Summit for Democracy: A Deceptive Lure

The first summit took place in December 2021 under the pretext of rallying up countries to protect democracy across the world. However, in reality it was used to aggressively promote neo-liberal values by replacing democracy with democratism, which boils down to unlimited power of the elites under merely formal democratic institutions. The organisers also sought to create a broad anti-Russia and anti-China front based on ideology.

Needless to say, such "summits" only fuel international tensions and draw up new dividing lines, splitting the world into "friends" and "foes," stigmatising countries, pinning them down with labels, and enforcing an undefined "rules-based order".

The US undertaking stems from the neo-colonial approach in foreign affairs taken to a new level. To begin with, they hypocritically assess the "quality of democracy". It turns out that democracies can be of different quality. Not different stages of historical development or different traditions and cultures, but different qualities of democracy. Coming from the US, it is priceless, given its problems in all areas, from freedom of speech to human rights.

The editorial policy of the major Western media is de facto controlled by corporate elites. There are well-established mechanisms of censorship, self-censorship and removal of unwanted accounts and content from digital platforms to suppress dissent in the information environment.

Repressions against the participants of the protest rally at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, labelled as "domestic terrorists" by the authorities and certain media, raise serious questions. Dozens of people who disagreed with the outcome of the presidential election received prison terms disproportionate to their opposition activities.

Seeking the role of the "global democratic leader", the US has been leading the world in terms of the number of prisoners (more than 2 million people) for many years. Conditions of detention in many penitentiary institutions degrade human dignity. Washington continues to hush up cases of torture in the Guantanamo special prison. The US special services established many secret prisons in the territories of allied states, an unprecedented practice in the modern world.

 the unprecedented for the modern world practice of creating Lobbying in the United States is in fact an institutionalised form of corruption. Representatives of the legislature are de facto controlled by large businesses.

The countries that took part in the first summit were solicited to adopt decisions on democracy and human rights that suited the United States and its minions and were formulated as "voluntary commitments". But there is a trick. Instead of letting other countries formulate their own vows, Washington instructs them what pledges they must regard as their "voluntary commitments". Notably, the assessment and monitoring of compliance with these "voluntary commitments" lie with western NGOs.

The West finances the organisations that will inspect countries across the world for compliance with the "voluntary commitments" they were forced to make. This actually amounts to interfering in the internal affairs of states through handy organisations under the pretext of protecting democratic values. In the past, the West acted as the centre, using different methods in different countries. Today, through these "summits for democracy" they are creating a single mechanism cynical to its core that will cover the whole world.

Washington's goals are quite obvious. It wants to erode the system of international law where every state is equal before international law. It is playing with loaded dice to get competitive advantages over others, to influence domestic politics of individual countries, to gain the ability to censor the information space, and so on. States are being forced to toe Washington's line through political or economic pressure and blackmail. 

Taken together, this is a flagrant infringement of the main principle of international law made with a view to destroy the whole architecture. The principle of equality and self-determination of nations is being erased. This principle, which provides for the free choice by nations of their development paths, is being replaced with a system of governance with "rules", a "mechanism" for assessing democracy and issuing "recipes" to those who need to "upgrade" their democracy to the necessary level.

Biden's initiative to hold the so-called summit for democracy is the major vehicle of the US grand strategy designed to undermine the role of the UN and to cobble together American satellites on a broad agenda starting from climate change and vaccination to military diplomacy, creation of political and military-technological regional blocks like QUAD and AUKUS.

Alexander Mantytskiy/Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the People's Republic of Bangladesh 

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