The names Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Sharron Angle, and Christine O’Donnell have been lost to history, consigned to the dustbin of Beltway barroom trivia. For Mitch McConnell, however, they remain an all-too-fresh reminder of opportunities squandered.

McConnell became Senate majority leader in 2015, but had it not been for those four flawed and ultimately defeated Republican candidates, he might have reached his dream job years earlier. Now McConnell is trying to regain that powerful perch, and a slate of similarly problematic contenders in key states may be all that stands in his way.

On paper, Republicans have a prime opportunity to recapture the Senate majority this fall. They need to pick up just a single seat to break the current 50–50 tie, and the political environment is tilting heavily in their favor. President Joe Biden’s approval rating is mired in the low 40s, inflation is rampant, and the Democratic majority rests on a trio of vulnerable incumbents in states—Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada—that the president carried by fewer than 60,000 votes combined in 2020.

Yet the GOP may be stuck with candidates whose pockmarked, and in a few cases, scandal-filled, résumés could render them unelectable—or at least they would have in an earlier era. In Missouri, a state that should not be attainable for Democrats, the Republican nominee could be Eric Greitens, a former governor who resigned in disgrace over sexual-misconduct allegations and whose ex-wife has accused him of abusing both her and their son in court filings. The likely GOP nominee in Georgia, Herschel Walker, is a former NFL star with his own stormy past. Former President Donald Trump has endorsed celebrities making their first runs for office, J. D. Vance in Ohio and Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, whose reversals on key issues—including, in Vance’s case, Trump himself—offer ripe targets for critics on the left and the right. The lone vulnerable Republican incumbent, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, has campaigned against COVID-19 vaccines and has seen his popularity plummet in a state that Biden narrowly won two years ago.

McConnell is well aware of the GOP’s good fortunes this year—and how easily the party could blow it. “How could you screw this up?” the once and perhaps future majority leader mused recently in Kentucky. “It’s actually possible. And we’ve had some experience with that in the past.”

He was referring to the GOP’s missed chances in 2010 and 2012, when Akin, Mourdock, Angle, and O’Donnell suffered their ignominious defeats. Akin and Mourdock each lost winnable races in Missouri and Indiana, respectively, after they both drew nearly universal condemnation for comments defending their opposition to abortion even in cases of rape. (Akin suggested that women who were raped somehow could not get pregnant, while Mourdock said that a pregnancy caused by rape is something “God intended to happen.”) Angle, a Tea Party favorite in Nevada, made plenty of head-scratching remarks of her own as she lost her bid to oust Harry Reid, then the Democratic majority leader. O’Donnell, trying to win Biden’s old Delaware Senate seat ran a TV ad in which she said the following words verbatim: “I’m not a witch. I’m you.”

In previous years, Democrats might have rejoiced at the prospect of facing Republicans such as Greitens, Walker, Vance, and Oz. But in the Trump era, no one knows where, or whether, voters will draw a line on candidates who might have been unacceptable in the past. “The situation has really changed since 2012,” former Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota told me. Heitkamp won a close reelection race that year, before losing her seat in 2018. She said it was “an open question” whether the comments that doomed Akin and Mourdock would cost Republicans a seat in the current climate.

Read: Biden’s uncertainty principle

Like so much else about modern politics, Trump is the root of the shift. He won in 2016 despite countless liabilities, most notably the October release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape. And as Heitkamp noted, he brought in a whole new cohort of white, male voters who might be more forgiving of badly behaving men.

Trump is also largely the force propelling this year’s roster of GOP hopefuls. McConnell had tried to recruit more experienced, more establishment Republican governors for the marquee Senate races, but partly because of Trump’s continuing influence within the party, several of them passed. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu cited the highly partisan culture of the Senate in declining a campaign, while Maryland Governor Larry Hogan is considering a 2024 presidential bid instead. In Arizona, Governor Doug Ducey stayed out of the Senate race after angering Trump with his refusal to back attempts to overturn Biden’s 2020 win there.

Trump “has been a fly in the ointment for them getting the level of candidates they want,” J. B. Poersch, the president of the Democrats’ top campaign super PAC, Senate Majority PAC, told me. “It’s in the way of everything, and it seems to keep getting in the way.”

