John Bolton’s Guide for Containing Russia and China
Drop the virtue signaling on democracy and put some boots on the ground in Ukraine. A Q&A with Trump’s former national security adviser.
Democracy summits aren’t going to deter them.
Photographer: Valery Sharifulin/Sputnik/AFP/Getty Images
Last month, I was in Honduras for its watershed presidential election. (OK, I was actually there to scuba dive, but it was during the watershed presidential election.) The result wasn’t a shock: The wife of a leftist former president with antidemocratic leanings beat the candidate of the right-wing ruling party with antidemocratic leanings. What was remarkable was how smoothly things went. The New York Times called it a “largely peaceful, orderly election” and reported that “the chief of the Organization of American States’s electoral observation mission, former President Luis Guillermo Solís of Costa Rica, called the vote ‘a beautiful example of citizen participation,’ noting the high turnout.”
Two weeks later, U.S. President Joe Biden held his Summit for Democracy, pledging “to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.” Guess who wasn’t invited: Honduras. And guess who was: Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq, all of which are rated “not free” in Freedom House’s annual democracy scorecard.