A Conversation Continued: Debating Democracy
by Thomas Carothers, Andrew J. Bacevich, Wayne Merry, Robert W. Merry and Amitai Etzioni
07.01.2007
A Conversation Continued: In the opening round of an exchange on democracy promotion that will continue over the coming weeks,TNI authors examine themes and questions raised in Paul Saunders's essay, "Learning to Appreciate France", which appeared in the March/April 2007 issue of The National Interest. Tony Smith offers his response here.
The Democracy Crusade Myth
Thomas Carothers
AS ATTENTION in Washington begins to turn to the likely or desired shape of a post-Bush foreign policy, calls for a return to realism are increasingly heard. A common theme is that the United States should back away from what is often characterized as a reckless Bush crusade to promote democracy around the world. Although it is certainly true that U.S. foreign policy is due for a serious recalibration, the notion that democracy promotion plays a dominant role in Bush policy is a myth. Certainly, President Bush has built a gleaming rhetorical edifice around democracy promotion through invocations of a universalist freedom agenda. And many people within the administration have given serious attention to how the United States can do more to advance democracy in the world. Overall, however, the traditional imperatives of U.S. economic and security interests that have long constrained U.S. pro-democratic impulses have persisted. The main lines of Bush policy, with the singular exception of the Iraq intervention, have turned out to be largely realist in practice, with democracy and human rights generally relegated to minor corners.
Consider the Middle East, the epicenter of the putative Bush democracy drive. Given its extraordinary transformative ambitions, the Iraq intervention can scarcely be called realist. Yet neither, however, is the president’s continual characterization of it as a democratizing mission very persuasive. The administration’s democratic bona fides in Iraq were undercut from the start by the fact that the U.S. decision to intervene was primarily driven by a jumble of security motives, including the desire to strike another (after Afghanistan) post–September 11 blow to impress the world with America’s determination, as well as genuine concern about Saddam Hussein’s presumed quest for WMD. The democracy rationale took on paramount importance only in the months after the invasion, as the other rationales dropped away. The presence of other potential U.S. interests—such as access to Iraqi oil and the chance to establish long-term military bases in Iraq—has further vitiated the credibility of the administration’s professions of democratic intention. So too has the administration’s persistent unwillingness to commit the resources necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq.
The Bush push for democracy in the rest of the Arab world is halfhearted at best and already receding. In the wake of September 11, the idea of a sweeping democratic transformation of the Middle East appealed strongly to Washington as a means of eliminating the root causes of Islamic radicalism. In a sharp break from the past, President Bush began speaking out forcefully about both the possibility and importance of Arab democracy. The administration did take some modest measures to back up this ringing rhetoric—jawboning Arab autocrats about political reform, establishing a regional pro-reform aid initiative (the Middle East Partnership Initiative, MEPI) and rewarding reformers with economic carrots, such as the free-trade agreement with Morocco.
Even at its peak in 2004–2005, this push for change among America’s autocratic friends in the region was nonetheless relatively weak. The jawboning had no real teeth, the aid initiatives were lightly funded and unassertive (MEPI’s annual funding has never exceeded $100 million; the administration’s current request to Congress for MEPI is $40 million) and the economic incentives modest. Although the idea of a democratic transformation of the Middle East did engage President Bush and some of his team, the stubborn fact remained that the United States continued to need close ties with its autocratic Arab allies for a host of reasons. Furthermore, these reasons were only intensifying—the stepped-up anti-terrorism campaign necessitated even closer cooperation with Arab security and intelligence services, the rising price of oil impelled even greater deference to energy-rich regimes and so forth. In addition, the newfound U.S. interest in Arab democracy sat uneasily next to the concern among many U.S. policymakers and political observers that rapid democratic change in the region would bring to power Islamist forces hostile to the United States.
