The Apostles of America’s Democracy
For all the blood spilled and fortunes lost on wars and nation-building, America’s most compelling export has never been its weaponry. It has been its students.
The Roman Empire did not conquer solely by force. It conquered by fascination.
From Gaul to Judea, the roads Rome paved conveyed more than legions and commerce—they bore language, law, and the seductive promise of civilization. Native tongues gave way to Latin. Local elites donned togas and dispatched their sons to master Roman rhetoric, to recite Cicero in hopes that proximity to imperial intellect might elevate their station. Over time, the provinces ceased merely to be governed by Rome. They aspired to be Rome.
America has long seen itself as the inheritor of that civilizational mantle. Foreign students do not come to reshape the republic. The republic reshapes them. They arrive in pursuit of opportunity; they depart as converts—converts to pluralism, to constitutionalism, to the stubborn, untidy conviction that liberty is worth the chaos it invites.
In fact, a 2013 Washington Post analysis noted that over 300 world leaders had studied at American universities—a figure that has likely grown since. Such connections forge potent channels of influence, deepening affinities between the United States and foreign elites, and cultivating a shared grammar of governance, diplomacy, and democratic aspiration.
Yet rather than honor these quiet emissaries of its ideals, the Trump administration treated them as latent threats. Through sweeping restrictions—revoking schools’ ability to host foreign students, suspending new visa interviews pending invasive social media screenings, and threatening deportation for those critical of American foreign policy—the United States acted on a crude and corrosive suspicion: that these young foreigners came not to learn, but to exploit and subvert.
It was a tragic misreading of what has long been one of America’s most understated triumphs. For all the blood spilled and fortunes lost on wars and nation-building, America’s most compelling export has never been its weaponry. It has been its students.
History bears this out. Again and again, the students America welcomes return home not as sleeper agents of subversion, but as insurgents of principle—armed with ideas too powerful to remain foreign. They carry back with them constitutions in their hearts and Springsteen in their earbuds. They champion free speech not because it was imposed upon them, but because they bore witness to its emancipatory force. These are not America’s adversaries. They are its apostles.
If the MAGA-era populist suspicion of foreign students marks a retreat from America’s soft power legacy, history reminds us of what that legacy once achieved. Few cases illustrate this better than Taiwan, where a generation of American-educated students became the midwives of a democratic birth.
In 1949, following the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in the Chinese Civil War, the Nationalist government of the Republic of China (ROC), led by the Kuomintang (KMT) party, retreated to the island of Taiwan. But the KMT did not see this as a defeat. Taiwan was merely a temporary base for the counterattack to recover the Mainland. Operating under this premise, the KMT declared martial law, asserting that the Chinese Civil War was still ongoing and that Taiwan was in a permanent state of emergency.
That rationale justified the decades-long suspension of civil liberties. Political opposition was outlawed. The press was muzzled. Dissidents were surveilled, imprisoned, or executed. Calls for Taiwanese independence, democratic reform, or even modest liberalization were deemed subversive and treasonous—an affront to the KMT’s sanctified mandate to restore Chinese unity. The White Terror, as this period came to be known, cast a chilling pall over Taiwanese society. Native Taiwanese (Han Chinese whose families had lived on the island long before the KMT’s arrival from the Mainland) were disproportionately accused of communist sympathies and persecuted for their dissent, regardless of their actual affiliations.
Yet the pivot of history occurred not on the island itself, but thousands of miles away. Beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the 1980s, waves of young Taiwanese men and women came to the United States to pursue higher education. Having come of age under authoritarian rule, they encountered in America a radically different political reality: a free press, constitutional rights, student protests, civil rights movements, and the messy vibrancy of pluralism. The Bill of Rights was no longer an abstraction—it was a lived experience.
In time, these students stepped forward not merely as observers of democracy but as architects of reform.
Among the earliest of these democratic apostles were Jay Loo (盧主義; pen name Lí Thian-hok, 李天福), Edward Chen (陳以德), and John Lin (林榮勳)—three Taiwanese international students who, in the 1950s, found in Philadelphia not just the echoes of America’s revolutionary past, but the license to imagine one of their own. In 1956, they and a handful of fellow exiles formed the Committee for Formosans’ Free Formosa (3F): a clandestine organization advocating for Taiwanese independence at a time when such a stance could cost them their futures, their families, or their lives.
This was the height of McCarthyism and the Cold War. To speak of independence was to risk being branded a traitor twice over—first by the Kuomintang and then by American authorities, ever wary that anti-KMT voices might mask communist subversion. Yet from rented apartments and the forgotten corners of university libraries, these exiled students defied the silence. They wrote manifestos. They mailed petitions to Congress. They raised the banner of a free Taiwan long before most dared even whisper the phrase.
