Matt Yglesias

Geopolitics and Democracy

True, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was democratically elected. But you can discern his authoritarian tendencies in the fact that he had the constitution changed to allow him to run for a second term, and currently he’s working on changing the constitution again to allow for a third term.

Oh, no, wait . . . that’s not Chavez, that’s staunch American ally and brilliant democratic leader Alvaro Uribe in Colombia. The horror.

Which just goes to illustrate a longstanding and bothersome point. In the world you’ve got your countries that are clearly democracies—South Korea, Canada, Portugal. And you’ve also got your countries that are clearly despotic—Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Burma. But you’ve also got an extremely broad class of countries, typically “middle income” countries, where they have elections and competition between political parties but also have a lot of corruption, weak state institutions, and not much in the way of an entrenched tradition of liberalism.

But lacking a good umbrella term for states that fall into this middle ground, the tendency is for the American media and political establishment to arbitrarily assign such states to either the “promising new democracy” box or “threatening incipient authoritarianism” box based primarily on geopolitical considerations. So-called “pro-American” leaders are also “democrats” whereas those alleged to be “anti-American” are “authoritarian.”

Democracy Promotion Requires Peace Promotion

Over at the Wonk Room, Peter Juul calls attention to our CAP colleague Brian Katulis’ paper on democracy promotion in the Middle East for the Century Foundation. It features the following bullets:

1. Restore U.S. credibility by disconnecting democracy and human rights promotion from U.S. security goals and reforming our own human rights and civil liberties practices. The Obama administration has already taken big step in this direction by directing the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp by next January.

2. Use diplomacy to promote national consensus in key countries and address conflicts in the region. Internal conflicts in countries throughout the region – form Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories to Iraq and Yemen — are driven by the lack of a national political consensus on basic structures of governance. Moreover, resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict will create an environment in the region more conducive to democratic reform.

3. Integrate U.S. approaches to supporting democracy and governance reform in the region. All U.S. government assistance – from USAID to the State Department to military aid — should be coordinated to better encourage better governance by recipients of American funding and assistance.

4. Increase positive incentives for democratic reform. The model of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which provided incentives to promote economic development and improved governance, is one the new administration can encourage reforms.

5. Diversify funding for democracy promotion in the region. Private philanthropy, endowments, partnerships and the like in the Middle East should be encouraged to take on political reform, building a stronger organic base for democracy and human rights.

6. Recognize the political power of Islamist forces. Like it or not, Islamist groups are potent political forces in many countries in the Middle East. Reform efforts that ignore them are at best incomplete, and the United States needs to take non-violent religious-political movements into account.

These are all excellent points. One thing I would add that I think has a tendency to go missing in these discussions is that the essential background for effective and sustainable democracy promotion is a relatively benign international climate. The end of the Cold War wound up being a boon to democracy not just because several Soviet-dominated countries in Central and Eastern Europe turned into democracies. It also helped spread democracy in Asia and Latin America, too, primarily because the United States no longer felt the need to support “our bastards” regimes and could, instead, make it clear that close relations with the U.S. depended on a proper respect for basic human and political rights. Great power conflict, by contrast, merely ensure than any actual or would-be dictator or revolutionary can always count on the support of one or the other external players.

That’s something to keep in mind in general as we try to stay true to our values while negotiating a transition to a more multipolar world. An emphasis on democracy and human rights implies some level of tension with the government of China. But at the same time, maintaining a basically friendly relationship with China is actually crucial to fostering an environment in which democracy and respect for human rights can blossom. That’s a difficult line to walk, but it’s important. And the general idea has application to the specific region. Working on the Israeli-Arab conflict or on trying to work toward an improved relationship with Iran can be seen as contrasting goals with democracy promotion. But at the same time, lowering international tensions in the Middle East would in many ways make it easier to move forward on democracy.

Michael McFaul on Russia

Jason Zengerle links to a worthwhile realist take on Russia from Stepehn Boykewich that, inter alia, engages in the sort of more-sympathetic-than-you-usually-hear-in-the-American-media reading of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power that you’ll often hear from, for example, me. Zengerle says:

Whether Boykewich is right, I can’t really say. But I think it’s an important view to consider–especially in light of Obama’s recent appointment of Stanford’s Michael McFaul (who’s something of a hardliner) as the National Security Council’s top Russia hand.

