International Relations (IR) scholars can no longer take US power, domestic institutions, or global ambitions for granted, especially since 20 January 2025. Many scholars highlight the democratic nature of the United States, the most powerful actor in the post-1945 international system, as essential to international order and global governance in this era. In After Victory, John Ikenberry argued that the United States was able to build the post-1945 order because it had two things: overwhelming power, and democratic constraint that reassured other countries rather than motivating a balancing coalition.Footnote 1 Since the end of the Cold War, of course, there have been significant debates over whether the United States should retrench from its global position,Footnote 2 or whether the tides of domestic politics would force such a retrenchment.Footnote 3 But the United States continues to be crucial to financing, coordinating, or mobilizing responses to major international problems or crises, such as the 2008 financial crisis, the global effort to contain the Iranian nuclear program through sanctions and diplomacy prior to 2018, and the response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Footnote 4
The United States’ willingness and capacity to continue as the underwriter of international order and global governance is now very much in doubt, however, because the US presidency is now essentially unconstrained in the international realm. The unwinding of these constraints predated Trump’s election in 2016.Footnote 5 But the rapid changes of 2025 constitute a sharp break because Trump’s attacks on the remaining democratic constraints on foreign policy during his first term left them fragile, allowing him to push them to the breaking point in his second term.
We argue that international order and global governance since 1945 implicitly depended upon domestic audience constraint in the United States, but that trends in recent decades have made it easier for leaders to escape domestic audience constraint. These trends weaken mechanisms of democratic accountability that scholars argue give democracies advantages in the international system, and undermine both US willingness and capabilities to serve as a guarantor of global governance.Footnote 6
We identify three trends that are particularly important for making a theoretically informed prediction about how the changing nature of democratic constraint in the United States might affect international politics. First, information fragmentation, driven by technological change, undermines vertical checks from the public because it allows leaders to more precisely target segments of their domestic audience with propaganda rather than building coalitions. Second, extreme polarization undermines checks on executive power, including not only vertical checks from elections but also horizontal checks from institutions and elites.Footnote 7 Third, the threat environment of the post–Cold War era empowers democratic chief executives and undermines horizontal checks from institutions. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, these trends gave the US presidency far more room to take quasi-authoritarian actions while eroding the resilience of democratic institutions that would otherwise pull constraints back to their default level after crises.
In his second term, Trump has taken steps that many scholars argue have already amounted to a change in regime.Footnote 8 We argue that even if the United States remains a democracy, long-term forces and Trump’s short-term assault on domestic constraints have already removed what limited checks remained on US foreign and security policy. The United States, a presidential system with all the accompanying perils,Footnote 9 now effectively has the foreign policy of a personalist regime.Footnote 10
Drawing on theories that suggest democracies have advantages in the international arena—advantages that the United States may now be losing—we highlight a series of implications for international order and global governance.Footnote 11 In terms of US willingness to remain globally engaged, we argue that it will face greater difficulty and costs of building broad coalitions to solve national and international problems. In terms of US capacity to engage globally, we argue that weaker domestic audience constraint will reduce incentives for the United States to invest in public goods at home that have spillover effects on global governance, including national defense, science and technology, and investments in future economic prosperity; reduce barriers to corruption that can undermine the quality of and trust in US capabilities; and reduce state capacity for international commitments.
An unconstrained US foreign policy may lead to a more unstable international order, with no clear path back to the post-1945 system led by powerful democracies.
