CP fails, increases backlash from non democratic countries

Third, too great an emphasis on democratic solidarity as a foundation for world order risks being geopolitically divisive, splitting the world into democratic and nondemocratic camps while undermining prospects for pragmatic cooperation with authoritarian powers including on crucial issues of peace and security, climate change, and the global economy. In practice, global problems do not coincide with ideological boundaries, and managing them requires cooperation with adversaries as well as like-minded fellow travelers. The United States and its allies are deeply entwined economically with China, and they need to coordinate with Beijing and (over the medium and longer term) with Moscow to address a slew of transnational threats that pay little heed to regime type, such as the dangers posed by climate change, pandemic disease, and nuclear proliferation.68 In response to this critique, proponents of a democratic alliance retort that an East-West geopolitical competition is already well under way, and the culprits are authoritarian China and Russia, who are pursuing revisionist, aggressive, and subversive policies. Neither Beijing nor Moscow, they are quick to add, has allowed the objective need to collaborate with democracies on global challenges temper their own national efforts to overturn the existing rules-based order or interfere in the internal political systems of free societies.69 In other words, if international cooperation is deteriorating, autocracies are the ones to blame. Even if this is true, there is a fourth and more serious problem with the club approach: it oversimplifies the global landscape and does not resonate with pressing developing country concerns. To begin with, a strict distinction between democracies and nondemocracies ignores the world’s messier realities, including the large and growing number of quasi- or flawed democracies, like India, whose independence and weight in world affairs is increasing. These dilemmas came to the fore in the guest list for Biden’s 2021 Summit for Democracy, which included the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan, for example, but not Singapore or Turkey.70 The effort to assign countries into one of two categories risks alienating important if problematic partners and, in the process, undermining other U.S. diplomatic goals. Compounding matters, when U.S. officials invoke the concept of democratic solidarity, many in the developing world understand this to imply a focus on wealthy, rather than poor, democracies.71 The West’s perceived inattention to development challenges in the Global South reinforces this sentiment. The war in Ukraine has accentuated this conundrum. While Western nations have thus far maintained a united front in opposition to Moscow’s aggression, many emerging economies and developing countries are leery of choosing sides in a new cold war or rallying to democracy’s banner. This is true even for democracies like Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa—all of which have chosen, for an amalgam of historical, ideological, nationalist, and pragmatic reasons, to pursue various degrees of nonalignment. (In India’s case, the practical motivations include preserving Russia as a source of military materiel and low-cost energy and as a strategic counterweight to China.)72 At the G20 foreign ministers meeting in July 2022, Secretary of State Antony Blinken failed to enlist these nations (as well as China, of course) in isolating and punishing Moscow.73