A democracy summit amid turbulent times

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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The White House co-hosted its second Summit for Democracy last week. Attendance was mostly virtual. Kind of like democracy itself for those in authoritarian nations.

And even for some living in ostensible democracies.

In India, the world's largest democracy, a small-minded majority recently expelled Rahul Gandhi from Parliament. The top challenger to Prime Minister Narendra Modi was ousted because of a criminal defamation conviction for a line in a 2019 campaign speech.

In Israel, it took unprecedented protests to pause Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's push to legislatively change the country's justice system, and thus its democracy.

In France, more menacing protests over Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron's plan to unilaterally move the retirement age from 62 to 64 have nearly paralyzed Paris.

And in Brazil, in an eerie echo of Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, rioters ransacked government buildings to protest former President Jair Bolsonaro's loss last January.

These individual events are collectively exploited by China and Russia as they try to align non-Western countries in an alternative to the postwar, U.S.-led, rules-based international order. And there's some evidence their approach is working, at least as it pertains to the global response to the war in Ukraine.

True, U.N. resolutions exhibit support for "a comprehensive and lasting peace," but the West's justifiable umbrage isn't as potent in the developing world, in part because while the conflict has been correctly characterized as a struggle between democracy and autocracy, its impact is more directly felt in global economic upheaval that threatens the food supply, among other hardships.

"A lot of the developing world believes that their economic problems are because of our sanctions, not because of the Russian invasion," Thomas Hanson, diplomat-in-residence at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told an editorial writer. And, Hanson said, some see a double-standard or even racism on America's part for its outsized reaction to conflict in Europe compared to Africa.

There are "real tectonic shifts going on," Hanson said. The administration, he added, has been very good at "alliance building — but diplomacy is another matter because we are not doing well in the narrative and in promoting our interests outside of basically the G-7." Meanwhile, China's "narrative is actually doing better right now in the developing world than ours."

Richard Gowan, U.N. director for the International Crisis Group, told an editorial writer that in the context of the war China is projecting itself to the developing world as a "source of stability in the international system." These nations don't necessarily "make a concrete political bloc," Gowan said, but they've been relatively tepid in denouncing Russia.

"Although there is a lot of sympathy for the Ukrainians, many members of the U.N. are hedging and are trying to avoid throwing their lot in completely with the West or with Russia," Gowan said, adding that the consistent message is, "we don't want to get sucked into a grand geopolitical context. We want this crisis to pass."

It would pass sooner if Russia were more diplomatically isolated, so it's unfortunate that many developing nations don't recall their own independence struggles and unreservedly rally around Ukraine's.

President Joe Biden is right that the U.S. should be a beacon of democracy. But Washington should also use the sovereignty argument more forcefully.