Is Biden Right That US Democracy Is Beating China and Russia?

Is democracy on a roll? You would think so if you listened to President Joe Biden’s speech at last week’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. It was vintage Biden, the rhetoric alternately soaring and stumbling. He started with “the transformational power of freedom” in Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors as they broke free of Soviet rule, lighting up “the flame of liberty.” The enlargement of NATO and the advance of democracy are one and the same, he argued, because the alliance is “bound by democratic values.”

The war in Ukraine, the president declared, is a war between a coalition of democracies and a Russian autocracy that poses a threat “to democratic values we hold dear, to freedom itself.” In the same way, the Quad partnership between Australia, India, Japan and the US is “bringing major democracies of the region together to cooperate, keeping the Indo-Pacific free.” Biden depicted the world in Manichean terms, divided starkly between the democracies, united in “the defense of freedom,” and their benighted foes, who would prefer “a world defined by coercion and exploitation, where might makes right.”