Saturday, June 12, 2004
WASHINGTON'S NEW WORLDVIEW.
Springtime for Realism
by Lawrence F. Kaplan
Post date: 06.10.04
Issue date: 06.21.04
In Washington, being a member of a "coalition" or a "committee" is to a foreign policy wonk what being a supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera is to a New York arts patron or a good seat at the Ivy is to a Hollywood mogul: an emblem of status. The only distinction being that opera extras and movie producers tend not to influence the world's sole superpower. An important committee does. The Committee to Defend America By Aiding the Allies, which battled isolationism before World War II; the Committee on the Present Danger, which argued for a harder line against the Soviets during the 1970s; the Committee for the Free World, which did the same in the 1980s--each has helped shape U.S. foreign policy. And, last year, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq did as well. As its title suggests, the group, which featured a bipartisan roster of democratic idealists, including former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey and current Republican Senator John McCain, promoted the moral case for war--that is, ending a tyranny and creating a democracy in its place. Its members met with White House officials, The New York Times profiled them, antiwar protesters besieged their headquarters, and Vanity Fair wrote about a Committee reception at which Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz delivered an impromptu pep talk. (Full disclosure: The Committee hosted the reception partly in my honor, and I spoke as well.)
The Committee no longer exists. It has long since vacated its Pennsylvania Avenue offices. Its website doesn't work. In its place, another group has emerged, one that captures Washington's new mood. The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy has become the anti-Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. As Coalition member and author David Hendrickson explained at the group's "American Imperium" conference in April, the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein "violated the basic legal principle placing the right and responsibility for the internal institutions of a given state in the people of that country." The Coalition, which was unveiled at the National Press Club last October, quickly attracted a bipartisan who's who of foreign policy experts, including former Democratic Senator Gary Hart; a campaign adviser to John Kerry, Charles Kupchan; and former Reagan aide Doug Bandow. All count themselves foreign policy "realists" who support a foreign policy grounded in narrowly conceived "vital interests" and loathe America's efforts to "impose" democracy around the world.
If America's democratic project in Iraq continues to disappoint, it won't be long before the Coalition's members find themselves meeting with White House officials. Indeed, it appears nearly everyone in Washington is a realist now. Neatly summarizing the revised wisdom, The Washington Post's George Will recently argued that America's errors in Iraq flow not so much from the bungled implementation of the democratic idea as from the idea itself--"the Jeffersonian poetry of democratic universalism." The new realism, moreover, has already been enshrined in official policy. The Bush team still employs high-minded rhetoric about America's democratic mission abroad, but, in practice, it has reverted to a more humble focus. The Kerry campaign, too, has abandoned any pretense of democratic idealism. Strategic chokepoints, oil wells, alliances--these are the things that animate Kerry's "realistic" vision of the world. Which is too bad. Because, no matter what you think of Iraq, realism can't win the war on terrorism.
Today's premier realist, the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer, explains the worldview this way: "Realists tend not to draw sharp distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' states, because all great powers act according to the same logic, regardless of their culture, political system, or who runs the government." Put bluntly, the character of regimes does not matter. Or, as one of the founding fathers of post-World War II realism, George Kennan--who denounced even "the assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment"--put it, "No people can be the judge of another's domestic institutions and requirements." All this leads to a disdain for what Hans Morgenthau, another father of American realism, described as "the contemporary phenomenon of the moral crusade."
Although typically associated with hard-headed Republicans like former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger, realism gained traction on the left in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when many liberals decided the United States was marred by involvement in too many suspect conflicts and unfit to pass judgment on other political systems. With the end of the cold war, President Clinton repudiated this sentiment, as did 2000 Democratic nominee Al Gore, who insisted that, just as battling communism had been America's mission, today the nation's mission was to spread democracy around the world.
But, for John Kerry, pronouncements like these derive from a lethal mixture of naïveté, hubris, and chauvinism. Hence, when in 1997 Clinton repeated his administration's mantra that the United States had become the "indispensable nation," Kerry complained, "Why are we adopting such an arrogant, obnoxious tone?" As with nearly everything else, Kerry attributes his disdain for foreign policy "arrogance" to the lessons he learned in Southeast Asia. But, as my colleague Franklin Foer has pointed out ("Like Father," March 8), Kerry imbibed his realism even earlier in life, at the foot of his diplomat father. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Kerry explained that his dad instructed him in the futility of tending "to see other people in the context of our history, our own hopes, our own aspirations."
