Democracy and Discontent

With democracy on the run and American power in question, what’s the future of democracy promotion?

U.S. presidential campaigns have the potential to clarify fundamental choices facing the United States about its role in the world. Inevitably, some noise blurs the process–the pandering and posturing to entice special interest groups and favored constituencies, for example, not to mention the drastic oversimplifications of complex situations and dilemmas. Nevertheless, several presidential face-offs–one thinks immediately of Richard Nixon versus George McGovern or Ronald Reagan versus Jimmy Carter–have framed a decisive foreign policy fork in the road and set the policy course for years to come.

As of this writing, the current race has not yet crystallized to that extent, but it could. John McCain and Barack Obama have presented contrasting visions of how to proceed in Iraq. They have disagreed over the idea of direct talks with Iran. And they clearly hold fundamentally different views about the basic value and wisdom of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. Yet most Americans would struggle to articulate the overall choice this election presents. Is it whether the war on terrorism should be continued in its current form or significantly altered? Is it about competing conceptions of the state of the world? Should the next Administration heed the advice Robert Kagan gives in his new book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, and hunker down for a protracted, ideologically based geo-strategic struggle with Russia and China? Or should it instead follow Fareed Zakaria and make the United States a subtle, almost postmodern superpower, navigating a nimble path of persuasion and partnership in a “post-American world”?

Central to these overarching questions is what role democracy promotion should play in U.S. policy. Although at various times in recent decades one could plausibly argue that democracy promotion was just a side issue, Bush has moved it to the core of U.S. foreign policy concerns and attracted enormous attention to the topic at home and abroad. He did so first by wrapping the most significant action of his presidency–the invasion of Iraq–in the cloak of democracy promotion, and he took it further by arguing that democracy is key to undercutting the roots of anti-Western political extremism wherever it appears, as well as by rhetorically recasting the war on terrorism as the pursuit of a “global freedom agenda.” Yet even as he elevated it, Bush also did enormous damage to U.S. democracy promotion by closely associating it with a vastly unpopular and problematic war, controversial regime change policies, and a war on terrorism that has involved shocking abuses of human rights and the rule of law.

It is this juxtaposition of the new centrality of democracy promotion and the seriously troubled state of the endeavor that prompted James Traub to write his new book, The Freedom Agenda. A polymathic journalist with a record of serious thinking and writing about both domestic and international affairs, Traub appears to have been bitten by the democracy promotion bug (along with writing, he is now policy director for the Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, a new human rights group). He writes not just with facility but undisguised enthusiasm for the idea, even as he tempers his analysis with references to limits and mistakes. Traub offers a wide-ranging, consistently incisive account that usefully bridges the gap between specialized works on the topic and more general writings about U.S. foreign policy. His book admirably chronicles the modern history of U.S. democracy promotion–even though depth suffers a bit for the sake of breadth–and acutely diagnoses the ills of the Bush era.

Traub’s prescriptions for the next Administration are a useful start, but the problems ahead are even deeper than he acknowledges. A course correction away from Bush’s errors will not be enough. The world is a much different place than it was in 2000–most notably, democracy is no longer on the march–and predominant American power is no longer a foregone conclusion. This doesn’t mean the United States should shrink from promoting democracy abroad. But it does mean that the next president will need to rethink fundamentally the strategies and policies the United States pursues in this domain.

Traub begins with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in 1898, the first large-scale U.S. effort to project its political ideals overseas. He plumbs that disappointing U.S. experience, concluding that “we learned that the world is recalcitrant but it didn’t stop us from trying.” After a nod to Woodrow Wilson, he jumps to the post-World War II occupations of West Germany and Japan. He asserts that credit for these success stories–stories endlessly invoked by Bush officials in the run-up to the Iraq intervention–lies primarily with the target countries themselves having been relatively conducive settings for post-conflict democratization.

Democracy promotion isn’t the only story in U.S. foreign policy history, of course, and Traub picks up the cold wind of realism that blew through the U.S. foreign-policy establishment for several decades starting in the early 1950s. American realism found a natural partner in modernization theory, which many political scientists and policy makers interpreted as an injunction to concentrate on helping Third World countries develop economically and to accept undemocratic strongmen rulers as necessary drivers of such change.

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