Myanmar and Russia show limits to Biden’s pro-democracy agenda

When Joe Biden took the stage at City University in July 2019, the presidential candidate was not just looking to give a speech about his worldview. He intended to make a statement about democracy and America’s defense of it around the world.

“I will ensure that democracy is once again the watchword of US foreign policy – not to launch a moral crusade, but because it is in our enlightened self-interest,” he told the New York crowd. “We have to defend freedom and democracy.”

But this week has shown how difficult it will be for President Biden to defend democracy and to oppose autocracy in a truly meaningful way.

On Monday, Myanmar’s military overthrew the country’s civilian leadership in a coup, ending its decade-long democratic experience. The next day, a Russian court sentenced opposition leader Alexei Navalny to nearly three years in prison, delivering a devastating blow to the pro-democracy movement that threatened Vladimir Putin’s government.

Together, these two international crises highlight a major challenge that Biden will face in the next four years, just as other presidents before him did: how to support democratic movements in places where the United States does not really have much influence, and where it could end up hurting themselves movements that the US wants to support.

In Myanmar, the United States has few options to pressure governing generals to turn the tide, especially as they barely provide financial assistance to the government. As for Russia, any American effort to support democracy in and around it is seen as a threat to be repressed and delegitimized. Last October, shortly after the Kremlin poisoned and nearly killed Navalny, the Putin regime claimed that the dissident worked with the CIA.

American leaders with high hopes of ushering in a more democratic future inevitably face the harsh reality of their limitations and the opposing forces working against them. “All governments in the past 30 years have struggled with this,” said Erin Snider, a specialist in promoting democracy in the United States at Texas A&M University.

Myanmar and Russia, then, show that the Biden government is already in the middle of this dilemma.

“It is certainly an initial test of the commitment they have made,” said Patrick Porter, head of security and international strategy at the University of Birmingham, UK. “It may not have been so difficult for the Biden government if they had not built their foreign policy around this issue.”

Promoting democracy is one thing. Successfully promoting democracy is another.

Progressives have made promoting pro-democracy movements around the world a cornerstone of their foreign policy platform in 2020, and Biden has repeatedly emphasized that his government will also seek to follow this approach.

But, as the cases in Myanmar and Russia make clear, talking is much easier than doing.

Washington took a quick first step in showing its discontent with the governments of Naypyitaw and Moscow, with Biden calling the military takeover of Myanmar a “direct attack on the country’s transition to democracy” and Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding that Russia ” immediately and unconditionally release Mr. Navalny. ”

Alexander Nemenov / AFP via Getty Images

Some skeptics view these pro-forma statements as irresponsible, but most say it is better for Biden’s team to make it clear where it is than to let it go. “I prefer to see a government that speaks out against these regimes, imposes costs and continues to defend the world’s Navalys,” a senior Democratic official in Congress told me.

But the statements are the easy part. The difficult part is not only deciding how much to support a nation’s democratic movement, but also how best to support it.

See Myanmar. After declaring the takeover of the military a “coup” on Tuesday, the Biden government said it would cut aid to the government and still send money to pro-democracy and civil society groups.

But State Department officials told reporters that day that the amount of financial support the US provides to the regime is “very little, almost none”, meaning that cutting aid is likely to do little to change the generals’ opinion.

Biden is also studying the possibility of imposing economic sanctions on Myanmar in the coming weeks. But while this would potentially give the United States an additional advantage over the military generals who rule the country, the shot could backfire.

This is because some experts warned that doing so could end up increasing the already immense economic influence of authoritarian China in Myanmar, while expelling democratic countries like South Korea and Japan, which worked to develop economic and military ties with the country and break China’s “strangulation” there.

And while China has a complicated relationship with Myanmar’s military regime, closer ties between the two countries are unlikely to bode well for Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement – or for the Biden government’s efforts to stem the growing influence of China in the region.

“The events in Myanmar will test how much competition with China serves as an organizing principle for US foreign policy under the Biden government,” a member of the Democratic Congress told me.

As for Russia, Biden has already avoided restarting relations with the country, so he is unlikely to care much about opposing the Kremlin. But Putin blamed the United States for his support for the big protests against the regime in 2011 – protests that Navalny helped to lead. Experts say it was when the dictator chose to oppose Washington instead of working with him, leading to the Kremlin’s interference in the last two presidential elections and the invasion of the US government.

If Biden wants to prevent US-Russia relations from growing further, he may not want to do more than condemnatory statements. And if he wants to help Navalny’s movement, showing too much enthusiasm can backfire. “In some cases, the US wrapping its flag around you can damage your legitimacy at home,” Porter of the University of Birmingham told me.

Furthermore, it is not clear whether the United States really has many ways to force Russia to change. The Kremlin rejects any democratization effort in and around Russia, while pro-democracy groups like Navalny’s are eliminated the second they become excessively threatening. The best way to punish Russia would be for European countries to restrict ties with Moscow, but this has always proved difficult for any US government.

Nobody expects Biden, or any government in the United States, to depose autocrats and inaugurate democracies in full expansion over his four or even eight years. At most, the United States can move the needle a little so that, over time, a country can liberalize so that organic democracy movements can grow. But even incremental progress requires trade-offs, which require the president and his team to assess how much they value a foreign nation’s democratic inclinations over everything else.

Biden, then, is the last American leader to face this problem, which has also plagued his predecessors. “I don’t think any president has been absolutely stellar on that front,” said Snider of Texas A&M.

The question now is whether the dramatic events in Myanmar and Russia – all in the first two weeks of his presidency – have prompted Biden to reconsider promoting democracy as the “watchword” of his foreign policy. Otherwise, you run the risk of not achieving your high goals.

“It’s a test that you can only fail,” said Porter.