> What would you do? Install a favorable dictator?
Oh, there's a lot between not doing anything at all and repeating the mistakes from Iranian days:
- provide economic / humanitarian aid contingent on progress in democratic values and actually audit where the money goes. This ended being effective around 2010 when China began hitting the global stage though.
- supporting countries or democratic, pro-Western parties/groups that are threatened by an aggressor (e.g. every former Soviet state)
- when supposed "allies" end up funding our enemies (e.g. Saudi-Arabia, who not just financed Bin Laden and is the main ideological driver in fundamentalist madrasas (religious schools) all over the world, thus being the main contributor to Islamist terrorism), cut them off. Hell the Saudis butchered a journalist (a father of U.S. citizens) in an embassy and we didn't do shit. Instead, we allow Saudi-Arabia and Qatar to host fucking World Cups. What a bunch of bullshit.
- aggressive, actually effective sanctions instead of just making the lives of a few oligarchs a tiny bit more difficult
- increase our own security posture in terms of military and provide a credible retaliation threat towards any potential aggressor
- invest into academic research on other countries. That one got shamefully disbanded after the collapse of the USSR and the shift towards prioritizing STEM over humanities - we now lack the academic capacity for actually understanding other countries or provide actual evidence-backed advice to politicians. Instead we got completely dependent on think tanks and consultancies.
- respond in-kind to Russia and China banning Western activities: they effectively force pro-democracy organizations to close shop? Fine, no more Chinese police stations in Western countries. They engage in cyberwarfare? Fine, we cut them off from the Internet. They refuse to allow Western countries fair and equal access to their markets? Fine, we ban investments from China and force-divest existing investments, and raise tariffs on their exports.
The last part is the easiest... over decades we believed in "change by trade", we hoped that they would become similar to us culturally. That worked in certain areas - McDonald's and Coca-Cola show that - but politically, we didn't give a slightest interest in both countries getting ever more authoritarian. And now it's biting us in our collective arses.