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View all search resultsDemocracy, collateral damage from great-power games
As great powers trample democratic ideals in a ruthless scramble for strategic alignment, caught-in-the-middle nations face the constant threat of becoming mere collateral damage. Yet, a fierce countercurrent is rising: a fearless, unbought generation of youth refusing to let their freedom be bartered away by autocrats and foreign patrons.
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A student throws a rock at riot police during protests against a rise in non-subsidized fuel prices, inefficient government spending and military involvement in civilian affairs and the government's free nutritious meal program in Surabaya, East Java, on June 26, 2026. (AFP/ Juni Kriswanto)
I
n the winter of 2024, the people of Georgia poured onto the avenues of Tbilisi, wrapped in the blue flag of a Europe they had been promised and were now being denied. Their government, an oligarch’s party drifting back toward Moscow, had pushed through a Russian-style law to muzzle civil society, claimed victory in an election the opposition called stolen and then suspended the country’s long-sought path into the European Union.
Night after night the police answered the crowds with water cannon and truncheons. Georgia’s hope of joining the democratic West was never the real prize in the tug-of-war between Russia and the West for its allegiance; it was simply what got crushed as each side pulled. It was collateral damage.
Georgia is no aberration. It is the pattern of our age. The contest now consuming the world, among the United States, China and Russia, is not, whatever we tell ourselves, a battle of democracy against autocracy with democracy ahead. It is a scramble for alignment, a race to win partners and deny them to rivals, in which democracy is no one’s aim.
When great powers chase advantage above all, democracy is what gets trampled in the rush. It is not the target. It is the collateral damage.
It was not always so. After the Cold War, the democratic West had no serious rival, and could attach conditions to its friendship: reform your courts, hold clean elections, respect your opposition and the rewards of trade and integration would follow. The promise of joining Europe, on those terms, turned a dozen dictatorships into democracies. Conditionality worked because there was only one bidder, and the price of its support was democratic behavior.
That world is gone. The bidding is open again, and in a bidding war for partners no one asks the awkward questions. A useful autocrat is now worth more to a great power than a principled democrat.
China and Russia court such rulers openly, with loans, arms and protection, no lectures attached, while the US, afraid of losing them to Beijing, looks past their abuses.
