December 5, 2021

President Joe Biden will convene more than 100 world leaders, along with civil society and private-sector representatives, for his much-touted “Summit for Democracy” on Thursday and Friday. The virtual event, focused on “renewing democracy in the United States and around the world,” fulfills a pledge Biden made repeatedly in his presidential campaign — and one that we urged him to ditch shortly after he was elected.

In an article laying out our case last December, we stressed that determining who is sufficiently democratic to make the invite list would inevitably create tensions, and that the entire concept of a democracy summit relies on an overly ideological approach to managing the global agenda. Better, we thought, to skip the summit and get to the work of promoting democracy by working with already existing international institutions and partnerships, while revitalizing our own programs like USAID. Finally, we feared the U.S. had questionable credibility to position itself as a leading democracy, worries that were heightened after January 6 and amid ongoing efforts by many Republicans to undercut our own democratic system.

The Biden team, obviously, chose differently. We still think the summit risks becoming a self-inflicted wound, but given that it is happening anyway, here are four ways in which the administration can mitigate the most likely pitfalls.

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