The lesson appears to have stuck. In April, Kerry said the goal in the present war should be "a stable Iraq, not whether or not [Iraq] is a full democracy." When it comes to Egypt, Kerry said in a recent interview, democracy promotion would have to take a backseat to "general stability in the Middle East." In China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Pakistan, too, "Kerry indicated that as president he would play down the promotion of democracy," according to the Post. After all, Kerry said, in an echo of Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous argument that the United States shouldn't push too hard to democratize "friendly" dictatorships, "You have to put your priorities first." All this proved too much for Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth, who says, "What is most disturbing about the Kerry statements is the suggestion that a sophisticated security strategy need not be complemented by human rights values."
Kerry's advisers see little need for the complement, either. Members of the campaign claim that former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who mocked George W. Bush's aspiration "to change the world" and his "sloppy neo-Wilsonianism" in a recent CNBC interview, has drained idealism from Kerry's foreign policy platform. In place of "neo-Wilsonianism"--a term the Clinton team once used to describe itself--former Clinton national security adviser and Kerry confidante Sandy Berger has coined a new motto for the presumptive Democratic nominee: "forward-looking realism." What this means in its particulars may be gleaned from Kerry's top foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers, who told the Los Angeles Times in April, "We have been concerned for some time that Bush's position about having some kind of democratic state [in Iraq] was too heroic." So, too, in the case of Iran, where, far from aiming for regime change, Beers says the United States must engage "the hard-line element." Another of Kerry's foreign policy advisers, Gary Hart, makes the point more bluntly. Inveighing against Bush's pledge to mount "a massive democratic revolution throughout the Arab world," Hart, a founding member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, said last year, "The extravagance, not to say arrogance, of this epic undertaking is sufficiently breathtaking in its hubris to make Woodrow Wilson blush."
There are, to be sure, people in the Kerry orbit who acknowledge that democratization is a vital U.S. interest. Former Clinton Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Ronald Asmus, the Progressive Policy Institute's Will Marshall, and the Hoover Institution's Michael McFaul all boast long histories of democratic idealism and all have brainstormed ways for Kerry to address the subject. Yet, when approached by democracy and human rights advocates about having Kerry devote an address to the subject during his recent series of speeches on national security, the campaign declined. Asked to explain the lack of any references to the topic in Kerry's recent addresses, one adviser says, "He doesn't want to sound too 'soft,' and, my guess is, he doesn't feel passionately about it."
ronically, while Kerry advisers blast the president's Wilsonianism, many administration officials regard Wilsonianism as last year's theme. True, the president himself still often channels Wilson. "Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours," Bush said in a speech last week. "But the realists, in this case, have lost contact with a fundamental reality. ... America is always more secure when freedom is on the march."
Trouble is, the very realists whom Bush decries are now running his foreign policy. The Pentagon's neoconservative democratizers have been losing influence for months now. The nadir came three weeks ago, when the National Security Council (NSC) signed off on a raid on the home of former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi--without informing the Pentagon beforehand. The neoconservatives' decline was already apparent last October, when, in an attempt to centralize Iraq policy at the NSC, Condoleezza Rice formed the Iraq Stabilization Group--again, without consulting the Pentagon. The official chosen to chair the group, Rice's boss in the first Bush administration, Robert Blackwill, has "reduced the Defense Department's influence to zero," says a senior administration official. Iraq czar L. Paul Bremer, who worked with Blackwill under Kissinger, now reports to his fellow realist at the White House rather than to the Pentagon. On the NSC itself, Blackwill, who shares the title of deputy national security adviser with Stephen Hadley, a Pentagon ally, "has sucked the air out of" his colleague, according to a White House official. As for the other locus of democratic idealism in the White House, the Valerie Plame investigation has consumed the vice president's foreign policy team. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney has been soliciting advice from Kissinger, and members of the Bush team claim that Rice, chastened by her prewar foray into the world of democracy promotion, has been doing the same from Scowcroft.
