In practice, the Biden administration’s foreign policy has been more conventional than the rhetoric suggests: “Realpolitik from top to bottom,” as international relations scholar Paul Poast put it earlier this year.
The goal has not so much been to defeat authoritarianism writ large as to compete with and contain particular authoritarian powers: China, Russia, and Iran.
Sometimes, as in US support for Ukraine’s war effort and military aid to Taiwan, this can fairly be described as standing up for a beleaguered democracy.
Sometimes, as in the upgrading of relations between the US and Vietnam that came during Biden’s visit to the country last year, it’s hard to see it that way. Conveniently for the US, Vietnam, a major American trade partner, is increasingly wary about China’s territorial aims in the South China Sea, but the two countries have very similar political systems: single-party, Communist regimes without national elections.
When the US convened a virtual “summit of democracies” in 2021, a good portion of the coverage and commentary focused not on the meetings themselves, but on the guest list. For instance, Hungary, a country whose government was backsliding on democracy and the rule of law and becoming increasingly friendly to Russia, was excluded. Poland, a country whose government was (at the time) backsliding on democracy and the rule of law, but was staunchly anti-Russian, was not.
In 2022, the US hosted the Summit of the Americas — a periodic gathering of Western Hemisphere leaders — but excluded Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, all authoritarian governments subject to US sanctions. The administration’s principled pro-democracy stance was undercut somewhat by the fact that the White House was simultaneously planning a presidential trip to Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis, as they have from numerous previous administrations, evidently get a pass when it comes to Biden’s freedom agenda.
The president famously promised on the campaign trail to make Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, a “pariah” over his role in the killing of journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi. In 2022, with the war in Ukraine putting pressure on global oil markets, Biden and “MBS” shared an awkward fist bump in Riyadh.
More recently, the administration has been pushing an ambitious deal under which Saudi Arabia would formally recognize Israel in exchange for concessions from Israel on Palestinian statehood and formal security guarantees from the US. The US hasn’t agreed to a pact like this with any country since Japan in 1960.
Then there’s India, where nearly a billion voters are going to the polls this month, but where moves by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government to sideline its opponents and crack down on the media have raised some questions about how much longer the “world’s largest democracy” will live up to that title.
The administration has been conspicuously quiet about the democratic backsliding in a country it considers a vital bulwark against Chinese power. This soft touch has continued even in the face of compelling evidence of plans by India’s intelligence services to kill the government’s critics on US soil.
And finally, there’s Israel’s war on Gaza. The administration’s arguments that countries in the Global South should be doing more to back Ukraine and punish Russia in the name of the rules-based international order fall a little flat when the US continues to provide weapons to a country that even the State Department concludes is likely violating the laws of war.
This administration is hardly the first to fall a little short of its own rhetoric when it comes to democracy and human rights. And it’s not as if Trump would do more to advance democracy or human rights if elected instead — not when it comes to Israel, or Saudi Arabia, or any other country.
But the sweep and ambition of this president and his team’s rhetoric make it hard not to note the inconsistencies as they rock on in an increasingly unfree world.
—Joshua Keating, senior correspondent