Someone was asking me to characterize McFaul’s views a couple of weeks ago and likewise was coming from the default assumption that he’s a hardliner of whom I would disapprove. I think I said in response that that’s definitely his reputation, but I’m not sure it’s really correct. Or, rather, I think it tends to illustrate some of the artificiality of some of the foreign policy line-drawing. McFaul has a strong scholarly and policy interest in democracy promotion. And you never see him cosigning realist manifestos. And you sometimes do see him cosigning these kind of manifestos. That said, with regard to both democracy promotion in general and Russia in particular, McFaul’s a bona fide expert who really knows what he’s talking about, not a bullshitter who thinks it’s good to “be tough” or whatever. Consequently, he has, I think, a very measured and reasonable take on these things. I’d be hard-pressed to disagree with anything in his article on “Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?” co-written with Francis Fukuyama.

Or take his long fall 2005 article with James Goldgeier on “What To Do About Russia”. I would say it takes more of a hostile tone about Putin than I would, but that the difference of opinion is really a disagreement about how we should understand Boris Yeltsin and the merry band of thieves who preceded Putin, rather than a disagreement about Putin. And the policy prescriptions are, again, measured and sensible. Indeed, the main policy argument is that we need to engage with the Russian government on an essentially realpolitik basis regarding nuclear proliferation and counterterrorism issues. They also argue that Russian conduct in Chechnya is harming U.S. interests in the broader fight against al-Qaeda, which I think is correct, but which relies on a basically realist assessment of the al-Qaeda issue. On the democracy front, they call for “[d]irect personal engagement with Russian democratic activists” in which we emulate Ronald Reagan who “accorded [] human rights activists the same respect that he showed for his Soviet counterpart” and for about $100 million in FREEDOM Support Act funds for Russian civil society programs.

On the whole, this is a modest, realistic, and somewhat realist agenda. And I think that reflects the fact that people who understand what they’re talking about understand that the world isn’t crowded with extremely sharp trade-offs between democratic and humanitarian ideals and American interests. Real hard-liners are people who just don’t want to cooperate with Russia at all, and who use the brutality of the Putin regime as a pretext for a highly confrontational security agenda on nuclear weapons, missile defense, and all the rest. But the people who want those things wanted them when Yeltsin was in power and would want them under any conceivable Russian regime, just as any Russian government would oppose them. If you genuinely interested in Russian democracy, you don’t crowd the US-Russian bilateral relationship with counterproductive hostility. And if you’re genuinely interested in U.S.-Russian cooperation, I think you do need to want us to try to find ways to exercise influence at the margin to push Russia back on a democratic path—cooperation could be deeper and easier with a more liberal, more democratic government in Moscow.

This is Not What a Good Prospect for Democracy Looks Like

Alissa Rubin’s look at recent political developments in Iraq is very interesting, but the lede seems overwrought to me:

With provincial elections scheduled for the end of January, Iraq appears to be plagued by political troubles that seem closer to Shakespearean drama than to nascent democracy.

It’s true that nascent democracy is hard to see in Iraq. But the events unfolding aren’t especially outlandish. What would be outlandish, really, would be for democracy to bloom in the land between the rivers. Everything we know about regime types and democratic consolidation always indicated that Iraq was an exceedingly non-promising locale for a democratic transformation. The fact that starting in mid-2003 the United States spent years combating a worsening insurgency tended to distract attention from the subject of democracy per se. But over the past year, with the insurgency on the wane this comes back into focus.

But it’s difficult for democracy to prosper in countries with serious ethnic and sectarian divides, especially when the majority group is — like Iraq’s Shiite Arabs — a less-than-overwhelming majority. It’s also difficult for democracy to prosper in countries whose economies are centered around national resource extraction. Conversely, it’s helpful for a democratic transition for a country to have democratic neighbors or to be integrating into multilateral democratic institutions. But of course, Iraq doesn’t have those things. Bad for democracy is to have neighbors with rival geopolitical designs that they’re trying to play out inside your territory.

Under the circumstances, Iraq will probably be pretty unstable for a while and then eventually someone or other will consolidate control over the country and they’ll almost certainly be using means that don’t get you an A on your democracy promotion 101 test.

Necessary Risks

Shadi Hamid writes that the United States needs to rethink its approach to the Middle East in a more fundamental way than perhaps many progressive leaders are thus far prepared to do:

While there is a well-deserved consensus that the Bush administration has caused untold damage to our relationship with the Arab
and Muslim world, it would be a mistake to think that eight years of Republican rule are an anomaly in an otherwise proud history of
successful engagement. The reality is more troubling: American policy has been consistently self-defeating under administrations of both parties for more than five decades.

