Ex-NATO Chief Says US Democracy Summit May Give Rise To New 'D11' Alliance

A new 11-strong alliance may come into being after the-US led Summit for Democracy, which is being hosted by President Joe Biden amid rising tensions with Russia and China regarding Ukraine and Taiwan, former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told Newsweek in an interview

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 09th December, 2021) A new 11-strong alliance may come into being after the-US led Summit for Democracy, which is being hosted by President Joe Biden amid rising tensions with Russia and China regarding Ukraine and Taiwan, former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told Newsweek in an interview.

President Joe Biden opened a two-day virtual Summit for Democracy earlier on Thursday, bringing together government officials, civil society and private sector representatives from more than 110 countries. The list of guests does not include China, Hungary, Russia, Saudi Arabia or Turkey, among a dozen other nations.

"It is high time that the world's democracies rally around certain principles ... My long-term vision for this project is to create an alliance of democracies," Rasmussen said, noting that it could be overseen by a permanent secretariat.

The former NATO chief suggested that the alliance could be led by a "D11" group of democracies, including G7 members, as well as Australia, India, and South Korea.

"We don't have an international organization based on freedom and democracy," Rasmussen said. "So we need that, not as an alternative to the United Nations, but as a forum that can coordinate our views on how to reform other multilateral national organizations and first and foremost to counter advancing autocracies.

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The purpose of such an alliance, Rasmussen went on to say, is to be a driving force for setting global norms and standards for the use of emerging technology, such as AI and social media.

He also believes that the democratic alliance should create an "economic Article 5" inspired by NATO's Article 5.

"We should adopt free trade agreements with Australia, we should increase our economic relations with Australia. Now the same goes for Lithuania ... of course we should help Lithuania," Rasmussen said. "Once democracy is attacked by China or another autocratic regime, then we should help, we should consider it an attack on all and we should unite and help that country."

The Russian Foreign Ministry has criticized the US summit for trying to designate on their criteria which country is democratic and which not, especially in light of a decay of democracy in the West.

Beijing has said that the summit provokes a split and confrontation in the world, while Budapest stated that it does not need a "judge" that would assess the state of their democracy.