“ON December 9 to 10, 2021, President Biden will host the first of two Summits for Democracy, which will bring together leaders from government, civil society and the private sector to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.”

Thus goes the opener of an account on the projected Joe Biden-hosted world event.

Joe Biden is the same guy who stated early on in his presidency: “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.”

The statement was made close on the heels of the mayhem that witnessed his takeover of the US presidency at the start of the year. But for an apparent lastminute decision by defeated President Donald Trump to deprive his successor of his leadership, thousands of Trump’s supporters protesting Biden’s election as president, came close to duplicating peoplepower ouster of presidents here and there in the world. Talks were rife at the time that Trump was about to give in to an urge to declare martial law in order to restore order. It took military intervention to quell the mob and pave the way for Joe Biden’s ascension to Washington.

But has Biden succeeded in restoring order in the United States?

No, if we are to judge the question on ceaseless incidents of mass shootings in schools and in public gatherings, the near-apartheid treatment by the whites of the Blacks and the deep discrimination against Asians that in all cases result in violence and deaths.

No wonder then that Biden must deem it opportune to talk of democracy like it were the first time it was ever proclaimed in the “land of the free” “four scores and seven years ago” in 1863.

If democracy appears crumbling right in its very cradle America, how can it survive elsewhere in the world?

Against the reality that many societies the world over are urging to wean away from America in various aspects of social, political and economic existence, the Biden idea of Summit for Democracy must betray veritable last dying gasps of an ogre about to meet with its demise.

Reports reaching this column have it that Singapore has been lumped with Myanmar and Vietnam together with four other Asean nations that have not been invited to the summit. Only three were invited to the event: the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. Take this development along the avowed aims of the summit: “Defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption and promoting respect for human rights.” Does it mean that those Asean members snubbed by Biden are afflicted with one or the other of the three evils the Summit for Democracy intends to combat? That Myanmar and Vietnam have not been invited is understandable given the military takeover in the former and the decadeslong socialist set-up in the latter.

But for Singapore to be excluded from the occasion should be intriguing. Not only is Singapore a democracy, but one that