We Need a Global Alliance to Defend Democracies
by Richard Kemp • December 31, 2020 at 5:00 am
Under a Biden administration, many will be mindful of the Obama-era sell-out of America's Middle East allies while accommodating the hostile Iranian ayatollahs.
Despite the optimistic indulgences by foreign policy experts and politicians over decades, China will not reform to allow normal coexistence within the world order but must instead be contained.
A modern alliance to resist today's "attempted subjugation and outside pressures" should focus not only on China and the immediate challenges of 5G technology and supply chains, but also on the other major strategic threats to democratic states.... The object should not be... to lecture governments such as Hungary, Poland and Romania... While [Biden] may find their internal policies unpalatable, they pose no threat to any other country.
An interests-based, rather than ideological, alliance of strategically like-minded democracies should be built, each with the economic power and will to counter the authoritarian entities that oppose the Free World.... The alliance should work to push back the authoritarians and radicals across the economic, cultural, political, cyber and technological realms and deny them access to critical infrastructure and technology as well as opportunities for cultural subversion. It should also act to deter their further advances.
An important function of the proposed alliance would be to encourage member states, and their allies against authoritarian and extremist entities, to both provide adequate defence resources and where necessary adapt and modernise forces to ensure credible deterrence.
If a country lacks the confidence to stick up for its own values at home, how is it to robustly defend its virtues against those who wish to undermine them? This weakness in Western democracies has already allowed great strides across the world by China, Russia and jihadism and has helped create the situation that a D10 alliance is now urgently needed to repair.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to use the G7 summit that Britain is hosting in 2021 to launch the "D10", intended as an alliance of democracies to counter China.
His proposal is for the G7 group of leading industrialised nations to be joined by Australia, South Korea and India. The focus would be on developing 5G telecommunications technology to reduce dependence on Huawei and the Chinese Communist Party as well as reliance on essential medical supplies from China.
President-elect Joe Biden put forward a somewhat similar initiative in 2019 and it is widely believed that he plans to convene a "Summit for Democracies" in 2021. It appears his intention is broader than Mr Johnson's both in scope and participation, and that it includes promoting liberal democratic values across the world.