The US needs to provide "shoes" and not "boots" on the ground in foreign countries, as it works towards promotion of democracy in nations across the globe, US Vice President Joe Biden has said.
"What we all should do more of...Is providing not boots on the ground but shoes on the ground, experts to help," Biden said.
"Help these emerging democracies tap the tools, the lessons, the expertise available, to help them set up the institutions and safeguards that will position them to succeed," Biden said in his address to the annual award dinner of the National Democracy Institute (NDI) yesterday.
"There are countries you have done it, and it has worked like (in) Colombia. It worked," he said.
Biden said the fact of the matter is that in some ways the problems we are facing in emerging democracies have "morphed into a different problem than we had in just 'bringing the Wall down', just dealing with the conflicts and superpower conflicts" on the margins in Africa and Asia, he said.
Biden said it has raised new concerns.
"There's new weapons of war -- not physical weapons of war, but corruption, the use of oligarchs, the use of raw materials as weapons of war -- a different kind of war.
"Uprisings and reversals in the past few years in the Middle East and North Africa, a reminder that for all the passion and sense of purpose we bring to it, the path to democracy is rarely simple and never linear," he said.
During its annual dinner, NDI honoured three young Ukrainian activists -- Hanna Hopko, Serhiy Leshchenko and Oleksandr Solontay.
Each of the honourees had achieved prominence in their respective fields before the political situation in Ukraine prompted them to take part in the demonstrations that led to the fall of the country's autocratic government earlier this year.
They have now transitioned to the political arena. Two of them -- Hopko and Leshchenko -- were elected to the Ukrainian Parliament in its October elections.
In his remarks, Biden said two things keeps US ahead of other nations: One is stamped into the DNA of every naturalised, as well as native-born American is an overwhelming skepticism for orthodoxy.
The second is "there's an unrelenting stream of immigration in large waves, not small, from 1776 on."
"The amazing thing about it is, as a consequence, we get to cherry-pick the best of every other society," said Biden.