The GOP’s recruitment struggle has made the race for Senate control far more of a wild card than the nationwide campaign for the House majority, where the biggest question according to most political observers is not whether Republicans will win, but by how many seats. Democrats could expand their Senate advantage even while losing the House—a reversal of the 2018 midterms, when they recaptured the lower chamber even as Republicans gained Senate seats. Democrats are defending seats only in states Biden won (albeit narrowly), and they have opportunities to oust Johnson in Wisconsin and snag seats in Pennsylvania and North Carolina left open by GOP retirements. The possibility that Republicans will nominate Greitens in Missouri and Vance or Josh Mandel in Ohio gives Democrats an outside shot at expanding the map even farther. A bullish Biden told Democratic donors in Oregon last week that he believes the party can gain two Senate seats in November. “McConnell is right to be worried,” Doug Heye, a veteran Republican strategist, told me. “We’ve seen that the political laws of gravity don’t exist the way that they typically have. But there’s also the reality that Donald Trump was able to do things that no one else had been able to do.”

Waves are more common in the House, where voters cast ballots based more on a party label than what they know about a specific candidate. By contrast, “there’s a really pronounced, clear pattern of candidate quality being important in Senate races,” David Bergstein, a spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told me.

Privately, however, Democrats worry that the pattern no longer holds. Heitkamp told me that during her victorious 2012 race, 20 percent of GOP voters told pollsters that they were willing to vote for a Democratic candidate. By 2018, when she lost, that number had dropped to just 4 percent. The prospect that polarization now supersedes candidate qualifications is even more worrisome for Democrats in the years ahead. If Republicans capture a comfortable Senate majority this year, they could position themselves to win a filibuster-proof 60 seats by 2024, when Democrats will have to defend incumbents running in red states such as Montana, West Virginia, and Ohio, along with several others in closer battlegrounds.

The possibility of a sizable Republican majority has even larger implications for a close 2024 election, when Trump could again be on the ballot and might try to pressure his allies in Congress to overturn a narrow defeat, as he did unsuccessfully in 2020. “It would be a disaster,” Martha McKenna, a Democratic strategist who spent several years at the DSCC, told me. “It would be a very dangerous situation for democracy.”

Such a GOP majority would also be different from the Republican majorities even of the recent past, filled with Trump loyalists and less likely to counter him in a potential second term as it did, at least on occasion, in the first. For that reason, Democrats are equally nervous as they are hopeful about going up against candidates such as Greitens, Walker, and Vance in the fall.

“I don’t think anyone is celebrating now,” Justin Barasky, a Democratic strategist who also worked at the DSCC, told me. “This is par for the course when it comes to Republican candidates.” The GOP, he said, “has become so radicalized that the Sharon Angles from 2010, the Christine O’Donnell’s, the Richard Mourdock’s of 2012, the Todd Akins—those are the mainstream Republicans now. There are candidates who are even further to the right or even crazier than those folks, and a lot of them are going to be Senate nominees this cycle.” If the political winds keep blowing the GOP’s way, a lot of them are going to be senators too.

Everything about the American abortion war has taken on an air of inevitability. The Supreme Court will reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion decision establishing a constitutional right to end a pregnancy. The United States will divide along expected lines, with abortion broadly accessible in blue states and all but entirely criminalized in red states.

This narrative is not completely wrong. Twelve states have passed so-called trigger bans that will outlaw all or most abortions if Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are overturned. At the same time, 16 states and the District of Columbia have policies guaranteeing abortion rights no matter what the Supreme Court decides.

But states in the middle of this spectrum—which have not made their preferences as explicit—may well be more contested than people seem to assume. The resulting legal landscape will be complex, and, perhaps more important, those states’ policies may evolve over time. The forces shaping a post-Roe America may prove surprising, encouraging some states that currently restrict abortion to reverse course.

Consider the following factors. One might expect abortion-skeptical states, at least in the short term, to keep many of their restrictions on the books. Indeed, most states, even ones perceived as supportive of abortion, ban abortion past a certain point in pregnancy (24 weeks, for example), require parental permission for minors’ abortions, or mandate that providers report certain information to the state, to name some of the more popular laws. But in the long term, if Roe falls, these states may face pressure to shift toward more abortion-friendly policies.