Jay Loo’s April 1958 essay in Foreign Affairs, “The China Impasse,” would become a theoretical keystone of the independence movement. In it, he argued with crisp legal logic that Taiwan’s status remained unresolved under international law and that its people were entitled to self-determination and sovereign statehood. That same year, The New Republic ran a series of essays debating Taiwan’s fate, featuring scholars from the U.S., U.K., and Australia. Loo contributed the final word in the November 24 issue with “Formosans Know What They Want”— a quiet yet forceful assertion that independence was not a foreign imposition, but a native aspiration, boldly placing the question of Taiwan’s sovereignty on the international stage.
Edward Chen brought that aspiration into the public square. He led early protests against visiting KMT officials and appeared in campus forums to argue Taiwan’s case with a calm moral clarity that cut through the haze of Cold War geopolitics. In a defining moment in 1961, at a high-profile debate at the University of Michigan on “the China question and Taiwan’s future,” Chen stood alongside Yale professor David Rowe and U.S. Representative Charles O. Porter. His eloquent defense of Taiwan’s right to self-governance drew rare bipartisan respect—a testament to his reasoned voice in an era of ideological extremes.
John Lin—once jailed in Taiwan for defending student activists—went on to earn a doctorate in political science from the University of Pennsylvania, becoming a galvanizing figure for a nascent movement in exile. Alongside fellow scholars, they sought to stir an American public largely indifferent to Taiwan’s precarious fate—all while dodging FBI surveillance and evading Kuomintang informants. In hindsight, their endeavor was nothing short of audacious: they were translating the American Experiment into another tongue. In the borrowed freedom of a foreign land, they began drafting the preamble to a democratic Taiwan not yet born.
While the early pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s laid the ideological groundwork for Taiwan’s independence movement, a new wave of activism emerged in the following decades—more organized, more strategic, and increasingly attuned to the corridors of power in Washington. Central to this new chapter was Chai Trong-rong, a Taiwanese international student who would later serve in the Legislative Yuan and become a pivotal force in shaping U.S. policy toward Taiwan.
Chai arrived in the United States in 1960 to study for a master’s degree in political science at the University of Tennessee. It was during this formative period that he became actively involved in the Taiwanese independence movement—an act that drew the ire of the Kuomintang regime, which swiftly blacklisted him and barred his return to Taiwan for over two decades. Undeterred, Chai continued his academic pursuits, earning a doctorate in political science from the University of Southern California in 1969. But it was not in the classroom that his legacy would be forged—it was in the halls of American democracy.
In 1982, Chai founded the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA), a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit dedicated to advancing Taiwan’s right to self-determination. As its founding president, Chai transformed diaspora activism into a coordinated diplomatic campaign, lobbying Congress, briefing policymakers, and reframing Taiwan not as a geopolitical liability, but as a democratic cause. His conviction was clear: “The more I enjoy freedom here, the more I feel I should help my brothers there to fight for it.”
Through FAPA, Chai played a central role in shifting U.S. sentiment toward Taiwan—challenging decades of Cold War orthodoxy that had cast the Kuomintang as an indispensable ally against communism. On May 20, 1982—the 33rd anniversary of the KMT’s imposition of martial law in Taiwan—the House Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs held a landmark hearing on Taiwan’s authoritarian practices. Chai and Richard Kagan, a history professor from Hamline University, were called to testify. That same morning, a press conference was convened to condemn the KMT’s authoritarian rule. By afternoon, more than 35 members of Congress issued a joint statement urging President Ronald Reagan to press the Taiwan authorities to lift martial law and embrace democratic reforms.
Momentum continued to build. In 1984, the assassination of Henry Liu (Chiang Nan)—a Taiwanese-American journalist critical of the KMT regime—sent shockwaves through the diaspora. FAPA responded swiftly, lobbying for accountability. Their efforts culminated in a U.S. House hearing on February 7, 1985, during which Liu’s widow testified. On April 18, the House passed a resolution urging the extradition of the murder suspects; it passed by a resounding 378–2 margin.
That spring, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee added its voice, approving a resolution on April 2 that condemned Taiwan’s martial law and called for democratic reforms. On May 20, the symbolic anniversary of martial law’s enactment, Congress issued another public statement reinforcing its support for democratization. Finally, on June 1, the U.S. Senate passed legislation affirming its commitment to Taiwan’s democratic future—a bill that became law on August 17, 1985.
