After the
Capitol Riot, Biden’s Summit for Democracy Is More Needed Than Ever
Stewart M. Patrick Monday, Jan. 18, 2021
The sacking of the U.S. Capitol by
an insurrectionist mob incited by
President Donald Trump has exposed the fragility of American
democracy and strained the nation’s already diminished credibility to promote
freedom and democracy worldwide. That is a problem for Joe Biden. The
president-elect, who will be inaugurated Wednesday, has promised to quickly convene an
international Summit for Democracy “to renew the spirit and
shared purpose of the nations of the Free World.”
In the aftermath of Jan. 6, there have been calls for Biden to
abandon this idea, insisting that America must get its own house in
order before trying to revive democracy globally. That is a false choice,
however. Now more than ever, democracy’s champions need to hang together.
Rather than jettison his summit, Biden should frame it as a sober gathering
where democratic nations can reconfirm their commitment to rule by the consent
of the governed, humbly acknowledge that their own democracies remain works in
progress, and pledge individually and collectively to stand up for their shared
principles at home and abroad.
Biden’s aspirations are noble. He is
determined to fumigate the stench of Trump’s cynical foreign policy and
rededicate the United States to the defense of democracy. In his four years in
office, Trump coddled and aligned himself with
a rogue’s gallery of dictators and
thugs, among them Russia’s Vladimir Putin,
China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un,
while bashing the leaders of major democracies—all of them U.S. allies—as “weak.” These actions
have helped prolong a global “democratic
recession” now well into its 14th year, according to Freedom House.
Biden sees his summit as a way to
restore America’s historic, if selective, role as the world’s premier beacon
and champion of liberty. His gathering, he has said, would “bring together the world’s
democracies to strengthen our democratic institutions, honestly confront the
challenge of nations that are backsliding, and forge a common agenda to address
threats to our common values.”
Even before the Capitol riot, Biden’s
summit carried risks. One dilemma was the guest list.
If Washington casts its net broadly, it will inevitably pull in some illiberal
democracies, such as Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines or Turkey, which could
serve as spoilers. Even including the world’s largest democracy, India,
presents risks, given the discriminatory policies that the governing Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has
adopted against the country’s Muslim minority. On the other hand, restricting
the guest list to established liberal democracies—say, a subset of the members
of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—would alienate many
longstanding U.S. partners and treaty allies.
The second danger is that a Summit for
Democracy could prove geopolitically divisive,
hastening the world’s split into democratic and nondemocratic camps and undermining prospects for pragmatic
cooperation with authoritarian powers like China and Russia.
The challenges of global interdependence, such as transnational terrorism,
climate change, nuclear proliferation, pandemic disease and financial
instability, are shared by all countries, regardless of regime type. By
promoting the emergence of a de facto league of democracies, the United States
could hobble more encompassing multilateral frameworks, such as the G-20 and
United Nations, which the world also needs to make headway on all these
problems.
The biggest concern in Biden’s proposal,
though, is that the United States has frittered away its historical standing as
the leader of the democratic world. The Trump era has exposed glaring
weaknesses in American democracy, including entrenched structural racism, and
has strained the nation’s constitutional guardrails against tyranny. Had Trump
won reelection, the very future of U.S. democracy would be in doubt. As it is,
the United States is more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War.
Citizens have retreated not only into partisan corners but indeed into
alternate political realities. Americans’ trust in elected leaders, and in each
other, is at a dangerously low point.
“We are better than this,” Biden repeatedly reassures his
compatriots. “This is not who we are.” But the sheen is off American
exceptionalism—the longstanding conviction that
the United States has the secret sauce for how a polity should
be organized and the moral standing to spread democracy to the wider world.
Four decades ago, Ronald Reagan lauded America as a “shining city on a hill.”
Today, fewer Americans—and even
fewer foreigners—believe that idea. Late on the afternoon on Jan. 6, as MAGA
rioters were rampaging through the U.S. Capitol, The Washington Post ran an
editorial from what appeared to be a parallel universe. “The U.S.
and E.U. must Respond Forcefully to China’s Destruction of Liberty in Hong
Kong,” its headline declared.
America’s adversaries, including
China, Venezuela and Iran,
have delighted in trolling the United
States over the desecration of Congress. Longtime democratic allies,
meanwhile, are aghast. Given these
realities, thoughtful critics like James Goldgeier and Bruce Jentleson
advise Biden to scrap his global Summit for Democracy and hold
a domestic one instead, consistent with the Biblical
injunction, “Physician, heal thyself.”
Let me offer a contrarian take. Provided
that the Biden administration approaches it in the spirit of humility rather
than hubris, there is no reason that an international Summit for Democracy
cannot both acknowledge the fragility of American democracy and insist on the
universality of democratic principles. As Biden himself wrote last year in
Foreign Affairs, “First and foremost, we must repair and
reinvigorate our own democracy, even as we strengthen the coalition of
democracies that stand with us around the world.” In other words, as the saying
goes, it is possible for the United States to walk and chew gum at the same
time.
The purpose of the Summit for Democracy
should be to promote an open, honest conversation about the shared challenges
that all pluralist democracies confront as they work to put
their ideals into practice and to build accountable institutions resilient
enough to withstand populist demagogues, expose corruption, thwart foreign
interference and combat misinformation in the digital age. The summit should
include a prominent role for civil society organizations and watchdog groups,
as well as robust discussion of the responsibilities and regulation of
technology giants that play such an outsized role in today’s political
discourse. Such an agenda is likely to win support from the European Union,
which recognizes its own vulnerability to
the same “madness” that has afflicted America.
To be sure, acknowledging that American
democracy is a work in progress could create domestic political vulnerabilities
for Biden. Some Republican politicians and right-wing media outlets may well
slime the new president for overhyping America’s sins, just as they once
castigated Barack Obama for, in their words, “apologizing” for the United
States. Still, if there were ever a moment to argue that U.S. democracy is
imperfect, that it requires constant vigilance to maintain, and that America is
in no position to smugly lecture the world, this is surely it.
Stewart Patrick is the James H. Binger
senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author
of “The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World” (Brookings Press:
2018). His weekly WPR column appears every Monday.
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