In the final part of this series, John Keane asks whether democracies will have the resolve to stand up to the USA and to find remedies for the maladies of representative democracy.
The history that is closest to us is always the most difficult to interpret. This means that nothing can be certain. The future’s impossible to predict. Yes, for the moment, it’s safe to say that the MAGA demagogue and his backers will do what they can to stave off American decline and defeat; that amidst the mounting global tensions and confusions, with its nuclear-tipped dome collapsing around its ears, the sudden demise or outright collapse of the United States ‘liberal democratic’ imperium is probably not on the cards; that rather like the Ottoman and British empires, our world will instead probably witness a string of slow-motion, spits-and-splutters episodes of retreat, regrouping and revenge; and that perhaps US imperial decline will happen the Hemingway way, slowly at first, then suddenly. It’s equally probable that the final crack-up of the American-led rules-based order will be protracted, disorderly and painful, and that there’ll be many cartoonishly crazy and contradictory happenings in which the prospects for democratic survival and renewal everywhere seem rather dim or dismal.
For the moment, amid all the uncertainties, what is obvious is that differences of opinion and policy among and within the outlier democracies are beginning to balloon. The short list below is both symptomatic of the breakdown of the American-dominated global order and probably no bad thing, if only because it is pressuring the outlier democracies to consider how best to save their own skins.
Citizen hostility: the clearest trend, though it might not immediately count for much, is rising citizen hostility to the bearish American empire. The latest surveys of people’s opinions by market research agencies such as Ipsos and Pew (in 24 countries in mid-2025) indicate that belief in the United States as a force for good is both heavily contested and falling, with fewer than half of people now holding a favourable view of Americas’ role in the world. The highest level of hostility (8 in 10 citizens) is in Sweden; more than six-in-ten citizens view the United States negatively in neighbouring Mexico and Canada; majorities in Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey are of the same opinion.
Loyal optimism: despite these public opinion poll results, there are governments whose promises of loyalty to the ailing United States outdo Pangloss in their ignorance of adversity and danger and their expression of naïve faith in a future where everything will turn out for the best. Masochistic wallowing (Tsitsi Dangarembga) is their thing. Unveiling a 2026 National Defence Strategy, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles reaffirmed that the alliance with the United States would ‘always be fundamental to Australia’s defence’. He echoed Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long daily praised the ‘partnership’ of Israel and the United States as a tryst based on ‘the truth’. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon welcomed the result of Donald Trump’s second election victory as a ‘comprehensive win’, subsequently calling for the strengthening of the American alliance, and manoeuvring to shift his government’s position to display ‘explicit public support’ for the US/Israel-led war on Iran.
Drifting ambivalence: at the opposite end of the geopolitical spectrum are the random and so far uncoordinated acts of resistance, as when Denmark’s ‘Operation Arctic Endurance’, in cooperation with troops from multiple NATO allies (France, Germany, Norway and Sweden), launched a ‘tripwire force’ to deter a United States invasion of Greenland, if necessary by blowing up runways to prevent US war planes from landing. The opportunist defiance camp is internally divided. Some are only conditional and temporary, as when the Italian government refused to allow US fighter aircraft bound for Iran to refuel in Sicily. Others talk tough, as when Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney announced (at the 2026 WEF’s annual meeting in Davos ) the end of the ‘pleasant fiction’ of a ‘rules-based international order’, the beginning of ‘a harsh reality, where…the large, main power, geopolitics, is subject to no limits’, and Canada and other middle powers strive to counter the rise of hard power by building more democratically resilient forms of mutual cooperation.
The preferred strategy of other outlier democracies is best described as drifting ambivalence, as when the Modi government weathers abuse (from Trump reposting a podcaster’s description of India as a ‘hellhole’) and heavy US tariff penalties (for purchasing discounted Russian oil and running a trade surplus with the United States), while playing off the United States with support for China and Russia and sneakily and slowly but surely terminating the joint efforts of the past quarter century to nurture cooperation between the ‘oldest’ and ‘largest’ democracies.
Fence sitting: even when principally symbolic, drifting ambivalence and opportunist defiance of the United States is exceptional. A clear majority of democratically elected governments are currently sitting on splintery fences. They feel the force of American decline and the turbulence it has triggered, but they are acting as if the storm will pass, and that, thanks to electoral defeat or a heart attack, Trump will be deposed so that when a future US government comes to its senses, things will get back to normal. In psychoanalytic terms, these governments suffer neurosis, a perception disorder triggered by anxieties they are trying (in vain) to repress. Their leaders may talk tough, and sometimes frankly. Germany’s Chancellor Merz risked the wrath of the Trump administration by telling high school students that the US government’s decision to attack Iran was foolish, but truth is that Germany remains a loyal ally of the United States. An unconditional supporter of Israel, Germany remains the hub for US military power by hosting the US European Command (EUCOM) and Africa Command (AFRICOM) in Stuttgart, along with Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre. As a crucial NATO partner, it contributes to the Enhanced Forward Presence in the Baltics, participates in missions against ISIS, works closely with the United States in supporting Ukraine and, initially, by materially backing the invasion of Iran.
