How to get Biden’s democracy summit right

Support for democracy is a conceptual centerpiece of US President Joe Biden’s foreign-policy strategy, and his administration has put this in grand terms. Consider the statement he issued after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in September: “Ukraine’s success is central to the global struggle between democracy and autocracy.” Much is packed into that sentence: that US interests can be defined in terms of democratic values, that the struggle between those values and autocracy is global, and that US interests in a particular country can be judged in that broad context.

Biden is far from the first US leader to feature democracy so prominently in their foreign-policy agenda. Since President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941, support for democracy as the foundation of a rules-based international order has run through US foreign-policy thinking as the answer to challenges ranging from communism to fascism, terrorism, violent extremism, and ethno-nationalism. Although the United States has been inconsistent—and sometimes even hypocritical—in its support for democracy globally, presidents of both parties keep coming back to it. For a time, democracy, and the universal rights on which it is built, seemed ascendant.

But we are in a moment of profound democratic decline around the world. Whether in Uganda, Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, parts of Europe, and even here in the United States, democratic governments struggle to deliver while authoritarian leaders capitalize on frustrated and polarized populations.

This democratic retreat is not happening in isolation. Leaders like Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin harbor other visions of the international order: Instead of democracy, they seek to make the world safe for autocracy. Putin wants a fractured world he can manipulate. But while he aims to burn order to the ground, Xi and his Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are advancing a new sort of rules-based international order in which economic integration and prosperity can coexist with centralized political control (and the brutal repression it requires). Whether it’s Russian-rooted corruption intertwining itself into the US and British financial systems or the CCP’s techno-authoritarianism baked into the apps, networks, and devices used by billions of people around the world, the struggle between democracy and dictatorship is systemic—and it requires collective action.

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Πηγή: atlanticcouncil.org