In Iraq, the results of this springtime for realism have been plain to see. Recent decrees revoking the independence of newspapers and reversing Bremer's earlier de-Baathification order may make a certain amount of short-term sense, but they hardly augur well for Iraq's democratic prospects. "The administration has largely given up on its own [former] priorities," says Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace, "going from a reluctance to rely on tribes, militias, and Baathists to accommodation with them." Most of all, Bremer and Blackwill favor the sort of technocrats with limited democratic credentials touted by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, a man Blackwill has championed inside the White House as the solution to all that ails Iraq. Hence, last week, Bremer and Brahimi tried to install Sunni octogenarian Adnan Pachachi as Iraq's interim president. Alas, Iraqi politicians chose their own candidate.
Blackwill, along with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, also has an influential hand in Iran policy. Gone from the administration's rhetoric is any talk of regime change in Tehran. Gone, too, in fact, is any mention of democracy there at all--apart, that is, from Armitage's insistence that Iran already qualifies as one. "The administration's realists are running Iran policy," says Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the National Defense University. "It's no longer regime change; it's détente." In Libya, as well, democracy has taken a backseat to the new realism. In exchange for Libya's renunciation of its WMD arsenal, Secretary of State Colin Powell now hails the brutal dictatorship as "an example to other nations"--this, despite his own State Department's assessment that Libya still employs "widespread use of torture and other degrading treatment [and] restricts freedoms of speech, assembly, press and expression." For his part, Bush has gone so far as to praise two autocrats, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, for their willingness to "recognize the importance of representative, democratic institutions." Demonstrating that "recognition," both boycotted this week's unveiling of Bush's initiative for democracy in the Arab world.
In fact, not even the much-hyped Greater Middle East Initiative upends Washington's decades-old bargain with the Arab world. Though Rice originally trumpeted it as the first step in transforming the Middle East, the administration quickly backpedaled in response to an outcry from Arab leaders. "Each nation has to find its own path and follow that path at its own speed," Powell hastened to point out. The watered-down initiative, according to Marina Ottaway and Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "will address a wide range of social, economic, and political issues, but it will do little of consequence to advance what is at the heart of the regional transformation that the United States says it wants--democratization." Instead, the program focuses on secondary issues--a literacy campaign, a "micro-finance" proposal--which have long been part of U.S. and European aid programs to the region.
he genesis of the new realism is, of course, America's problems creating democracy in Iraq. But today's problems in Iraq do not derive from failures of democracy. They derive from failures of security, which have made democracy difficult to achieve. Those failures owe to a well-chronicled fact--the United States lacks the troop levels required to provide security. It should be axiomatic that, as former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) adviser and democracy expert Larry Diamond puts it, "you can't have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has a monopoly on the means of violence." In Iraq today, not even the U.S. Army, much less the interim government, possesses such a monopoly.
Nor is it clear that the Bush team's particular recipe for building a democratic Iraq amounted to much more than a cartoon version of democratization. "The distinction between liberation and democratization, which requires a strategy and instruments," says former U.S. Information Agency Director Penn Kemble, "was an idea never understood by the administration." Indeed, it was precisely the equation of the absence of oppression with the existence of democracy--exemplified by Donald Rumsfeld's infamous "freedom's untidy" comment during the postwar looting--that underpinned the White House's assumption that it could rapidly draw down U.S. forces after toppling Saddam. It took the United States years to transform Germany and Japan. In Iraq, by contrast, the CPA already has its bags packed.
Stepping into the vacuum created partly by the mistakes of the Pentagon and White House, realists now counsel that the quickest path to stability in Iraq lies in abandoning our democratic hopes for the country. Some, like Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, argue for partitioning the county into Kurd, Shia, and Sunni zones. Others argue for installing an autocrat. Still others, like Pat Buchanan, advocate withdrawing altogether.
Ultimately, however, democracy offers the best--perhaps the only--way to ensure stability. Now that Iraqis have been granted some degree of freedom, what Shia or Kurd will submit to a Baghdad strongman again? Only elections can confer the legitimacy a new Iraqi government will require. Argues Jennifer Windsor, a Middle East expert at Freedom House: "Democracy is the only political system that can balance competing attachments and interests in Iraq today, so it is the only hope for stability."
