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On December 9-10, President Biden will host the “Summit for Democracy” which will bring together worldwide online “leaders of government, civil society, and private sector.” The guest list includes 111 countries. Among these guests are 28 of the 30 NATO members: Turkey and Hungary are missing but, on balance, there are Israel and Ukraine together 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 face through collective action the greatest threats facing democracies today”. This will initiate “a year of action to make democracies more reactive and resilient”, which will culminate with the second Summit in attendance to “build a community of partners committed to global democratic renewal”.
Joe Biden thus maintains what was announced in his electoral program (il manifesto, November 10, 2020): a global Summit of the “nations of the free world“, first of all to “counter Russian aggression, keeping NATO’s military capabilities sharpened and imposing on Russia the real costs for its violations of international norms “and, at the same time, for ” building a united front against China’s offensive actions and violations of human rights “. In this way, the United States will once again “play the leading role in writing the rules.” “The defense of democratic values – reiterated Biden as President – is stamped in our DNA as a nation“.
What is imprinted in the DNA of the United States is demonstrated by approximately one hundred wars of conquest that have characterized their history. According to a documented study by James Lucas (Il manifesto, November 20, 2018), only the series of wars and coups d’etat – carried out by the United States from 1945 to the present day in over 30 Asian, African, European, and Latin American countries – has provoked 20-30 million deaths, hundreds of millions of injured people (many of them remained disabled), plus a polluted number of deaths, probably hundreds of millions, caused by the indirect effects of wars: famines, epidemics, forced migrations, slavery, and exploitation, environmental damage, subtraction of resources from vital needs to cover military expenses. In the bloodiest wars – Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq – US military forces were directly responsible for 10-15 million deaths. The bloodiest coup was organized in 1965 in Indonesia by the CIA: it provided the Indonesian death squads with the list of the first 5,000 Communists and others to kill. The number of people killed 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 Affairs Commission, he supported President Bush’s decision to attack and invade Afghanistan, and, in 2002, he promoted a bipartisan resolution authorizing President Bush to attack and invade Iraq. In 2007, he passed a plan to break up Iraq into three regions – Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite – functional to US 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 the putsch in Ukraine, in which Biden played a direct and decisive role.
With regard to internal democracy, it is enough to remember that, according to official statistics, the police killed about 1,000 defenseless citizens every year in the US, mainly blacks and Hispanics. Suffice it to recall that the United States wants to sentence the journalist Julian Assange to 175 years in prison for bringing to light their war crimes. Probably in a few days, the British judiciary will decide on his extradition to the USA. Meanwhile, on December 6, Britain co-hosted a preparatory event for the Summit, entitled “Defending Democracies from Disinformation“, and focused on “best practices for promoting an open and transparent information system.”
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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.
Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
