Tuesday 12 Jan 2021 @ 09:20
Chatham House
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Democracies Must Band Together and Look Inwards

EXPERT COMMENT

Creating a new coalition of democracies will not solve the world’s problems but can rebuild confidence and tackle vulnerabilities plaguing democratic societies.

‘Democracy is on the ballot’ was a common refrain by supporters of Joe Biden during the US presidential campaign, supporting the claim Donald Trump posed a grave threat to American democracy as well as promising to discard his affinity for autocrats and to restore democracy as a guiding light for America’s approach to the world.

Joe Biden will hardly be the first president to emphasize democracy in US foreign policy but he has the chance to do so in a fundamentally new way – by bringing together major democratic powers to focus on fixing problems in their own societies.

Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, policy experts have explored ideas for making cooperation among democracies a more integral part of US foreign policy. In the final year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright convened a group of 106 foreign ministers in Warsaw to launch the Community of Democracies, an intergovernmental coalition that still exists.

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Original article link: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/01/democracies-must-band-together-and-look-inwards

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