The lack of "realistic" alternatives to democracy in Iraq applies equally to the Middle East as a whole. Complaining that democratic idealists "incorporate Wilsonian ideas into their vision in urging the spread of democracy," prominent realist G. John Ikenberry of Georgetown University scoffs at the notion that this "is not merely idealism, according to them; it is good national security policy." Meanwhile, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued in The New York Times last week, "What we need now is pragmatism and not ideology. ... We must do everything we can to help the region's more moderate and friendly regimes--the Saudis and others--to defeat terrorism and improve the protection of foreign workers and oil facilities." Likewise, Republican Senator Pat Roberts insists that Washington must restrain its tendency toward "social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy."
But the United States is entitled--on September 11, the aim of a democratic Middle East became a matter of our national well-being, even survival. And the United States is obligated--because either pressure for democracy in the Arab world will come from the United States or it will come from nowhere at all. For the source of America's entitlement, look no further than the region's "friendly regimes." Not only has repression fueled terrorist movements in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt; the very governments we prop up have sanctioned the worst elements as a way to deflect popular anger from their palace gates. The absence of civil society, the weakness of independent media outlets, the weakness of secular opposition parties--all these things underpin the truth that, as Bush said in a recent speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, "as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready to export."
This is more than conjecture. A recent study by Princeton's Alan Krueger and Czech scholar Jitka Maleckova analyzed data on terrorist attacks and measured it against the characteristics of the terrorists' countries of origin. The study found that "the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists." Unfortunately, according to the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Report, not a single Arab state offers such freedoms. One could plausibly have argued before September 11 that this was none of America's business. But, on that day, the Arab world's predicament became our own--thrusting the United States into a war of ideas to which realism has no adequate response.
Nor will victory in this highly ideological war be accomplished by standing by while Arab states leisurely pursue their "own path" to democracy, as Powell puts it. When it comes to the Arab world, either the spur for democratization will come from without or it will not come any time soon. Realists like Republican Senator Chuck Hagel insist the solution to the lack of freedom in the Middle East cannot be that "we are going to go forth and impose democracy." If Hagel means to suggest we should not regularly resort to arms to do so, he has a point. Yet, the realist critique refuses to distinguish between war and democracy promotion. (In this, it takes its cue from the White House, whose revised case that it waged war for the explicit purpose of creating democracy--rather than to topple an aggressive tyrant and then implant a democratic political order--has created the impression that America cannot promote democratization by means other than force.) Yes, America will need to "impose" democracy in the Arab world, but it can also rely on peaceful tools, such as broadcasting, financial aid, diplomatic pressure, public support for regimes that pursue democracy, and public opprobrium for those who do not. If this amounts to an imposition on the sovereignty of dictatorial regimes, so be it.
The notion that we ought not impose what Cordesman derides as "our own political values"--that is, democracy--on others misses the fact that, as democracy scholar Joshua Muravchik has pointed out, if people do not want to be governed by consent, they can always vote for a tyrant. In fact, defining democracy as a universal rather than specifically American aspiration means the United States would not stop such an outcome. More compelling is the argument that some countries might not be ready for democracy. No one has espoused this view more vigorously than Powell, who, in his memoirs, dismisses the idea of a "desert democracy where people read the Federalist Papers along with the Koran." This line of reasoning mirrors the logic that American policymakers applied to other formerly undemocratic regions of the world. Joseph Grew, the State Department's chief Japan expert, cautioned President Truman that "the best we can hope for is a constitutional monarchy, experience having shown that democracy in Japan would never work." Awash in cultural relativism, his colleagues and successors made the same point about East Asia, Germany, and South America. Now that the tide of democracy has swept over these regions, they are making the same point about the one part of the world it has yet to touch.
To be sure, with Iraqis killing Americans every day, the temptation to yield to such pessimism may prove irresistible. But, when they advertise Iraq--like they advertised Vietnam before it--as the repudiation of a larger democratic war of ideas, the realists encourage a more pessimistic conclusion than circumstances justify. A policy can be measured by its successes, and it can be measured by its failures. When it comes to America's record in promoting democratic change, the former surely outweigh the latter. The world may not change easily, but, because of America, it has changed. Having come so far, and confronted with a new totalitarian threat, how "realistic" would it be to quit now?
Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at TNR.
Springtime for Realism
by Lawrence F. Kaplan
Post date: 06.10.04
Issue date: 06.21.04
In Washington, being a member of a "coalition" or a "committee" is to a foreign policy wonk what being a supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera is to a New York arts patron or a good seat at the Ivy is to a Hollywood mogul: an emblem of status. The only distinction being that opera extras and movie producers tend not to influence the world's sole superpower. An important committee does. The Committee to Defend America By Aiding the Allies, which battled isolationism before World War II; the Committee on the Present Danger, which argued for a harder line against the Soviets during the 1970s; the Committee for the Free World, which did the same in the 1980s--each has helped shape U.S. foreign policy. And, last year, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq did as well. As its title suggests, the group, which featured a bipartisan roster of democratic idealists, including former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey and current Republican Senator John McCain, promoted the moral case for war--that is, ending a tyranny and creating a democracy in its place. Its members met with White House officials, The New York Times profiled them, antiwar protesters besieged their headquarters, and Vanity Fair wrote about a Committee reception at which Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz delivered an impromptu pep talk. (Full disclosure: The Committee hosted the reception partly in my honor, and I spoke as well.)
The Committee no longer exists. It has long since vacated its Pennsylvania Avenue offices. Its website doesn't work. In its place, another group has emerged, one that captures Washington's new mood. The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy has become the anti-Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. As Coalition member and author David Hendrickson explained at the group's "American Imperium" conference in April, the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein "violated the basic legal principle placing the right and responsibility for the internal institutions of a given state in the people of that country." The Coalition, which was unveiled at the National Press Club last October, quickly attracted a bipartisan who's who of foreign policy experts, including former Democratic Senator Gary Hart; a campaign adviser to John Kerry, Charles Kupchan; and former Reagan aide Doug Bandow. All count themselves foreign policy "realists" who support a foreign policy grounded in narrowly conceived "vital interests" and loathe America's efforts to "impose" democracy around the world.
If America's democratic project in Iraq continues to disappoint, it won't be long before the Coalition's members find themselves meeting with White House officials. Indeed, it appears nearly everyone in Washington is a realist now. Neatly summarizing the revised wisdom, The Washington Post's George Will recently argued that America's errors in Iraq flow not so much from the bungled implementation of the democratic idea as from the idea itself--"the Jeffersonian poetry of democratic universalism." The new realism, moreover, has already been enshrined in official policy. The Bush team still employs high-minded rhetoric about America's democratic mission abroad, but, in practice, it has reverted to a more humble focus. The Kerry campaign, too, has abandoned any pretense of democratic idealism. Strategic chokepoints, oil wells, alliances--these are the things that animate Kerry's "realistic" vision of the world. Which is too bad. Because, no matter what you think of Iraq, realism can't win the war on terrorism.
Today's premier realist, the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer, explains the worldview this way: "Realists tend not to draw sharp distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' states, because all great powers act according to the same logic, regardless of their culture, political system, or who runs the government." Put bluntly, the character of regimes does not matter. Or, as one of the founding fathers of post-World War II realism, George Kennan--who denounced even "the assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment"--put it, "No people can be the judge of another's domestic institutions and requirements." All this leads to a disdain for what Hans Morgenthau, another father of American realism, described as "the contemporary phenomenon of the moral crusade."
Although typically associated with hard-headed Republicans like former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger, realism gained traction on the left in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when many liberals decided the United States was marred by involvement in too many suspect conflicts and unfit to pass judgment on other political systems. With the end of the cold war, President Clinton repudiated this sentiment, as did 2000 Democratic nominee Al Gore, who insisted that, just as battling communism had been America's mission, today the nation's mission was to spread democracy around the world.
But, for John Kerry, pronouncements like these derive from a lethal mixture of naïveté, hubris, and chauvinism. Hence, when in 1997 Clinton repeated his administration's mantra that the United States had become the "indispensable nation," Kerry complained, "Why are we adopting such an arrogant, obnoxious tone?" As with nearly everything else, Kerry attributes his disdain for foreign policy "arrogance" to the lessons he learned in Southeast Asia. But, as my colleague Franklin Foer has pointed out ("Like Father," March 8), Kerry imbibed his realism even earlier in life, at the foot of his diplomat father. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Kerry explained that his dad instructed him in the futility of tending "to see other people in the context of our history, our own hopes, our own aspirations."
