[Originally published in the Rutland Herald and Barre Times-Argus.]
The Bush administration’s foreign policy is internally inconsistent. It claims the virtually exclusive right to bring democracy to any poor, misbegotten, non-democratic country of its choosing, while at the same time supporting some very undemocratic regimes.
It would be easy to understand this bifurcated policy if it were possible to determine that it was in the U.S. national interest, but that does not always seem to be the case. Far too often, the support or non-support of a given country is dependent on factors that have nothing to do with any rational thought process.
If you examine the best of America’s philosophical underpinnings, it is easy to understand why this administration or any other, for that matter, would want to spread democracy around the world. We truly believe that we have the best political system that has ever existed. We believe that if the entire world were based on democratic principles, there would be far fewer conflicts and far fewer dangers facing us from abroad. Whether or not this is objectively true, as a nation, we believe it to be.
We also know that this is a wildly dangerous world. If we learned nothing from the immense dangers of the Cold War, 9/11 taught us a lesson we will never forget: America, despite its historic sense of geographic isolation (safety) from the constantly warring worlds in Europe and Asia, is newly vulnerable in today’s technologically advancing world.
For the first time, our enemies really can get to us! They can cause us to be afraid – a traditionally alien emotion in fortress America. As we know from the past seven years, fear promotes compromise on constitutional issues like: civil rights, torture and interrogation and personal freedoms. The world has watched as we have fearfully condoned or at least overlooked wireless wiretapping, the abrogation of habeus corpus rights, questionable detention, interrogation and torture activities and the physical and mental abuse of military prisoners in the hope that such compromise would bring us more safety. This has not helped our image in the world. Sadly, we have forgotten Benjamin Franklin’s admonition that he who gives up freedom for safety deserves neither.
So, we are faced with a real dilemma. Who are we? Are we, as we believe, the most democratic people in the world? Or are we a people faced with a real existential threat from those terrorists who would do us harm and thus backed into a corner where adopting undemocratic methods and supporting undemocratic foreign elements is our only route to survival?
On the one hand, we support undemocratic regimes in Chad, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia and elsewhere, either because they support us on our “War on Terror,” have oil or are somehow politically or economically important to us. The same is true in Egypt, the Sudan, Libya, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, to name a few. China is hardly a bastion of democracy. Yet, we have been told by our administration, after admissions that there were no weapons of mass destruction, no connection to 9/11 and that Iraq was really no threat to the United States, that we invaded Iraq in order to install democracy there. Why have we not invaded Myanmar to throw out those horrible people, or the Sudan to stop the horrors in Darfur, or Zimbabwe to get rid of Mugabe? The list goes on and on. Their peoples have suffered no less and probably considerably more than the Iraqis did under Saddam Hussein.
The purpose here is not to say which road we should take. The purpose is to point out that as long as we are pursuing two mutually incompatible policies, we will continue to marginalize ourselves as hypocrites in the outside world.
Today, all America has is its military power which is being worn down and overextended in its roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have no diplomatic, political or economic clout in the world. That is the case because our policies are laughed at by much of the rest of the world. If you don’t believe that, take a look at the Pew poll that shows what the rest of the world thinks of us today. It is not a pretty sight.
We need to decide what course to take. Shall we be the ultimate pragmatists who conduct our relationships based on our own national interest, without reference to difficult, nuanced issues of right and wrong? That’s our Saudi Arabian or China or Egypt policy today. Or shall we do this totally idealistically by supporting all movements that employ the democratic process? That’s what got us Hamas in Palestine.
This is not a simple issue, but it is one that needs to be examined and debated in this country. Whatever we actually are, or wish to think we are, we can’t get away with supporting two mutually contradictory policies at the same time.
Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe and the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff. He lives in Williston.
