Hollow rhetoric
Joe Biden is wrapping up his first foreign trip to Europe as president of the United States. To reclaim the global leadership role that his predecessor Donald Trump abandoned after taking office in January 2017, Biden tried to renew relations with European NATO members and other allies. To reclaim his country's vanguard role, Biden used the slogan "The United States is back."
During the trip, in most of his speeches, Biden claimed that cooperation and partnership among the Group of Seven and other invitees to last weekend's G7 summit such as Australia, India, Japan and South Africa, as well as other US allies, are based on specific values.
Biden claimed that the United States' alliances and partnership are based on human rights and democratic values. However, he also emphasized that these values are under severe threat from foreign powers. He reiterated that such threats are coming from Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China.
Biden's claim is not new. It is a continuation of Trump's foreign policy. The slight difference is that Trump was perceived as soft on Russia and tough on China. Biden wanted to give an impression that he is taking a tough stance against Russia too.
To keep American public opinion favorable toward him, Biden's high-level diplomatic acts may be helpful to him domestically, but there was a lot of noise and pomp and very little substance.
Biden is doing precisely what a right-wing populist like Trump would do. To avoid taking responsibility for their citizens' well-being, to cover up their grave failures, and to distract public attention from their own severe botches, right-wing populists and nationalists use such tactics worldwide. Unfortunately, Biden has continued the same strategy.
Biden and his team are well aware that democracy is now on the defensive all over the world, in developed as well as developing countries. The democratic system of governance is more in crisis than after the Great Depression of the 1930s. Perhaps the Biden team are not unaware that Nazism and fascism sprouted in Germany and Italy as the unintended consequences of Western democracy. Those political systems developed as external threats to the so-called free world across the Atlantic.
Today, the threat to the democracies in the West and elsewhere is from within. The crisis of Western democracies is purely internal, and not a product of Russia or China.
Ultra-nationalist and right-wing populist leaders such as Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in the UK, Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Narendra Modi in India have been tampering with democratic norms and values. They are the products of the internal failure of democracy.
Biden, in his address on June 9 to US Air Force personnel and their families stationed at Royal Air Force Mildenhall, quoting the Declaration of Independence, said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We mean it. No nation can defeat us as long as we stick to our values."
However, democracy has failed to ensure the lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness of the people, not just in the US but in other countries.
The post-2008 financial crisis and the current Covid19 pandemic have both proved that mature democracies in the West and in the developing world have failed miserably. For instance, democracy in the United States has failed to protect the lives and liberties of women, people of color, and other minorities. American society is deeply divided. The #MeToo movement and the Black Lives Matter movement depict a severe lack of human rights and democracy for many people in the US.
Racism, xenophobia, economic inequality, gun violence, and police brutality are long-standing characteristics of the world's oldest democracy. American democracy primarily contributes to protecting the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the rich and protects the private property of the wealthy.