How they see us: Trying to rally the free world
Joe Biden is taking a stand against the global “drift toward illiberal government,” said Mark MacKinnon in The Globe and Mail (Canada). The U.S. president brought together the leaders of 111 countries last week for a virtual Summit for Democracy intended “to shore up a political system that has lost ground to a rising tide of authoritarianism.” Biden acknowledged that many democracies have stumbled in recent years—including his own country. “Here in the U.S.,” he said, “we know as well as anyone that renewing our democracy and strengthening our democratic institutions requires constant effort.” Worldwide, it’s a grim picture: The latest ranking of democracies by the U.S.-based NGO Freedom House showed slippage in 73 countries, while Ukraine and Taiwan are “under escalating pressure” from two autocracies excluded from the summit—Russia and China, respectively. It’s obvious why those two bullies were shunned, said Marek Ostrowski in Polityka (Poland), but the rest of the guest list was incoherent. Poland, “the country with the sharpest decline” in democratic norms, got an invite, but fellow NATO members Hungary and Turkey did not. And you have to do “political acrobatics” to justify the inclusion of Congo, Angola, and Iraq in the summit, because they’re all ranked “not free” by Freedom House.
This summit wasn’t really about democracy, said China Daily (China) in an editorial, but about creating “another concentric circle around the U.S. as it freezes the divisions of a new Cold War into place.” The inner circle is AUKUS, the alliance it has formed with Australia and the
United Kingdom. The next includes NATO in Europe and India and Japan in the Asia-Pacific region. Now, using “the banner of democracy,” it is “trying to lure developing countries to its cause, as the most expendable outer defensive circle for its hegemony.” Biden has some nerve, said Sergey Strokan in RT.com (Russia). He loves to contrast the
U.S. with “authoritarian, undemocratic Russia,” but which of us bombed Libya and Iraq, turning each into a failed state? Which of us overthrew elected governments in Ukraine and Georgia with color revolutions? Whose capital was stormed this year by a bloodthirsty mob seeking to overturn an election? “Washington has no right to even hint about its leadership in the democratic world.”
If the U.S. doesn’t lead this fight, who will? asked Clemens Wergin in Die Welt (Germany). Authoritarianism is not only getting stronger in historically totalitarian countries but also expanding to swallow fragile democracies. Corrupt autocrats want a world where their dirty money can thrive, so they band together to evade sanctions—just look at Russia and China helping Venezuela or Iran investing in Belarus. They are seeking “to expand the undemocratic space in order to make their own business model permanent.” This battle against global corruption and lawlessness is a “systemic conflict” like the Cold War. For all its faults, America is still “the leading power of the free world,” and we must join it to “push back decisively against the enemies of freedom.”