America lacks credibility, moral authority to hold ‘democracy summit’; it is a geopolitical tool to extend its hegemony

The second iteration of Joe Biden’s ‘ Democracy Summit’ kicked off Wednesday. It is being attended by more than 120 world leaders, including Narendra Modi, in virtual and in-person format. That’s eight more than the inaugural edition in 2021. It is unclear, however, on what basis countries were chosen or left out from this ‘exclusive club’. The yardstick seems inconsistent. Turkey and Hungary were not invited ostensibly because they were not adjudged as ‘democracies’. Neither was Bangladesh, another democracy where an elected prime minister runs a stable government. And yet Pakistan, the international basket case, got a green signal. In a tragicomic turn of events, Islamabad turned down Biden’s invitation because it fears upsetting its ‘iron brother’ China. Vladimir Putin, of course, is persona non grata. Beijing has responded by hosting what it claims to be its own version of a ‘ forum on democracy’ on Thursday, inviting 300 guests from over 100 countries. The purpose of the summit is also not clear despite Biden’s vague assertion that the world is “turning the tide” after ‘backsliding on democracy’. Ironically, Biden made the comments on the very day Saudi Arabia’s cabinet approved a decision to join China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), planning to solidify its partnership with Beijing and cocking a snook at the US. Chinese president Xi Jinping recently visited Moscow to meet Putin amid signs that the Sino-Russian axis is strengthening. Amid these geopolitical games, questions must be raised about the feasibility of the exercise. A grandiose ‘summit on democracies’ isn’t just a reflection of the inconsistency that plagues American foreign policy, but the very idea is strange, given the fact it separates the world into two ideological blocks where the division is neither neat nor feasible. Besides, US, the country that hosts the summit, is in no position to hand out certificates. It has backed autocracies, autocrats, military juntas and demagogues for decades, and continues to do so in pursuit of hegemony, driven by self-interest and the self-justification of American exceptionalism. As former US president Franklin D Roosevelt reportedly said about Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” The US is also a deeply flawed democracy and lacks the moral authority to hold such a summit. A 2021 Harvard youth poll found that young Americans lack faith in the country’s democratic credentials. “Only 7% viewed the US as a ‘healthy democracy,’ and 52% believed that democracy is either ‘in trouble’ or ‘failing.’ This concern is echoed in the fact that 35% of respondents anticipated a second civil war during their lifetimes, and 25% believe that at least one state will secede.” Beyond the lofty yet vague ideal of ‘strengthening democracies’, therefore, Biden’s summitry is driven by two unstated, hard-nosed goals: pushing back against notions of America’s ‘decline’ as a superpower and an ideological battle against China, an adversary that for the first time since Washington’s victory in Cold War presents a viable alternative to the ‘international rules-based order’. China is stepping up in its role as America’s peer competitor. Beijing’s transactional diplomacy is devoid of any evangelism of values, giving it a natural advantage in strongman-ruled states. It has gained influence in West Asia by midwifing peace between arch-rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran and has been actively trying to woo the Global South through a range of political and economic initiatives, including trade as well as massive infrastructure and connectivity projects. The US sees China’s rising influence in South Asia, Latin America, West Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, as a strategic challenge, one that has been compounded by its own retreat from central and West Asia. As China’s threat grows across most domains where America hopes to retain its hegemony as the ‘rule-keeper’, the Washington consensus on China as a great power rival has become bipartisan and total. One of the key goals of the summit, therefore, is to reinforce America’s global leadership under the garb of a democracy-promotion initiative. In this reading, democracy is not a value-based political system that the US is trying to defend but a tool for its hegemonic power politics. Looking at the framing of the summit, I am reminded of a symposium held recently by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It was surreal to listen to three members of the global foreign policy elite — two Indian political scientists and one American academician — review and pass sweeping judgements on the health of the world’s largest democracy during a podcast organized by an American think tank in New York. Hearing them ratify, cancel and indulge in alarmism over the electoral choices of a billion Indians with all the arrogance and swagger of Anglophone aristocrats presiding over Indian democracy as their own fiefdom, one gets an essence of America’s interventionist