One of the things that it most upsetting to me about being an American is that the foreign policy of my nation has been marked by a schizophrenia of conflicting values and long-term vision versus short-term goals and necessities. Our support for regimes with abominable human rights records during the Cold War, and the Latin American "Gunboat Diplomacy" on behalf of American commercial interest come to mind. I happy, however, to see that this is no longer the case, and that, ironically, it took Dubya to make that change.
I say "ironically", because most observers' analyses of the motivations for his administration's policies stop at his background in the energy sector. Because of this, they reason, he is clearly launching wars in the Middle East to seize and exploit the mineral wealth of other nations. Clearly this is not the case. It would be cheaper and far more pragmatic to buy the oil from repressive strongmen, than to try to forcibly remake the area into peaceful, functional, and open democracies.
Which is why, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced on her latest trip to Cairo and Riyadh that America will no longer pursue "stability at the expense of democracy" in the region, I rejoice.
"It is time to abandon the excuses that are made to avoid the hard work of democracy," said Ms. Rice. "There are those who say that democracy is being imposed. In fact, the opposite is true: Democracy is never imposed. It is tyranny that must be imposed."
Ending our support for strongmen in the region on the grounds of "Yes, he's a sunuvabitch, but he's our sunuvabitch" will go a long way to resolving some of the long-term structural imbalances in our unquestionably dysfunctional foreign policy. It's a good thing.
UPDATE: WaPo's David Ignatius has more:
But an overlooked aspect of Rice's speech was that it established guideposts by which to measure the policy of the United States. She enunciated a pro-democracy position so forcefully that if the Bush administration deviates from it, or undermines its credibility through belligerent, anti-democratic actions, it will be open to the charge of hypocrisy.
That "glass house" aspect of Rice's proclamation can help keep the Bush administration honest about some of its toughest foreign policy decisions. It's the secular equivalent of "What Would Jesus Do?" What would a democratic nation that cares about the rule of law do about the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? What energy policies are appropriate for a nation that advocates change in Saudi Arabia?
Rice was not advancing an expedient wartime ethic, of the sort we have heard too often from the Bush administration, but a universal moral one. America's mission, by her account, isn't a war against terrorism but a struggle for democracy. That may sound like a mere change in semantics, but it moves the United States from a situation in which every Muslim is a potential enemy to one in which every Muslim is a potential ally. Again, amen.
The signature lines in the speech were: "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course." That was the clearest enunciation yet of a policy that has been evolving since Sept. 11, 2001. The United States has shifted from being a status-quo power in the Middle East whose interests were narrowly defined around oil to a transforming power whose interests are broadly defined around political and economic reform.
Policy changes such as these are rare things. And, in this case, much-needed.
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