What is the US trying to achieve with its Summit for Democracy? | DW News

United States President Joe Biden on Thursday warned of a global slide in democracy, saying international trends were "largely pointing in the wrong direction." He called it a critical moment for fellow leaders to redouble their efforts to bolster democracies to "determine the direction our world will take in the next decade.” Speaking at the start of a two-day virtual Summit for Democracy Biden said "democracy doesn't happen by accident and we have to renew it with each generation." He called it the "defining challenge of our time."

A total of 110 world leaders are participating in the summit, but the gathering has drawn backlash from countries including China and Russia that were not invited to participate. Over the weekend China held its own own virtual "International Forum on Democracy." It involved politicians and scholars from more than 120 countries, according to state-owned CGTN's reporting. Chinese Communist Party officials said Biden's efforts to force others to copy the Western democratic model were "doomed to fail." That is exactly why the "Summit for Democracy is so important," Laura Thornton, director and senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, told DW. "We need to keep in mind that autocrats are having their own summits. They're exchanging lessons learned along with surveillance technology and other methods of coercion. So we really have a job ahead of us to defend our democracies," she said.

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