The Biden administration is also sharing hosting duties this year with the Netherlands, Costa Rica, South Korea and Zambia to emphasize the breadth of the democratic coalition. And it comes three weeks after the Netherlands joined hands with the U.S. to limit the export of advanced semiconductor technologies to China.
But solidifying alliances with countries in regions beyond Europe has proved just as difficult, if not more so.
The Solomon Islands — a longtime U.S. ally on strategically vital sealanes linking Australia with Hawaii — turned a deaf ear to Biden’s democracy rhetoric by inking a controversial security pact with Beijing in 2021.
Parts of Africa have also been a hard sell, particularly because so many countries there have benefited from China’s large infrastructure investments. While 27 African countries voted in favor of a March 2022 U.N. resolution against Russia’s aggression, 16 others — including South Africa — abstained from the vote while Eritrea voted against it.
In Latin America, Costa Rica is the sole country that joined U.S. sanctions against Russia. And the region’s Mercosur trade grouping denied Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s request to speak to the body in July.
China is taking its own multipronged approach to courting the globe.
On Ukraine, Beijing is trying to show its friendlier side — but to both Russia and the West. Xi’s visit with Putin produced multiple “strategic cooperation” deals that included an increase in Russian gas sales to Beijing as well as agreements to expand cross-border transport links by building new bridges and roads.
At the same time, China has gone on a global public relations push to paint itself as the country advocating for peace in Ukraine. Beijing is marketing a 12-point potential peace plan. And Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang assured Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in a phone call earlier this month that Beijing wants “a constructive role” in ending the conflict.
China also hosted its very own International Forum on Democracy last week, claiming 300 participants from 100 countries. The group discussed “diverse forms of democracy, slamming monistic and hegemonic narratives on the subject,” Chinese state media reported.
“We uphold true multilateralism, work for a multi-polar world and greater democracy in international relations, and make global governance more just and equitable,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said earlier this month.
That rhetoric underscores Beijing’s shift from blanket rejection of criticism of its political system to a semantic redefinition of democracy and human rights.
“What the Chinese are trying to do is not fight against democracy and human rights and reject them — they’re trying to pick Biden’s pocket and co-opt them by defining them as what China does,” said Daniel Russel, Obama’s former assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
Asked about the Biden administration’s democracy summit, the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in D.C., Liu Pengyu, said the U.S. is “trying to divide the world into ‘democratic’ and ‘non-democratic’ camps based on its criteria, and openly provoke division and confrontation.”
As much as Beijing wants to keep trade lanes open with Europe, it is also getting more aggressive toward trading partners that turn against it. China imposed a trade embargo against Lithuania in 2021 after Taiwan set up a diplomatic office in the EU country. More recently, it threatened the Netherlands with possible retaliations for siding with the U.S. on semiconductors.
