Title: Promoting Democracy to Stop Terror, Revisted
Abstract: U.S. DEMOCRACY PROMOTION in the Middle East has suffered a series of crippling defeats. Despite occasionally Paying lip service to the idea, few politicians on either the left or right appear committed to supporting democratic reform as a central component of American policy in the region. Who can really blame them, given that democracy promotion has become toxic to a public with little patience left for various missions abroad? But as the Obama administration struggles to renew ties with the Muslim world, particularly in light of the June 2009 Cairo speech, it should resist the urge to abandon its predecessor's focus on promoting democracy in what remains the most undemocratic region in the world. Promoting democratic reform, this time not just with rhetoric but with action, should be given higher priority in the current administration, even though early indications suggest the opposite may be happening. Despite all its bad press, democracy promotion remains, in the long run, the most effective way to undermine terrorism and political violence in the Middle East. This is not a very popular argument. Indeed, a key feature of the post-Bush debate over democratization is an insistence on separating support for democracy from any explicit national security rationale. This, however, would be a mistake with troubling consequences for American foreign policy. A post-Bush reassessment THE TWILIGHT OF the Bush presidency and the start of Obama's ushered in an expansive discussion over the place of human rights and democracy in American foreign policy. An emerging consensus suggests that the U.S. approach must be fundamentally reassessed and repositioned. This means, in part, a scaling down of scope and ambition and of avoiding the sweeping Wilsonian tones of recent years. That certainly sounds good. Anything, after all, would be better than the Bush administration's disconcerting mix of revolutionary pro-democracy rhetoric with time-honored realist policies of privileging stable pro-American dictators. This only managed to wring the worst out of both approaches. For its part, the Obama administration has made a strategic decision to shift the focus to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which it sees, correctly, as a major source of Arab grievance. This, in turn, has led the administration to strengthen ties with autocratic regimes, such as Egypt and Jordan, which it sees as critical to the peace process. Some might see such developments as a welcome re-prioritization. However, by downgrading support of Middle East democracy to one among many policy priorities, we risk returning to a pre-9/11 status quo, where the promotion of democracy would neither be worn on our sleeve nor trump short-term hard interests. The transformative nature of any democracy promotion project would be replaced by a more sober, targeted focus on providing technical assistance to legislative and judicial branches and strengthening civil society organizations in the region. In many ways, this would be a welcome change from the ideological overload of the post-9/11 environment. But in other ways, it would not. Those who wish to avoid a piecemeal approach to reform and revive U.S. efforts to support democracy often come back to invocations of American exceptionalism and the argument that the United States, as the world's most powerful nation, has a responsibility to advance the very ideals which animated its founding. These arguments are attractive and admirable, but how durable can they be when translated into concrete policy initiatives? In the wake of a war ostensibly waged in the name of democracy, can a strategy resting on gauzy moral imperatives garner bipartisan support and therefore long-term policy stability? In an ideal world, there would not be a need to justify or rationalize supporting democracy abroad; the moral imperative would be enough. But in the world of politics and decision-making, it rarely is. …
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-02-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 3
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