Biden's summit built on shaky foundations

Hypocrisy seen in so-called democracy gathering as divisions weigh down US

US President Joe Biden is hosting an international Summit for Democracy this week even though he faces his own challenges on the domestic front.

Biden's approval ratings have been drifting lower, as a fierce partisan divide remains in the country over issues such as how to address the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, border security and unemployment, as well as how elections should be conducted.

On Thursday and Friday, Biden will host the first of two such summits.

"Democracy is not a prerogative of a certain country or a group of countries, but a universal right of all peoples," Chinese Ambassador to the US Qin Gang and Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov wrote in an article for The National Interest on Nov 26. "It can be realized in multiple ways, and no model can fit all countries."

Russia and China, which are not invited to the summit, have been portrayed as the US' two major competitors and geopolitical adversaries.

While countries define democracy differently, the Chinese government has won wide approval from its people, particularly as it has pulled millions of people out of poverty.

"It is of the essence to inquire if indeed the United States has the moral ascendancy to classify and catalogue which countries are democratic－thus invited to the summit－and which are not, hence not invited," academic Anna Rosario Malindog-Uy wrote in an opinion article on Sunday for The Asean Post of Malaysia. She is a professor of political science and China studies and president of Techperformance Corp, an information technology company in the Philippines.

She noted that the US was recently listed among "backsliding democracies" in a report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Stockholm.

According to the group, there has been a decline in effective parliament in the US and diminished freedom of expression, association and assembly.

"Its democratic norms are continuously weakened and extremely rooted in extreme partisan polarization, which is beyond policy differences but an existential conflict over race and culture," Malindog-Uy wrote.

Simmering in the political divide is the insistence by former president Donald Trump that Biden was not legitimately elected, while Democrats investigate the Jan 6 uprising at the US Capitol by Trump's supporters, an act they consider an assault on democracy and an insurrection.

Sharp divide

The country's racial tensions were heightened in May 2020 with the murder of African American George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Floyd's death led to an international rise in the Black Lives Matter movement and calls to "defund the police".

On the pandemic, there is a sharp divide as to how to address it. So far, the US has the most confirmed infections and deaths. Its total number of COVID-19 cases surpassed 49 million last weekend, with more than 2.5 million new infections reported during the past 28 days.

Inflation has been hovering above 5 percent, and food and energy costs are surging. In a Gallup poll released on Thursday, 45 percent of households report that recent price increases are causing financial hardship.

The Federal Reserve had portrayed inflation as "transient" but lately has adjusted its outlook. Nonfarm payrolls increased by 210,000 last month and unemployment fell, but economists polled by Reuters had forecast payrolls increasing by 550,000 jobs.

On immigration, the Biden administration will resume a Trump-era border program that requires asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for hearings, in response to a federal court order, US and Mexican officials said on Thursday.

The administration's move has been met with consternation by immigrants-rights groups but likely cheered by conservatives, as hundreds of thousands of migrants have made their way to the US southern border in the past year.

Scott Warren, a visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute, wrote in an opinion article for Newsweek on Thursday: "Given the reality of domestic political challenges, the Biden administration should avoid any veneer of promoting democracy. Instead, the United States should present a humble face at the summit, looking to learn from other countries as much as it tries to set its own agenda.

"Rather than a formal presentation of country commitments, the summit should serve as an exchange of ideas to vexing democratic challenges in an increasingly complex global landscape," he wrote.

Warren said that "some are asking why the United States and all its political failures … is even hosting a summit, rather than focusing on its own backyard".

Like AUKUS, the new security pact between Australia, the US and the UK, the democracy summit "is more a compulsion of realpolitik in contemporary times with China being identified as the No 1 threat to the US' hegemonic standing in Asia and the world in general than about democracy", Rosario Malindog-Uy wrote.

"This US 'Summit for Democracy' with a bizarre list of invited countries appears to be based on geopolitical considerations more than anything … nothing more than a larger, geopolitically centric effort of the US to counter China and Russia. This is precisely the reason why China and Russia were not invited to this summit," she concluded.