On July 17th the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, dispatched a memorandum to America’s diplomats stepping back from a decades-old priority, promoting democracy abroad. Henceforth, he wrote, diplomats should simply congratulate the winning candidate in any country’s election and refrain from “opining” on the fairness of the process, or even on “the democratic values of the country in question”. The change, he wrote, was in keeping with “the administration’s emphasis on national sovereignty”.