The lesson appears to have stuck. In April, Kerry said the goal in the present war should be "a stable Iraq, not whether or not [Iraq] is a full democracy." When it comes to Egypt, Kerry said in a recent interview, democracy promotion would have to take a backseat to "general stability in the Middle East." In China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Pakistan, too, "Kerry indicated that as president he would play down the promotion of democracy," according to the Post. After all, Kerry said, in an echo of Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous argument that the United States shouldn't push too hard to democratize "friendly" dictatorships, "You have to put your priorities first." All this proved too much for Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth, who says, "What is most disturbing about the Kerry statements is the suggestion that a sophisticated security strategy need not be complemented by human rights values."
Kerry's advisers see little need for the complement, either. Members of the campaign claim that former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who mocked George W. Bush's aspiration "to change the world" and his "sloppy neo-Wilsonianism" in a recent CNBC interview, has drained idealism from Kerry's foreign policy platform. In place of "neo-Wilsonianism"--a term the Clinton team once used to describe itself--former Clinton national security adviser and Kerry confidante Sandy Berger has coined a new motto for the presumptive Democratic nominee: "forward-looking realism." What this means in its particulars may be gleaned from Kerry's top foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers, who told the Los Angeles Times in April, "We have been concerned for some time that Bush's position about having some kind of democratic state [in Iraq] was too heroic." So, too, in the case of Iran, where, far from aiming for regime change, Beers says the United States must engage "the hard-line element." Another of Kerry's foreign policy advisers, Gary Hart, makes the point more bluntly. Inveighing against Bush's pledge to mount "a massive democratic revolution throughout the Arab world," Hart, a founding member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, said last year, "The extravagance, not to say arrogance, of this epic undertaking is sufficiently breathtaking in its hubris to make Woodrow Wilson blush."
There are, to be sure, people in the Kerry orbit who acknowledge that democratization is a vital U.S. interest. Former Clinton Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Ronald Asmus, the Progressive Policy Institute's Will Marshall, and the Hoover Institution's Michael McFaul all boast long histories of democratic idealism and all have brainstormed ways for Kerry to address the subject. Yet, when approached by democracy and human rights advocates about having Kerry devote an address to the subject during his recent series of speeches on national security, the campaign declined. Asked to explain the lack of any references to the topic in Kerry's recent addresses, one adviser says, "He doesn't want to sound too 'soft,' and, my guess is, he doesn't feel passionately about it."
ronically, while Kerry advisers blast the president's Wilsonianism, many administration officials regard Wilsonianism as last year's theme. True, the president himself still often channels Wilson. "Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours," Bush said in a speech last week. "But the realists, in this case, have lost contact with a fundamental reality. ... America is always more secure when freedom is on the march."
Trouble is, the very realists whom Bush decries are now running his foreign policy. The Pentagon's neoconservative democratizers have been losing influence for months now. The nadir came three weeks ago, when the National Security Council (NSC) signed off on a raid on the home of former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi--without informing the Pentagon beforehand. The neoconservatives' decline was already apparent last October, when, in an attempt to centralize Iraq policy at the NSC, Condoleezza Rice formed the Iraq Stabilization Group--again, without consulting the Pentagon. The official chosen to chair the group, Rice's boss in the first Bush administration, Robert Blackwill, has "reduced the Defense Department's influence to zero," says a senior administration official. Iraq czar L. Paul Bremer, who worked with Blackwill under Kissinger, now reports to his fellow realist at the White House rather than to the Pentagon. On the NSC itself, Blackwill, who shares the title of deputy national security adviser with Stephen Hadley, a Pentagon ally, "has sucked the air out of" his colleague, according to a White House official. As for the other locus of democratic idealism in the White House, the Valerie Plame investigation has consumed the vice president's foreign policy team. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney has been soliciting advice from Kissinger, and members of the Bush team claim that Rice, chastened by her prewar foray into the world of democracy promotion, has been doing the same from Scowcroft.
