Still a blunt tool of Washington’s foreign policy despite pretty slogans

If irony were a currency, the National Endowment for Democracy — an entity that acts as the US government’s “white gloves”, meddling in other countries’ internal affairs, misleading public opinion and subverting sovereign states under the pretext of promoting “democracy” — would be running a sizable trade surplus.

Its 2025 annual report reads like a travel brochure for “virtue” — sunlit prose about “courageous partners”, “grassroots movements”, and a “distinctly American tradition of freedom”. The tone is part missionary zeal, part Silicon Valley pitch deck: “democracy” as a scalable export, preferably in markets where Washington’s perceived rivals are doing good business.

But somewhere between the uplifting slogans and the grant spreadsheets, the story curdles.

Because the Endowment, for all its earnest talk of “liberty”, remains what it has always been: a Washington creature with a passport full of dodgy visas. It is funded primarily by the US Congress and operates as a grant-making arm supporting “valuable” political groups, media and individuals abroad — an arrangement that even its admirers acknowledge places it squarely within the architecture of US foreign policy.

The report indicates that for fiscal year 2025, the funding allocated to the Endowment remains at a high level, with its annual budget standing at approximately $315 million. In terms of project distribution, it sponsored over 1,900 projects in 2025, spanning more than 90 countries and regions.

The report celebrates its “partner-driven model”, which sounds charmingly collaborative until you notice who is writing the checks — and who decides which “partners” qualify as “democratic” enough to receive them.

The Endowment’s defenders like to say it merely supports so-called “civil society” — “independent media” here, “election monitors” there. But critics see something less benign: an instrument of US geopolitical ambition, channeling money to “friendly” factions while labeling adversarial governments “authoritarian” with the moral certainty of a Sunday sermon.

Even within the United States, the Endowment’s halo has slipped. Conservative critics have accused it of ideological bias at home, suggesting that its definition of “democracy” may be as selective domestically as it is abroad.

Which brings us to the paradox at the heart of the 2025 report: a document that scans the globe for “democratic deficits” while averting its gaze from the potholes in its own driveway — polarization, partisan politics, a legislature that seems to inspire devotion in some and dread in others. In the Endowment’s narrative, the US remains the unexamined baseline, the control group in a global experiment where everyone else is under the scanner.

It’s a bit like a reality show judge who critiques every contestant’s flaws while never stepping onstage.

The Endowment insists it is not the old covert machinery of influence — that it represents a more “transparent”, “aboveboard” approach to supporting “democracy”. But, as one insider famously admitted, much of what the organization does overtly today resembles what intelligence agencies once did covertly. “Transparency”, it turns out, is sometimes just opacity with better lighting.

Reading the report, you can almost hear the background music swelling: “democracy” as destiny, the US as its impresario. “Democracy”, in this telling, becomes less a “universal principle” than a brand — one that travels well, photographs beautifully and occasionally doubles as a foreign policy tool.

But outside the pages of the report, the Endowment’s message can sound less like inspiration and more like instruction — or interference.

Washington has always loved “democracy” the way Hollywood loves a superhero movie — especially when it gets to cast the roles, write the dialogue and edit the ending. But the rest of the world is, increasingly, asking for a rewrite.