Why Democracies Resist Great-Power Pressure

The UN Charter was signed on October 24, 1945, and made the following promise:

“We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind (…) have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.”

As investors, we have to develop outlooks about the future relationships and actions of various states. Understanding whether nations uphold the principles of the Charter or act purely to further their interests in a realpolitik way is fundamental to sharpening these forward-looking convictions.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, countries around the world voted to firmly condemn the invasion at the United Nations General Assembly only weeks later, calling for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces. Countries that abstained from or opposed the resolution were widely analyzed for their material ties to Moscow. Farzanegan and Gholipour (2023) formalized this empirically and confirmed that defence cooperation, aid, and arms imports from Russia all predicted non-condemnation.

The Trump administration’s reversal on the Ukraine conflict in 2025 offered a natural experiment: was this interest-bounded morality applicable to the West? How should investors and analysts interpret the hegemon’s positions on sovereignty and international agreements? What conditions predict misalignment with predetermined principles?

We answer these questions through a probit analysis of the 2022, 2025, and 2026 UNGA votes, expanding upon Farzanegan and Gholipour’s model by including US-specific variables.

Paper Link:
https://stinin.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/UNGA_Ukraine_paper.pdf

Our findings are congruent with F&G’s, as countries with a stronger dependence on the United States were more likely to align with it in the reversal. Adding US-dependence variables to the model significantly improves its ability to predict which countries switched in 2025 (p = 0.050). Within that block, aid dependence shows the strongest individual signal: a country receiving roughly three times more American aid than an otherwise comparable country was 4 percentage points more likely to defect (p = 0.036).

However, the strongest finding of our paper is not about material dependence but rather regime type, as democratic governance was the single strongest predictor of whether a country held its 2022 position: moving from a hybrid regime to a consolidated democracy reduces the probability of switching by around 20 percentage points (p = 0.001). Democracies have to answer to a myriad of actors such as electorates, free media, courts, and opposition parties. We theorize that these institutions make it costly to abandon publicly stated positions, even when a hegemon signals otherwise.

For investors assessing the durability of international coalitions, whether these be sanctions regimes, defence partnerships, or trade alignments, our findings suggest a simple heuristic: ask what the coalition is made of. Coalitions that are held together by aid dependence and security patronage will likely shift when the patron shifts, while coalitions anchored in democratic states will hold longer.

The 2025 UNGA vote was a stress test of the post-2022 consensus on Ukraine, and it cracked along exactly the lines the material structure predicted. The UN Charter promised a world rid of power politics, built on reason and diplomacy. Our data suggests such a world is possible, but only where domestic institutions make that commitment binding.