You also can be a part of it!
Behind the public persona of a president who has become an inexhaustible source of memes, profound changes are taking place. Since returning to power, Donald Trump has not only launched two military interventions — the first in Venezuela and the second in Iran — without authorisation from either his country’s Congress or the United Nations Security Council, but has also withdrawn the United States from dozens of international organisations and agreements, drastically reduced its funding to the United Nations — particularly affecting its human rights pillar — and effectively declared the principle of multilateralism obsolete.
At stake is the rules-based international order painstakingly built following the Second World War. The genocide in Gaza, perpetrated in open defiance of orders of the International Court of Justice and shielded by the United States’ veto and diplomatic cover, is the starkest image of that collapse: proof that the most powerful states have decided that international law is optional. We are living in the world George Orwell depicted in 1984: a world where values have been deliberately turned on their head, where “war is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
The interventions in Iran and Venezuela are illegitimate, since the fact that a country has an authoritarian government does not justify unilateral intervention. International law establishes conditions under which a multilateral intervention may be authorised: the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, adopted by the United Nations in 2005, states that the international community may act when a state commits crimes against humanity or fails to protect its own population. But such authorisation requires approval by the Security Council and must meet strict humanitarian criteria, rather than depend on the unilateral will of a single power.
It should be noted that in none of these cases has there even been a convincing pretence that the intervention was motivated by the restoration of democracy or the protection of human rights. What drives the Trump administration are economic interests — including his own personal interests — and the strategic interests of the United States, as narrowly defined by Trump himself. Trump represents a return of the most ruthless realpolitik: he does not act in the name of values — not even values one might disagree with — but in the name of power and profit.
Trump’s alliances confirm this assessment. The U.S. government established a Board of Peace that is the closes thing imaginable to a club of Trump’s friends. Most of the countries invited — and nearly all those that accepted the invitation — have appalling human rights records. These include Bahrain, Belarus, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. Needless to say, there will be no U.S. military intervention in those countries. Nor will there be one in China or North Korea, countries where there is documented evidence of the existence of concentration camps, because this would trigger a global war.
That said, it would be premature to sign the death certificate of the rules-based international order. This was always an imperfect order: its rules were often applied with double standards and frequently embraced hypocritically. Yet it provided normative frameworks that often prevented the unchecked imposition of the will of the strongest. What happens to that order going forward will depend on several factors: in the short term, on this year’s U.S. midterm elections, and then on the 2028 presidential election. But it will also depend on what others do with the space left vacant by the United States. And here there are both risks and opportunities: the vacuum may be exploited by authoritarian actors — particularly China — to reshape international institutions to their advantage, but it may also be filled by democracies committed to multilateralism and human rights. CIVICUS’s 2026 State of Civil Society Report, published on 12 March, analyses this turning point: the deliberate attack on the multilateral order, the normalisation of impunity in conflicts and, at the same time, the rise of a global resistance that refuses to accept this state of affairs.
In this context, democratic states have a historic opportunity — and an urgent responsibility — to articulate a common position on human rights and the defence of democracy. The aim is not to export democracy by force, which rarely works anyway, but to deny authoritarianism the diplomatic and economic impunity that sustains it. This agenda is credible only if applied consistently: a democratic coalition that demands accountability selectively, punishing its adversaries while shielding its allies, would offer no alternative to Trump’s order but, at best, a more polished version of the same problem. Double standards have historically been the main driver of erosion of the system we must now defend.
Such initiative has illustrious intellectual precedents. Anticipating the Responsibility to Protect doctrine by over a century, Juan Bautista Alberdi argued that human rights must take precedence over state sovereignty when the latter is exercised against human dignity. René Cassin, one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proposed in his initial draft the idea that there can be no international peace without respect for freedoms and human rights. And the Universal Declaration on Democracy, adopted by the Inter-Parliamentary Union in 1997, states that democracies must defend democratic principles in their international relations, stand in solidarity with other democracies under attack, and extend their solidarity to all victims of human rights violations under non-democratic regimes.
The challenge is to translate declared solidarity into tangible mechanisms. Václav Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic, argued that a state’s internal regime is not merely a domestic matter, because it determines its international behaviour: a state that represses its own citizens has neither the incentives nor the institutional culture to respect the rights of other peoples. In other words, international peace cannot be sustained on the basis of domestic tyranny.
Translated into policy, the Havel Doctrine implies that democracies should coordinate their positions in multilateral forums instead of negotiating separately; make their trade and investment agreements conditional upon compliance with minimum human rights and civil liberties standards; suspend the sale of arms and surveillance technology to governments that use them against their own citizens; and offer effective protection to persecuted and exiled activists and journalists. None of this is new or utopian: these are commitments that democracies made in the past and subsequently abandoned. The Orwellian world is not our inevitable destiny; the democratic community can still act.