From the start, therefore, the highly public Bush embrace of Arab democracy camouflaged a deeply conflicted policy soul, torn between a continuing need for stability and the newly felt imperative for fundamental change. In the past two years, the desire for stability has fully eclipsed the impulse for change. A series of regional developments—electoral gains by Islamists in Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon, the new U.S. effort to mobilize an Arab alliance to help oppose Iran’s growing influence and the deterioration of the political and security situation in Iraq—have combined to cause the administration largely to abandon its pro-democracy push. Whereas in June 2005 when Condoleezza Rice was in Cairo she forthrightly spoke about the United States’s interest in Egypt’s democratic progress, she never even mentioned democracy or human rights during her trip there in January, despite Egypt’s ongoing political crackdown.
If the Bush democracy drive has been only partial even at its epicenter, it has been almost absent from the main pillars of Bush policy toward the rest of the world. To start with, the administration has followed a firmly realist line toward Russia and China, America’s two main (at least potential) geostrategic challengers or partners. It has emphasized cooperation with both countries on the many major economic and security areas of common interest while generally downplaying democracy concerns, despite the fact that both those countries have been in a phase of political de-liberalization.
Although the Bush team insists that democracy promotion is an intrinsic element of the War on Terror, the day-to-day imperative of anti-terrorism efforts drives the United States into closer relations with helpful non-democratic governments not just in the Middle East but other places as well, especially in Asia and Africa. The Bush bear hug of Pakistan’s dictatorial president Pervez Musharraf, which is a (shaky) fulcrum of the overall War on Terror, is the ultimate realist bargain. Moreover, the War on Terror has entailed a dispiriting and often shocking array of U.S. abuses of the rule of law and human rights of detainees and prisoners abroad, as well as residents and citizens at home. Given these realities, how the Bush team expects the world to see the War on Terror as the pursuit of a "freedom agenda" is mysterious.
The War on Terror also, of course, includes the intervention in Afghanistan, which produced a significant democratic opening there. As with Iraq, however, many observers at home and abroad tend to be cautious about the Bush team’s claim of democratic purpose in Afghanistan. They are aware that the intervention was driven by security concerns rather than a sudden burning U.S. desire for Afghan democracy, and that the administration is falling short on the necessary commitment to consolidate Afghanistan’s new political order due to other preoccupations, Iraq above all.
The administration’s international energy policy—centered around the search for dependable access to oil and gas in a context of dramatically raised prices—is also eminently realist. Again as with the War on Terror, it is not just in the Middle East, but in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Africa, that the administration has cozied up to useful (i.e. energy-rich) strongmen leaders, giving them a pass on their political shortcomings. Vice President Cheney’s unalloyed praise for Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in his 2006 visit to Astana was a vivid example of this approach.
In short, the components of Bush foreign policy beyond Iraq—its great-power relations, the War on Terror and international energy policy—are all substantially realist endeavors in which democracy and human-rights concerns are minimized for the sake of traditional "hard" economic and security interests. The notion that the universal pursuit of freedom constitutes George Bush’s global compass is an enormous illusion.
Of course there is some pro-democracy substance in Bush’s foreign policy beyond the partial push for democracy in the Middle East. The administration has exerted pressure for democratic change on several authoritarian regimes, using the bully pulpit, economic sanctions and democracy aid. Such pressure has been directed at various governments—including those of Belarus, Burma and Cuba—where the United States has no countervailing economic or security fish to fry. In several other cases the administration has exerted pressure on governments it views as security threats, such as those of Iran, North Korea and Syria. In such cases, however, whatever pro-democracy interest lies behind such pressures is derivative of a security-driven, regime-change instinct. And over time, need for accommodation with those regimes, again for security reasons, appears to be winning out.
Much more broadly, the administration has sought to support democratization in many countries that over the last few decades have experienced political openings and are now either wavering in their paths or moving shakily ahead. These include Ukraine, Georgia, El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala, Nepal, Mozambique, Ghana, Macedonia and others, especially in Latin America, the western side of the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Such support usually consists of a mix of diplomatic advice and nudging, democracy-assistance programs and some pro-reform economic incentives. It draws on and furthers the institutionalization of a democracy-building capacity within and around the U.S. foreign-policy bureaucracy that has taken place since the early 1980s. Such efforts, though numerous and valuable, are generally very modest in scale and at best a helping hand, not a guiding force, in the political life of the countries they reach.
