Don’t invite tyrants to ‘Summit of Democracies’
President Biden deserves credit for convening a Summit of Democracies to promote democratic freedoms around the world. But there is a real danger that by inviting some elected leaders with an authoritarian streak, he may end up legitimizing wannabe tyrants.
According to a White House statement, Biden “will bring together leaders from a diverse group of world’s democracies at a virtual Summit of Democracies” on Dec. 9 and 10, to be followed by a second, in-person summit next year.
The goal of the first meeting will be to come up with joint initiatives to defend against authoritarianism, fight corruption and promote respect for human rights, it says.
It sounds great, and it’s is certainly a welcome departure from President Trump’s embrace of North Korean despot Kim Jong-un and other autocrats whom he wooed gleefully while ignoring their human-rights abuses.
But the Biden administration runs the risk of making the mistake of trying to build a big tent and invite both well-established and hybrid democracies, with the idea of getting the latter to abide by the group’s general rules.
That has been tried in the past, and it didn’t work out well. In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration cosponsored a huge international summit aimed at bolstering democracy around the word.
At a June 27, 2000, conference in Warsaw, Poland, top officials of 106 democratic nations signed a declaration titled “Toward a Community of Democracies.” While dictatorships such as Cuba and China were not invited — as they probably won’t this time — the Warsaw conference and its sequels in following years included some countries led by rulers whose names should have never been allowed to appear anywhere near the word “democracy.”
Among the participants of the Warsaw conference were Venezuela, ruled by elected former coup-plotter Hugo Chavez, and Peru, whose President Alberto Fujimori had shut down his country’s congress eight years earlier.
You could argue that Chavez had just been elected at the time, and that he deserved a chance to embrace democracy. But Venezuela continued to be invited to the Community of Democracies conferences until 2005, when Chavez was already grabbing nearabsolute powers.
Both Venezuela and Peru happily signed the 2000 Warsaw declaration, which committed countries to free and fair elections, as well as total respect for other branches or government and a free press.
Would it make sense for Biden to invite El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele? He was democratically elected, but he has stormed into his country’s congress with army troops to intimidate opposition legislators and, most recently, used his congressional majority to sack five independent Supreme Court judges.
Would it make sense for Biden to invite Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who recently threatened to not recognize the results of next year’s presidential elections if he’s defeated?
Would it make sense for Biden to invite Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador? He recently gave a red-carpet welcome in Mexico to the dictators of Cuba and Venezuela, giving these tyrants a huge propaganda boost at a time when both were carrying out mass arrests of government critics.
Would it make sense for Biden to invite Bolivia’s president Luis Arce, who allows his justice system to keep former president Jeanine Añez in prison on baseless charges of “genocide?”
Would it make sense for Biden to invite Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez? At the time of this writing, he has refused to disavow or sack his Security Minister Aníbal Fernandez for tweeting a veiled threat against a political cartoonist’s children earlier this week.
Instead of inviting more than 100 countries, like the Clinton administration did,
Biden should keep it small.
It would be best to invite a smaller group of wellestablished democracies to coordinate new diplomatic ways to press Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and other dictatorships to restore basic freedoms. Summit participants could also seek new ways to protect themselves from wannabe autocrats in their own countries — such as Trump in the United States — who want to subvert the results of free elections.
A small summit of wellestablished democracies would make more sense than inviting leaders of dubious democratic credentials, and allow them to brag about being invited to a club of free countries.
President Biden, don’t make that mistake. We tried it once, and we should learn from what went wrong.