Realism and Idealism
When Michael Young writes about the Mideast, it's usually worth a read. This piece in Reason online is no exception. He says the U.S. drive to democratize the Arab world has lost its momentum in the last year. No news in that. But he says much has changed in that world since the process began, and that the U.S. policy split between realism and idealism is a false dichotomy. And America can and should pursue both.
The administration has always mixed interests and ideals, conciliation and confrontation, since no foreign policy can ever be conducted on the basis of one without the other. But [Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine] was indirectly right in another sense: When it comes to facing the dilemma of advancing democracy against interests in the Arab world, the administration has been willing to hold up odiously manipulated elections as proof of progress—for example the recent presidential election in Egypt or municipal elections in Saudi Arabia. In other words, the administration, perhaps reluctantly, has intermittently fallen back on an old realist trick of insisting things are better, providing counterfeit evidence of this, and turning to more important items of business.
Yet now is as good a time as ever for the U.S. to make democratization a basis of its foreign policy doctrine in the Middle East. Many Arabs have no patience for Bush. But the center of gravity in the region has decisively shifted in the direction of advancing liberty, as recent events have eroded the legitemacy of Arab leaders: three relatively free elections this year in Iraq (one of them forthcoming in December), another relatively free election in Lebanon after the country saw an end to Syrian occupation, and growing discontent with the fossilocracies in other parts of the region, particularly Egypt or Tunisia, and with second-generation despotisms, such as those in Syria and Jordan. For an administration to ignore such changes and banish democracy to a secondary tier of priorities would display a striking lack of ambition and foresight.
A more obvious parallel question is whether the U.S. can even return to the cold realism that guided policy under the first Bush administration. As 9/11 showed, that approach posed a genuine national security threat, as disgruntled Arabs, associating Washington with their own domestic persecutors, retaliated against the U.S. Conversely, absolute, inflexible devotion to democracy at the expense of more practical consideration of interests is simply not sensible.
That leaves a third option: that the U.S. declare the spread of democracy a strategic interest (not an open-ended desire), one that must be advanced where and when possible, even if it is temporarily delayed by intervening objectives. Arab regimes should be pushed to take specific measures within specific timeframes to open up their societies, and the U.S. can tie this to other forms of bilateral cooperation. Finally, no administration should ever hail as progress what is patently an effort by dictatorships to sell it a defective bill of democratic goods.