One noteworthy new arrow in the U.S. democracy-promotion quiver is the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). By giving out substantial dollops of dollars to poor countries on the basis of their performance on a set of social, economic and political indicators, the MCC seeks to be a strong positive incentive for good policy performance. The pro-democratic content of the indicator set is limited, and some non-democracies have managed to become eligible for MCC aid, such as Morocco and Jordan. Nevertheless, the political indicators are part of the mix and do carry some weight.
The pro-democracy components of Bush’s foreign policy are thus multiple and real. Yet they are subordinate parts of a broader policy largely structured along realist lines, giving the overall whole what could be called a semi-realist character. With a few exceptions, the pro-democracy components concern countries of lesser importance to the United States and basically entail a continuation of programs and policies put into motion by previous administrations.
Given the circumscribed role that democracy promotion plays in President Bush’s foreign policy, why is the perception common in the United States that his policy represents democracy promotion on steroids? Of course the soaring rhetoric distracts some, who assume that if the president says something often enough it must be at least somewhat true. The main reason, however, is Iraq. For many people debating foreign policy in the United States, looking at Iraq is akin to looking at the sun—nothing else is visible. Although the administration’s original motives for going into Iraq are still debated, the intervention as a whole is often discussed in the terms of the democracy-promotion framework in which the administration has wrapped it.
The rest of the world, in contrast, does not generally view Bush’s policy as a democracy-promotion binge. Profound skepticism about America’s stated pro-democratic intentions reigns widely. The many cases of the United States’s embracing friendly autocrats—the fulsome praise for President Musharraf, the hand-holding with Saudi leaders, the toasts for President Nazarbayev—starkly undercut a U.S. rhetorical line that in other societies sounds transparently self-serving and profoundly hypocritical. America’s own recent violations of the rule of law and human rights only complete this picture.
The sad, mildly ironic reality of the Bush approach to democracy promotion is that it may represent the worst of both worlds: It has soured people all around the globe, and many in the United States as well, on the very legitimacy and value of U.S. democracy promotion, despite having involved only a limited engagement in actual democracy promotion. The growing calls for a realist corrective, involving a backing away from democracy promotion, are misguided. Needed instead is a searching debate about how the United States can get back on track with what—until this administration—was the gradual development over twenty years of a U.S. approach to supporting democracy abroad, that while far from perfect and flecked with inconsistencies, nevertheless commanded bipartisan support at home and growing legitimacy around the world.
Thomas Carothers is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His latest book is Confronting the Weakest Link: Aiding Political Parties in New Democracies (2006).
No Disrespect to Canada. . . .
Andrew J. Bacevich
THE OCCASION of his second inaugural address inspired the 43rd president of the United States to new heights of eloquence. "We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion", he announced:
The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. . . .America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. . . .
How are we to interpret these words? For some of those listening, the sentiments expressed by the president represented an authentic rendering of America’s history and an accurate statement of America’s purpose. For others, the president’s words reeked with hypocrisy, the references to liberty and claims of a divine mandate camouflaging far more sinister aims.
So is George W. Bush an idealist or a cynic? Should we take his words at face value or dismiss them as sanctimonious cant? Is the essence of Bush’s America contained in his promise to advance the cause of freedom around the globe? Or has that essence already revealed itself in hellholes like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?
A third possibility exists, with the truth altogether more ambiguous and elusive. Perhaps President Bush’s post-9/11 conversion—the advocate of a "humble" foreign policy transformed into an impassioned crusader—was both heartfelt and calculated. It just might be that the president genuinely believes what it has become expedient for him to believe. After all, a grand restatement of America’s liberating mission issued in the midst of efforts to expand the American empire offers a way to reconcile—or at least to conceal—the tensions between American ideals and American interests.