[Kimberly Wehle: What Roe could take down with it]

First, polls consistently show that public opinion supports some level of abortion access, especially early in pregnancy, and opposes criminalizing doctors or women. Those numbers have been quite stable, yet even so, plenty of state legislatures have restricted abortion without political consequences. But if the Supreme Court clearly repudiates Roe, we may see a backlash that galvanizes people who haven’t typically taken a side in the abortion debate, including many who accept restrictions on abortion but not outright bans. This is unlikely to happen across the country, but it could make a key difference in a handful of states. Hints of such political mobilization are already apparent in places such as Virginia, which has historically restricted abortion but now has repealed some of those regulations following public outcry.  

Second, states likely to ban abortion are concentrated in the South and the Midwest, while abortion-friendly states, with some exceptions, cluster on the coasts. The effect of criminalization will be to further consolidate services in regions permitting abortion. That will make the services of any clinic outside those centers—in the middle of the country, for example—far more in demand. The financial considerations of abortion clinics have been an unpopular topic for abortion-rights advocates. But the provision of abortion services is more efficient at scale, and noncoastal clinics should be able to provide their services for less cost as they grow. A booming market for contraception, which reached $250 million by 1938, helped create pressure from businesses on states to broaden access. If the market for abortion care shifts so that regional clinics become better resourced and politically powerful, states might begin to listen to those providers and the professional organizations that represent them.

Third, laws that seek to punish abortion—which, at present, focus on providers and those who assist them—are going to become harder to enforce. One key reason is the emergence of telehealth for abortion. Last year, the federal government lifted a restriction on the first drug in a medication abortion—a two-drug regimen that ends a pregnancy before 10 weeks of gestation. Providers can now mail abortion pills to patients, and as a result, entirely virtual clinics, offering medication abortion through online telehealth services, have proliferated. Even in the states that ban remotely provided abortions, early terminations accomplished by pills that are mailed will be hard to trace and difficult to deter. The time, money, and infrastructure to effectively enforce those laws may not be worth the cost. In the long run, underenforcement could lead to repeal or modification of those policies.

[Jessica Bruder: A covert network of activists is preparing for the end of Roe]

But other factors put pressure in the opposite direction, potentially pushing even middle-ground states toward more restrictive policies. True, polls suggest that Americans do not want abortion to be criminalized, especially early in pregnancy, but the nation is politically fragmented, and abortion bans may be relatively popular in some states. Even in more contested states, many politicians may be able to protect themselves from the consequences of unpopular policies, thanks to gerrymandering, uncompetitive seats, and limits on voting. Republicans may be worried that committed anti-abortion voters will be less likely to donate to or turn out for swing-state politicians who don’t meet their demands. Florida and Georgia, for instance, are large, diverse, politically contested states where the state legislatures tend to pass laws on issues designed to energize the base, regardless of what the wider public thinks. This dynamic might only deepen after Roe is gone, particularly if abortion aligns with other hot-button topics in the country’s culture war.

Furthermore, even if polls suggest that most Americans don’t want Roe overturned, no one yet knows how Americans will react to its demise. Many polls that ostensibly focus on Roe in fact ask questions that cover a range of reproductive-rights issues, some of which have little to do with Roe at all. Public reaction will depend on what the Supreme Court says, how the media present the Court’s decision, and how successfully social movements can spin the results.

If enforcing abortion bans is hard, that might encourage abortion-skeptical states to keep their abortion restrictions, not the other way around. Before the Supreme Court decided Roe, abortion prosecutions were the exception, not the rule, typically occurring when provider negligence led to a patient’s death. States periodically cracked down, but many were content to have a law on the books condemning abortion without doing much to enforce it. The same bargain might appeal to some states after Roe is gone: access to black-market abortion, underenforced criminal bans, a symbolic statement about the evils of abortion, and the option to ratchet up enforcement on providers when conservative voters demand it.

States may even seek to avoid political consequences by prioritizing whom to punish. In other countries where abortion is a crime, such as Ecuador, prosecutors disproportionately target not just doctors but also low-income patients, and especially people of color. Selective enforcement can blunt backlash to a criminal law—this seems to have been the case with the criminalization of marijuana and the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. Though people of different races were roughly equally likely to violate those laws, people of color were far more likely to be arrested or prosecuted. Taking aim at marginalized communities may allow states to escape pressure from more privileged Americans, who will feel that the law won’t personally affect them.

So how many states will gravitate toward criminalization, proactive protection of abortion rights, or something in between? Nothing is predetermined, and each state will be different, responding to the particular politics and pressures of their populations. Both movements will find that one-size-fits-all strategies won’t work; they’ll have to become masters of the specifics of each state. Without Roe, this will be a state-by-state fight, and they’ll have to find strategies that speak less to the nation and more to the politics of place.

Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene is on trial for allegedly violating a Civil War era law.

Colchis boxwood trees, native to forests in the Caucasus region are under threat. Scientists in Georgia are now trying to protect young boxwood trees in a bid to preserve the plant for generations to come.

Georgia voters seek to disqualify Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene from re-election for engaging in 'insurrection'.

After suffering embarrassing defeats in the past couple of months, Vladimir Putin is doubling down on his war. He is rearming, resupplying, and repositioning Russian forces for a major new onslaught in eastern Ukraine. Even if his troops are finally able to dislodge Ukraine’s, however, that’s unlikely to be enough to satisfy him. He may agree to a cease-fire or a negotiation to give his military time to regroup. But as long as Putin is in power, Russia will continue to do whatever it can to reverse the post–Cold War settlement that has animated Putin ever since the Soviet Union collapsed.

At the same time, the United States and its NATO allies are speeding up delivery of heavier weapons to help Ukraine withstand the coming Russian onslaught, if not actually win the war. There is a larger question that both sides, particularly the West, will need to address soon, though: What happens to Ukraine once the fighting slows or the war stops?

The answer is straightforward: For Ukraine to be truly free and independent, it will have to be a member of the European Union and NATO. Although Moscow will no doubt object, Putin’s brutal aggression makes clear that only European countries that are members of NATO can be truly secure. And NATO should welcome Ukraine into the fold.

Ironically, Moscow’s unprovoked aggression is proof that its long-standing complaint about NATO moving too close to its borders was little more than a convenient excuse for its revisionist aims. The alliance posed no threat to Russia, and prior to the war, President Joe Biden and other NATO leaders made clear that they would not come to Ukraine’s defense. Had Ukraine been a member, however—alongside the Baltic states and all non-Soviet members of the Warsaw Pact—Russia would have been unlikely to invade for fear of a wider military confrontation that it would surely have lost. Far from NATO being the proximate cause of war, NATO’s absence enabled Putin to act.

Since February 24, when Putin invaded, many European nations have undergone a wholesale reevaluation of their security needs. Germany now understands that dialogue and trade are no substitute for deterrence and defense when it comes to dealing with an autocratic country like Russia. Finland and Sweden are on the verge of joining NATO, something few experts had thought possible before the invasion, given their centuries of neutrality and independence. Others are increasing defense spending, dispatching weapons to Ukraine, and bolstering the forward military presence in NATO’s eastern flank.

This transformation in thinking about European security and the threat Russia poses should also guide the Western approach to the future of Ukraine. Already, the EU has moved swiftly. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen traveled to Kyiv on April 8 and assured President Volodymyr Zelensky that the first major step for Ukraine’s accession would take “a matter of weeks,” rather than the usual years. Although Ukraine’s application still faces many hurdles, considerable momentum has built to bring the country into the EU as swiftly as possible.

As part of its membership in the bloc, Ukraine will receive a security guarantee from other EU members: The Treaty of the European Union includes a mutual-defense clause of the type that Ukraine has demanded as part of any peace negotiation or cessation of hostilities with Russia. Although this is important, there are two problems with relying on this alone to ensure Ukraine’s long-term security against Russian aggression. First, even if fast-tracked, EU accession will likely take many months, if not a year or two. Second, although the EU’s security guarantee is significant, it doesn’t bind the U.S., Europe’s ultimate protector, to Ukrainian defense.

Fortunately, both of these shortcomings can be overcome with NATO membership. Joining the alliance itself is straightforward, requiring the unanimous agreement of NATO’s 30 member states and their ratification of NATO’s governing treaty, including its Article 5 collective-defense provision. And because the U.S. is a leading member, bringing Ukraine into NATO also extends America’s security guarantee to its territory.

We have been here before. In 2008, Ukraine sought an invitation to apply for NATO’s Membership Action Plan (MAP), which prepares aspirant nations for membership in the alliance. Sharp disagreement among allies blocked a decision, leading to the vague commitment that Ukraine (and Georgia) “will become members of NATO.” Until now, key allies such as Germany and France have rejected inviting Ukraine to join NATO, for fear of provoking Russia. Now that Moscow has demonstrated that it need not be provoked to commit aggression, NATO must reverse course and bring Ukraine into the alliance as soon as possible.

