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April 04, 2005
America's Grand Strategy: Preemptive Democracy
Our ultimate world policy goal used to be "less Communism," but now it's "more democracy." Clinton lifted the budget for democracy promotion from $100 million to $700 million, and under the Bush Administration we've seen those programs bear fruit in Serbia, Georgia, the Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Bush in turn declined to take the easy way out and appoint a Musharraf-style dictator for Iraq, but has instead held out for what may yet be democracy there, not to mention encouraging moves toward democracy in Egypt and among the Palestinians. Cynically or not, it seems that now American foreign policy is to preemptively spread democracy.
This is a big change: before Clinton and G.W.Bush, democracy was always a real but modest American goal in the world. Democratic Party presidents emphasized stronger democracy as a side effect of helping America's friends, whether with Wilson's idealistic promises of self-determination to follow victory in World War I, Truman's Marshall Plan to deflate the appeal of European communist agitation or Kennedy's Peace Corps to do the same for the developing world; Republican presidents preferred democracy as the natural replacement for enemy governments, as when Reagan chastised the Communist bloc or Bush Sr. restored elected government to Panamá. But sometime in the last 10 years, everyone seems to have come around to the view that promoting democracy abroad is not just good for America's soul, but helps America's interests.
Maybe it's because democracies hardly ever go to war with other democracies. A world with more democracies is a world with fewer countries that are likely to go to war with us. A world with a really large fraction of democracies is a world with fewer countries that are likely to go to war with each other and drag the United States in after them. In an age in which we no longer have a "permanent enemy," spreading democracy seems like a good way to create permanent friends. Even France, our most hostile established democracy, still does a much better job of cooperating with us than Pakistan, our current favorite dictatorship.
A second reason, and maybe just as important, is that democracy -- especially constitutional law-abiding checks-and-balances democracy -- seems to go along with prosperity and honest government and most of the other good things we'd like to see in the world. So if we make democracy our ultimate goal, and if we define democracy as something more serious than an occasional rigged election, then that gives us an excuse and a measure for most of the other good things we hope for abroad.
But the best reason for us to spread democracy is that it puts America in the position of acting instead of reacting. For decades now, we've been surprised over and over as some badly-governed corner of the world jumps up and bites us in the rear. The Arab countries, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Panamá, Vietnam too -- all of them were showcases of lousy government long before they were dangers to American interests or American lives. And in practically every case, the cost of improving the situation in one of these soon-to-be war zones before it came to war would have been a lot less than the cost we actually paid in blood and treasure after war broke out. Very often we already were spending quite enough money, but it wasn't doing any good because we were so obsessed with "stability" -- and very often that corrupt supposed "stability" was exactly the problem. If we commit to taking each opportunity to spread democracy, we might be able to avert some wars instead of fighting them.
It would have cost us far less blood and treasure if we had shut down al-Qaeda in the early 90s. It would be nice if we really did shut down our next enemy, whoever they are, before they were enough of an enemy that we had to fight a war against them. Without a crystal ball, we can't know who that next enemy would be, and we can't afford to preemptively invade everywhere. But we can afford to preemptively spread democracy everywhere.
People suggest that America is an empire, and an empire, more or less, means a country that's strong enough to make laws not only for itself, but for other countries. I'd say that "thou shalt move gradually but steadily toward democracy" would be a pretty good law for America's Empire.
[E1] David Adesnik of Oxblog is suspicious of Democratic commitment to promoting democracy, perhaps because of Kerry's "let's go home" isolationist rhetoric in 2004. But Republican opponents of Clinton's foreign policy used isolationist phrases too. When Democrats actually have one of their own in the White House, the foreign policy has been consistently more pacifist but also consistently more willing to invest in peaceful democracy promotion than under Republicans -- compare Wilson, Truman, Kennedy and Clinton to realists like Nixon and Bush Senior.
Posted by danielstarr at April 4, 2005 04:52 AM
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