And at last, reform began to stir. President Chiang Ching-kuo—the son of authoritarian strongman Chiang Kai-shek and himself a product of Soviet political tutelage—would come to be known as “the Reluctant Liberalizer.” He was no democrat at heart, yet it was under his watch that Taiwan’s authoritarian scaffolding began, cautiously, to be dismantled. The decision was not born of ideological awakening, but of necessity. The international climate had shifted: just a few years prior, the United States had severed diplomatic recognition of the Republic of China in favor of the People’s Republic, leaving Taipei increasingly isolated on the world stage. Now, Congress had turned its attention to Taiwan’s human rights record.
Simultaneously, pressure from within was mounting. The regime faced a restive public: mass protests, a nascent civil society, and a burgeoning sense of Taiwanese identity began to undermine the legitimacy of KMT rule. The foundations of the old order were visibly fracturing. A rising middle class, a generation of educated youth, and an increasingly assertive chorus of local voices refused to be suppressed. Taiwan was changing. And the era of one-party rule was living on borrowed time.
In 1987, Chiang lifted martial law, formally ending a 38-year state of emergency. He legalized opposition parties, permitted greater press freedom, and dissolved the so-called “Ten Thousand Year Parliament”—a legislature frozen in time since its representatives had been elected in 1947 from the pre-exile Republic—by allowing the aging body to retire and opening the door to democratic elections. But it was only after his death in 1988 that Taiwan’s democratization accelerated in earnest, under the leadership of a very different kind of statesman: Lee Teng-hui, a U.S.-educated technocrat whose rise would forever alter Taiwan’s political trajectory.
Lee Teng-hui embodied the very fusion of Western education and Taiwanese aspiration that defined a generation. After earning a master’s degree in agricultural economics from Iowa State University in 1953 and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1968, Lee returned to Taiwan and, in a move both pragmatic and visionary, joined the Kuomintang in 1971. Rather than oppose the party from without, he sought to reform it from within. Rising through the ranks, Lee served as mayor of Taipei, governor of Taiwan Province, and ultimately vice president under Chiang Ching-kuo.
Upon Chiang’s death, Lee assumed the presidency, becoming the first Taiwan-born leader to hold the office. What followed was a transformative era. Lee championed sweeping democratic reforms and undertook a “Taiwanization” agenda that reoriented the island’s identity—from a temporary refuge for a government-in-exile to a sovereign, pluralistic polity anchored in a distinctly Taiwanese consciousness. He challenged entrenched KMT hierarchies, curbing the dominance of the Mainlander elite and elevating native Taiwanese leadership. With him at the helm, civil society flourished, judicial institutions were strengthened, and the machinery of authoritarian rule gave way to participatory governance.
The culmination of Lee’s efforts came in 1996, when Taiwan held its first direct presidential election. Lee Teng-hui ran—and won—solidifying the legitimacy of Taiwan’s democratic experiment. His victory was more than electoral; it was symbolic, a generational turning point that vindicated the dreams of exiled students, dissident intellectuals, and civil rights advocates who had long envisioned a free and self-governing Taiwan.
Taiwan is but one chapter in the ledger of democracies nurtured by the American imprint. Another, less heralded yet equally revealing, is Mongolia—a landlocked nation improbably wedged between two of the world’s most unyielding autocracies: Russia to the north and China to the south. Against these geopolitical titans, Mongolia’s democratic survival is nothing short of remarkable.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Mongolia transitioned from a communist state into a parliamentary democracy. But its democracy was fragile from the outset—economically underdeveloped, politically inexperienced, and geopolitically vulnerable. It was a young republic, uncertain and exposed, clinging to the scaffolding of democratic institutions in a region where authoritarian relapse seemed all but inevitable. Nevertheless, Mongolia held the line, and its quiet but resilient commitment to democracy became a subtle testament to the reach of American soft power.
Beginning in the 1990s, a rising generation of Mongolian students sought higher education in the United States. They returned not only with academic credentials but with a civic vision rooted in constitutional governance, public accountability, and pluralistic leadership. These American-educated Mongolians became key stewards of the country’s political maturation, and their imprint informed institutions, reoriented norms, and helped steer Mongolia away from the gravitational pull of its authoritarian neighbors.
One of the most emblematic of these figures is Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj. A former journalist and two-time prime minister before becoming Mongolia’s president, Elbegdorj studied at the University of Colorado Boulder and later earned a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2002. He returned to his country as a reformer with a mandate. During his second premiership in 2004, he championed the transformation of Mongolian National Television and Radio into publicly funded, independently governed media—a foundational step toward a free press. That same year, his government overturned longstanding restrictions on public assembly in Sükhbaatar Square, reclaiming the symbolic center of political expression for the people.
