The inconsistencies and contradictions in U.S. democracy promotion, are not limited to one particular administration, but to the U.S. approach as a whole.
Ideologically, the United States is a self-proclaimed promoter and protector of democracy in the world. Its democracy policy has evolved over the past century. The U.S. fought World War II, in part, to defend democracy against fascism and waged a three-decade-long struggle during the Cold War against communism.
Soon after the Cold War, U.S. President George H. W. Bush proposed a “New World Order” based on “freedom, peace and democracy.” His successor, President Bill Clinton, said at the United Nations on September 27, 1993, that the “overriding purpose” of U.S. foreign policy was to “expand and strengthen the world’s community of market based democracies.”
In order to advance this purpose, Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright took the initiative of establishing a Community of Democracies (CoD). At the first meeting of the CoD in Warsaw in 2000, 106 countries promised to advance democratic norms and institutions. The United Nations endorsed this intergovernmental organization and later raised a “U.N. Fund for Democracy,” with contributions from members.
In more recent years, President Joe Biden convened the “Summit for Democracy.” The first such summit was convened in a virtual form on December 9-10, 2021. Its objectives were “defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, and advancing respect for human rights.” The second summit was hosted by the United States in collaboration with Costa Rica, Zambia, the Netherlands, and South Korea in March 2023, and the third summit was hosted by South Korea in March 2024, in a hybrid format.
Biden promised at the second Summit for Democracy that he would work with the U.S. Congress to “commit $9.5 billion across all our efforts to advance democracy around the world.”
These efforts are motivated by the perception of “autocratic assertion and an ongoing democratic recession,” as put by Thomas Carothers and Francis Brown of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in a February 2024 assessment of the Biden administration’s approaches to democracy policy.
The U.S. strategic community (both official and unofficial) has identified Russia and China as the two key states pursuing “autocratic” assertion, thus integrating the United States’ ideological stance on democracy with the foreign policy goals of containing Russia and China.
In their critical assessment of Biden’s approach, Carothers and Brown said that “Biden’s democracy policy has been dominated by periodic needle-poking relating to policy actions that belie the administration’s soaring rhetoric about standing for democracy against autocracy.”
The inconsistencies and contradictions in U.S. democracy promotion, however, are not limited to the Biden-Harris administration alone, but to the U.S. approach as a whole. Recall Clinton’s campaign speeches in 1992, when he criticized his predecessor, Bush, for aligning U.S. interests with a variety of dictatorial regimes, while highlighting the values of democracy and freedom.
Let us look closely at these inconsistencies in U.S. democracy policy in South Asia over the years.
