National Interest

by Mark P. Lagon

    There is reason to believe that despite the onslaught of bad news, the world has not abandoned the cause of improving the human condition.

Do autocracy, populism, migrant-phobia, attacks on civilians in Ukraine and Gaza, foreign aid cuts and AI poised to rob jobs aplenty mean that the world has stopped even pretending to care about upholding human dignity

    To wit, authoritarianism and its methods have swept the world. Freedom House has documented a 20-year trend of declining political and civil liberties, as well as democracy, worldwide, such that 79 percent of the world’s population lives under governments it classifies as “not free” or only “partly free.” With China in the lead, great power autocracies are exporting their penchant for corruption and their techniques of surveillance, propaganda and civil society harassment globally.

    Populism has taken hold in several of the world’s major democracies. Among emerging great powers, it temporarily held sway in Bolsonaro-era Brazil. It grew deeper roots in the Hindu nationalist BJP regime in India. A populist wave in the West began with illiberal democracy in Hungary, followed by Brexit in the UK, a Russian-financed National Front (now National Rally) in France and even a rise of the nationalist right in Germany. Some populist leaders in major Western countries have proven quite compelling and deft at leveraging rhetoric and power, from Donald Trump to Giorgia Meloni.

    The most pronounced effect of populism has been the yanking of the welcome mat for refugees. After coming into office last year, the Trump administration moved quickly to institute limits on refugee quotas, raids with anonymized personnel and vehicles, private detention facilities and indiscriminate deportations to 27 willing countries, including human rights-violating states such as El Salvador, Libya and Uganda.

    Global health investments, the most successful form of foreign assistance, have been scaled back not just by the United States but also the UK, France, Germany and Japan; the highly indebted recipients of this aid, such as in Africa, will be hard-pressed to replace it. The latter four countries all cut their pledges at a November 2025 triennial donor conference to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by some 50 percent, even as the Trump administration made a robust three-year pledge of $4.6 billion. In the name of a very worthy goal, greater country ownership, the United States has negotiated compacts with nearly three dozen countries to scale down bilateral health aid.

    The alternative to signing these agreements is no aid at all—a choice Zimbabwe and some others have made in response to US demands for access to data and critical minerals. The compacts have been negotiated government-to-government, thereby deprioritizing the vital role of civil society organizations in advocating for, designing, monitoring and implementing health programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Their role would better ensure that the transition from aid to country responsibility will succeed and not face a resurgence of malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS (mortality from which had been driven down 63 percent since 2002).

    Finally, artificial intelligence (AI) makes the “neoliberalism,” free trade and outsourcing of the past seem like slow threats to the dignity of work and the capacity of human beings to retool for other forms of employment. Experts have no clear prognosis, but a literally non-human force, funded by and enriching the highest-income stratum of the United States, is accelerating apace and poised to replace human capital with machine learning, thereby exacerbating inequality. Moreover, some ask whether the United Nations is well-suited or best to grapple with the governance, practical and moral, of AI and protect the human dignity upon which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is centered.

    Yet, article titles in The National Interest on “the end” of something are wise to include question marks, as Francis Fukuyama can no doubt attest (when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced US withdrawal from 66 multilateral entities in January 2026, his press release dissed Fukuyama’s “discredited fantasy of the ‘End of History.’”) In this case, rays of hope might shine a path forward.

    Take humanitarian relief. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the 66 multilateral arrangements was not the end of the story. The US Agency for International Development (USAID), which the administration shuttered, was the humanitarian arm of the US government, even more than its development arm. In a world replete with wars, civil strife, gender-based violence and post-conflict instability, the United States needed to find alternative means to provide for humanitarian needs.

    With minimal conditionality, the Rubio State Department wisely funded the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (the UN Refugee Agency) and two effective UN agencies long headed by Americans, the World Food Programme and UNICEF. In the past, other donors, such as Nordic states, chose to fund and trust OCHA and WFP without earmarking how their resources would be used. Now the United States under a Trump administration has adopted precisely that unbureaucratic approach not pursued by Republican or Democratic administrations in the past.

    Take authoritarianism and populism. Are they “running the table” in the world  China’s re-totalitarianized regime—one of the two most prominent powers and economies in the world – occasionally has to bend to the will of its people. When street protests in several cities voiced mass opposition to extreme COVID-19 lockdowns that lasted three years, the Chinese government announced an abrupt shift in December 2022.

    Moreover, debates about the manner of US intervention aside, Nicolas Maduro is no longer in power in Venezuela and is being held to account in a court of law. This is the leader whom Western Hemisphere governments referred to the International Criminal Court, which opened an investigation into crimes against humanity. The party of 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado had its 2024 election victory stolen by Maduro. While she has not yet been allowed into the country, the fact that she was not directly installed by an American intervention opens a legitimate path to her party’s eventual election victory. These trends favor citizens’ dignity over continued repression and economic and public health chaos.

    Furthermore, Viktor Orban, the architect of “illiberal democracy,” was ousted in an April 2026 election after 16 years in power. The will of civil society dismissed Vladimir Putin’s closest friend in NATO and the European Union.

    Also consider the cuts in health assistance by the United States and other donor countries. They are stark and risky in their haste. Yet, it is the moment of long-needed country ownership in Africa. Led by Ghana’s President, John Mahama, African heads of state have been calling for health sovereignty in the wake of perceived lack of access to COVID vaccines and donor-driven priorities.

    The government-to-government compacts between the United States and African countries on shifting responsibilities deprioritize civil society’s role. Yet country ownership and health sovereignty must encompass more than governments alone. If civil society organizations are fully leveraged, then continued progress against epidemics and expanding access to healthcare for the marginalized could better human dignity.

    Moreover, while AI stands to fuel unemployment and inequality, it offers a vehicle to make this crucial transition of global health from aid a success. AI can enable reliable supply chains; manage data and surveillance vital to combat disease outbreaks; map demand for health commodities, incentivizing innovation and production lines of healthcare companies large and small; and increase individual choices about their healthcare for people in low- and middle-income countries. AI stands to bolster global health security if fully leveraged—serving US national security while recognizing the value of all vulnerable people.

    These hopeful examples suggest at least two precepts in a path forward.

    Don’t pit ideals and interests against one another. The most robust US security policies have blended realism and idealism. Pushing autocratic allies (Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, El Salvador and Chile) toward democracy and the founding of the National Endowment for Democracy in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan helped make the last chapter of US Cold War policy a decisive success.

    So too, amid aid cuts, African states will be more likely to step up domestic healthcare spending if they conclude that their countries’ economic development requires investing in their greatest asset—their people. Interests could motivate measures serving citizens’ dignity. Just as AI can advance US health security and that of citizens in LMICs, with a chance to survive and thrive.

    Don’t reject all international institutions of the past. NATO has leveraged allies’ collective will and capacity to the great benefit of members’ and non-members’ citizens (like Afghanistan’s women during NATO’s deployment from 2003 to 2021 and Ukraine’s innocent civilians since 2022). It’s worth sustaining.

    Also, from the late 1990s to the late 2000s, state-centric post-World War II institutions were leavened by new bodies, including private-sector and civil-society stakeholders such as the Global Fund and Gavi, as well as the US compact-based Millennium Challenge Corporation. If the late 1940’s was “global institutions 1.0,” this was the 2.0 version. Ongoing reform discussions in international institutions—including the UN and World Bank—in a “global institutions 3.0” mustn’t abandon the measurable successes of the 2.0 models.

    Often misquoted, Mark Twain quipped about an 1897 New York Journal obituary, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” So it is with human dignity: if leaders discern the interests at stake and leverage and replicate the best of international institutions.