There are, of course, numerous obstacles, practical and otherwise, to bringing Ukraine into NATO. Zelensky has suggested that he would be willing to forgo NATO membership, but only, his advisers have said, if Kyiv received legally binding security guarantees that were even “stronger than NATO’s.” Zelensky’s stance represents his understandable disillusion with the alliance, which has failed not only to deliver on membership but to come to Ukraine’s defense even when it has been subject to an unprovoked attack. That is why an initiative, led by the U.S. and other major military allies such as Britain, France, and Germany, to offer Ukraine swift entry into NATO would reassure Kyiv that the alliance’s security guarantee is serious and real.

Putin would undoubtedly object to Ukraine’s NATO membership and threaten “political and military consequences,” as Russia has in the case of Finland’s and Sweden’s prospective accession to the alliance. But he has already invaded Ukraine and committed grievous atrocities against its population. He could escalate further, using chemical or nuclear weapons, but that would risk widening the conflict. Ultimately, there is not much that Russia can do to prevent Ukraine from entering NATO.

Perhaps the biggest practical obstacle is that part of Ukraine’s territory is likely to be contested, if not, as in the case of Crimea, under foreign occupation for the foreseeable future. Indeed, if the current aggression settles into the kind of back-and-forth fighting that has characterized the conflict in the Donbas for the past eight years, NATO would be inviting into its ranks a country actively at war. That would be unprecedented, but it need not be impossible. Kyiv and its new NATO allies could agree that Ukraine would continue to bear the brunt of fighting in the east, and that NATO countries would continue to supply it with the weapons and intelligence it needed to defend itself. They could also agree that NATO would not directly intervene in the conflict unless Russia again threatened Kyiv or the viability of the Ukrainian state. Similar arrangements could be made with respect to any occupied territory in Ukraine.

Strong advocacy and careful diplomacy will be necessary to bring this about. The U.S. will be key to both. So far, the Biden administration has done a terrific job of building a powerful, united coalition of Western states to weaken and isolate Russia, and assist Ukraine militarily and financially. Washington has led this effort from the start. It now needs to do the same to unite NATO members behind the idea of inviting Ukraine to join.

Fortunately, many of the top people in the administration, including the president himself, are likely to look favorably on the effort. Biden has a strong record of supporting both NATO’s enlargement and Ukraine’s development as a democracy free of corruption. The war and its brutality have affected the president to his core, and he will see the value of deterring Putin from ever again invading Ukraine. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan share the president’s perspective and predilections on this score. Although Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s views on Ukraine’s potential NATO membership are less certain, he has shown a determination to support the commander in chief. Others within the administration, including Victoria Nuland, the No. 4 at the State Department, who as the U.S. ambassador to NATO in 2008 pushed forcefully to give Ukraine a MAP, could no doubt use their considerable skills to advance that cause.

A strong U.S. commitment to support Ukrainian membership in NATO is vital to persuade other members to follow suit. Because the key to success will be Germany and France, early, high-level engagement with Berlin and Paris will be important. Their opposition in 2008 doomed progress on Ukrainian membership, and without their consent a new effort will go nowhere. Both countries, however, are strong advocates for bringing Ukraine into the EU. NATO membership would represent a small additional step and would bring the U.S. in as a guarantor as well.

Putin invaded Ukraine ostensibly because NATO was moving too close to Russia’s borders and threatened its security. That argument never held any water. But even if it did, the invasion of Ukraine has brought NATO still closer to Russia’s borders. The alliance is set to permanently station large numbers of troops on its eastern frontier. Finland, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia, will join NATO, as will Sweden. And Ukraine, which prior to the invasion faced the longest odds of ever joining NATO, might well enter the alliance after all.

Few modern leaders have miscalculated as badly as the Russian president has. Ukraine’s acceptance into NATO would represent the final defeat of his failed strategy.

Some 35 percent of Americans—including 68 percent of Republicans—believe the Big Lie, pushed relentlessly by former President Donald Trump and amplified by conservative media, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. They think that Trump was the true victor and that he should still be in the White House today.

I regularly host focus groups to better understand how voters are thinking about key political topics. Recently, I decided to find out why Trump 2020 voters hold so strongly to the Big Lie.

For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose. They know something nefarious occurred but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same.

[David A. Graham: Coup nation]

As a woman from Wisconsin told me, “I can’t really put my finger on it, but something just doesn’t feel right.” A man from Pennsylvania said, “Something about it just didn’t seem right.” A man from Arizona said, “It didn’t smell right.”

