The Foreign Service Journal, December 2022

60 DECEMBER 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The pledges generated by the summit varied widely in specific- ity and scope. New Zealand, for example, pledged $1 million NZD “to support anti-corruption within the Pacific region.” Meanwhile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo simply promised it would “[organize its] elections within constitutional deadlines.” Mixed Reviews Like any Washington policy initiative, the summit got mixed reviews at home. “I don’t think [the summit] amounted to much, substantively,” Colin Dueck, a foreign policy professor at George Mason University, told the author in a January 2022 interview. “One reason was the format. Hundreds of NGO leaders, private sector individuals, and heads of state are unlikely to hammer out a practical or workable agenda in a virtual setting. And they didn’t.” Others gave a more positive, if tentative, assessment. Retired Ambassador Norman Eisen, who served as chief of mission in the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014, and two colleagues from the Brookings Institution write that the summit “laid a robust groundwork for success. …The summit has already resulted in some initial measurable commitments to advance democracy in the U.S. and abroad, establishing specific, concrete steps to fulfill them.” However, they also note that any real success would require vigorous follow-through. Ambassador Cameron Munter, chief of mission in Serbia from 2007 to 2009 and in Pakistan from 2010 to 2012, believes some of the terminology surrounding the summit and the vagueness of its objectives served to muddy its intent. “The term ‘global demo- cratic revival’ presents a bit of a warning,” he said in an early 2022 interview with the author, because “there’s always a temptation to try to re-create ‘the way it was before,’ a kind of idealized, pre-pop- ulist time in which, somehow, democracy will flourish again. But this is unlikely. In my opinion, this is why the virtual democracy summit got mixed reviews. We know what we don’t like, and we have notions of what we used to have, but the question remains: What do we look forward to?” What, indeed. Last February, just two months after the virtual summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin—who had not been invited—offered one possible future scenario when he ordered his military to invade Ukraine. FreedomHouse president Michael Abramowitz told The New York Times on Feb. 27, 2022, that the invasion provided “a taste of what a world without checks on anti- democratic behavior would look like.” If there is a silver lining to the grisly story unfolding in Ukraine, it’s that it “made political leaders and thinkers sit up and realize that the threat to democracy is real and very concrete: [They think,] ‘Right now, it’s Ukraine, but it could be us next,’” said Staffan Lindberg, founding director of the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, in a live- streamed Carnegie Endowment event on April 8, 2022. “Hopefully [Ukraine has] galvanized democracies in both the global North and South to act more coherently together and stand up and sup- port one another going forward.” Democracy and Foreign Policy It’s an article of faith that promoting democracy makes good foreign policy. In an interview with the author, Ambassador Brian Carlson, who was chief of mission in Latvia from 2001 to 2004, explained his belief that “the United States is defined by, and cen- ters its foreign policy on, democracy. And we Americans believe that democracy depends on honoring the basic political rights of the individual.” Kori Schake, deputy director of policy planning at the State Department from 2007 to 2008 and now director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, says it’s important to keep promoting democracy abroad. In an interview earlier this year, she told the author: “Democracies don’t go to war against each other, and they don’t commit atrocities, and they abide by rules internationally because it’s the natural outgrowth of abiding by rules domestically.” The American public, however, doesn’t share the administra- tion’s eagerness to promote democracy—in fact, most think we needn’t bother. A December 2021 Pew Research Center poll found that only 25 percent of Americans believe promoting democracy should be a priority for U.S. foreign policy. Atlantic Council senior fellow Emma Ashford spoke for many when she said the United States needs to clean its own house first. “Ambitious foreign-policy goals are completely out of step with the realities of the country’s domestic political and economic dysfunction,” she wrote in For- eign Policy last year. “How can the United States spread democ- A December 2021 Pew Research Center poll found that only 25 percent of Americans believe promoting democracy should be a priority for U.S. foreign policy.