If they had allowed peace to prevail and provided they had conceded to NATO being dismantled because the Warsaw Pact did, the situation now in 2023 would not be the same.
If the depleted uranium, a toxic metal which is highly cancerogenic and has caused many health and environmental risks in Iraq War, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan War, Bosnia, Kosovo conflicts etc is a typical sign of Western democracy based on their (and only their) rules, does that mean that the Summit for Democracy, which was organized from 28th to 30th March 2023 by Biden’s administration represents a major health hazard of sort? To some extent, the answer to this question is positive with one additional remark that even the first Summit for Democracy held two years ago shows that the rest of the world, even if they decided to accept the invite and duly attend, is gaining ever stronger immunity as regards this sort of ‘infection’.
Even the Voice of America reports about it, by announcing the three day long virtual summit from Tuesday to Thursday last week ‘Like Summit, like Democracy‘ All that is virtual, namely, it is not real, but they admit what its real purpose is i.e. what their target is. Biden is (trying to) expand their network at this new Summit for Democracy while the concerns about Russia and China are growing alarmingly. With this Second Summit, the USA is targeting the rest of the world, while Russia is in the midst of the special military operation in Ukraine and China is setting off on a diplomatic offensive in pursuit of a united front against autocracies. Though, Bloomberg reports, President of Zambia Hakainde Hichilema, who was invited to be one of the chairpersons of the summit, said that democracy cannot feed the hungry mouths. A while ago, as is commonly known, we were recommended that patriotism cannot be poured into one’s tractor instead of petrol in order to drive it. So you see. Times change. Hakainde Hichilema warns that the heavy indebtedness places his country in danger and that IMF, apart from stating that it is a serious issue, cannot and does not want to do much so as to resolve it. Bloomberg reports that China is becoming the world’s biggest creditor of developing economies and the savior of epic proportions of developing countries which end up in a debt crisis. It is not of negligible importance that the President of Zambia a few days ago spent two and a half hours talking to the Russian Ambassador in their country, Azim Yarakhmedov.
The U.S. is boastful of having invited 121 world leaders – attendees for the summit this year, which is eight more than 2021 – reports the Voice of America, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Lichtenstein among them too. Whilst Foreign Policy reveals that Turkey and Hungary, U.S. NATO allies, had not been invited to this summit and neither had they for the previous one, which is an expression of a growing concern due to the democratic decline of these two countries. This choice, Foreign Policy remarks, will most probably fuel tensions even more between Washington DC and the two NATO allies and make the rift between the rest of the NATO and EU on one hand and these two ‘renegades’.
Understandably it comes across as odd to see this form of democracy in which only one opinion is allowed. In other words, is it not in effect autocracy which the USA blames its bitter rivals for in line with the good old approach of pointing political fingers at others and not itself. If one places all this into a bigger historical perspective of the past two years in between the two Biden’s summits, in a nutshell, all that has happened since, has shown that that Biden’s reprimand from 2021 did not have much effect on the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán and the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan so that they had to be warned again. They will not bat an eyelid surely and neither did they two years ago. Viktor Orbán, though, should not ignore the threat which recently emerged in the form of Samantha Power, the USAID boss, which reinstated their office again in Budapest, Hungary and following the good old pattern, she met up with the representatives of the civil society, NGOs on the payroll of the U.S. government and independent media which are ‘independent’ inasmuch as the democracy in a system in which only what that government of the USA approves. Surely Samantha Power is one of the organizers of Biden’s Summit for Democracy, which is, it goes without saying, not very innovative, and started the session with vociferous support for Ukraine. Alas, words are merely that: words and that unpleasant circumstance that there is a gaping discrepancy between vacuous verbal declarations and concrete actions becomes ever more obvious even in the Collective West.
And thus the influential Foreign Affairs political journal reports that the USA does not need yet another summit for democracy but the USA needs a plan to oppose autocracy in such a way that a mechanism of monitoring would be put in place for the defense of democracy abroad established as the top foreign policy priority. Above all, it entails even more U.S. interventionism which is why the huge part of the world is weary of the U.S. Moreover, it means ‘too many carrots, too few sticks’ – Foreign Affairs, the U.S. political elite media, criticizes Washington DC. By the same token, the Guardian, London, does not object to the use of depleted uranium given that it is used only by the U.S. and its staunch ally, the UK, sends a political message that the world still needs a world ‘policeman’. They go on to add that they anticipate that the U.S. will not give up in that regard. How democratic can a police state be is blatantly obvious without much elaboration. Finally, The Washington Post in their Editorial warns that it would be much better that the U.S. and its ‘democratic’ allies were ready to strike back against the ever stronger strategic alliance between its two military rivals which has the potential to change the global order as comprehensively as the U.S. did half a century ago.
Is the USA able to put a halt on the ongoing change of the global order which it has finally begun to notice itself? Can the carrots and sticks and police truncheons be of any use in that? What is the primary goal of the second Biden’s Summit for Democracy? If we recall the comprehensive study carried out by University of Princeton in 2014, the researchers concluded that the USA is not a democracy but oligarchy because around 90 % of the decisions made are for the pure financial and political benefit of those who are able to pay for the lobbyists. And another issue is what sort of a democracy is that if it commands unquestioning, abject obedience in everybody?
After the downfall of the Berlin Wall, the system in the Collective West lost its counterpart to offset the balance of power. While the Communist bloc was existent, the Collective West had to exercise caution and pay sufficient attention to the workers’ rights and high democratic standards because there was a genuine global competition to offset its power against the Warsaw Pact, which had vanished at that point. If one recalls the end of the 90s the enthusiasm world wide as if it was the age of a great global revival. At the time Fukuyama was admittedly right with his thesis on the end of history because indeed liberal democracy seemed to have been the only logical system which caters for human needs and rights. Arguably, the Berlin Wall was torn down because the huge populations on the other end were desperate for freedom: to be able to vote, to have their say on relevant matters in a society, and that they become the individuals who will have their own representatives in government. It appeared that the USA had a particular historical opportunity the same as Ancient Rome had in Pax Romana to become Pax Americana in the capacity of a benevolent hegemon. The U.S. at least described itself that way. And many viewed them in that light.
If they had allowed peace to prevail and provided they had conceded to NATO being dismantled because the Warsaw Pact did, the situation now in 2023 would not be the same. After a while, it became obvious that their intention was not to establish democracy but (oft brutal) global dominance. And a unipolar world complete with it. Democracy for them appears to be just a cosmetically well packaged camouflage for despotism world wide or ‘the best democracy money can buy’ – as the U.S. political elite would tend to say in bare sarcasm. Imposing hegemony under the pretext of democracy which has long vanished turned it into its complete opposite. The U.S. political and financial Frankestein is well and truly out Orwellian style.
