democracy promotion funds and programs. Rubio’s reorganization gutted the nearly half-century-old Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, eliminating all but one of its offices and its employees working on democracy promotion.
The U.S. Agency for International Development was bloated, inefficient, and unfocused, but its demise left democracy promotion as collateral damage. Budget cuts also hobbled the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute, the vanguard of U.S. election monitoring abroad. Trump, meanwhile, openly admires dictators, cozying up to Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, lunching with Pakistani Army chief of staff Asim Munir, and even joking about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s skill at fixing elections.
U.S. national security could soon pay the price.
In Bangladesh, Nobel Peace Laureate Mohammad Yunus, the face of an Islamist coalition that ousted its elected secular president, Sheikh Hasina, after a snowballing series of orchestrated mass protests in 2024, talks of elections early next year, but bans Sheikh Hasina’s secular Awami League, meriting silence from the White House. As Yunus releases radical Islamists and even Islamist terrorist group members from prison, Asia’s fifth most populous country could become an Islamic State hub, one with four times the population of Iraq and without the sectarian divisions that generated resistance in the Middle East.
If Trump and Rubio interceded to demand real democracy in Bangladesh, and not a stage-managed election dependent upon the banning of Bangladesh’s largest pillar of secularism and tolerance, they could avert the crisis. The way Rubio should approach flawed elections is the way former Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerejian did 35 years ago in Algeria: “While we believe in the principle of ‘one person, one vote,’ we do not support ‘one person, one vote, one time.’”
The same is true in the Middle East. Trump believes Erdoğan a strongman through whose partnership he can outsource security while perhaps also profiting on the side. Turning a blind eye to Erdoğan’s election fraud and arrest of opponents is a price Trump is willing to pay. The problem is twofold: First, Erdoğan’s corruption has hollowed out Turkey’s institutions so that when Erdoğan dies, Turkey will be hard-pressed to recover.
Second, it is important to understand why Erdoğan opposes free and fair elections. His motivation is not just the accumulation of wealth; it is removing any obstacles to the promotion of his ideology. Into the democratic vacuum, Erdoğan seeks to indoctrinate a generation into the Muslim Brotherhood worldview, not only in Turkey but also across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Trump’s disinterest in democratic norms risks enabling Turkey to supplant the role of the Islamic Republic of Iran, just as that regime teeters.
Other leaders have taken notice. Edi Rama, Albania’s four-term prime minister, consolidates rule using Erdoğan’s playbook, as he leverages false corruption charges to marginalize or imprison opponents or potential competitors, such as Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj and his own former deputy prime minister Arben Ahmetaj. While Trump may believe cultivating Rama will grease family real estate deals along the Albanian Riviera, he has allowed Rama to throw elections and escape democratic accountability. Albania has become the drug capital of Europe and a future source of instability.
The same is true in Africa. The Ivory Coast has been a continental success story, its economy booming, but there are dark clouds on the horizon, with bordering countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso in a region increasingly under siege by both Islamist insurgents and Russian influence.
WHAT WILL AND WON’T MATTER IN THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS FROM TUESDAY’S RESULTS
Last month, 83-year-old Alassane Ouattara won an illegal fourth term after disqualifying competitors like Tidjane Thiam, the former CEO of Credit Suisse. The election was beset by fraud, but there were few observers there to witness it. Ouattara placed his ego above patriotism and Ivorian stability, but rather than call him out, the State Department legitimized the slow-burning fuse Ivorian election fraud has now lit.
Democracy promotion was not all snake oil, and election monitoring was not a waste. The tragedy now is that to save a couple of million dollars, Trump has condemned U.S. taxpayers to pay billions of dollars to clean up the mess later.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
