Biden’s Summit of Babble By Colin Dueck
The notion that the United States will rally all liberal democrats worldwide to act against all illiberal non-democrats is nonsensical.
L ast week, President Biden hosted a virtual conference entitled the Summit for Democracy and invited dozens of heads of state. The premise of the summit was that democratically oriented government, civil society, and private-sector leaders would meet to lay out a practical agenda regarding the common threat from authoritarianism. Predictably, they failed to do so.
From the beginning, media coverage of the Summit for Democracy obsessed over the meeting’s invite list. Treating the event as if it were a Hollywood award-show after party, journalists gossiped about the attendees: Who’s in? Who’s out? But since there is a gray zone of semi-democratic states in the world — and since the United States must inevitably retain working relationships with many such states — there was never any way to satisfy critics with the concept of a global democratic summit.
A more apt complaint might have been that some of the invitees are not really functional democratic states at all. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, was on the list of attendees. Here is how the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies described that country in its 2021 Armed Conflict Survey:
Over a hundred different conflicts plague the Democratic Republic of Congo (DROC). State and non-state armed groups fight over land, minerals and identity, compounded by competing international interests. The distinction between state and non-state is blurred: the Armed Forces of the Congo is one of many armed groups and it allows certain other actors to control territory and state institutions. . . . Violence escalated in 2020-21, with an increasing number of attacks on civilians and clashes between armed groups. Armed groups frequently attacked, abducted, burned, pillaged, murdered and committed sexual violence, leading to large displacements of people.
The DROC is neither a functional democracy nor a functional dictatorship. Rather, it is essentially a failed state. The citizens of that country endure real-world deprivations unimaginable to most inside the West. What good does it do them to listen to a remote lecture from Joe Biden regarding the blessings of rules-based liberal order? What concrete purpose is accomplished? The answer is clear: This isn’t really about them at all. Rather, it’s about us. Specifically, it’s about bolstering the apparently insatiable liberal Western need for mental and verbal self-affirmation.
The unreal quality of the meeting was reinforced by its chosen format. Even a live conference of this type would have been unwise. But the notion that hundreds of NGO leaders and heads of state could hammer out a meaningful, workable agenda by Zoom was preposterous. Still, if you’ve been hanging around college campuses for the past year and half, including remotely, then you know this is the kind of thing liberals like. The use of virtual settings for verbal reaffirmations of progressive norms, increasingly disconnected from reality, is all the rage.
Academic in the worst sense, the Summit for Democracy was doomed to fail because it built on an overly abstract and faulty foundation. President Biden claims that supporting human rights overseas constitutes “the center,” as he puts it, of his foreign policy. Of course, it does not. When Biden ran for president last year, he made the most withering criticism of the previous administration for its policies on international human rights. This included, for example, the U.S. policy toward Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Now that Biden is president, his own administration has circled back to something not so different from his predecessor in those cases — that is to say, a working American relationship with numerous flawed regimes in the Middle East. I do not blame the Biden administration for doing this. Rather, I note the moralistic pomposity with which Biden made such damning critiques last year. He was never likely to fully act on them. And he has not. The hollowness of his campaign stance has been revealed.
The notion that the United States will rally all liberal democrats worldwide to act against all illiberal non-democrats — a key theme of Biden’s foreign-policy rhetoric — is nonsensical. The U.S. faces some very real enemies and competitors overseas. China, in particular, is approaching material capabilities which are in some respects comparable to America’s. The idea that the United States will counter this challenge by refusing to cooperate with all undemocratic regimes — a logical corollary of the Summit for Democracy — is bizarre. America has faced and overcome numerous powerful authoritarian competitors before, sometimes peacefully. In not one case did it succeed by limiting itself to cooperation only with other democracies. Just to take a practical example, Vietnam remains a one-party dictatorship to this day. Yet the United States will have to work with Vietnam to counteract Chinese influence nearby. It would be strange not to do so. The Biden administration must understand this, since, in practice, it continues to have decent relations with Hanoi. Again, in this case, reality imposes itself on the administration’s pious declarations. Why issue such empty declamations when there is no need to do so? They only undermine U.S. credibility.
Finally, for American conservatives, there was one last feature of Biden’s summit worth noting. He took the opportunity provided by the meeting to laud his own domestic priorities, including the so-called Build Back Better plan, a multi-trillion-dollar boondoggle for party coalitional constituencies. He furthermore insisted in front of an international audience that his party’s proposals on voting laws are nothing less than an existential necessity for democracy itself. This kind of left-wing political grandstanding is nothing new in liberal international approaches. You may read any issue of Foreign Affairs, still the nation’s leading foreign-policy journal, and find it jam-packed with earnest recommendations for left-of-center domestic-policy priorities. Rarely, if ever, will you find an argument for conservative ones. Yet American liberals persist in demanding that U.S. foreign policy requires the immediate implementation of their own precious wish-list on domestic matters, and then they call that being non-partisan. Moreover, they seem to really mean it. This lack of self-awareness is painful to observe. Still, that’s no reason for conservatives to simply go along with it. If a liberal administration such as Joe Biden’s insists that adherence to his vision of rules-based world order requires going along with his own particular domestic agenda, conservatives are fully justified in asking: Why should we?
The overall spectacle of Biden’s foreign-policy trajectory is deeply disturbing to watch. He dutifully reads prepared speeches urging respect for liberal norms worldwide. Yet even as he issues what may be toothless warnings, the gap between America’s capabilities and its commitments continues to grow. Meanwhile, a number of seriously aggressive predators gather around the perimeter of America’s troubled alliance system. Those hardened autocrats based in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang have little use for liberal rhetoric. They probe for weakness, waiting to make their next move. Are they afraid of Joe Biden? We’re about to find out.
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