In Iraq, the results of this springtime for realism have been plain to see. Recent decrees revoking the independence of newspapers and reversing Bremer's earlier de-Baathification order may make a certain amount of short-term sense, but they hardly augur well for Iraq's democratic prospects. "The administration has largely given up on its own [former] priorities," says Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace, "going from a reluctance to rely on tribes, militias, and Baathists to accommodation with them." Most of all, Bremer and Blackwill favor the sort of technocrats with limited democratic credentials touted by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, a man Blackwill has championed inside the White House as the solution to all that ails Iraq. Hence, last week, Bremer and Brahimi tried to install Sunni octogenarian Adnan Pachachi as Iraq's interim president. Alas, Iraqi politicians chose their own candidate.
Blackwill, along with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, also has an influential hand in Iran policy. Gone from the administration's rhetoric is any talk of regime change in Tehran. Gone, too, in fact, is any mention of democracy there at all--apart, that is, from Armitage's insistence that Iran already qualifies as one. "The administration's realists are running Iran policy," says Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the National Defense University. "It's no longer regime change; it's détente." In Libya, as well, democracy has taken a backseat to the new realism. In exchange for Libya's renunciation of its WMD arsenal, Secretary of State Colin Powell now hails the brutal dictatorship as "an example to other nations"--this, despite his own State Department's assessment that Libya still employs "widespread use of torture and other degrading treatment [and] restricts freedoms of speech, assembly, press and expression." For his part, Bush has gone so far as to praise two autocrats, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, for their willingness to "recognize the importance of representative, democratic institutions." Demonstrating that "recognition," both boycotted this week's unveiling of Bush's initiative for democracy in the Arab world.
In fact, not even the much-hyped Greater Middle East Initiative upends Washington's decades-old bargain with the Arab world. Though Rice originally trumpeted it as the first step in transforming the Middle East, the administration quickly backpedaled in response to an outcry from Arab leaders. "Each nation has to find its own path and follow that path at its own speed," Powell hastened to point out. The watered-down initiative, according to Marina Ottaway and Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "will address a wide range of social, economic, and political issues, but it will do little of consequence to advance what is at the heart of the regional transformation that the United States says it wants--democratization." Instead, the program focuses on secondary issues--a literacy campaign, a "micro-finance" proposal--which have long been part of U.S. and European aid programs to the region.
he genesis of the new realism is, of course, America's problems creating democracy in Iraq. But today's problems in Iraq do not derive from failures of democracy. They derive from failures of security, which have made democracy difficult to achieve. Those failures owe to a well-chronicled fact--the United States lacks the troop levels required to provide security. It should be axiomatic that, as former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) adviser and democracy expert Larry Diamond puts it, "you can't have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has a monopoly on the means of violence." In Iraq today, not even the U.S. Army, much less the interim government, possesses such a monopoly.
Nor is it clear that the Bush team's particular recipe for building a democratic Iraq amounted to much more than a cartoon version of democratization. "The distinction between liberation and democratization, which requires a strategy and instruments," says former U.S. Information Agency Director Penn Kemble, "was an idea never understood by the administration." Indeed, it was precisely the equation of the absence of oppression with the existence of democracy--exemplified by Donald Rumsfeld's infamous "freedom's untidy" comment during the postwar looting--that underpinned the White House's assumption that it could rapidly draw down U.S. forces after toppling Saddam. It took the United States years to transform Germany and Japan. In Iraq, by contrast, the CPA already has its bags packed.
Stepping into the vacuum created partly by the mistakes of the Pentagon and White House, realists now counsel that the quickest path to stability in Iraq lies in abandoning our democratic hopes for the country. Some, like Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, argue for partitioning the county into Kurd, Shia, and Sunni zones. Others argue for installing an autocrat. Still others, like Pat Buchanan, advocate withdrawing altogether.
Ultimately, however, democracy offers the best--perhaps the only--way to ensure stability. Now that Iraqis have been granted some degree of freedom, what Shia or Kurd will submit to a Baghdad strongman again? Only elections can confer the legitimacy a new Iraqi government will require. Argues Jennifer Windsor, a Middle East expert at Freedom House: "Democracy is the only political system that can balance competing attachments and interests in Iraq today, so it is the only hope for stability."
