Through last week’s Summit for Democracy, President Joe Biden apparently sought to unite the world to rescue democracy, which is facing a critical crisis. Instead, the online event has set the world apart, with charges that its real intent was to contain China’s rise and seek US hegemony. By excluding almost half of the world, the occasion also exposed the Biden administration’s rhetoric on multilateralism as conflicting with its resolve for unilateralism.

But the US has faced such a credibility gap in its global standing with increasing frequency throughout the last three decades.

With the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the US could have chosen to partner with the world to achieve global goals. Instead, successive Republican and Democratic administrations shed their ideological imperatives to dictate to the world — undertaking “humanitarian” interventions in troubled spots with devastating consequences. So much so that even President Barack Obama, despite his liberal credentials, opted for a troop surge in Afghanistan.

In response to the worsening humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia has taken the timely decision to hold an extraordinary meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which Pakistan has offered to host, on Dec. 17. As the representative body of 57 Muslim countries, the OIC must come to the rescue of hapless Afghans, especially when the rest of the world has left them at the mercy of winter. But Afghanistan is a global problem that cannot be solved with the expression of Muslim solidarity alone.

The scale of the disaster in the war-torn nation is extremely disturbing: The World Food Program estimates that up to 23 million Afghans — more than half the population — may not have enough to eat by the end of this month. With drought, pandemic and conflict, the food security situation will continue to worsen; hunger will increase and the economy will collapse. The rest is easier to fathom.