Walter Russell Mead
From his 2021 address through the Munich Security Conference to last week’s Summit for Democracy, President Biden has been clear. He wants to frame world politics as a contest between liberal democracy and autocracy. That’s unfortunate. While not completely misguided, this approach hampers America’s diplomacy overseas and further erodes the weak consensus at home behind a strong American foreign policy around the world.
Mr. Biden is invoking an old American tradition here. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt framed the world wars as conflicts between democracy and dictatorship. And from Harry S. Truman to Ronald Reagan, America’s Cold War presidents used similar language.
Mr. Biden isn’t all wrong. If the U.S. and its allies lose the contest, and people like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and their hangers-on in countries like North Korea and Nicaragua get to determine the world’s future, democracy isn’t going to flourish.
Nevertheless, the president and his team need to think again. Defining the current contest as one between democracies and autocracies is a flawed strategy. Abroad, this approach weakens America’s ties with key allies and exposes us to devastating charges of systemic hypocrisy. At home and abroad, the widespread unpopularity of the expanded version of democracy Mr. Biden expounds—including controversial stands on issues like trans rights—is too polarizing and divisive to support the long-term consensus American foreign policy needs for success.
If the U.S. is serious about an Indo-Pacific strategy, it is going to have to assemble and cultivate a coalition of countries that are anything but liberal and democratic. Finland, Sweden and Norway may score a perfect 100 on Freedom House’s widely used global freedom index, with Denmark hard on their heels at 97. But if we want any kind of Southeast Asian strategy at all, we will have to work with countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, all of which count as “not free” on the Freedom House scale. And without as many “partly free” countries like India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Nepal, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka as we can bring into our network, we have zero chance of holding the balance against China.
It goes further. In Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan all rate as “not free.” Do we write off this part of the world? If we want to keep Middle East oil producers from aligning with our enemies, we need to work with some very undemocratic governments. And if we want to counter China in Africa, there are very imperfect governments in Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan that we can’t afford to ignore.
To alienate these countries through vacuous posturing about our sincerity as human-rights crusaders would be stupid. To spurn their aid because we dislike their human-rights and democracy policies would be suicidal.
At home, it is easier to show people that China under its current policies poses a direct threat to American security and prosperity than it is to energize people for a democracy crusade in East Asia. Worse, by conflating its international fight for liberal democracy with its internal struggle against the populist GOP, the Biden administration is undercutting the domestic foreign-policy consensus it seeks to build. When administration officials tell the public that the fight against Vladimir Putin is another front in the war against Donald Trump, they undermine the bipartisan support Ukraine desperately needs.
Beyond the Trump question, most Republicans don’t want to build a “democracy” at home that guarantees extreme versions of transgender ideology and abortion on demand through the ninth month of pregnancy. They certainly won’t want to help the Biden administration build such a democracy overseas. The more Mr. Biden beats this drum, the more isolationist Republican opinion is likely to become.
To win support at home and abroad, American foreign policy needs to become less ideological. Common perceptions of common threats will do more to build the kind of international and domestic coalition that American foreign policy needs than democracy-vamping speeches from the bully pulpit.
Many countries share America’s concerns about Chinese, Russian and Iranian expansionism. China’s abuse of the World Trade Organization harms the whole world. The American-led global system that Russia and China want to break brought many countries unprecedented prosperity and security. These arguments carry more weight than abstract democracy talking points, even in Europe. Concerns about the Uyghurs did less to change German thinking about China than worries about China’s economic designs on the German automobile and capital-goods industries.
Mr. Biden should remember that his global coalition is held together more by common interests and common sense than by common values. And he should never underestimate the domestic and the international cost of overhyped, underthought democracy rhetoric.
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