The exact details of the story vary—was it Hugo Chávez who stole the election? Or the CIA? Or Italian defense contractors? Outlandish claims like these seem to have made this conspiracy theory more durable, not less. Regardless of plausibility, the more questions that are raised, the more mistrustful Trump voters are of the official results.

Perhaps that’s because the Big Lie has been part of their background noise for years.

Remember that Trump began spreading the notion that America’s elections were “rigged” in 2016—when he thought he would lose. Many Republicans firmly believed that the Democrats would steal an election if given the chance. When the 2020 election came and Trump did lose, his voters were ready to doubt the outcome.

Some Trump voters looked at the numbers and couldn’t make sense of them. How could so many more people have voted in 2020 than in 2016? A man from North Carolina, when asked why he thought the election was stolen, said, “There was 10 million more votes for Trump in this last election than he got in 2016. You’re telling me that [Joe] Biden got that many?”

To the extent that Big Lie believers try to explain their skepticism over millions more people voting for Biden than for Trump, they often point to relative crowd sizes at rallies. As the man from North Carolina put it, “I personally went to Trump rallies that were filling stadiums, and then Biden can’t even fill a freaking library. Like, no, it’s not true. I don’t believe it. Don’t buy it.”

Another common refrain is that the votes “flipped” in the middle of Election Night. Trump supporters went to bed thinking that their guy had won and then woke up to a different reality—which to them was startling and deeply suspicious. A woman from Georgia told me, “When I went to bed, Trump was so in the lead and then [I got] up and he’s not in the lead. I mean, that’s crazy.”

[Read: Trump’s next coup has already begun]

Long before Election Day, the media had warned about a “red mirage” and alerted Americans to the possibility that Trump would have a large lead on Election Night only to have it dissipate as mail-in ballots were counted. But if you were watching Fox News, you probably didn’t hear any of this. Instead, Trump, MAGA-friendly politicians, and conservative media outlets were priming voters to see a conspiracy.

Trump correctly assumed that the majority of the mail-in ballots that would be counted late at night would go to Biden. So he cast mail-in ballots as fraudulent almost by definition. The woman from Georgia told me that mail-in ballots were “a crock,” without elaborating further.

Attempts to set the record straight tend to backfire. When you tell Trump voters that the election wasn’t stolen, some of them tally that as evidence that it was stolen. A woman from Arizona told me, “I think what convinced me more that the election was fixed was how vehemently they have said it wasn’t.”

These voters aren’t bad or unintelligent people. The problem is that the Big Lie is embedded in their daily life. They hear from Trump-aligned politicians, their like-minded peers, and MAGA-friendly media outlets—and from these sources they hear the same false claims repeated ad infinitum.

Now we are at the point where to be a Republican means to believe the Big Lie. And as long as Republicans leading the party keep promoting and indulging the Big Lie, that will continue to be the case. If I’ve learned anything from my focus groups, it’s that something doesn’t have to make sense for voters to believe it’s true.

The Black Sea Fleet flagship entered service in Soviet times and had been deployed in conflicts from Georgia to Syria.

In 1997, I was living in Cambodia, working for the U.S. government to help solidify the country’s fragile democracy. The air was hopeful: Civic groups were preparing to monitor upcoming elections, political parties were selecting candidates and drafting platforms, and newspapers had popped up to feverishly report on it all.

At his Fourth of July party, however, the U.S. ambassador to Phnom Penh warned of storm clouds ahead. The very next day, Hun Sen—a former military commander who at the time was Cambodia’s co–prime minister—marshaled the army and carried out a military coup. I stood on the rooftop of Hotel Cambodiana, where expats and government officials had fled for safety, and watched Hun Sen’s goons round up members of Parliament and political opponents, escorting them down to the Mekong River. It is reported that many were killed. I feverishly took Polaroid photos of the Cambodian opposition leaders hiding in the hotel, so that the ambassador could issue them the safety of U.S. passports.

The die was cast on that day. I returned to Cambodia many times as a visitor in the years that followed, and lived there from 2008 until 2014, and as time went on, the democratic space shrank and Hun Sen’s grip tightened. Yet, although we do not hear their voices much, many Cambodians are still fighting for their democracy from both outside and inside their country.

They are among millions of democrats who live in dictatorships, who press on and push for freedom, even as they feel alienated from and neglected by the world. In my 25 years overseas, I’ve met many of them, in Myanmar, Georgia, and elsewhere.