Regime Type, Domestic Audience Constraint, and International Order Since 1945
Several decades of scholarship on the domestic politics of international relations have pointed to the limits that politically relevant domestic actors can impose on leaders’ policies as the critical variable in understanding how domestic politics matters in international relations.Footnote 12 In our earlier work, we brought together two sources of variation in domestic audience constraint. First, structural sources of domestic audience constraint, such as institutions, are relatively stable and slow to change, and tend to be higher on average in democracies. Second, strategic sources of domestic audience constraint allow leaders in a given regime type to adjust their level of audience constraint. Leaders can act strategically to either insulate themselves from audience constraint (such as a democratic leader who risks acting in secret to temporarily avoid accountability) or expose themselves to more audience constraint (such as a dictator who risks allowing protests to escalate, in order to generate credibility).Footnote 13 Thus within each regime type, leaders face a default level of constraint set by institutions, but have a defined amount of “agency space” or room for maneuver within the regime-defined bounds.Footnote 14
IR scholars show that greater audience constraint generally leads to better outcomes in the international arena, and that democracies have greater levels of domestic audience constraint compared to most, if not all, authoritarian regimes, yielding international advantages. Myrick argues that domestic constraint gives democracies three main advantages: the “stability advantage”—avoiding abrupt shifts in policy; a “credibility advantage”—improving signals of resolve or negotiating positions; and a “reliability advantage”—committing and sticking to international agreements.Footnote 15 Others argue that democracies provide more public goods than dictatorships do because democratic leaders rely on a large number of supporters to keep them in office and thus cannot pay off regime supporters with private, excludable goods.Footnote 16 Scholars find that democracies enjoy an array of substantive advantages, including more peaceful relations with other countries, more effective war-fighting, more open trading relations, better sovereign credit and financial power, greater transparency, and more reliability in their alliance partnerships.Footnote 17 Additionally, scholars argue that in the post-1945 era, democracies shaped the international system and that the system, in turn, rewarded democracies, or those who behave like them.Footnote 18
A subsequent wave of scholarship shows that some authoritarian regimes could generate domestic audience constraint that can rival democracies and achieve similarly favorable outcomes, for example, in selecting and fighting wars.Footnote 19 Leaders of all stripes sometimes temporarily increase their domestic audience constraint, for example, by making threats public and risking an “audience cost” for backing down.Footnote 20 But these findings also led to a puzzle: if domestic audience constraint is so useful, why do dictators not try to constrain themselves more often? We argued that straying too far from the default level of domestic audience constraint can make the same behavior more costly on average, alter the nature of those costs, and even trigger regime change. It is thus more costly and risky for an autocratic leader to deliberately engage constraints than for democratic leaders, and more costly for democratic leaders to evade constraints than for autocrats.
Or, at least, most observers assumed that was the way things worked until they began to recognize what Larry Diamond has called a “democratic recession.”Footnote 21 Trends in the international system, including the rise of China and significantly reduced Western support for democracy promotion, made the climate more favorable for autocrats.Footnote 22 At the same time, democratic leaders found they had greater scope to deviate from democratic institutions and norms and could do so at lower cost. Once the cost of evading democratic constraint is sufficiently low, democratic leaders may be increasingly tempted to take actions unfettered by domestic audiences and forgo the benefits of domestic constraint.
What’s New? The Changing Nature of Domestic Audience Constraint
The builders of the post-1945 order did their work within a media structure that allowed politicians to get messages to a broad audience;Footnote 23 a political landscape that was less polarized than that of today, allowing room for cross-cutting coalitions;Footnote 24 and an external threat environment that engaged Congress in oversight of overseas commitments.Footnote 25 There was, of course, devastating repression in this era, including the Red Scare and Jim Crow. But in the national security realm, important constraints remained.
Over time, technological, political, and geopolitical forces made it easier for presidents to avoid domestic accountability for their actions on the world stage. We highlight three forces that are not the only factors slackening US global commitments, but are particularly relevant because they directly affect democratic audience constraint and weaken both horizontal and vertical checks on executive power.
Information Fragmentation
Citizens cannot hold leaders accountable for their actions without information.Footnote 26 In the first few decades of the post–World War II period, a small number of broadcast channels reached all Americans with a television. Viewers encountered information about government policies whether they wanted it or not, because they had little choice over what to watch.Footnote 27 Leaders who wanted to explain or sell their policies, and opposition parties who wanted to expose poor policy choices, could reach broad cross-sections of voters. Most leaders behaved as though they believed they would face consequences for broadly unpopular actions.
