Democracy8k8 casino online summit lacks 'clear purpose'

Hours after US President Joe Biden convened the Summit for Democracy on Thursday, Stephen Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School tweeted his article published on Foreign Policy: "Biden's Democracy Summit Could Backfire. There are dangers to hosting diplomatic meetings without a clear purpose."

"For starters, it's still not clear what the ultimate objective of the gathering is," whether it is to yield tangible results or is going to be a talk-fest that eventually issues some pious proclamations but generates little substance," Walt wrote.

"This is an important question because the real way to sell democracy — as Biden, himself, has stated — is to show that democratic societies can out-perform autocratic alternatives," he noted. "Unfortunately, the United States is not in the best position to lead this effort right now."

Walt cited the Economist Intelligence Unit 2020 democracy index, which downgraded the United States to the category of "flawed democracy" before former president Donald Trump was elected, saying that "nothing has happened to reverse that status".

"On the contrary: One of the United States' two major political parties still refuses to accept that the 2020 presidential election was legitimate and is working overtime to erode democratic norms and rig future elections in its favor," he wrote.

Ashley Quarcoo, a nonresident scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program, also noted that against the backdrop of the summit, the US faces a "continuing assault" on its own democratic institutions.

"The Biden administration has not been able to stem the emergence of antidemocratic forces in the United States," Quarcoo said in a summit preview posted on the Carnegie website on Monday.

She noted that 19 US states have passed laws that will make it more difficult for Americans to vote, and cited Grinnell College National Poll in October, which found that 52 percent of Americans believe that US democracy is under "major threat".

An earlier survey also found similar trend. A CNN poll conducted from Aug 3 to Sept 7, asked 2,119 respondents' how they see the state of American democracy, and 56 percent of those asked said the option — "American democracy is under attack" —best described their view.

For Walt, two recurring problems in US foreign policy also could happen to the summit: the inability to set clear priorities and stick to them, and a tendency to proclaim lofty goals and then to fail to deliver.

After discussing the Biden administration's possible central concerns such as "autocracy" and "a rising China", Walt asked, "What if problem No 1 is actually a big global problem like climate change or the pandemic?"

If so, then US foreign policy's main task is to foster cooperation with countries of every sort instead of dividing the world into "good" and "bad" states, such as those whose political systems are like the United States' versus those that aren't, according to the author.

"If that is Biden's top priority, then a summit that quite consciously excludes a lot of big and important countries is likely to be counterproductive," he wrote.
The 2021 Chicago Council Survey of American Public opinion and US Foreign Policy, released in October, found that neither human rights nor promoting democracy abroad is a top foreign policy priority for the American public.

Only 18 percent say that helping to bring a democratic form of government to other nations is a very important goal for the United States, while 27 percent say it is not important at all, the survey said.