Biden hopes to reassert American faith in democracy after four years in which former President Donald Trump toadied to dictators to lead the world’s democracies in the struggle with autocratic states, above all China, for the hearts and minds of the world’s citizens and to agree on strategies to fortify democracies against internal and external threats. The ambitions behind the summit are epic in scope. to lead the effort towards democratic resilience and reinvigoration around the world.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told me last month, “In every conversation I’ve heard him have with a foreign leader, the centerpiece of the conversation has been that he sees the fundamental struggle of our time as the face-off between autocracy and democracy. No task seems more urgent than the protection of democracy at home and abroad. Unlike his predecessors of whatever persuasion, this president has taken office at a moment when a democratic future in the United States-and in some important allied countries-can no longer be taken for granted.

Bush at one end and “realist” skeptics like Richard Nixon and Bush the elder at the other, Biden would fit most comfortably with the realists, though he is certainly more sensitive to human rights violations than they.īiden seems to have been mugged by reality. If one were to place American presidents of the last century along a spectrum of missionary democratization, with idealists like Woodrow Wilson and George W. (There’s a reason the press has always had a soft spot for the man.) He had, I noticed, marked the parts about limitation, failure, hubris. In the summer of 2009, when I first met then-Vice President Biden to interview him for a New York Times Magazine profile, he pulled out a copy of The Freedom Agenda, my book on democracy promotion, to show me the passages he had underlined.

Years later, he did not expect much of similar efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan. As a freshman senator half a century ago, he opposed the Vietnam War not because he regarded it as immoral but because he didn’t think the United States could reform the autocratic regime in Saigon.

Joe Biden has never put much stock in America’s self-assigned mission of fostering democracy abroad.

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