Biden’s rough road to restoring America’s ‘place in the world’
Joe Biden this week gave his first speech on foreign policy as U.S. president — undoubtedly aware of how rocky the road ahead will be.
He inherits a world where democracy is under siege, crucial public institutions have been undermined, the far right has become emboldened and even attempted coups appear to be acceptable to many people.
And that’s just referring to his own country — the United States.
In the rest of the world, the threats are even worse.
President Biden’s speech on Thursday was part of a visit to the State Department — often ridiculed by Donald Trump as the deepest of the “deep state” — to thank diplomats and other foreign service employees for their work. A passionate student of international affairs throughout his political career, Biden also used the occasion to reinforce his idealized vision of a United States that has been “missing-inaction” for the past four years — a nation that supports liberty and democracy, cherishes alliances, respects multilateral institutions and uses diplomacy as a way of “restoring America’s place in the world.”
However, his country’s once-influential “place in the world,” as Biden himself must know, is both compromised and uncertain after Trump’s damaging assault on American democracy.
This week, the Biden administration demanded that the military in Myanmar reverse a coup that overthrew the country’s civilian leadership after a decade-long democratic experiment.
But no mention was made of the fact that Myanmar’s military used the same excuse as Trump did before the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection in Washington — false claims of voter fraud in a November election. Myanmar’s military did successfully what Trump failed to do.
Biden also demanded that Russia release its most famous dissident, Aleksei Navalny, who has just been sent to jail on phoney charges. And his administration criticized China for its brutal handling of the country’s Muslim Uighur population and of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists.
But so far at least, American righteousness about these international human rights abuses appears to have been lost amid the ridicule heaped on the U.S. for the riot at the Capitol building.
Russia’s state-controlled media reported that President Vladimir Putin was “gleeful” at the chaos in Washington.
“The celebration of democracy is over,” one Russian politician was quoted as saying. “What amazes us most of all is the awful out-of-control hypocrisy.”
And in China, the gloating was as euphoric.
According to a research report published Thursday, Chinese videos have cited the January riot and the impeachment proceedings as signs of the decline of “American-style democracy.” And one video described the United States as “permanently damaged” and a “failed state.”
For their part, smug Chinese officials pointed to the Washington riot as justification for their government’s own crackdown in Hong Kong.
It is the China-U.S. relationship, of course, that is the most important one for the Biden administration. Although Trump’s handling of China in the past four years was largely loud and inconsistent, and China has exploited America’s weakness, early signs from Biden is that his approach will be tougher and more strategic.
As for Russia, the U.S. president has already given notice directly to Putin that the free ride he received from an obsequious Donald Trump has come to an end. As if to reinforce this message, his speech was particularly dismissive of Russia’s actions.
Biden’s words and early actions will be applauded by traditional U.S. allies. However battle-scarred they may feel now after years of Trump, they know that the stakes are enormous.
The simple fact is that democracy is in crisis worldwide.
Only 8.4 per cent of the world’s population live in a full democracy, while more than a third live under authoritarian rule. That is the lowest recorded “democratic” score since this survey began in 2006.
According to the latest edition of the Democracy Index released this week by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a London-based research group that annually rates the state of democracy across 167 countries, there has been a large rollback of civil liberties in the past year.
The survey attributes much of this to government-imposed lockdowns and other pandemic control measures.
But as they did in the wake of 9/11 in 2001, many governments have used this health crisis to impose emergency powers, limit freedom of expression and target political rivals.
Other research organizations, such as the non-partisan Freedom House, have reported that more than 100 countries have seen their levels of freedom decline since 2016, many before the onset of the pandemic.
The four years of Trump’s rule in the U.S. has not only undermined American democratic institutions, but have also been an encouragement to other authoritarian leaders worldwide.
That is the world that Biden has inherited, and that is the mountain he will have to climb as U.S. president to restore his country’s place of leadership on the global stage. But it won’t happen overnight.
As long as Trump’s storm troopers in the Republican party walk the same halls of Congress that were stormed by domestic terrorists on Jan. 6, the world will wait and watch to see whether Biden’s Democrats ultimately win America’s latest civil war.