In many ways, the present state of international affairs appears a perfect storm. At a time when a polarized American political environment challenges U.S. capacity to construct and follow through on durable strategies for American engagement in the world, old enemies around the globe are empowered with new tools at their disposal.

Reflecting on the last decade, three prominent examples of this come to mind. First, the rise of ISIS and white supremacist groups have borne evidence to the new ways that extremist organizations can turn to sophisticated forms of online engagement to strengthen recruitment and drive a movement. Second, the release of the Panama Papers in 2016 demonstrated the ways in which kleptocrats around the world have leveraged globalization and loopholes (some old, some new) often within Western regulatory regimes to strengthen their influence and operate with impunity. Third, the emergence of digital technologies, the Internet, and social media have provided ammunition to illiberalism around the world, whether it amounts to a stronger grip on the rule of authoritarians at home, new ways for authoritarian powers to advance their foreign policies, or another medium for illiberal voices within democracies to subvert democratic institutions.

While all three scenarios of old enemies bearing new tools deserve their own analysis, the lattermost provides the most useful starting point to consider how one long-standing challenge for U.S. foreign policy is taking on new dimensions, what this means for U.S. engagement in the world, and what American priorities should be.

The Rising Threat of Authoritarianism and Authoritarian Regimes
Though the global push for liberal democracy made great strides in the decade and a half following the Cold War, the ideological trench lines between the liberal and the illiberal never disappeared. Resurgent forces like nationalism are demonstrating that the progress wasn’t permanent. The root causes of the wave of nationalism and authoritarianism that has taken hold in the last decade are complex, geographically variable, and diverse, running the gamut of cultural, economic, political, and social forces at play.

Exacerbating every single one of these issues, however, is the advent of the internet and other new technologies that have changed the face of the illiberal threat, and facilitated the strengthening of anti-democratic elements within democracies. Empowered by the internet, social media, and the surveillance capacities stemming from big data, machine learning, and AI, authoritarianism is not only strengthening its hold around the world, but spreading. In 2019, Freedom House observed a decline in global internet freedom for the ninth straight year — a simple, but telling barometer for democracy. Armed with these technologies, autocrats now have a much easier path to internal repression than they did in decades past.

While technological optimists were quick to cite the boon that social media provided to democratic resistance movements in the Arab Spring, the years that followed have shown the flip side of the coin. Authoritarian governments have found new ways to more effectively silence critics, harass opponents, control or influence the information at home, and manipulate online content to serve their own interests. In Egypt, 2019 saw the passage of new restrictions on social media activity under the auspices of countering “fake news,” in effect, giving the government new powers to censor media and build on its broader crackdown on free journalism. This past fall, reporting spotlighted how the Myanmar military used Facebook to distribute hateful propaganda that incited further genocidal violence against the Rohingya. In China, the effort to create a mass surveillance state by leveraging facial recognition technology, big data, and machine learning has reached new heights, making Beijing the global standard-bearer of digital authoritarianism.

Alongside the Chinese government’s efforts to deny informational access through the Great Firewall, its repression of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang is a prime example of how technology enables authoritarians to exercise age-old authoritarian practices with greater efficiency and effectiveness. Historically, the mix of authoritarianism and ethno-nationalistic sentiments alone was perilous for minorities in countries ranging from Myanmar and Zimbabwe to Poland and the Ottoman Empire. But Xinjiang powerfully demonstrates the ways in which new technologies make it easier for authoritarian regimes to silence minorities and minimize the threat of resistance — in all its forms — through censorship. Through artificial intelligence-enabled surveillance technologies, the regime is subjecting Muslim Uighurs to extensive monitoring and ideological manipulation.

Meanwhile, a long list of countries, such as Kyrgyzstan, the U.A.E., Venezuela, and Zambia, have purchased Chinese facial recognition technology and monitoring systems. While certainly not every illiberal regime will exercise these tools to maintain control as effectively as the Chinese government, that should be no comfort. Analysts debate the degree to which direct exportation of digital authoritarianism is a pillar of Chinese grand strategy as opposed to a product of other forms of technological diffusion. What is clear, however, is that there are troubling signs that China is making strides on influencing the international governance arena for cybercrimes, internet content, and censorship.

A 2018 New Economy report contended that the fate of the open internet may rest on “Digital Deciders” — a group of oft-overlooked Asian, African, and Latin American countries which are, more or less, undecided on the issue of global cyber governance. The report concludes that “proponents of a global and open internet will need to provide the tools, confidence, and pathways to allow those in the Digital Deciders to drift towards the global and open end of the spectrum and resist the anchor pull of the sovereign and controlled approach. Furthermore, these proponents must prove and present the merits of their approach.” It is therefore particularly concerning that Beijing is actively creating global frameworks for the interoperability of these technologies, and sometimes helping foreign government officials use data and facial recognition for illiberal means, such as spying on political opponents.

Autocratic regimes have also found in the internet and technology a useful set of tactics for advancing their foreign policy priorities — often, at odds with those of the U.S. and its allies.

