February 01, 2005

Democracy and Reality
President Bush’s prudent qualifications have been obscured.

President Bush's inaugural declaration of a foreign policy rooted in spreading liberty has received an early and strong boost from the large turnout in the Iraqi elections. The crude objection to it that the Arabs are either hostile to democracy, or even merely indifferent to it, has been decisively routed by the civic bravery of the Iraqi voters. And the "democracy project" looks consequently more, well, more realistic than it did a week ago.

But when all about you are losing their heads, as Kipling notes, is the very time to keep a cool head yourself. We should therefore turn a cautious eye on the president's speech. And when we do, we discover that the cool head of Ramesh Ponnuru got it right first time. As he told viewers of CNN's Capital Gang, George Bush was somewhat too eloquent for his own good.

Many listeners thought they had heard the president announce that it was henceforth the policy of the United States to overthrow tyrants and establish democracy everywhere by return of post. So powerful was this impression that the following day "a senior administration official" was wheeled out to explain that there had been no change in U.S. foreign policy and that the president was not proposing to spread democracy by military force. Mr. Bush similarly qualified himself in a press conference a few days later.

Nor were they "retreating" or reneging. Mr. Bush's original promise to support democracy abroad had been hedged about with qualifications: It would be the work of several generations, not one administration. It was not primarily a "task of arms." Freedom could not be imposed on other countries by the U.S. We would merely help them to achieve it. It would inevitably reflect their distinctive traditions and end up looking very different from our own democracy. And so on and so forth.

Alas, these prudent qualifications were obscured by his soaring rhetorical promises to advance liberty and democracy throughout the world. This was, said Mr. Bush, "the urgent requirement of our nation's security and the calling of our time." Indeed, the "ultimate goal" of U.S. foreign policy was "ending tyranny in our world."

Even qualified and delayed, this is quite a goal. As several commentators have pointed out — notably Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations — it may conflict with other U.S. goals, notably recruiting and keeping non-democratic U.S. allies in the war on terror.

This criticism is reasonable and should be borne in mind by policy-makers. But such conflicts can probably be managed. Throughout the Cold War, American presidents combined the rhetoric of freedom and democracy with the realpolitik of maintaining alliances with imperfect democracies (Turkey) and outright dictatorships (Spain, Portugal, South Korea).

President Bush is sometimes unwise enough to condemn this past policy — mainly in the Middle Eastern context — as a bankrupt and amoral strategy. In fact it was entirely justifiable morally as the only practical way of securing the larger victory of liberty against the worldwide assault of Communist totalitarianism.

It worked. America won the Cold War at the modest cost of occasionally sounding hypocritical in such local contexts as the Congo or the Philippines.

And it continues today in the war on terror. Bush has forged alliances with undemocratic rulers in central Asia and the Middle East to obtain U.S. bases against al Qaeda. No doubt the despots would prefer him to talk less about the blessings of liberty. But the concrete benefits they gain from an alliance with the U.S. outweigh any slight embarrassment they might feel. (Besides, in the words of that great amateur strategist Mick Jagger, the despots "don't embarrass easy.")

And the end result of this judicious combination of idealistic ends and prudent means is that the U.S. is winning the international war on terror with the cooperation of many governments, some of them dubious.

Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing in the Washington Post, sees a further and more subtle benefit in the presidential rhetoric of liberty: It eventually undermines even our friends among dictators.

Reagan's ringing endorsement of freedom, for instance, weakened Pinochet and Marcos at home and, when they got into difficulties, restrained even the president from coming to their assistance. Bush similarly found that his libertarian rhetoric had more or less committed him on the side of Ukraine's "orange revolution" against his anti-terror ally, Russia's President Putin.

Kagan writes with unusual authority on this topic. As someone who has argued since the early 1990s that U.S. foreign policy should rest on the promotion of democracy, he has a fair claim to being the intellectual inspiration behind the Bush inaugural. Indeed, he believes the speech is and should be the manifesto of a revolutionary democratic U.S. foreign policy.

His argument, however, exhibits two glaring omissions. First, in none of the cases he cites — Ukraine, the Philippines, Chile — was the U.S. called upon to do anything more than advise, encourage, and warn. We did not have to intervene militarily. Second, in all of these cases, the end result of "people power" was a friendly regime perfectly acceptable to the U.S. We had no reason of interest to obstruct the change.

In both circumstances promoting democracy cost relatively little. That has not always been true in the past — and it is unlikely always to be true in the future.