Biden's Chimerical Summit for Democracy

In Greek mythology, the Chimera was a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature, composed of different animal parts from Lycia, Asia Minor. It is usually depicted as a lion, with the head of a goat protruding from its back, and a tail that might end with a snake's head. In an accident of etymology, the term has also come to mean a foolish fantasy..

The term does a pretty good job of describing the so-called.Summit for Democracy the US administration will convene early next month-- though an even better metaphor might be a wolf in sheep's clothing.“This Summit for Democracy is yet another chimerical device meant to demonstrate that the collective West has a kind of constructive, consolidating agenda. But a consolidating agenda should include concrete practical measures but not mere theoretical speculations ending up in yet another scandal,"said Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in an interview on the Rossiya-l television channel.

The US Department of State released on Tuesday evening the list of 110 participants to the Summit for Democracy. The mix invitees includes liberal democracies, weaker democracies, and several states with authoritarian characteristics. Eight invitees fall exceptionally low on these democracy rankings: Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq,Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan,Serbia,and Zambia.Four additional invitees suffered heightened levels of autocratization or big declines in freedom of expression over the past ten years: Brazil, India, the Philippines,and Poland.. Even the US itself is not qualified enough to hold such a summit. the US has been added to the list of "backsliding" democracies for the first time, according to the 2021 annual report released by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance."

What considerations were at play?. First and foremost, broader US. strategic and diplomatic interests mattered. Pakistan,the Philippines,Ukraine, Indonesia, Nigeria and Kenya are all flawed democracies, yet they are important partners of the United States-US-Philippines alliance is back to counter China, Ukraine at the forefront of withstanding Russian, Pakistan to exert considerable influence on counterterrorism, Indonesia has been considered as the de facto leader of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),and Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa In the case of Kenya, Biden's team elevated the countrys significance due to ongoing crises in Ethiopia and Sudan. I Second,“anti-China ideological clique" plays a role. The invitation of Taiwan as a participant betrays the nature of the
gathering, which is anything but democratic. It is simply another prop in Washington's geopolitical box of tricks. A gathering aimed at drawing up ideological lines to instigate another Cold War is merely an excuse for reminiscing about the heyday of the US-led VIP club.The Brookings Institute suggested that Biden's summit for democracy highlight the so-called civil liberties, which would draw a contrast to "single-party regimes" like China. Washington has also been confronting Beijing on human rights over the past few years, which serves as a political tool to slander China's policies on Xinjiang and Hong Kong."

Third, Finally, the eye-catching exclusion of Hungary and Turkey may have been based on Biden's reluctance to do anything to help the reelection chances of Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban a and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Viktor Orban has accused Brussels and Washington of trying to meddle in Hungarian politics in advance of a parliamentary election in April next year. US is backing the left-wing bloc that will seek to replace Orban after a decade in
power. For Turkey, the frustration with Erdogan has become bipartisan in Washington.Tension between US and Turkey are at an all-time high due to Erdogan's decision to acquire Russia's S-400missile system.

Bound to fail..  What the summit aims to achieve? According to a website of the White House, the summit aims to discuss the several threats democracies across the world are facing and address these with collective action.“The summit will focus on challenges and opportunities facing democracies and will provide a platform for
leaders to announce both individual and collective commitments. reforms, and initiatives to defend democracy and human rights at home and abroad," the White House said.

If the goal is to advertise the US political, social and economic model,Washington should probably delay the summit and put its house in order first. However, the United States always images that it would be quite good to create something global that would give an impression of the Western world's consolidation. Coincidentally, support for democracy is a conceptual centerpiece of Biden's foreign-policy strategy, and his administration has put this in grand terms. The summit initiators in Biden administration believe that the world should be divided according to one more principle: into democratic and non-democratic countries. Then the chimerical summit in support of democracy was invented to claim US leadership in the world.

Undoubtedly the summit aims to fight against social, political and economic diversity by trying to advance one single model over all others. But this grand plan is bound to fail. The democracy summit, with its simplistic“us-and-them” narrative, is out of sync with the reality of today's complex, complicated and interdependent world. Splitting the world into good and bad countries may reassure and comfort but such a distinction is complete fiction.

US should accept that only history is in a position to judge what models turn out to be efficient, productive and fair and what models will find their place at the dump of human delusions. And history has a lot of means at its disposal to punish leaders, who believe that they possess a "one size fits all" model,which could successfully replace the existing diversity with an imposed universalism.

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