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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The State Department might be expected to put up some resistance to legislative meddling in its mission. "That was [its] initial reaction toward the anti-trafficking legislation that was passed in both houses. That was also the initial reaction of the international religious freedom legislation," says Lorne Craner, head of the International Republican Institute and former assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor in the Bush administration. The State Department eventually successfully adapted to the institutional changes mandated by both pieces of legislation, he notes. "And given the president's words and his actions, I think at this point [the act] will get a more sympathetic hearing from the ... leadership than the trafficking or religious freedom legislation did."
Although a bill promoting democracy with bipartisan support might seem to be noncontroversial, conservatives have traditionally expressed skepticism toward the strain of messianic unilateralism that runs through neoconservative thought. As Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote 15 years ago in "The National Interest," "It is not the American purpose to establish 'universal dominance' in the provocative formulation of Charles Krauthammer -- not even the universal dominance of democracy."
It's not only conservatives who find fault with the strategy of putting democracy above all other considerations. "The inevitable fact is that in some places it is necessary to weigh competing American interests against one another," argues Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy and Rule of Law project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "And this bill seems to assume an 'all democracy all the time' approach to foreign policy without even seeming to acknowledge deeper tensions between a democracy goal and other economic and security goals."
It also fails to take into account pressing short-term issues such as North Korea's nuclear weapons and China's growing influence in the international arena, Carothers says. "This bill doesn't seem to acknowledge that conceiving of our relationship with China as a democracy mission is probably not going to happen and will not help integrate China into the international political and economic system in the next two to 10 years."
Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, sees the bill as an effort to give what are seen as negative U.S. policies, particularly in the Middle East, a more positive spin. (Bush's nomination of longtime advisor Karen Hughes as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy is clearly another part of that effort.) The bill uses "the power of the U.S. military occupation and military presence in the region since 9/11 to declare that a new historical moment has arrived," she says. "The problem is that all the things the Bush administration wanted to fight against turned out to be lies -- Iraq's nukes, potential weapons of mass destruction, links with al-Qaida. You can always say that you're fighting for democracy because it is such an elusive concept."
Bennis adds that the Bush administration's "claiming credit for the move to democratization is very insulting to the peoples of these countries -- the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Lebanese. These democratization attempts have been in place for the last 25 years at least, and have failed because of the efforts of the U.S. government."
The issue of U.S. hypocrisy also troubles former ambassador Palmer, a supporter of the bill. "Young Arabs see us as inconsistent, as promoting democracy but propping up the Saudi dictators. They feel that we're not credible." He believes that the ADVANCE Democracy Act will eliminate the double standards by which the U.S. government supports democracy some of the time, in some places.
Carnegie's Carothers, however, argues, "You cannot legislate the elimination of double standards in America's approach to democracy in the world, because those double standards are based on the fact that our interests don't always go together despite all the nice rhetoric in presidential speeches."
To overcome the bill's critics, Horowitz will again rely on the support of the evangelical community, which he considers to have been "the most powerful force in human rights in the last 20 years." That force was evident when the North Korea Human Rights Act seemed to be on the verge of failure last year. "I can tell you that senior officials of the Korean and Chinese embassies told me that the bill had zero chance of passing the gantlet in the Senate," Horowitz recalls. But then his coalition went into overdrive, putting pressure on Democratic leaders such as Tom Daschle, on whom the coalition threatened to unleash 300 Korean-American pastors if he didn't help remove obstacles to the bill's passage. Daschle capitulated, then lost in a close reelection race in November anyway.
If significant legislative resistance to the ADVANCE Democracy bill emerges, expect another wave of pressure from an alliance of evangelicals and neoconservatives. Having successfully shifted the debate on North Korea from security issues to human rights concerns, it is now attempting to sell a more ambitious program: the destabilization of more than 40 dictatorial regimes around the world. Whether the result is 20 years of increasing democracy (think Poland) or 20 years of devastating decline (think Russia) will depend not only on passage of the democracy act but also on the way that events affecting America's economy and national security -- which aren't always in our control -- play out on the world stage.
