In an article published today, Dr. Robin Niblett, Director and Chief Executive of Chatham House—the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA)—recommends that “defense of democracy” internationally be the glue that would really cement the U.S.-U.K. Special Relationship under a Joe Biden presidency, even though Britain’s exit from the European Union might complicate other issues in which the U.K. would normally be involved with the U.S. The article appears under the headline “A New U.S.-U.K. Democratic Agenda Could be on the Horizon.”
Niblett and the oligarchic interests he represents are anxious to ensure the U.S. could continue to be roped in to defend the post-World War II “liberal democratic order” which is now crumbling at an accelerating rate. Defense of democracy, he states, “has long been a clarion call” of Biden’s, and of course Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab are absolutely on the same page. Niblett recalls Biden’s October 2018 speech at Chatham House in which he demanded that the transatlantic community “rally together to counter the authoritarian alternative,” and his more recent campaign vow to host a “Summit for Democracy” in his first year in office, if elected. Transatlantic nations should pledge “to fight corruption, defend against authoritarianism and the spread of the surveillance state and advance human rights in their own countries as well as abroad,” Biden trumpeted during his campaign.
Niblett is confident that all of the wonderful things the U.K. has done to defend democracy abroad—sanctioning the Chinese for imposing its “draconian” National Security Law on Hong Kong, including the so-called “Magnitsky provisions” into the new U.K. Sanctions Act, and being the first to sanction officials in the Belarus government for “suppressing democracy”—can now serve “as the foundation for a more modern,” 21st-century U.S.-U.K. Special Relationship. China and Russia are clearly targets in this geopolitical screed.
The U.K.’s chairmanship of the G7 group of democracies is the best way to protect democratic values within a more institutional approach, he suggests, and recommends expanding G7 membership to even include democracies from Asia, Africa and Latin America, as these are regions where “Chinese influence is expanding most rapidly,” along with the threat that its 5G technology might be embraced. It would be best if Britain used its G7 chairmanship as a prelude to Biden’s proposed Summit for Democracy, Niblett concludes, warning that both nations will have to “integrate their democracy agendas around meaningful steps,” to show that the special relationship “reaches beyond the practical realms of military, intelligence and counter-terrorism cooperation.” In this way, he says hopefully, the U.S. and U.K. “would be working together again, as they did in the 1940s, to bring about the sort of liberal democratic world order that both countries want to see.”
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/11/new-us-uk-democratic-agenda-could-be-horizon
