Last week, President Biden hosted a virtual conference entitled the Summit for Democracy and invited dozens of heads of state. The premise of the summit was that democratically oriented government, civil society, and private-sector leaders would meet to lay out a practical agenda regarding the common threat from authoritarianism. Predictably, they failed to do so.
From the beginning, media coverage of the Summit for Democracy obsessed over the meeting’s invite list. Treating the event as if it were a Hollywood award-show after party, journalists gossiped about the attendees: Who’s in? Who’s out? But since there is a gray zone of semi-democratic states in the world — and since the United States must inevitably retain working relationships with many such states — there was never any way to satisfy critics with the concept of a global democratic summit.
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