President Joe Biden has made democracy promotion a key element of his foreign policy, declaring from the outset that the United States would stand up for human rights and freedoms wherever they are under attack. Biden faced his first test shortly after he entered the White House, when a coup brought the military back to power in Myanmar. Biden promptly reimposed heavy sanctions on that country.
But as Biden nears the end of his term, his record on promoting or defending human rights and democracy globally is patchy at best. Still, in his reelection campaign, he has retained protecting the forces of human dignity and freedom as a core theme.
Unfortunately for Biden, nothing has been more damaging to that theme than his political and military support for Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, including his repeated refusal to push for a cease-fire. Such strong backing, while allowing the most right-wing and religiously conservative government in Israel’s history to expand its military assault across Gaza, is bleeding support from Biden’s base at home. More significantly, it has left the U.S. as diplomatically isolated as Russia was when it first invaded Ukraine.
Long before Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist atrocities led Israel to unleash war, Biden had been using promotion of democratic rights selectively — to target America’s adversaries and weak, strategically unimportant states, while condoning authoritarian practices in countries that matter to American interests. The pursuit of moral legitimacy in support of democracy promotion, meanwhile, has contributed to making sanctions the tool of choice for U.S. policymakers, despite being a blunt instrument to bring about political change.
Biden, for example, has been silent on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s lurch toward authoritarianism, because acknowledging that reality would run counter to the American president’s narrative that the war in Ukraine symbolizes a “battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”
The truth is that Zelensky has effectively choked Ukraine’s nascent democracy by banning opposition parties, jailing political opponents, shutting independent media outlets and deferring elections indefinitely under martial law. Zelensky has essentially followed in the footsteps of his nemesis, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Consider another example: While ratcheting up sanctions on military-ruled Myanmar — now reeling under a deepening humanitarian crisis — the Biden administration is mollycoddling Pakistan’s domineering military, which has long blocked a genuine democratic transition in the country. With the U.S. implicitly endorsing the Pakistani military’s viselike grip on national politics, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin in December hosted Pakistan’s army chief at the Pentagon, while Secretary of State Anthony Blinken invited the visiting general to his office.
Meanwhile, confounding those who believe in Biden’s rhetoric, the president, in practice, does not hew to his own narrative of a “global battle between democracy and autocracy,” thereby implicitly conceding that such a simplistic or rigid approach would crimp the wider pursuit of U.S. diplomatic interests. This is apparent from Biden’s strategic outreach to autocracies at a time when America’s sharpening competition with China is increasingly shaping its diplomacy.
One example stands out in particular. On the campaign trail in 2019, Joe Biden vowed to punish Saudi Arabia for its murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and Saudi crimes in Yemen, saying he intended to make the Saudis “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.” He also asserted that there is “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”
Yet, even at the risk of exposing the hollowness of his moralizing, Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia in July 2022 in order to mend frayed ties with the kingdom. And, despite the backlash he faced at home for fist-bumping Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during that visit, Biden gave the de facto Saudi leader a hearty handshake during the G-20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023.
In fact, after the summit, Biden directly flew from India, the world’s largest democracy, to Vietnam, one of the more authoritarian countries in the world, to upgrade strategic ties, despite Vietnam’s widening crackdown on dissent and peaceful protests.
To be sure, Biden’s outreach to non-democracies is advancing American interests. His embrace of the Saudi Crown Prince helped produce a multinational agreement in New Delhi on an ambitious, U.S.-promoted rail and shipping corridor that would extend from India to Europe via the Middle East. In Vietnam, Biden signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” a status that the U.S. had long wanted.
Few would question Biden’s effort to pursue a more balanced and pragmatic approach to the overseas promotion of democratic rights, given that more than two-thirds of Americans think that U.S. democracy itself is broken. Building new or closer partnerships with other states, even if they are non-democracies, has become imperative for the U.S. to help counter China’s global influence game. So it is scarcely a surprise that America today maintains close cooperation with a wide array of undemocratic or democratically-backsliding governments.
The problem lies in the Biden administration’s open use of human rights promotion as a geopolitical tool to bring pressure on the countries it targets, including through U.S. government-funded organizations. On occasion, human rights concerns are raised as leverage even against a friendly state like India. This approach blunts the effects of rights promotion by undermining American credibility.
Blending promotion of democratic rights with the application of sanctions, meanwhile, often only reinforces the authoritarian conduct of the targeted regimes. Examples extend from Myanmar, Iran and Syria to Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.
Worse still, sanctions against non-democracies almost invariably advance the commercial and strategic interests of America’s main rival, China. This means that the U.S. continues to aid China’s accumulation of economic and military power, while letting Beijing escape scot-free over abuses such as Muslim gulag in Xinjiang, the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since the Nazi era.
Simply put, the geopolitics of human rights and democracy promotion contribute to America’s strategic overreach, which, in turn, accelerates the relative decline of U.S. wealth and power.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).