There's a game that kids (and, OK, me too) like to play with the fortune cookies you get at Chinese restaurants. Read the fortune, but append the phrase "in bed" to whatever it says. Hilarity ensues. The game illustrates that in fortune-telling, as in everything else, There's a game that kids (and, OK, me too) like to play with the fortune cookies you get at Chinese restaurants. Read the fortune, but append the phrase "in bed" to whatever it says. Hilarity ensues. The game illustrates that in fortune-telling, as in everything else, context matters. A couple of additional context-setting words transform platitudes into dirty jokes. Much the same could be said of the ongoing debate about the role of democracy promotion in American foreign policy.
Shadi Hamid, as he explained first in The American Prospect and again for Tom Paine, thinks it should be at the center of progressive foreign policy. Spencer Ackerman, also writing in the Prospect, disagrees, preferring a focus on human rights. John Hulsman and Anatol Lieven take yet another view, preferring a focus on what one might call the construction of a liberal state infrastructure, "the rule of law, a reasonably independent and efficient judiciary and police, a law-abiding, honest and rational bureaucracy and a population that enjoys basic rights of labor, movement, and free discussion."
The way I see it, there's less to this dispute than meets the eye. The real problem is what's missing -- those crucial additional words that determine context. And context makes all the difference. From my perspective, you can take any of these proposals -- "let's promote x," "let's promote y" -- and add the phrase "through legitimate international institutions and mechanisms of international law" and it's all to the good. Absent that phrase, it's not so good. In particular, the neoconservative contention that we should promote x and y through unilateral military action is a terrible idea.
The popular liberal counterproposal of doing x or y through quasi-coercive diplomatic and economic measures, however, is less of an improvement than many people think. The success of this brand of unilateralism in places like Ukraine and Georgia is highly misleading as a model for the Middle East. The problem is a phenomenon that I'd very much like to give a less shrill and lefty sounding name to, but alas, I don't have one handy: it's called "imperialism."
In Eastern Europe, the United States of America has never served as an imperial power. These are countries that have either been dominated by Russians for hundreds of years, or else were previously dominated by Germans before falling under Russian hegemony. The United States was in no way involved in these efforts at imperial domination, and expended considerable blood and treasure throughout the 20th century combating the local imperial powers. Consequently, trust and affection for the United States is very high in that region and we can get away with a lot of meddling without being seen as meddlers. This is particularly true in that the regimes we sought to subvert in Ukraine and Georgia were fairly literal successors to the previous Russian colonial administrations.
The Middle East (like Latin America) is very different. We Americans don't think of ourselves as an imperialist power, but that's certainly how we're seen by others. In particular, the common Middle Eastern view is to see us as simply the inheritors of the former local empires of our allies, France and (especially) England. This is, moreover, not an especially inaccurate understanding of the situation. The American population's knowledge of Middle Eastern history is sketchy at best, but the residents of the region understand it pretty well.
They understand that Israel, our regional best friend, was a creation of the British empire's control over historical Palestine. That our other major strategic ally in the area, Turkey, was the pre-Anglo-French colonizer of the Arabs. That the overwhelming majority of friendly Arab regimes -- the monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Bahrain along with the Christian political establishment in Lebanon-- are literal creations of the retreating colonial powers. That the regimes with which we have hostile relations -- the Islamic Republic of Iran and Baathist Syria -- were forged in revolutions against post-colonial monarchies. That Saddam Hussein's Iraq had the same story. And, last, that our relationship with Egypt switched from friendly to hostile when the post-colonial monarchy was overthrown in a coup, and then to friendly again when the anti-colonial regime agreed to make peace with Israel.
Under the circumstances, we simply lack the requisite ability to boss countries around and be viewed as credibly operating on behalf of the local populations rather than our own nefarious designs. Indeed, at this point it hardly matters whether our designs are, in fact, nefarious. Consider the recent history. The long legacy of nefarious designs and support for unpopular regimes was bad enough. Then came George W. Bush, who loudly proclaimed his determination to repudiate that legacy and proved it by … overthrowing one of the remaining anti-colonialist governments and occupying its territory for an indefinite period of time. Then he said Israel didn't need to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority because it wasn't democratic. The Palestinians then had an election -- and now he says Israel doesn't need to negotiate with the victor because Palestinians voted for the wrong candidate.
Our credibility, in other words, is in the toilet. And simply putting a new president in office won't suffice to fish it out. If we want to work effectively for reforms that would benefit the populations of Middle Eastern countries, we'll need to do it through international institutions. And we'll want to spend more time bolstering those institutions' legitimacy rather than denigrating them.
Realistically, a determination to work through legitimate international institutions and legal methods is going to put constraints on how much we can accomplish. This is, however, less of a drawback than one might think. Simply put, operating with constraints on our ability to achieve what we'd like is better than casting the restraints off only to put ourselves in a position where everything we do backfires horribly.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
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