Since the early 2000s, Russia has sought to preserve influence in its near-abroad (countries in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia) in the face of NATO expansion, European Union expansion, and democratic movements like the Color Revolutions. But through a combination of traditional media, new online platforms, and fake social media accounts, Russia has gained new, asymmetric means of advancing this goal. Using an army of bots, Russia’s Internet Research Agency has deployed fake news and propaganda to inflame pre-existing divisions within European countries in a way that is favorable to Russian geostrategic interests. By promoting misinformation and noise in an already noisy European public discourse, Russia’s activities have further undermined Europeans’ trust in their institutions and elites, drummed up sensitivities to national sovereignty and mass migration into Europe, and, as a result, contributed to the decreasing cohesion of the European Union and NATO.

This is not unlike how Russia uses the internet to advance its goals vis-a-vis the United States. Like European democracies, a United States that is plagued by division is also one that is more vulnerable to the misinformation campaigns of hostile foreign actors — and less attentive to pernicious Russian activity elsewhere in the world. As eloquently written by Kenneth A. Schultz, “By intervening in a manner that benefited the Republican presidential candidate, Russia put its thumb on the scales of our partisan divide. Any sense that ‘we’ were attacked is compromised by the fact that some of ‘us’ benefited.” What’s more, Russian interference into the 2016 U.S. election played into Vladimir Putin’s broader strategy to discredit the American political model and undermine the ability of U.S. foreign policymakers to support a democratic reform agenda in countries near Russia’s borders. By spotlighting and worsening the growing dysfunction in American politics, Putin could disarm one of the United States’ most threatening weapons in its arsenal: the ability to stand on the pedestal provided by its own trusted democratic model to support pro-Western reform sentiments in countries like Ukraine and others.

Given these vulnerabilities in democratic systems, it is equally important to consider why democracies, including the U.S., are struggling, and what the U.S. can be doing to promote open societies in such a time of rapid technological change.

The Pressing Need to Look Inward
Central to the issue is the fact that the U.S. and other Western democracies are failing to formulate an effective, democratic approach to issues like misinformation, online governance, and regulation of AI and big data in their own countries. For example, it is not just companies like Huawei that supply surveillance technology to governments globally, but U.S. and Western European firms as well.

AI surveillance technology capabilities are, of course, most likely to be abused in countries that already suffer from weak rule of law, institutions, and checks and balances, which applies to many of the countries that rely the most on China for AI surveillance technology. But often, the same countries that source advanced surveillance technology from China also source other potentially abusable technologies from Western firms. In that sense, the issue of digital authoritarianism around the world is not just being driven by the United States’ competitors, but also its own firms and those of its allies.

This warrants a subtle yet significant reframing of the issue that the United States faces: combatting authoritarianism goes beyond Washington’s heavy focus on strategic competition with the likes of China and Russia. Sound domestic regulation, too, is key.

Another key regulatory challenge with concrete implications for the health of global democracy, the advent of social media, for instance, has created an environment where views from the fringes of public opinion attract the most attention. Vitriol gains an audience; measured opinions and nuance do not. This is playing out in real-time in American democracy, as social media platforms accelerate tribalistic division amongst American citizens and are subject to exploitation by rogue actors at home and abroad alike. Propaganda and disinformation — whether coming from Russia or domestic actors — are more effective than ever before, advancing false or misleading narratives and hollowing out the meaning of objective truth. Populist political leaders, meanwhile, seize on the opportunities presented by this worsening tribalistic division to launch attacks on democratic institutions for personal gain, take more radical actions to preserve their political power, and either exploit or develop workarounds to preexisting accountability mechanisms.

As Derek Hrynyshyn has illustrated, profitable algorithmic targeting — which allows companies to tailor online content toward things that either have shock value for users or align with pre-existing beliefs — has become a core aspect of many prominent social media companies’ business models. The adverse effect of this is to harden existing inclinations and inflame division between segments of the population. Moreover, these social media platforms have evened the playing field when it comes to which ideas are more likely to circulate in the media space. While lowering the barriers to accessing a “megaphone” can be helpful for social progress, it has also allowed illiberal ideas to spread in a way that was less possible in an age dominated by commercial mass media outlets, whose business models centered on producing content that resonated with mass audiences rather than narrow segments of the population.

The inability to formulate a robust democratic approach to these sorts of technology and internet-related issues goes well beyond the U.S., as evidenced by the fact that many democracies around the world are simply becoming less democratic. In the Freedom House report from last year, it held that 33 of the 65 countries in the study experienced a deterioration in internet freedom, such as Brazil, Bangladesh, and Sudan, while just 16 experienced an improvement, such as Ethiopia and Armenia. Further, a Pew Research Center report earlier this year unveiled the findings of an extensive array of interviews with close to a thousand technology experts across academia, the private sector, and the public sector on the intersection of technology and democratic institutions and representation globally. Half of these experts argued that technology will “weaken democracy between now and 2030 due to the speed and scope of reality distortion, the decline of journalism and the impact of surveillance capitalism.”