Technological change has fueled information fragmentation. As Prior shows, the rise of cable television gave citizens the choice to tune out the news in favor of entertainment.Footnote 28 Indeed, though scholarship suggests that media fragmentation and polarization are related, they remain distinct processes, and scholars are only beginning to untangle the direction of causality.Footnote 29 Meanwhile, technology continues to generate new platforms that further fragment the informational landscape, including the rise of social media.Footnote 30
Information fragmentation reduces both the reach and quality of information about government actions, undermining vertical checks from voters.Footnote 31 Prior argues that technology alone, rather than elite-driven content, changes the composition of the electorate by allowing those less interested in politics to tune out, increasing the proportion of voters with strongly held beliefs or partisanship.Footnote 32 Social media fragments information sources even further, allowing politicians to reach ever-smaller slices of the electorate. As a result, democratic leaders no longer expect that voters encounter the same set of facts. Leaders who want to evade constraint can do so more easily. And leaders who could make use of audience costs for international advantage will have greater difficulty in doing so.Footnote 33
At the same time, the news industry has been in steady decline, degrading the quality of information. Legacy news organizations have downsized and their ownership has consolidated. Local news coverage has also declined precipitously, lowering political knowledge and citizen engagement and depriving citizens of information about how federal programs affect their communities.Footnote 34 There is evidence that the contraction of local news supply results in more national coverage, contributing to the overall nationalization of political debate that has become increasingly polarized.Footnote 35
Information fragmentation thus alters the nature of vertical accountability. It is simply harder for leaders or opposition party politicians to get information to a broad swath of the public. Conversely, the ability to target messages or propaganda directly to certain segments of the population—bypassing large swaths of the electorate and quality filters entirely—can help motivated leaders escape domestic constraint.Footnote 36 Democratic leaders can more easily evade the negative consequences of information about their actions. Some leaders will not pay costs they might have had to previously, such as blowback for revelations they acted in secret, or may perceive the costs as far lower or inconsequential. Additionally, democratic leaders have less incentive to provide public goods, including longer-term investments that yield global power dividends, when they can rely upon a “bespoke” political base and stay in power without building cross-cutting coalitions. As we discuss in the next section, these reduced incentives leave fewer resources available for international commitments, whether or not future leaders wish to make them.
Extreme Political Polarization
Extreme partisan polarization is a political trend which, as Myrick argues, undermines both vertical and horizontal checks and thus the stability, credibility, and reliability advantages of democracies, including the United States.Footnote 37 While polarization and media fragmentation are undoubtedly related, studies of polarization highlight many potential causes that are largely separate from media, including economic inequality and extreme party leader tactics.Footnote 38
In moderation, polarization can improve representation by giving voters clearer electoral choices.Footnote 39 Indeed, those who advocate for a more restrained US grand strategy often argue that the two parties’ similarities on foreign policy robs voters of real alternatives in how the United States conducts its international affairs.Footnote 40 But extreme polarization, as in the United States today, undermines accountability because leaders’ copartisans continue to support them regardless of their actions or record of achievement. This dynamic also reduces incentives for opposition politicians to scrutinize government actions and publicize mistakes, a horizontal check that is an essential component of democratic constraint.Footnote 41
When combined with the fragmented informational environment and a leader who knows how to use it, extreme polarization is an even more pernicious threat to democratic constraint because an elected leader can hold onto their base of supporters regardless of their behavior. The rise of partisan media has also allowed citizens to selectively engage information that conforms with their pre-existing views, which can, in turn, deepen polarization, as well as insulating partisans from negative information about their elected leaders.Footnote 42 In the extreme, politicians can lie directly to their supporters, seemingly without consequences.Footnote 43 These conditions make it almost impossible to generate the broad coalitions necessary for difficult or risky policies, including treaties.Footnote 44
The Post–Cold War Threat Environment
Geopolitical factors also affect domestic institutions, as theorists of the “second image reversed” have long argued.Footnote 45 It is widely understood that just as “war made the state,” the Cold War helped generate the US national security state.Footnote 46 As Aaron Friedberg argues, limits on federal power allowed the United States to flourish and avoid becoming a “garrison state” during the Cold War.Footnote 47 The global order persisted after the Cold War ended, partly because the United States continued to play a reluctantly leading role, not only abiding by the self-binding constraints of the post-1945 settlement but also expanding international institutions.Footnote 48 But the end of the Cold War left the United States in what Michael Desch calls a “threat trough,” which weakened states in general because the cohering effect of an external threat disappeared.Footnote 49
The nature of post–Cold War threats affected domestic institutions by rapidly accelerating the growth of presidential power and the decline of horizontal checks on the executive, especially after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Freedom of action at the international level can give democratic leaders more agency space to take autocratic-like actions, as wartime leaders who crack down on civil liberties well know. But unchecked international leeway can also undermine institutions that help leaders credibly commit not to abuse their power.Footnote 50 A crucial mechanism in institutional arguments is the credible threat to punish or even remove the leader, which makes the arrangements self-enforcing.Footnote 51 One distinct feature of democracies is their ability to peacefully restrain or remove bad leaders.
