In Search of an Effective Democratic Realism

Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion, by Thomas Carothers. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004). 297 pages. $24.95 (paper), $50 (cloth).

A central premise of the Bush Administration's post-9/11 foreign policy is that autocracy breeds terrorism. In a major address in November 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush said, "60 years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. 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 for export." Bush thus announced a new U.S. policy: "a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East."¹

The Bush Administration's new focus on democracy promotion in the Middle East flowed directly from the National Security Strategy that the president had issued a year earlier. In the strategy's foreword, Bush said that "the values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society." "The duty of protecting these values against their enemies," he wrote, "is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages." Bush asserted that the United States would use its historically unparalleled military, economic and political power not "to press for unilateral advantage" but "to create a balance of power that favors human freedom." He went on to pledge that the United States would "actively work" to promote democracy around the world. "The events of Sep. 11, 2001," he argued, "taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states." The United States, he concluded, "welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission" of advancing human freedom.²

Bush's democracy-centric foreign policy has set off an intense U.S. and international debate about how the United States and its allies can best promote democracy, particularly in the Middle East but also more generally across the Islamic world and beyond. In turn, this debate about the role of democracy promotion as an antidote to global terrorism has further scrambled the traditional fault lines of American foreign policy.

In the old three-cornered debate about U.S. foreign policy, the liberal-internationalist school monopolized democracy promotion. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson, the liberal internationalists argued that building both international legal institutions and democratic nation-states would result in a lasting peace. The former would not suffice without the latter because only democracies could be trusted to abide by international law and to support its collective enforcement. In contrast, both the isolationist and realist schools of thought looked upon the active promotion of democracy abroad with great skepticism. Adherents of each school forever quoted Secretary of State John Quincy Adams' Independence Day speech of 1821:

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America's] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.³

In the 1980s Ronald Reagan viewed realism as too limited a tool in his struggle against the "evil empire." In Reagan's "neo-conservative" worldview, the expansion of freedom was both the end and means of U.S. policy. Since 9/11, the split between realists and neo-conservatives over the role of democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy has widened. This debate can be readily observed within the pages of The National Interest, the premier journal of American realism. Two recent issues (Summer and Fall 2004) contained at least three articles on democracy promotion under the rubric of "the democracy project."

The most compelling of these articles involved an intramural debate between Charles Krauthammer and Francis...