The lack of "realistic" alternatives to democracy in Iraq applies equally to the Middle East as a whole. Complaining that democratic idealists "incorporate Wilsonian ideas into their vision in urging the spread of democracy," prominent realist G. John Ikenberry of Georgetown University scoffs at the notion that this "is not merely idealism, according to them; it is good national security policy." Meanwhile, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued in The New York Times last week, "What we need now is pragmatism and not ideology. ... We must do everything we can to help the region's more moderate and friendly regimes--the Saudis and others--to defeat terrorism and improve the protection of foreign workers and oil facilities." Likewise, Republican Senator Pat Roberts insists that Washington must restrain its tendency toward "social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy."
But the United States is entitled--on September 11, the aim of a democratic Middle East became a matter of our national well-being, even survival. And the United States is obligated--because either pressure for democracy in the Arab world will come from the United States or it will come from nowhere at all. For the source of America's entitlement, look no further than the region's "friendly regimes." Not only has repression fueled terrorist movements in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt; the very governments we prop up have sanctioned the worst elements as a way to deflect popular anger from their palace gates. The absence of civil society, the weakness of independent media outlets, the weakness of secular opposition parties--all these things underpin the truth that, as Bush said in a recent speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, "as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready to export."
This is more than conjecture. A recent study by Princeton's Alan Krueger and Czech scholar Jitka Maleckova analyzed data on terrorist attacks and measured it against the characteristics of the terrorists' countries of origin. The study found that "the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists." Unfortunately, according to the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Report, not a single Arab state offers such freedoms. One could plausibly have argued before September 11 that this was none of America's business. But, on that day, the Arab world's predicament became our own--thrusting the United States into a war of ideas to which realism has no adequate response.
Nor will victory in this highly ideological war be accomplished by standing by while Arab states leisurely pursue their "own path" to democracy, as Powell puts it. When it comes to the Arab world, either the spur for democratization will come from without or it will not come any time soon. Realists like Republican Senator Chuck Hagel insist the solution to the lack of freedom in the Middle East cannot be that "we are going to go forth and impose democracy." If Hagel means to suggest we should not regularly resort to arms to do so, he has a point. Yet, the realist critique refuses to distinguish between war and democracy promotion. (In this, it takes its cue from the White House, whose revised case that it waged war for the explicit purpose of creating democracy--rather than to topple an aggressive tyrant and then implant a democratic political order--has created the impression that America cannot promote democratization by means other than force.) Yes, America will need to "impose" democracy in the Arab world, but it can also rely on peaceful tools, such as broadcasting, financial aid, diplomatic pressure, public support for regimes that pursue democracy, and public opprobrium for those who do not. If this amounts to an imposition on the sovereignty of dictatorial regimes, so be it.
The notion that we ought not impose what Cordesman derides as "our own political values"--that is, democracy--on others misses the fact that, as democracy scholar Joshua Muravchik has pointed out, if people do not want to be governed by consent, they can always vote for a tyrant. In fact, defining democracy as a universal rather than specifically American aspiration means the United States would not stop such an outcome. More compelling is the argument that some countries might not be ready for democracy. No one has espoused this view more vigorously than Powell, who, in his memoirs, dismisses the idea of a "desert democracy where people read the Federalist Papers along with the Koran." This line of reasoning mirrors the logic that American policymakers applied to other formerly undemocratic regions of the world. Joseph Grew, the State Department's chief Japan expert, cautioned President Truman that "the best we can hope for is a constitutional monarchy, experience having shown that democracy in Japan would never work." Awash in cultural relativism, his colleagues and successors made the same point about East Asia, Germany, and South America. Now that the tide of democracy has swept over these regions, they are making the same point about the one part of the world it has yet to touch.
To be sure, with Iraqis killing Americans every day, the temptation to yield to such pessimism may prove irresistible. But, when they advertise Iraq--like they advertised Vietnam before it--as the repudiation of a larger democratic war of ideas, the realists encourage a more pessimistic conclusion than circumstances justify. A policy can be measured by its successes, and it can be measured by its failures. When it comes to America's record in promoting democratic change, the former surely outweigh the latter. The world may not change easily, but, because of America, it has changed. Having come so far, and confronted with a new totalitarian threat, how "realistic" would it be to quit now?
Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at TNR.
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