The Cynicism of Biden's 'Defense' of Democracy

The “democracy vs. autocracy” framing is just a new version of dividing the world up into opposing blocs.

Paul Poast is half-right in his assessment of Biden’s foreign policy:

To put it bluntly, the Biden administration’s approach to foreign policy is realpolitik from top to bottom. This isn’t necessarily bad. A realpolitik approach to foreign policy enables Biden to do what he can in the face of constrained U.S. capability. Liberal hegemony is easy when it’s easy to be a hegemon. But when it’s not, ideological purity is often sacrificed for the sake of national interests.

Poast gets the cynicism of Biden’s foreign policy right, but he underrates the importance of the president’s ideological framing of the conflicts that the U.S. is supporting. It’s true that “the protection of democracy doesn’t appear to be driving Biden’s foreign policy in practice,” as Poast says, but Biden does wrap up the same old hegemonist status quo in that packaging. For Biden, “defending democracy” is a convenient way to distinguish himself from the strongman-admiring Trump rhetorically and also pose as democracy’s global champion without having to act differently from the way that his predecessors, including Trump, acted on the world stage.

Biden often relies on the “democracy vs. autocracy” framing in his speeches and op-eds as a way of explaining and justifying U.S. policies in different parts of the world. He has even used this framing to pretend that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are part of the same larger global struggle. According to the president, Americans are the “essential nation” and “[w]e rally allies and partners to stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future.”

That framing has negative consequences of its own, as Stephen Wertheim argued in the article Poast is responding to, by encouraging the administration to be hardline and inflexible in its approach to current conflicts involving the U.S. Wertheim says this of Biden’s “defend democracy credo”:

It fosters one-sided, maximalist policies that intensify conflicts without resolving them, while entangling the United States within them. Not since George W. Bush has a president so tightly linked democratic ideals with military instruments.

In case it isn’t clear, the problem here isn’t that Biden is too fired up with democratic zeal, but that he is trying to sell people on militaristic policies with a pro-democracy sales pitch. To make things worse, Biden and his officials seem to believe their own propaganda about the stakes of these conflicts, and this makes them unwilling to contemplate compromises that might bring these wars to an end.

As his dealings with Modi confirm, Biden isn’t worried about whether the “allies and partners” respect democratic norms. The efforts to suck up to Mohammed bin Salman show that he doesn’t care if they bother to elect their leaders or how they treat their own people. What matters is whether they are aligned with the “essential nation.” In this respect, Biden’s foreign policy is not all that different from George W. Bush’s “with us or against us” approach in the 2000s. Bush also claimed to want to promote democracy, and the “freedom agenda” was how the administration tried to sell U.S. meddling all over. It was a way to excuse U.S. crimes and blunders by claiming that they were being done for the sake of a greater good. That is what pro-democracy posturing does for Biden now.

As far as Biden is concerned, everyone included among the “allies and partners” are on the side of democracy because they are on Washington’s side, and the rest are either unreliable fence-sitters or one of the enemies of democracy. According to this view, some of the world’s largest democracies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa are on the “wrong” side because they “fail” to endorse U.S. preferences. Meanwhile, a backsliding and increasingly authoritarian India gets a pass for anti-China reasons. The “democracy vs. autocracy” framing is just a new version of dividing the world up into opposing blocs and then viewing everyone outside our camp—including many other democracies—as enemies of the “free world.”