When Elbegdorj became president in 2009, he swiftly commuted all death sentences and declared a moratorium on capital punishment—an expression of liberal principle rarely seen in the region. His administration implemented ambitious reforms: passing legislation to curb Ulaanbaatar’s severe smog, launching a satellite city initiative to ease urban congestion, and instituting biannual National Tree Planting Days, which led to the planting of over two million trees to fight desertification. In 2010, he halted the issuance of new mining licenses to protect local livelihoods.
Yet Elbegdorj’s most consequential legacy may lie in his institutional reforms. He introduced the Smart Government program to digitize public services and improve bureaucratic efficiency. He overhauled judicial appointments to emphasize merit and transparency, strengthened the Independent Authority Against Corruption, and established Citizens’ Halls nationwide—public forums where ordinary Mongolians could engage directly in budgetary and legislative decision-making.
Elbegdorj was not alone in this democratic relay.
Chimediin Saikhanbileg, a George Washington University graduate, served as Mongolia’s Minister of Education and later as Chair of the Information and Communication Technology Authority. Between 2004 and 2008, he set in motion large-scale national initiatives to modernize the country's infrastructure and education system—founding the American School of Ulaanbaatar, integrating U.S.-style curriculum standards, and rolling out a nationwide fiber-optic network. These efforts sowed the seeds of digital literacy and civic consciousness, forging a generation more attuned to democratic norms and less susceptible to authoritarian nostalgia.
In the realm of defense, Lieutenant General Dovchinsürengiin Ganzorig—a graduate of both the U.S. Army Ranger School and the U.S. Army War College—introduced Western civil-military norms into Mongolia’s armed forces. His master’s thesis formulated what would become the cornerstone of Mongolia’s foreign policy: the “Third Neighbor” strategy—an explicit effort to court alliances with democratic states like the United States, Japan, and France in order to hedge against overwhelming dependence on Russia and China. As Chief of the General Staff, Ganzorig helped ensure that Mongolia’s military remained professional and politically neutral, bolstering the institutional guardrails that keep authoritarian temptation at bay in a still-consolidating democracy.
More recently, Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai, a 2015 graduate of Harvard Kennedy School, ascended to the premiership in 2021. He represents the next generation of Mongolian leadership: globally fluent, technocratic, and unabashedly democratic. His Vision 2050 plan articulates a strategy for national modernization, economic diversification, and foreign partnerships. A vocal critic of corruption and illiberal influence, Oyun-Erdene has reaffirmed Mongolia’s democratic commitments at a time when regional currents push strongly in the opposite direction.
The story is not solely one of men. Oyungerel Tsedevdamba—Mongolia’s first Yale World Fellow and a Stanford-educated Fulbright scholar—has long been a trailblazer for gender equality and civic advocacy. During her tenure as Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism (2012–2014) and as a member of parliament (2012–2016), she championed legislation against domestic violence and fought to protect Mongolia’s cultural heritage and fragile ecosystems. Through her Local Solutions Foundation, she has uncovered fossil smuggling networks and raised public awareness around environmental health. As president of the Democratic Women’s Union, she has worked tirelessly to advance women’s political representation—an essential pillar of any functioning democracy.
Together, these figures—men and women alike—illustrate how democratic ideals, once encountered abroad, can be rooted back home with fierce, lasting impact.
Taiwan and Mongolia are more than scattered tales of reform.
They trace the careful grafting of democratic sinew onto the still-forming skeletons of young republics—sculpted, in no small part, by the ethos of American education and the liberal values it imparts. Around the world, one finds legions of former international students now serving in parliaments, leading civic movements, building free media, and drafting constitutions.
However, in recent months, a new suspicion has clouded this legacy. The Trump administration’s crackdown on student visas—and its rhetoric casting foreign students as infiltrators—signaled a profound shift, not just in policy but in posture. The target was no longer merely illegal immigration or espionage. It was aspiration itself.
Indeed, some international students have staged protests. A few have burned American flags or engaged in property destruction. Their actions are provocative—and in some cases, indefensible. But they have also become a convenient stand-in, an easy caricature that obscures a much larger and more meaningful cohort: the students who admire the American Experiment and hope to replicate parts of it back home. Their convictions may not always find expression in placards or slogans, but they sprout in quieter ways—in the ways they govern, teach, and build.
I know this because I’ve lived it. I came from Cambodia seeking more than credentials. I came seeking perspective, truth, and a freer way of thinking. I stayed because I found something worth staying for. And like others who have walked this path, I carry with me not only an education, but a duty—to speak honestly, to defend liberty, and to remember what drew me here in the first place.
If America forgets this—if it treats its apostles as adversaries—it risks forfeiting one of its most powerful instruments of influence. Not through force. Not through coercion. But through inspiration.
And that is not just a loss for the students. It is a loss for liberal democracy itself.
