On December 9-10, President Biden will host the “Summit for Democracy” that will bring together, in a worldwide online connection, “leaders of government, civil society and the private sector.” The invitation list includes 111 countries. Among them are 28 of the 30 NATO members: Turkey and Hungary are missing but, on the other hand, Israel and Ukraine are there, along with 26 of the 27 EU members except Hungary. The Summit “will provide them with a platform to defend democracy and human rights at home and abroad, to address through collective action the greatest threats facing democracies today”. This will launch “a year of action to make democracies more responsive and resilient,” culminating in a second Summit in attendance to “build a community of partners committed to global democratic renewal.”
Joe Biden thus maintains what was announced in the election program [1]: a global Summit of the “nations of the free world”, first of all to “counter Russian aggression, keeping NATO’s military capabilities sharp and imposing real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms” and, at the same time, to “build a united front against China’s offensive actions and human rights violations”. In doing so, the United States will return to “play the leadership role in writing the rules.” “The defense of democratic values,” Biden reiterated as president, “is stamped into our DNA as a nation”.
What is imprinted in the DNA of the United States is evidenced by the hundred or so wars of conquest that have characterized its history. According to a documented study by James Lucas (the manifesto, November 20, 2018), just the series of wars and coups – carried out by the United States since 1945 in more than 30 Asian, African, European and Latin American countries – has caused 20-30 million deaths, hundreds of millions of wounded (many of whom remained disabled), plus an untold number of deaths, probably hundreds of millions, caused by the indirect effects of the wars: famines, epidemics, forced migration, slavery and exploitation, environmental damage, diversion of resources from vital needs to cover military expenditures.
In the bloodiest wars – Korea, Vietnam and Iraq – US military forces were directly responsible for 10-15 million deaths. The bloodiest coup d’état was organized in 1965 in Indonesia by the CIA: it provided the Indonesian death squads with the list of the first 5 thousand communists and others to be killed. The number of slaughtered is estimated between half a million and 3 million.
Joe Biden himself, promoter of the “Summit for Democracy”, had a leading role in part of this story. In 2001, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he supported President Bush’s decision to attack and invade Afghanistan and, in 2002, sponsored a bipartisan resolution authorizing President Bush to attack and invade Iraq. In 2007, he pushed through the Senate a plan to dismember Iraq into three regions – Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite – functional to U.S. strategy. In 2009-2017, as vice-president of the Obama administration, he participated in the planning and execution of the wars against Libya and Syria and of the putsch in Ukraine, in which Biden played a direct and decisive role.
Regarding internal democracy, it is enough to remember that, according to official statistics, the police kills every year in the U.S. about 1,000 unarmed citizens, mostly Blacks and Hispanics. Suffice it to recall that the U.S. wants to sentence to 175 years in prison the journalist Julian Assange who brought to light their war crimes. Probably in a few days the British judiciary will decide on his extradition to the U.S.. Meanwhile, on December 6, Great Britain co-hosted a preparatory event for the Summit, entitled “Defending Democracies against Disinformation”, focused on “best practices for addressing disinformation and advancing an open and transparent information system”.