Democracy as Foreign Policy

I just finished writing a chapter on a foreign policy model that reviews the American experience in Afghanistan that attempts to extract lessons learned and apply them to policies designed to address the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). International interventions were undertaken by the United States (US) President Bush in both Afghanistan and Iraq with the goal in implementing democracy in both countries according to the theories of Natan Sharansky’s influential volume, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. I disagree with Sharansky, but I’m not exactly sure why I disagree with him, so this purpose of this quick essay is to think through why I disagree with his thesis and see what comes out on the other side.

The first item for examination is the traditional fact-value distinction. Sharansky is firmly on the “value” side with the argument that democracy must be implemented to increase freedom and decrease tyranny and terror. Anybody who disagrees with him must be against freedom and for tyranny and terror, right? But the problem I have is with the workability and effectiveness of democracy in foreign policy. Does it really work as well as Sharansky said it would? Did holding elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Arab spring countries improve them? I would argue that it hasn’t, but that’s not where the critique ends. I’m not sure that Sharansky’s argument was designed to improve foreign policy as much as it was to improve the career prospects of Sharansky. This isn’t meant to be overly critical because there are many people making arguments and trying to get ahead, but at some point there has to be a clear distinction made between the attractiveness of an argument and its workability, and this line is actually getting less well defined in our media age.

One way this analytic tension manifests itself is as a debate between “curiosity” and “problem solving,” with the idealists putting forth lots of idea and realists questioning wither they could ever work. However, America’s constitution is based on the failures of the too-democratic Articles of Confederation, and it was the Federalists who organized the country and increased centralization to create a more workable and effective government organization. It can be argued that the modern media age has upset this traditional balance between centralization and democracy, implemented a more extreme democracy, and returned to the nation to an unworkable political system. However, as Tocqueville points out, democracy in America can be so all encompassing and pervasive that it is impossible to understand any alternative to democracy. It is this mindset that helps to explain why democracy is seldom questioned and when it is, why the reaction can be so emotional and negative.

Returning to Afghanistan and Iraq, elections were held in both places and resulted in Karzai and Maliki respectively. How did they do? Karzai ruled over years of epic corruption with Kabul Bank, Dawood Hospital, and the Afghan Air Force that was used to run drugs are only the beginning of the long and sordid tale. After over 10 years of American intervention effort, Afghanistan is fourth in corruption behind Somalia, North Korea, and Sudan, which is rare company. Iraq’s leader Nouri al Malaki, a close friend of George Bush’s, used Iraq’s army to attack Sunnis rather than share power with them, which helped to create ISIS. Clearly just having elections is insufficient for establishing effective and long-lasting governance in countries, but it remains to be seen how to implement security, governance, and development policies that leave a country in a stable and sustainable state.

The current policy of merely holding elections puts policy makers in an interesting double bind however because, once chosen, policy makers are no longer able to leverage them because they have been “selected” by the people. The people who usually have little experience with democracy conversely see their leaders as selected by Americans more than elected by them and believe that they are implementing American policy. The larger problem is that an overreliance on or premature implementation of elections leaves American policy makers unable to hold a nation’s leaders accountable. That is, if they are excessively corrupt, then they cannot be removed, which is a problem. Reviewing the argument up until now, I find myself arguing for Americans taking a more active hand in running countries in which we are heavily involved. In some ways this makes sense: that is, if America is funding the government, and if American military personnel are dying to protect that government, then shouldn’t the American government have some say about how that government is run? In other words, if we’re effectively in charge, shouldn’t we act like we’re in charge? While this may not square with American politics, it certainly squares with politics in many parts of the world in which the US has security interests. This is doubtless a controversial conclusion, but it’s worth considering as the US continues to confront international security challenges in the 21st century.