US democracy was “fragile”, U.S.’s Blinken

Shafaq News/ according to the America's top diplomat, Biden administration will seek to draw a line under a history of “costly military interventions” and policies aimed at regime change in other countries.

 Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, said on Wednesday in his first big speech since taking the office that past US interventions had given “democracy promotion” a bad name and lost the confidence of the American people.

“We will do things differently,” he said in a speech at the US Department of State.

“We will not promote democracy through costly military interventions or by attempting to overthrow authoritarian regimes by force. We have tried these tactics in the past. However well intentioned, they haven’t worked,” he added.

The admissions underpin the Biden administration’s efforts to shape a new foreign policy that breaks with Donald Trump’s “America First” isolationism while seeking to avoid longstanding criticisms that Washington is a meddling global policeman throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The US still has troops in Afghanistan, the theatre of its longest-running war, and maintains troops in more than 500 sites overseas including Japan, Germany and Bahrain.

Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, set a May 1 deadline to withdraw all remaining US troops from Afghanistan. Biden has yet to announce what he will do, although some Democratic advisers are pushing for troops to stay on in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Biden last week ordered the first military action of his presidency, launching deadly air strikes on Shia groups in Syria.

While Blinken said there was no question that US democracy was “fragile”, he also argued that the US was “uniquely capable of bringing countries together to solve problems no country can solve on its own”.

 “The world does not organize itself,” Blinken said, arguing that the US’s absence from the global stage led to chaos or alternative leadership that undercut US interests and values.