Vlad’s massive military mobilization netted him a Zoom call with the President of the United States and a tough warning that if he invaded Ukraine the Russian economy would become a casualty. Biden also agreed that NATO allies and Russia should discuss their respective security concerns. But the dictator’s latest saber-rattling has backfired if only because it has frightened and unified Europe as well as the normally fractious U.S. Congress.
Furthermore, Putin’s crisis underscored the importance of Biden’s next initiative, a two-day Global Democracy Summit on December 9 and 10, which aims to create a mega-alliance of nation-states that can help counteract and overcome the world’s autocracies.
Biden laid out a red line to Putin — that an invasion of Ukraine would result in ruinous sanctions and an end to Putin’s energy export ambitions into Europe. And Putin came up empty. He wanted guarantees that Ukraine could not join NATO or get missiles capable of destroying Moscow. He got neither.
“To judge from the initial comments from both Washington and Moscow, Washington was the winner in this duel“
wrote Russian expert Anders Andrus in Kyiv Post. “The Biden administration has consolidated the West, that is the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada as well as a number of smaller countries, such as Switzerland, Norway, and the Balkan countries, so that official Russians now talk about `the collective West.’ The West has reassembled in the eyes of the Kremlin.”
Ambitious consultations and alliance-building distinguish Biden from previous Presidents. This spring, he created what I called “Biden’s Bamboo Curtain”, to contain China and in defense of Taiwan by assembling many Asian countries under the umbrella of the Quad military intelligence organization created a few years ago by the US, India, Japan, and Australia. Next, he has consolidated European allies to contain the current Kremlin threat. And this week, his Global Democracy Summit hopes to organize the world’s democracies, and their civil societies, into a network of ideas, collaboration, and protection against predatory nations.
The Summit is by invitation only and controversial. Not all the 110 “democracies” participating are paragons of political virtue, including the United States. In fact, it is a motley crew that includes sketchy countries like Mexico, Brazil, Pakistan, and the Philippines with its strongman version of governance. Also attending will be Poland, which has been nibbling away at the rule of law, but not Hungary which has been doing the same. Then there are the anti-democratic forces growing inside the United States itself that are attempting to gerrymander and restrict voting rights in order to rig elections. But the real threat is that the number of outright autocracies grows and only 82 of the world’s countries are both democratic and truly “free”.
Green countries, 82, are free; 59 in yellow are partly free and 54 in purple are not free at all. Freedom House 2021.
Biden’s new “alliance” has already drawn fire from the usual suspects, namely China and Russia, but also others such as excluded NATO member Turkey, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and all countries from the Middle East except for Israel and Iraq. A Russian parliamentarian Konstantin Kosachev sneered that after the January 6 Capitol riot in Washington “America no longer charts the course and so has lost all right to set it. And, even more so, to impose it on others.”
Invited nations were chosen if they were committed to fighting despotism and corruption. “I don’t think of this as the administration picking winners and losers as much as the administration trying to rally like-minded partners to fight the threat of authoritarianism, and also may be trying to rally countries that are not doing well to do better,” said Michael J. Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization in the Washington Post.
But the Biden administration has also played politics with its list. Pakistan had to be invited because its rival, India, was and also because Pakistan is essential in dealing with Afghanistan’s new Taliban regime. And the exclusion of Turkey and Hungary was about settling old scores and sending a stern message concerning their flirtations and business dealings with Russia.
The Summit’s intention is to address three challenges: preventing authoritarianism; fighting corruption; and protecting human rights. Naturally, Russia and China unleashed their propagandists against the exercise, even accused Biden of being provocative. In a rare op-ed essay, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors in Washington argued America was simply stoking ideological confrontation.
China’s ambassador even claimed China was a democracy. “What China has is an extensive, whole-process socialist democracy. It reflects the people’s will, suits the country’s realities, and enjoys strong support from the people.” And the Russian ambassador chimed in that “Russia is a democratic federative law-governed state with a republican form of government. Democracy is the fundamental principle of its political system.”
Yeah sure. Tell that to Alexei Navalny, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Uyghurs in China, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, missing Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, Jack Ma at Alibaba, or the tens of thousands of journalists and political prisoners who have been killed or been held in Chinese and Russian gulags in the last decade. Of course, there have been injustices committed within democracies too but these are rare. As Churchill once quipped: “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”
Biden may not have been stern enough with Putin to suit some, but his strategy of alliance-building averts confrontation in the short-term and is the only possible solution in the long run against the world’s tyrants.
Diane Francis
https://dianefrancis.substack.com/
