Joe Biden wants a global democratic alliance but does he risk alienating crucial US allies?
President Biden is working to make Americans “feel better about themselves” after the turbulent Trump years, Thomas Graham says.(AP: Melina Mara)
Joe Biden’s mission to rebuild America’s foreign policy was already facing difficulties well before the fall of Afghanistan; snagged, ironically, on the very ideal he set to define it — the strengthening of democracy.
Many analysts argue the US President should now tone down his soaring rhetoric about building a global democratic bloc and focus instead on healing the fractured American polity.
They warn the Biden administration’s current approach risks alienating crucial democratic and non-democratic allies alike and it could drive them into the hands of China.
The democracy paradox
“America is back!” President Biden proclaimed at a G7 meeting in mid-June, before immediately drawing battle lines.
“I think we are in a contest,” he said, “not with China per se, but with … autocratic governments around the world.”
It was a test, he told the gathering, that would ultimately decide whether liberal democratic values would prevail in the rapidly changing political world of the 21st century.
The self-declared leader of the free world then went on to outline the creation of the Build Back Better World Partnership initiative to rival China’s Belt and Road initiative and a new global alliance to preserve democracy — a grouping of like-minded nations which America itself intended to lead.
Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, says the speech wasn’t just pitched for international ears.
“Certainly Joe Biden was thinking about how he could make Americans feel better about themselves after four disruptive years of Donald Trump,” Mr Graham says.
In fact, the notion of crafting a new global democratic alliance, Mr Graham points out, has been part of Biden’s political mantra for decades. It was a central theme of his election campaign in 2019.
Seen in that context, the current turmoil in Kabul represents a particular embarrassment.
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Far from preserving and strengthening democracy, the speedy withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, and that country’s subsequent collapse, has left a fledgling democratic nation to fall into the hands of authoritarian extremists.
It’s a point that Chinese state media has sought to capitalise on ever since.
“The death knell of US hegemony” was the way Xinhua News Agency described events, warning nations in the Indo-Pacific, particularly Taiwan, that the United States was a paper tiger and ultimately an unreliable ally.
More pragmatism, less polemic
Professor Thitinan Pongsudhirak, the director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Thailand’s Chulalongkorn University, says the situation in Afghanistan has damaged US credibility in the South Asia region.
But he told the BBC that the extent of that damage in the long term depended on where Washington goes from here.
Biden’s commitment to US partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region, as detailed in the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance paper in March, could be key.
“If [the US] fully resource their Indo-Pacific strategy, this could be a more focused foreign policy for the Biden administration, away from the Middle East and the wars that cannot be won,” he said.
Professor Pongsudhirak’s comments came as US Vice-President Kamala Harris was dispatched on a diplomatic mission to South-East Asia to bolster confidence in the United States’ ongoing commitment to the region, visiting both Vietnam and Singapore.
But notably, for an administration centered on preserving and strengthening democratic values, neither [Vietnam or Singapore] fits the liberal democratic bill: the first is a one-party state and the second could best be described as a nominal democracy, where elections are conducted regularly, but where the governing party has never lost a vote.
The China syndrome
For Susannah Patton, from the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, the realities of working with countries that aren’t an obvious fit underpin the dangers of adopting a values-led approach to international relations.
