The Washington Post Opinion Editorial Board - Trump’s respect for ‘national sovereignty’ is situational The State Department is wrong to de-emphasize free and fair elections as a foreign policy goal. July 30, 2025 at 12:40 p.m. EDTYesterday at 12:40 p.m. EDT

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Trump’s respect for ‘national sovereignty’ is situational

The State Department is wrong to de-emphasize free and fair elections as a foreign policy goal.

July 30, 2025 at 12:40 p.m. EDTYesterday at 12:40 p.m. EDT

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends a meeting with President Donald Trump and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Oval Office on July 22. (Yuri Gripas/EPA/Shutterstock)

Democracy might be America’s greatest export. The U.S. government, under presidents of both political parties, has advocated free and fair elections. Even when allies have fallen short, the State Department has almost reflexively expressed concern about improprieties or intimidation at the ballot box.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio has put an end to that standard procedure. He quietly issued a directive this month that the department and its diplomats “should avoid opining on the fairness or integrity of an electoral process, its legitimacy, or the democratic values of the country in question.” Rubio wrote in an all-staff cable that any public comment about a foreign election “should be brief” and “focused on congratulating the winning candidate.”

Rubio’s aides say they are operationalizing a noninterference vision of foreign policy articulated by President Donald Trump during a May speech in the Middle East. At the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh, Trump decried his predecessors for “giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.” It was an implicit rebuke of past U.S. criticism of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for ordering the murder of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. “It is God’s job to sit in judgment,” Trump said. “My job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity and peace.”

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Through it all, though, promoting democracy abroad has been seen as a fundamental U.S. interest, especially by Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Calling out election fraud put useful pressure on corrupt regimes to shape up, emboldened democratic opposition movements and strengthened America’s moral stature as the shining city upon a hill.

Rubio’s July 17 directive allows for “rare” exceptions to criticize sketchy elections when there’s a “clear and compelling” U.S. interest. Therein lies the rub: When it suits them, Trump and his administration are happy to lecture certain countries, even allies, on how to live and how to govern their own affairs.

Trump has raged against the leftist president of Brazil, the world’s fourth-largest democracy, over the prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro, Trump’s friend, in connection with a failed coup after losing the 2022 election. Rubio ripped Germany, the seventh-largest democracy, after its intelligence community designated the right-wing Alternative for Germany party an extremist organization: “That’s not democracy — it’s tyranny in disguise,” Rubio tweeted. Last weekend, the secretary questioned the legitimacy of Venezuela’s president: “Maduro is NOT the President of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government,” Rubio wrote on X.

Citing Maduro’s democratic illegitimacy might be a reflex akin to an amputee feeling the tingling of a ghost limb. The former senator from Florida has long spoken out against the thug in Caracas, and rightly so.

Before becoming America’s chief diplomat in January, Rubio eloquently spoke in favor of free and fair elections in Venezuela and elsewhere. “Wherever freedom and human rights spread, partners for our nation are born,” Rubio said in 2015. In that era, he spoke in support of the State Department’s annual report holding human rights abusers to account, saying that “the world has been a better place” because of these efforts. Rubio also co-sponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019, landmark legislation that solidified his reputation as a principled critic of Chinese repression.

That record is why no Democratic senator voted against confirming Rubio. But he is a loyal soldier to Trump, and he is trying to appeal to the MAGA movement to advance his 2028 presidential ambitions. The issue with de-emphasizing universal values as a core national interest, however, is that Rubio risks looking insincere every time he chooses to emphasize them.

French moralist François de La Rochefoucauld observed that “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” But the problem with Trump’s stance — and Rubio’s articulation of it as policy — is not that it leads to an uneven invocation of values in defense of foreign policy goals; it’s that it makes any invocation of values inherently suspect. This specific type of hypocrisy oversees the destruction of virtue.

The truth is that it is clearly a compelling U.S. interest to promote free and fair elections, with rare exceptions when silence is the best course. Critics will never tire of highlighting past instances of U.S. policy being out of step with lofty ideals. Promoting democracy abroad ebbs and flows as a government priority, but the State Department need not lose sight of the values that have made the great experiment in self-governance so successful.