Bush is by no means the first president to identify the elimination of tyranny as a vital U.S. interest. More than a few of his predecessors have seen the promotion of freedom as the best way to expand the roster of nations "friendly" to the United States. Yet friendship in this context connotes something more than cordiality. It implies subordination, other governments acceding to Washington’s rules (especially with regards to political economy) and according to Washington’s unique prerogatives (especially in relation to the use of force). For the United States, Canada epitomizes friendliness—not because Canadians themselves are friendly (although they are) but because Ottawa poses no hint of a threat and entertains no illusions about who wields the upper hand when it comes to Canadian-American relations. The United States will never feel fully secure until the world consists of nations like Canada, both genuinely free and reliably acquiescent.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is writing a history of U.S. civil-military relations.
Not Being with the Program
Wayne Merry
LINKING POLICY to democracy holds the potential for policy hypocrisy. Ninety years ago we declared war on Germany in part to "make the world safe for democracy." At the time, Wilhelmine Germany had a functioning parliament with legitimate multiparty politics and a freer wartime press than Britain or France, plus universal manhood suffrage—something Britain did not achieve until well after the war. Our contribution to the conflict arguably led to a more fragile German democracy than if we had stayed out. In fact, Germany in 1917 had a broader franchise than did the United States itself with our property requirements and poll taxes in many jurisdictions. Indeed, most black Americans did not achieve the electoral rights of Germans for another half century.
What about the supposed "democratic peace", the notion that democracies do not go to war with each other? Sadly, America’s greatest war stands in contradiction, as both the United States and Confederate States of America were functioning democracies by the standards of the time, while our Civil War showed how virulent are conflicts between popularly elected states. Even at the time, commentators noted the classical example that authoritarian Sparta sought to limit and negotiate the Peloponnesian War while democratic Athens insisted on a fight-to-the-finish total war.
Workable democracy means different things in different contexts. For example, there is nothing inherently undemocratic in reserving legislative seats for minority groups; in some countries it may be essential for participatory pluralism. Aberrations that violate an American’s instinctual notions of democracy may be acceptable in another cultural environment (as with inherited seats in the British House of Lords).
The easiest trap to fall into is to define democracy as majority rule, elections and legislatures. This invites a tyranny of the majority. Without civil liberties, rule of law, minority rights and genuine accountability, a country might be better off in the long run without a sham democracy that erodes popular support for democratic growth.
Democracy promotion in the United States is shared by government agencies and a variety of NGOs, many with substantial taxpayer support. Some of the NGOs do excellent work, with sophistication and cultural awareness. Such is not equally the case for government programs. The cause lies in the distinction between the goal of exporting democracy to another country and that of facilitating the import of democracy by it. The better NGOs seek to do the latter. Government, by its nature, attempts the former.
Government programs demand results, usually in "measurable" terms within the tenure of an administration or Congress. The statutes and appropriations for democracy promotion, the structure and leadership of the programs, and the career interests of participants all combine to "push" democracy—or at least the outward forms of it—rather than to encourage the slow and difficult learning process that democracy requires. Anyone who raises questions about local context and culture or the appropriateness of American-based standards is accused of "not being with the program."
The American "City on a Hill" itself demonstrates to all the world that even mature democracy is a work in progress. Democracy and its expansion can be good things, but alone they guarantee nothing. Too often, linking foreign policy to democratization causes Washington to see what it wants to see rather than to face grim realities. America, as the world’s most successful example of popular government, should contribute to the growth of democracy elsewhere, but the transformational approach of recent decades has often been contrary to our own intentions and interests.
Wayne Merry is a senior associate at the American Foreign Policy Council.
Bush’s Rationale of Success
Robert W. Merry
THE QUESTION of what actually fueled George W. Bush’s determination to invade Iraq continues to generate debate four years after the tanks rolled in. Was it really about wmd and the presumed nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda? Was it about the heady dream of transforming the Middle East through the exportation of Western-style democracy? Was it ultimately about oil, with those other rationales serving merely as smokescreens? Was it all part of a drive toward global hegemony?