President Joe Biden has spoken of a world divided between democracies and autocracies, one where the United States must stand with its friends, against its dictatorial enemies, and so for his Summit for Democracy in December, the Biden administration determined that participants should be leaders of democratic countries.

Organizers thus inadvertently became bouncers at the night club of democracy, a messy business into which inconsistencies and subjectivity seeped. The invitation list was not always in line with independent democratic assessments. The Democratic Republic of Congo, an authoritarian regime, was invited, while Bolivia, a mid-performing democracy, was not. Zambia, Niger, and Angola were asked to join, though they are arguably no better than Sri Lanka, Tunisia, or Sierra Leone, which were not. This relative arbitrariness resulted in uncomfortable spokespersons for democracy: Rodrigo Duterte—who has eroded checks and balances, justified extrajudicial killings, created a deadly environment for journalists, and encouraged a culture of misogyny—represented Philippine democracy, for example.

Importantly, the summit also shut the door on democrats and activists from civil society, opposition parties, and other sectors who are unluckily living in uninvited countries. Ignoring these democrats is a mistake. They should be front and center in our battle between democracy and autocracy. The tendency to revert to an iron curtain, dividing the world into clubs of nations, should be resisted. The only way we win this battle is by engaging and increasing support to democrats in autocracies.

In my experience, these folks are the most innovative defenders of democracy—they have to be!—from whom we could learn plenty. I worked with North Korean groups in Seoul that ingeniously smuggled flash drives into products crossing the border from China into North Korea and even attached messages to hot-air balloons to penetrate the North’s sealed information space. On the Thai border in the 1990s, I helped the then-exiled Burmese government organize and communicate with activists still in the country, surreptitiously meeting in the jungle, sending coded handwritten messages through tribal communities and launching radio programs.

The underlying point is that the struggle between democracy and autocracy is based not on geographic delineations but on values and ideas held by people everywhere. Differentiating between democracies and non-democracies is as effective as relying on borders to stop a pandemic from spreading. Democracies are threatened by autocrats from within, such as the far-right Alt-Info movement gaining steam in my previous home, the Caucasus country of Georgia. And autocracies have brave democrats fighting for change, such as the heroic Russian journalist who held a sign up on live TV exposing Vladimir Putin’s lies. Country labels, further, do not always predict geopolitical cooperation: Singapore, not a democracy, supported sanctioning Russia over the war in Ukraine, whereas India, our supposed democratic bulwark in Asia, abstained. Dividing the world into friendly and hostile blocs also impedes cooperation needed to tackle global crises, such as the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.

I have seen successful democratic advances against autocracy—including the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Saffron one in Myanmar—and they were due to the grit and stamina of civic and political actors within. Democratic work in closed spaces is fraught; the capacity to operate varies. In the 1990s, for example, I was in Malaysia at a time when democracy and human-rights organizations were unable to work legally, and opportunities to engage with political actors didn’t exist. So those of us at international democracy-promotion groups provided support to consumer-rights organizations instead. Advocating for safe food and products, after all, is a political process, engages citizens, and establishes a rights agenda.

Many countries and international organizations are doing this important, creative work, but governments need to prioritize and increase funding for these efforts. Democrats from Egypt, Cameroon, Venezuela, Central African Republic, and Belarus, to name a few, must be included in the global democracy coalition, and not relegated to capturing our attention through fleeting headlines. They desperately need alliances and solidarity, and can benefit from learning best practices and tactics from others.

They also show us that democracy is not a unitary or stable achievement. My experiences with besieged democrats abroad have held up a painful mirror to my own country, teaching me not to take freedom for granted.

Supporting them is not only the right thing to do; it is a matter of global security. Rising autocrats put our geopolitical order at risk, as we see tragically today with Russia’s war in Ukraine.

In Cambodia, Hun Sen is still in power, unfazed by cuts in U.S. and European Union assistance and canceled trade deals. He has called the American ambassador a “liar” for his condemnation. Why would he care? His pockets are lined with Chinese money, and he shows little concern about the welfare of his citizens. The thing he does fear is the democratic movement inside the country. This is why he must keep imprisoning, exiling, and even killing the democrats who are obstacles to his rule.

The real threat to autocracies everywhere is the democrats within. The key to a more stable global future is therefore in their hands. They must be in the club.