Better ideas? You bet!

Francis Fukuyama and Adam Garfinkle answer a fatuously put rhetorical question:

As an editorial in The Wall Street Journal recently asked: "Anyone out there have a better idea" than the Bush administration's policy of high-profile democracy promotion in the Arab and Muslim worlds as a means to fight terrorism? Well, yes, there is one. That better idea consists of separating the struggle against radical Islamism from promoting democracy in the Middle East, focusing on the first struggle, and dramatically changing our tone and tactics on the democracy promotion front, at least for now.

End the conflation of the two, they demand. The pseudo-Wilsonian blathering actually obscures the nature of both problems, they are arguing, and thus impedes the identification of their solution. Given that this conflation effectively constitutes the United States' current strategic worldview, as set out by the president and his government, this piece attacks the key prop of the administration's self-mythology. (It's not a strategy, so much as one of the after-the-fact arguments grasped to justify the Iraq invasion. As the most rhetorically inspiring, it was seized on by the administration, and "Lo!" a "strategy.")

The nub of the conflation is drawing a specious causal relation between the two:

Authoritarian political cultures do function as enablers of radical Islamism, but the essential cause of the latter--today as before, in dozens of historical cases concerning violent millenarian movements--is the difficulty that some societies and individuals have in coming to terms with social change. That is why rapid modernization is likely to produce more short-term radicalism, not less. Muslims in democratic Europe are as much a part of this problem as those in the Middle East. This is not a trivial point; it is a central one that directly challenges a key tenet of the administration's view.

What the administration sees as one problem ought to be seen as two. Radical Islamism needs to be dealt with separately from democracy promotion. This involves doing everything we can to ensure the political success of the governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also involves killing, capturing or otherwise neutralizing hard-core terrorists in many parts of the world, and keeping dangerous materials out of their hands, in what will look less like a war than like police and intelligence operations.

Hmm, that last bit sounds familiar. They call for an effort to "stigmatize" terrorism, one approach for which I examined some time ago.

Democracy promotion should remain an integral part of American foreign policy, but it should not be seen as a principal means of fighting terrorism. We should stigmatize and fight radical Islamism as if the social and political dysfunction of the Arab world did not exist, and we should shrewdly, quietly, patiently and with as many allies as possible promote the amelioration of that dysfunction as if the terrorist problem did not exist. It is when we mix these two issues together that we muddle our understanding of both, with the result that we neither defeat terrorism nor promote democracy but rather the reverse.

Fukuyama's and Garfinkle's piece helps reintrroduce into both policy problems the political oxygen necessary for solving both of them, whereas both have been paralyzed for years by the administration's need for ex post facto justifications for its military adventurism.

Cross-posted to American Footprints.

Comments

[tommi]

To promote democracy is the manifest destiny of the west, which is to say capitalism, consumerism and consumption, I whole heartedly believe that the democratic objective is one and the same as capitalism. Under this vial USAID can give a Bearing Point under a 95.8 million dollar USAID contract make the US rich and cripple a place like Afghanistan in economic dependence, an astounding 92% of the total budget for 2004-2005 came from external funds. Forget Terror, I don't think Bush or anybody else in the White House looses a sec of sleep over it, it us you and I who do. For them it is just another justification as STYG says.

[ohwilleke]

I have a hard time believing that democracy promotion is really administration policy at all.

We have close ties with regimes like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and UAE, none of which are Democracies. Our Pakistani ally took power in a military coup that deposed his relatively pro-Western predecessor. We have shipped alleged terrorists to monarchies and dictatorships from Syria to Morocco to Egypt for torture upon arrive, and have also done so in places like Uzbekistan.

Contrawise, we have opposed democratic, but left leaning regimes in places like Brazil and Venezula.

I don't see the democracy promotion policy that the administration claims to adhere to outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which had governments of any kind after we deposed the respective incumbents, and both of which created states closer to Iran in design than that of Western democracies.