New trade deals: It should come as no surprise that fence sitters, feeling the pain of the splinters from the fences on which they are uncomfortably perched, are showing some signs of needing to resolve their neurosis by thinking and acting differently. New trade deals are the current flavour. On behalf of the EU, Germany is attempting to negotiate a deal with China, its top trading partner. Chile has successfully agreed a trade agreement with the EU; after two decades of difficult negotiations, Australia has suddenly agreed to a similar major trade deal with the European Union. Following a widely reported Davos speech on the power of the powerless, in which he declared the end of the ‘liberal rules-based order’, Canada’s PM Mark Carney has negotiated a dozen trade and security deals on four continents, including deals with China and Qatar, and agreed a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. Free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur are also under negotiation.
Democratic innovations: the task of defending and rebuilding the investment and trade infrastructures on which democratic institutions and ways of life so obviously depend is as important as it is difficult, and politically controversial. In matters of political economy, repositioning democracies formerly mainly dependent upon the United States within the wider alternative ‘neo-medieval’ multiplex of cities, provinces, regions and trans-continental governmental and NGO institutions will prove to be a critically important priority. This will be made more urgent by the world-reshaping role now played by Russia, Iran, China and other despotisms.
But there’s an equally important question now facing the outlier democracies: in the age of American decline, are these democracies capable at home of throwing off masochistic wallowing by crafting institutional innovations and breathing new life into the spirit of democracy? Alas, there are for the moment few signs of this happening.
It’s true that the Welsh parliament has recently passed legislation to make lying about matters of fact a criminal offence during Senedd elections and to establish a recall system, granting citizens the right to give the boot to underperforming or misbehaving representatives in between elections. The Spanish government has extended potential full citizen rights to more
than half a million (undocumented) immigrants. In Australia, a major new Reclaiming Democracy Together citizens’ initiative has been launched.
But bundles of prickly questions remain. Will the independent and global media monitoring of American bullying continue to reveal things and produce scandals that are not to America’s liking, and serve to shame and restrain its shrinking power?
Within both surviving democracies and in the new democracies to come, will democrats get serious about the decolonisation of their democracies? For instance, will they use free and fair elections to elect mutinous governments willing to speak and act against the United States? Might we come to see the rise of a new crop of democratically elected leaders who speak frankly and practise the art of leading others honestly and boldly by the head and heart, not by tugging and pulling at their noses?
Might the rhetoric of Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney be a harbinger of things to come? ‘America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever will be part of America in any way, shape, or form…I reject any attempts to wear us down, to break us so that America can own us. That will never happen.’
Is the world going to witness renewed efforts by citizens and their chosen representatives – as in South Korea, or Indonesia – to build democracy hideaways, havens and hermitages? Will judiciaries dare to stand firm and do as Brazil’s Supreme Court did in September 2025, when it convicted a demagogue and his aides of stage managing a failed conspiracy to overturn a general election in a coup d’état plot that included disbanding courts, empowering the military, and assassinating the democratically chosen president-elect?
Hope
The future of outlier democracies will depend heavily upon positive and practical answers to these kinds of searing questions. Here’s the hope: confronted by Russian-style despotisms, a rising Chinese empire and an angry America bearishly in retreat and decline, democrats everywhere might realise that this is a moment of opportunity not to be wasted, a tipping point in which the future of democracy no longer depends on the approval and support of the United States. New forms of post-imperial democracy will instead depend upon the solidarity of the shaken (Jan Patočka’s famous phrase), and on the courage, inventiveness and determination of governments and people who are being sidelined, left behind, bullied and screwed.
The mounting uncertainties, setbacks and misfortunes and American derogatory abuse will hopefully galvanise the minds and hearts of democrats on every continent. So serious are the times that the hope is their commitment to democracy will toughen their resolve to stand firm, while searching at all levels of government and social life for new remedies for the maladies of representative democracy, all the while saying again and again: since uncontrolled power is dangerous, and since America on the skids is trying to sow division and disunity to its advantage and can no longer politically be fully trusted or relied upon, democracy is once again, for very different reasons than our grandparents supposed, an indispensable global virtue, a non-negotiable and basic requirement everywhere of a decent and dignified life for creatures large and small on an endangered planet we call home.
This article was drawn from notes prepared for public lectures in Nanjing and Oxford, May-June 2026
Read the full eight-part series here.
John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. Renowned globally for his creative thinking about politics, history, media and democracy, he is the author of the best-selling Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995), The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), Power and Humility (2018), The New Despotism (2020) and The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has been published in more than a dozen languages. He was nominated for the 2021 Balzan Prize (Italy) and the Holberg Prize (Norway) for outstanding global contributions to the human sciences.His latest books are China’s Galaxy Empire (2025) and Demagogues and Despots: Democracies on the Brink (2026).