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 prompted the United States to make major national security investments, but of a type that transferred power to the presidency and in a manner that undermined US institutions.Footnote 52 Congress granted sweeping authorizations to the president not only to use military force in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also to intrude on civil liberties in the United States through surveillance and other counterterrorism tools. These grants of authority lowered the marginal cost to the president of taking repressive actions. At the same time, Congress and the Supreme Court were highly reluctant to check a president fighting a “war on terrorism” and later, the Iraq War, making the new powers very difficult to reverse.Footnote 53 Barack Obama, who campaigned against the Iraq War and presidential power, nonetheless made use of this expanded agency space through the use of drones and other tools of “light-footprint warfare.”Footnote 54 Many scholars have thus concluded that 9/11’s greatest effect was not on the international system but on the United States government itself.Footnote 55
Trump thus took office in 2016 with already weakened horizontal checks on the presidency. Congress’s failure to convict Trump after he was impeached for the January 6 insurrection in 2021, followed by the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity in 2024, dealt grievous blows to the United States’ ability to sanction or remove leaders. In his second term, Trump’s advisers have become loyalist enablers, removing one of the last remaining constraints on foreign policy that worked in his first term.Footnote 56 Thus Trump in his second term governs under the near-complete absence of horizontal checks on the presidency. Given the importance of such constraints to democratic advantages, the removal of these checks threatens the US advantage in generating financial, economic, and military power.
Additionally, the failure of basic accountability mechanisms also allowed Trump to turn presidential power against the engines of US state capacity. Trump’s attacks on the federal workforce, independent agencies, scientific expertise, and the basic research enterprise also pose an existential threat to state capacity. Trump’s kleptocracy threatens vital national assets. The United States may find it difficult to rebuild state capacity in response to a new external threat, as it did in the early Cold War. As Myrick demonstrates, external threats, such as that posed by a rising China, are not inherently unifying. If threats arise in a polarized environment, they may exacerbate polarization rather than dampening it.Footnote 57
Implications for the Future of World Order and Global Governance
How do these changes matter for global governance and world order? After all, it is normal for democratic leaders to use politics to shape, engage, or even try to evade their domestic audience.Footnote 58 This kind of strategic politics is the basis for the voluminous literature on audience costs in international relations.Footnote 59 But IR scholars expect such shifts to be temporary. Political institutions keep democratic leaders from trying to make their insulation from certain domestic constraints permanent. We have argued that democratic institutions are better able to handle these temporary shifts and avoid an abrupt change in regime type precisely because they are more flexible and resilient, and there is a credible threat that leaders who go too far will be punished politically, including removal in the extreme.Footnote 60
A US foreign policy unconstrained by domestic audiences is likely to provoke changes across multiple domains of global governance and world order.Footnote 61 The democratic advantages that facilitated US provision of international order were eroding well before Trump. These advantages did not make US leadership automatic, but they made US commitments more stable, credible, and reliable.Footnote 62 Arguably, these advantages also made those commitments cheaper—in both political and material terms—than they otherwise would have been. At the extreme, an entirely personalist foreign policy with power concentrated in the executive will undermine credible commitments, economic and financial leadership, alliance politics, the financing of sovereign debt, support for democracy and human rights, an array of international norms, and international institutions.
