20 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL have to practice it. Citizens have to participate in it. Public servants have to administer it. Courts have to protect it. Political leaders have to respect it. And then the cycle must begin again with the next generation. Looking Back to Look Forward Knowing the outcome makes it tempting to look back and declare the democratic development efforts of the 1990s a failure, but that would be a mistake. The progress was real. Lives were improved. Communities grew stronger. Institutions became more capable. Citizens gained a greater voice in government. The more useful lesson here is also a humbling one: We confused progress with permanence. Democracy, in reality, is never complete. Perhaps we needed to think less about when Nicaragua’s democratic transition would be complete and more about how it could be sustained across generations. We needed institutions, laws, policies, and resources, but we also needed people committed to protecting them. And we needed that commitment to endure from one generation to the next. That lesson has stayed with me. As I watch democratic institutions come under strain in countries around the world, including our own, I find myself returning more often to what Nicaragua taught me: Democracy is not self-sustaining. It depends on people willing to uphold the rule of law, accept the legitimacy of elections, tolerate opposition, protect independent institutions, and place those institutions above individuals and political parties. Today’s circumstances are of course different, and easy comparisons should be avoided. But I am far less willing today to assume that long-established democratic institutions—including our own—are inherently secure. No democracy can afford to take its institutions, or the people and norms that sustain them, for granted. We made extraordinary progress in Nicaragua. But progress was not permanence, and with democracy, there is no finish line. n
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