I think that’s right. As Hamid says, America’s cozy relationship with unpopular Arab despots is, in many ways, at the root of our larger problem vis-a-vis the Muslim world. Simply stepping back from Bush-style unilateralism is a good idea, but it won’t actually resolve that problem. And I think most of his policy recommendations are good. I’m a bit wary, however, of the idea that we should “elevate democracy promotion through aid conditionality.” This is a popular suggestion, but I think it has a lot of problems. One way you could implement it would be to say to the King of Jordan “either write and adopt a democratic constitution and hold free and fair elections to fill the office by 2010 after which you step aside or we’re cutting you off.” That would presumably result in the King telling us to get lost, and us cutting off aid. But that’s typically not what democracy promoters have in mind. Instead, they want us to make more moderate demands (”a set of benchmarks, including respect of opposition rights, freedom of expression, and progress toward holding free elections, even if only on the municipal level at first”) that, presumably, the incumbent authorities are more likely to accept.

But this sets up an odd dynamic. In effect, clever State Department bureaucrats are trying to trick the Mubaraks and Husseins of the world into accepting deals that lead to them losing their grip on power. But common sense indicates that this is closer to the core area of competence of the dictators than of the State Department. Most likely, they’ll trick us, proposing cosmetic reforms that fundamentally change nothing. Meanwhile, we’re now officially certifying shame reform processes. Beyond that, in a larger sense the nexus of terrorism, US policy, and Arab autocracy isn’t just about electoral systems, it’s about control and autonomy and specifically the sense that the United States is trying to push Arabs around, tell them what to do, and control their lives and their countries. Attempting to micromanage political reform in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere is likely to compound that problem rather than ameliorate it. This is especially true in light of the fact that, as Hamid says, American motives are viewed with enormous suspicion in the region.

Better would be to embrace Hamid’s other ideas and then, I think, just distance ourselves from some of these autocratic regimes. The next president should decline to invite Saudi princes to his vacation house. Instead of selling these regimes advanced weaponry and then offsetting that with special extra goodies for Israel, we could just not sell the advanced weaponry and eschew the extra goodies for Israel. And the president can say that while he won’t dictate internal policy to Arab governments, America’s view is that democracy is good, and we would be happy to deal with democratically elected governments no matter who won which elections.

McCain: For Musharraf Before He Was Against Him

Just like everyone else, John McCain’s had statements out today praising Pervez Musharraf’s decision to step down as President of Pakistan. But it’s worth noting that back in December when Pakistan was in the news because of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, McCain distinguished himself for taking a much more pro-Musharraf line than most other prominent U.S. politicians. Here he is talking to Anderson Cooper:

COOPER: Is there any other option but Musharraf?

MCCAIN: I think that the new chief of staff of the army is a person who’s clearly going to be a player, because the army will play a role in whatever and however any unrest is addressed. But I think Musharraf, as the president of the country, is probably — and he has stepped down from his military position, as you know. Is probably also a key element.

Alex MacGillis reported for The Washington Post that McCain was “outspoken in defense of Musharraf,” saying “I continue to believe Musharraf has done a pretty good job” whereas “Benazir Bhutto and [former prime minister Nawaz] Sharif presided over failed states, there was corruption, there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf took charge.” By contrast, as Jason Zengerle points out, Barack Obama issued a clear call for Pakistani democracy.

It’s also worth reading the December 2007 coverage in the last of last week’s Georgia coverage just as a reminder of how much McCain relished a crisis mentality. He thinks that scary things happening in the world are good for him politically notwithstanding the fact that he’s associated with the policy approach that leads to the scary happenings.

Musharraf Steps Down

Today’s big news is that Pakistan’s president-slash-dictator Pervez Musharraf is going to resign. The whole issue has gotten a bit obscured by the Olympics, the campaign, and Russia-Georgia but to recap the last time Pakistan was in the headlines they held parliamentary elections that Musharraf’s allies badly lost, leaving the legislature in the hands of a civilian coalition. More recently, they moved to impeach Musharraf. And today he’s announcing that rather than fight the charges, he’ll bow to pressure and resign for the good of the country.

In a proximate sense, this seems unambiguously good — Musharraf is right to think that fighting the impeachment drive would be a disaster for Pakistan. And in a long-term sense, it would serve the United States well to shift from too much of a reliance on a relationship with Musharraf specifically to a broader engagement with Pakistani society. In the medium-term, however, what I’m hearing from people is that the problem now is that the governing coalition will have to actually do something. Thus far, their post-election agenda has mainly been focused on sidelining Musharraf and moving back to full civilian rule. That’s understandable, but during this period long-festering problems with the economy and in the frontier regions have deteriorated. The focus on Musharraf was, among other things, a way to avoid taking full responsibility for dealing with Pakistan’s considerable problems.