We study how the ideology of political leaders shapes a country's trading partners using a global dataset of leader ideologies covering over 1,400 leaders in 182 countries between 1945 and 2022. We identify 133 clean transitions from non-leftist to leftist governments, and 146 from non-rightist to rightist. Using a stacked difference-in-differences design, we find that by the fourth year after a transition to a leftist government, the average trade-weighted partner is 0.11 standard deviations more \textit{autocratic}, and the share of trade with strictly autocratic partners rises by approximately 1.75 percentage points — a 13 percent increase relative to the baseline. In sharp contrast, a transition to the right leads to a trade-weighted partner that is 0.17 standard deviations more \textit{democratic}, and the share of trade with autocracies falls by 2 p.p. (18\%). Our findings suggest that by opposing Western democracies in general, and American imperialism in particular, leftist governments around the world have narrowed relationships with autocracies.

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