Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 31 December 2020. © Richard Kemp
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to use the G7 summit that Britain is hosting in 2021 to launch the ‘D10’, intended as an alliance of democracies to counter China.
His proposal is for the G7 group of leading industrialised nations to be joined by Australia, South Korea and India. The focus would be on developing 5G telecommunications technology to reduce dependence on Huawei and the Chinese Communist Party as well as reliance on essential medical supplies from China.
President-elect Joe Biden put forward a somewhat similar initiative in 2019 and it is widely believed that he plans to convene a ‘Summit for Democracies’ in 2021. It appears his intention is broader than Mr Johnson’s both in scope and participation, and that it includes promoting liberal democratic values across the world.
This raises the spectre of abortive efforts at democracy-building in the Middle East and South Asia in the years after 9/11. It would be ill-judged and it fails to recognise a changed world in which allegiance to the US has been devalued as economic incentives from China to many countries, including democracies, have significantly grown. Confidence in US leadership has also been substantially undermined by interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which today are widely regarded as failures. Under a Biden administration, many will be mindful of the Obama-era sell-out of America’s Middle East allies while accommodating the hostile Iranian ayatollahs.
In other words, while the spread and development of Western-style democracy should of course be encouraged, something of more concrete utility to national self-interest than a liberal-left world view needs to be on offer. Instead of attempting an ideological programme to duplicate American democracy around the world, the US should work with the UK on a version of Mr Johnson’s action-oriented D10 proposal, but significantly expanded in scope.
This would recognise that, despite the optimistic indulgences by foreign policy experts and politicians over decades, China will not reform to allow normal coexistence within the world order but must instead be contained. As British Chief of Defence Staff General Sir Nick Carter said in a speech this month:
‘What’s needed is a catalyst somewhat like George Kennan’s “long telegram” in which he observed that peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union in 1946 was unlikely to work. This led to the Truman Doctrine of containment which provided the basis of US and Western strategy throughout the Cold War.’ Continue reading