![]() It is that the incumbent Sri Lankan regime and its ethos, are closer to autocracy than democracy. So, it is not an indictment of Sri Lanka’s democratic system. Sri Lanka’s exclusion from the global summit is an estimation that Sri Lanka today is led by someone who cannot be invited to a summit on democracy because he is hardly committed in his actions and discourse, to the values and norms of democracy, and the superiority of democracy as a system. Equally obviously, had Trump been a leader of another country, he would not have been invited to the summit. Obviously Biden never felt that the USA itself was not a democracy in terms of its system, even while he denounced Trump as an autocrat. The global Summit for Democracy is an effort at coordination, consensus and coalescence. Now, it seems that Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, having narrowly won the battle for America’s soul, is waging the battle of ideas globally. In his campaign he often said that what was at stake was no less than a battle for the soul of America.īiden felt that Trump was also unable to lead the USA successfully in the great power competition against China, though Trump had escalated the US response, because as an ultranationalist with pronounced autocratic tendencies, there was an ideological continuum between the President of the USA and the President of the USA’s greatest competitor, China and of the latter’s greatest ally, Russia.Ĭhina and Russia had given evidence of this by embracing rightwing, ultraconservative regimes and formations, a classic example being the Myanmar junta. Biden sees an organic link between ultranationalism and autocracy, and Donald Trump together with the Ku Klux Klan and proto-Nazi fringe that supported him as the domestic ‘axis of evil’ he felt compelled to do battle against. This is one of the reasons he came out of retirement to battle Trump. He perceives it not merely as an external battle it is internal to America too. It is that battle that he feels is the greatest challenge that he faces and indeed this generation faces. democracy’-is the more important existential one. December’s summit is the first of two, the other in 2022.įor Biden, the great power competition can be managed, but the battle of ideas-which he has consistently and correctly billed as ‘autocracy vs. He also believes that the USA should lead the struggle in the battle for democracy as an idea, and that this requires a concerted global effort an in-gathering of global forces. He believes that the US should not merely have a network of strategic alliances and allies which can meet contain China (and Russia) in the great power competition. This was one of the arguments woven into the backcloth of Joe Biden’s two massive bills for infrastructure development and social spending. Biden is acutely aware that China promotes its belief that its system is superior to that of democracy due to its better outcomes in terms of the delivery of material public welfare. The other dimension is that of the competition between systems as reflected in the contest of values, norms, ideas, ideologies. The virtual summit with President Xi is an example of that endeavour. In that realm, President Biden has been trying to cool things down so that there is no inadvertent clash. One of Biden’s deeply-felt ideas is that the USA must retrieve the high ground of its own democratic values and commitments which President Trump traduced.Īpart from its intrinsic importance, he feels that the contestation with China is taking place in two dimensions. The summit was a promise that Joe Biden made at least a year before he was elected. That’s hardly surprising given the current leadership in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka, the oldest democracy in Asia and indeed Afro-Asia, finds itself left out of the (virtual) global Summit for Democracy (8-9 Dec) for which 110 states have been invited by President Biden. Indeed, President GR is also the perfect example of Biden’s hypothesis of Trump and Xi being on an autocratic continuum His presence and participation at the summit would have undermined the very purpose of it. He is no longer in the camp of democracy. When President Gotabaya Rajapaksa tells President Xi on the record, twice, that he wishes “to learn the governance experience of the Communist Party of China”, he cannot realistically be expected to be invited to the US President’s global summit on democracy. SJB and Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa
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