But surely, it is not inevitable that every one of the 33 countries named by Freedom House is destined for autocracy. We need to be asking the right questions about what the United States can be doing to sway those hanging in the balance one direction or another, and ensure that those moving in a positive direction continue to do so. Democracies in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia face many of the same issues when it comes to the role of the internet and social media, and the allure of AI, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things. That said, some democracies presumably have fared better than others in countering disinformation, fake news, and the like. In constructing its own approach, at home and abroad, the U.S. should deeply explore which countries’ programs have worked, which could be adopted at home, and which should be touted on the international stage to signal optimism about democracy’s prospects. It is also worth remembering that the biggest social media companies and many of the top global technology companies are American companies, so the U.S. government seems uniquely positioned to deal with this issue, even if its response thus far has been more or less absent.

New Tools Aren’t Everything
To effectively answer the much broader question of what the U.S. must do in light of growing authoritarianism globally, the diagnosis of the problem must not be an oversimplification. Other forces beyond the technological and internet factors emphasized here are also likely responsible for the resurgences of authoritarianism in the 21st century. One commonly cited example is the rising inequality stemming from the effects of mismanaged globalization, which has made the anti-establishment message of populists more compelling. However, there are also significant geopolitical factors at play. Following the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and its European allies provided some combination of pressure and encouragement for many states around the world to adopt democratic and market norms lest they be shut off from international aid, investment, and diplomatic support. While these efforts failed spectacularly in certain cases, it no doubt played a significant role in ushering in a wave of at least temporary democratization throughout the 1990s.

Key shifts in the international environment in the opening of the 21st century, however, signaled the end of this period and the incentive structure shaping countries’ internal governance decisions. After 9/11, the standing of countries in the view of the United States hinged much less on their degree of openness than their import, and willingness to help, in the Global War on Terror. Moreover, the emergence of China and Russia as alternative power centers — with China, in particular, becoming a lifeline to much of the developing world — reduced dependence on the U.S., and consequently the incentives for countries to move in a liberal direction. U.S. misadventures in Iraq and subsequent struggles in Afghanistan, meanwhile, blurred the lines between a democratic reform agenda and a more controversial, and destructive, brand of nation-building — giving illiberal leaders abroad a leg to stand on in repelling calls for democracy at home and from the U.S.

Had social media and technologies like artificial intelligence not emerged as tools illiberal leaders can employ, would authoritarianism be as threatening as it looks today? Likely not to the same degree, but a combination of evolving structural forces and ill-advised choices made by the U.S., its allies, and Western-led institutions would still ensure a more sound footing for authoritarianism in 2020 than in 1995.

That authoritarianism is on the rise globally should worry Americans deeply, and not just for moral reasons. The rise of illiberal leaders and antidemocratic movements pose concrete risks to American values, interests, and lives. For one, not unlike the Chernobyl disaster in 1989, the COVID-19 crisis makes a strong case that Americans should, in fact, concern themselves about the way other countries govern themselves — including those halfway across the world. When any country’s government favors image preservation over transparency in a crisis of potential global magnitude, it creates risk for everyone.

Prioritizing political survival over public welfare and politicizing scientific expertise is dangerous in any regime — democratic or autocratic. Nevertheless, the lack of free press, institutional balances, and other democratic constraints in an illiberal regime substantially reduces transparency, and therefore the odds that critical information is conveyed in an accurate and timely manner that could make the difference between a localized crisis and a global one.

Creeping authoritarianism of course has implications for what the goals of strategic competition with the likes of Russia and China, respectively, should be. One starting point could be to look at the list of so-called “Digital Deciders” and, rather than simply bemoan companies like Huawei, explore tangible ways the U.S. can make a stronger value proposition to each unique country for the future of internet governance and technology usage. This should be coupled with much more active diplomatic engagement in these conversations around the world, along with a concerted, cross-sector effort to work with global democracies to reduce their vulnerability to sharper campaigns — such as election interference — by Russia and China to weaken democratic institutions. As Laura Rosenberger has importantly stressed, “democracies need to compete on their own terms—not only to build a more resilient society against authoritarian information manipulation, but to seize the initiative in this contest,” while not neglecting democratic values of openness and inclusion in the process.

What’s also notable about the challenges outlined in this article is just how interconnected domestic and foreign policy are on these types of issues. A crucial element to any solution must include more effective regulation of technology companies at home, given the tangible implications for the opportunities autocrats abroad have to repress their own citizens and achieve their foreign policy objectives. Perhaps a more activist citizenry could play a role in holding these companies accountable, but not in the absence of effective regulation. Finally, the U.S. should recognize the role that foreign policy blunders of its own, too, have played in harming the global democracy promotion agenda, and that the U.S. values proposition is in need of a reevaluation and brand reset in many ways that have nothing at all to do with new technology.

Regardless of the path Washington takes from here, one thing is certain: the fight against illiberalism will define the future of U.S. domestic and foreign policy for years to come.

Liam Kraft

Director, U.S. Foreign Policy Programme

- Twitter: @liamkraft_407
- LinkedIn: Liam Kraft

Research supported by:

Melissa Ballard

Research Assistant
U.S. Foreign Policy Programme

Twitter | LinkedIn

Edited by: Cameron Vaské

All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not represent the views of The International Scholar or any other organization.

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