Daily Times

On March 29, 2023, United States President Joe Biden kicked off his second Summit for Democracy, consisting of a series of in-person and virtual engagements, co-hosted by Costa Rica, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Zambia. The conference involves 120 countries, including Taiwan, a renegade province of China- that has recently become a flashpoint of escalating tension between the US and China.

Beyond being cynical of the usefulness, critics have questioned the stated purpose of the summit, given that the summit is widely perceived as a charm-offensive effort to assemble a coalition of countries in a bid to wagon them into its strategic containment mission against its geopolitical rivals, chiefly China. While addressing other world leaders virtually, Biden said, “the United States is building on our enduring commitment to boost democracy globally.” But in light of the US track record in its interventionist attempts to promote democracy in other countries, such rhetoric rather warrants ominous political developments in the years ahead.

Riding on moral and political grandstanding based on the so-called liberal and democratic values, the United States has always discounted the non-western countries’ governance systems built on their very national traditions and political realities, imposing a counterproductive system on them. Thus, it has subjugated their political sovereignty and national agency to the advantage of Washington’s economic interests and geopolitical hegemony. Frighteningly in contrast and blatantly hypocritical to what it has preached, the United States, throughout its history, has done everything that is egregiously undemocratic, infringing the recognized standards of state-to-state conduct and international laws.

Throughout the cold war, US interference in other countries’ internal affairs toward its geostrategic advantages was mostly confined to covert political warfare.

To recap, during the cold war, the United States tried to change other nations’ governments 72 times through covert and overt political operations. These included assassination plots against the purported anti-western political leaders, covert and overt support to anti-government forces, sponsoring political or military coups, election engineering, etc.

While lecturing other countries on democracy, the United States is heard to emphasize “free and fair election” as a prerequisite to democratic governance. But, its history is fraught with several episodes of meddling in foreign elections, tipping the electoral scales toward the advantages of its puppet forces. For instance, according to the analysis by Lindsey A. O’Rourke, there were at least 16 occasions in which Washington sought to influence foreign elections by clandestine sponsoring, advising, and spreading propaganda for its favourite candidates, often doing so beyond a single election cycle. The US-backed parties among these won elections 75 per cent of the time.

During and aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, the United States was seen making rancorous outcries over the alleged Russian interference in its election process. The fearmongering furores reached the extent that led the former CIA acting director Michael Morell to call it “the political equivalent of 9/11.” Unfortunately, research from the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University, however, found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behaviour” in the US presidential election in 2016.

Ironically, according to the book- “Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions”- written by Dov H. Levin, a political scientist at the University of Hong Kong in 2020, the United States is the biggest election meddler of them all time, having messed with more than twice as many elections as Russia /Soviet Union. According to Levin, the US intervened in most elections between 1946 to 2000.

Throughout the cold war, US interference in other countries’ internal affairs toward its geostrategic advantages was mostly confined to covert political warfare spearheaded by the CIA. But since the United States started to enjoy the “unipolar moment,” resulting from the collapse of the former Soviet Union, its “values promotion drive” enmeshed with its foreign policy agenda and emboldened by its hubristic “liberal illusion” transformed into the more military interventionist trajectory, squandering its unipolar moment on trillion-dollar military spending, illegal wars, and militarism.

Most notably after the 9/11 terror attack, Washington’s “democracy promotion by force” – what former President George W. Bush farcically called the “freedom agenda” – resulted in enduring political chaos, utter economic collapse, and unprecedented human sufferings and deaths across much of the world. According to the Pentagon’s Airpower Summary, the United States and its allies dropped more than 337000 bombs and missiles on the countries between 2001 and 2020. That’s an average of 46 strikes per day for 20 years. Washington’s invasion of Iraq, and brutal military intervention in Syria, Libya, and Yemen have left the whole region in everlasting instability and political uncertainty, with little evidence of a strengthening of democracy in the wider region.

As the United States has deliberately been pushing the Sino-US relationship in the direction of what many dubbed as a new cold war, so has its foreign policy posture increasingly transformed into a one-size-fits-all militaristic form. The summit for democracy is merely a dubious attempt- driven by a divisive cold-war mindset and camouflaged under the rhetorical invocation of the so-called democratic values – to woo as many countries as possible into its potentially disastrous strategic struggle against China and other strategic rivals.

The writer is a freelance columnist.