To understand the implications of these changes for global governance and order, consider the thought experiment of inverting prior scholars’ findings about the democratic advantage and domestic audience constraint. For example, the inverse of Cowhey’s “credibility advantage” suggests that in the absence of domestic political institutions, US commitments to multilateral institutions of any kind are unreliable.Footnote 63 Martin’s work, inverted, suggests that without legislative or other constraints on the executive, multilateral economic sanctions will be further undermined.Footnote 64 Lake’s early work on the democratic peace suggests that an unconstrained United States will be more likely to become involved in wars it is less likely to win, and potentially more expansionist in ambition.Footnote 65 Leeds’s emphasis on democratic alliance reliability can be inverted to suggest that the United States will now be a less reliable partner.Footnote 66 Similarly, the consistency of foreign policy commitments will also be undermined.Footnote 67
A United States governed by an unconstrained and unpredictable executive branch is also less likely to use its power to backstop the international economy, as Drezner argues it did after the 2008 financial crisis.Footnote 68 It is less likely to fund and pressure other countries to support UN peacekeeping missions which, despite their well-deserved criticisms, reduce the damage wrought by civil war and potentially decrease the probability of conflict.Footnote 69 The US failure to defend the territorial integrity norm and Trump’s territorial threats against Canada, Denmark, and Panama lower the anticipated costs of invading one’s neighbors, potentially leading to more inter-state conflict.Footnote 70 If the United States and other democracies can no longer credibly signal to adversaries during crisis bargaining, an important source of bargaining power is diminished.Footnote 71
But the implications of an unconstrained United States go beyond whether it is willing to engage in this kind of international leadership in the future and how other countries might react. Unlike the transition after Trump’s first term, a future president who wants to recommit to a strong US role in global governance may find the country lacks the capacity to do so. If the behaviors that led to the United States’ sterling reputation for sovereign debt repayment are undermined by this instability and unpredictability, the foundation of US economic and military power may crumble.Footnote 72 As Drezner argues, it will be harder for politicians to build broad coalitions for public goods to address national and international problems.Footnote 73 These include national defense,Footnote 74 scientific innovation,Footnote 75 or international cooperation to address global problems like climate change or migration.Footnote 76 The unconstrained power of the presidency has also allowed Trump to pursue policies that international political economy scholars would expect interest groups to lobby against or self-interested politicians to check, such as highly variable tariffs, restrictions on visas for foreign students who contribute to US competitiveness, and attacks on scientific research. The unraveling of bureaucratic institutions that find and prosecute corruption may degrade the quality of US capabilities and lower demand for them among allies. And a military turned inward to patrol the streets of US cities may face reduced readiness for great power conflict.
Conclusion and Implications for Global Governance and World Order
We have argued that technological, political, and geopolitical trends have altered the nature and scope of domestic audience constraint in the United States. The United States remains the most militarily powerful state, and how it chooses to use that power will dramatically affect international relations, for better and for worse. Domestic audience constraint in the United States has been a crucial ingredient of world order and global governance. By weakening US power and institutions, the decline of domestic audience constraint may both undermine what remains of the existing global order and prevent the United States from playing as significant a role in whatever comes next.
There is still a debate about whether the United States has already undergone regime change or is still teetering on the edge of a transition. Even if American democratic institutions bend rather than break, the changes outlined before undermine the United States’ ability to generate the kind of legitimate power and authority required to manage or shape the global order in the future.Footnote 77 Politics never stopped at the water’s edge, but US domestic politics are no longer an arena to hash out differences and forge broad-based, durable compromises to invest in public goods. With an unconstrained chief executive, basic ingredients for US participation in international competition and cooperation—from credit to investment to military alliances—become harder to obtain. American leaders have stretched domestic constraint beyond recognition, such that it is no longer strong enough to bind the global order.
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of Zara Williamson and Andrew Blinkinsop, the three careful and constructive reviewers, the editorial team, and many of our students, colleagues, and friends for conversing with us on this topic over many years.
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