The plan’s attempt to “promote of democracy” is a pretext for wars of aggression and American imperialism.

As the Cold War came to an end that the US “increasingly emphasized support for democracy as a foreign policy goal” as it sought to “a new organizing concept that [could] fill the void left by containment’s demise”.41 According to Peceny, the US “use[d] the promotion of democracy to build domestic political consensus and ‘policy legitimacy’ for US interventions”.42 Washington’s track record in subsequent decades of invoking “democracy promotion” to launch wars of aggression, particularly in the case of Iraq, and regime change efforts has left the concept with little credibility. By 2008, Thomas Carothers, the leading academic proponent of US “democracy promotion” lamented that, “on the world stage, the US provokes many doubts and suspicions about its efforts to promote democracy”.43 Carothers list of prescriptions “to decontaminate American democracy promotion” reflect the degree to which the concept had been abused: “[the US] has to first say that democracy promotion will not be pursued via unauthorized military force against another country. Secondly, it means that the US must stop associating democracy promotion with regime change … Third, it means not intervening in elections for the sake of favoring certain groups”.44 In fact, as Carothers more-or-less conceded, democracy promotion was merely an ideological justification to buttress the designs of US imperialism in the post-Cold War era.45

Moreover, Washington has consistently demonstrated it is willing to abandon its purported democratic concerns when it serves US interests. To expand its global military base network, Vine demonstrates that “[US] officials have repeatedly collaborated with murderous, antidemocratic regimes and ignored widespread evidence of human rights abuses”.46 Many of the countries that host US military bases qualify as “authoritarian regimes” under leading democracy indices; in these cases, Vine argues that “American installations and the troops stationed on them are effectively helping block the spread of democracy”.47

Due to this historic and ongoing hypocrisy, the Biden administration’s “democracy versus autocracy” framework has faced widespread criticism and struggled to galvanize global support. 48 Due to its close relations with far-right, repressive governments in India, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and the Philippines, the US has been accused of hypocrisy and using “democracy” as ploy to construct a geopolitical bloc. Ahead of Biden’s initial “Summit for Democracy”, a report in The Washington Post noted that the White House had “creat[ed] an invite list that seems to divide the world into good guys and bad guys”.49 Former State Department official, Elizabeth Shackelford has observed that the “‘us’ versus ‘them’ approach” has “draw[n] attention to the hypocrisy of US engagement around the world”.50 As such, “[t]he clear lesson emerging is that democratic values matter a lot less than winning the geopolitical influence game” against China and Russia.51 Across the Global South there is little desire to be drawn into a new Cold War in the name of “democracy”, as evidenced by the emergence of a “new non-alignment” – a development that has caused much frustration in Western capitals.52