foreign policy based on the power principles of liberal hegemony. The medium is liberalism, the aim is to advance American foreign policy objectives. Democracy here becomes interchangeable with hegemonism, and takes on the attributes of a liberal hegemonic project that installs only ‘keepers’ in democracies around the world, especially in Global South and lays down a set of inviolable rules deemed as “universal” which the elites and their institutions in liberal democracies will preside over, seemingly distrustful of the natives’ ability to adhere to democratic principles, including choosing their own leader through free and fair elections. Any deviation from these “universal” rules will be adjudged as “deviation”, “backsliding of democracy” or “electoral autocracy” and the interventionist impulse will set in — all under the garb of upholding “norms” and “inalienable rights”. As Harvard University professor Stephen M Walt writes in Foreign Policy, “saying the US is just trying to uphold the rules is politer than saying its goal is to preserve US primacy in perpetuity, weaken China permanently, topple governments it doesn’t like, or undermine its other adversaries. Of course, when US officials say ‘rules-based order,’ they mean the current order, whose rules were mostly made in America.” One of the aims of the summit is also to build global networks and alliances as part of America’s attempts to extend its unipolar moment in an era of its decreasing influence and increasing multipolarity. In this context, the summit seeks to throw a geopolitical and ideological gauntlet at China. That’s why a dysfunctional state such as Pakistan gets an invite. There are, however, two irreconcilable dichotomies at the heart of this project. One, exercises such as galvanizing democracies to advance American foreign policy objectives become imperative when liberal hegemony cannot be easily extended or even pursued due to greater multipolarity. Seen from this lens, ‘democracy summit’ is America’s tacit admission that its unipolar moment is over. It felt no need to hold such events in the heady unipolar years of 1990s. Second, while liberal hegemony is practiced by the US as a moral imperative to “safeguard human rights and bring global peace”, it does so following the realist logic of great power behaviour that seeks to maintain its hegemony and indulge in competition and conflict with powers deemed as its peer competitors. This is why the US is trying to compete with China, constrain and contain its rise while leading the West in sanctioning Russia and providing arms and ammunition to Ukraine. America’s conviction in its exceptionalism is so entrenched that it has a firm belief in the notion that American leadership is good both for itself and the world. This creates interventionism and an inevitable clash with nationalism. In an article for Foreign Affairs, Jon Temin of the Truman Center for National Policy urges the Biden administration to build “an accompanying monitoring mechanism” along with holding democracy summits “to track countries’ progress on the commitments they made.” In other words, Biden is being advised to become a “supercop” for democracy and dish out “punishment” to those who the US thinks have gone astray. In his essay Realism and Restraint, American political scientist John J Mearsheimer expands on this activist impulse. He writes, “A crusader impulse is deeply wired into liberal democracies, especially in their elites, and it is difficult for them not to try to remake the world in their image… Liberalism has an activist mentality woven into its core. The belief that all humans have a set of inalienable rights, and that protecting these rights should override other concerns, creates a powerful incentive for liberal states to intervene.” Take, for instance, America and Germany’s stance on the disqualification of Indian Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi as a Parliamentarian. It was a judicial verdict that set in motion a law that has seen the automatic disqualification of several Indian lawmakers, including from the ruling BJP. And yet, Germany and the US say that they are “monitoring” the developments and lecture India on “standards of judicial independence and democratic principles” in a hectoring, arrogant tone. Incredibly, the implied advice is that the Indian government must reverse a decision taken by India’s independent judiciary. While Rahul Gandhi has several legal options open before him to overturn the decision, American and German reactions are tantamount to blatant intervention in India’s sovereign decisions over a matter that concerns India’s domestic politics. What we see here is that under the guise of upholding “universal principles” and “inalienable rights of individuals”, the US-led West is twisting its own norms of ‘ruled-based order’. To dictate the choices of a sovereign, democratic nation through interventionist policies is deeply antithetical to democratic norms, and yet the US, which holds an ostentatious ‘democracy summit’ is repeatedly guilty of this dubious exercise. Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.