Of all those possible rationales, the one that becomes unavoidable is democratization. It’s probably impossible to glean what precisely was going through Bush’s mind, or that of his advisors, as they worked up to their decision to invade. But we do know they had to face the question of how they were going to pull it off, how they would avoid a complete mess in the sands of Arabia. And none of the other rationales addresses that.
Thus, it helps to understand that ultimately there had to be two rationales—a rationale of necessity and a rationale of success. The rationale of necessity, as put forth by the administration before the war, was the looming threat of WMD and the prospect of those weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. That was a scary specter, and it helped generate support for the war decision. We don’t know to this day—and probably never will—just how sincere the Bush people were in putting forth this rationale. Was it truly the rationale of necessity, or did it merely mask other visions of American global influence that animated administration potentates? In any event, the administration’s stated rationale of necessity turned out to be bogus. There weren’t any WMD, and there wasn’t any serious Iraqi connection to Al-Qaeda.
But there still had to be a rationale of success. Surely it isn’t conceivable that the war’s architects never considered the question of how, in planting the flag of an alien civilization into the heartland soil of Islam, they were going to prevent the complete destabilization of that region. And of all the rationales put forward speculatively as underlying the invasion, there was only one rationale of success—democratization.
So how did they think they were going to pull it off? The answer has to be that they thought they would pull it off by establishing a democratic beachhead in the Middle East, which would become an engine of stability in Iraq and then serve as the staging area from which the United States and its allies would undertake the spread of a stabilizing brand of democracy in nearby states.
This isn’t to say Bush and his war architects were all Wilsonians at heart. Certainly Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney, those stalwart nationalists with hardly an element of Wilsonianism discernible in their worldviews, didn’t begin their calculations with any dreamy notion of serving humanity, in the Middle East or anywhere else. And Bush himself, of course, began his presidency with manifest disdain for the very idea of nation-building through the export of Western principles of governance.
But ultimately they all had to embrace the neoconservative notion of "morality in foreign policy’’, of spreading stability through the spread of democracy. Nothing else could give them any kind of assurance that they weren’t going to get hopelessly bogged down in an Arabian quagmire, with the unleashing of an unquenchable lust for blood in the region and a lust for political redress at home. Of course, that’s precisely what the administration reaped by turning to the Wilsonian impulses of the neocon camp. In the end, there was no compelling rationale of necessity for invading Iraq, and the rationale of success turned out to be a recipe for disaster.
Robert W. Merry is the president and editor-in-chief of Congressional Quarterly.
Democracy is Not a Suicide Pact
Amitai Etzioni
SOME REALISTS argue that if the United States promotes democracy in places such as Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the opening up of these polities would lead to more Islamist states. Thus democratization would damage U.S. interests, installing even more oppressive regimes in the nations involved—regimes that will promote terrorism in other nations to boot. Some "un-realists" argue that the United States should accept such a risk because theocracies are like childhood diseases that nations may have to endure before they can grow up to become democratic.
There is a third way: Opening polities gradually, initially allowing only pro-democratic forces to participate until they are able to compete with the already well-established Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Some are much less prepared than others to cope with unrestricted political pluralism. Such nations need a transition period; they cannot jump from the tribal politics of the Stone Age—or from hyper-oppressive regimes—to well-functioning democracies.
Furthermore, there is nothing in democratic theory to hold that those who are known to seek "one person, one vote, one time"—that those who, like the Nazis, seek to use elections to gain power but then turn democratic regimes into totalitarian or theocratic ones—should be accorded free reign. Like boxers who insist on their rights to put lead into their gloves, totalitarian and anti-democratic religious parties have no place in a democratic competition.
There are those who hold that democracies need not fear free elections because even if extremist parties gain a majority, the courts will uphold individual and minority rights. The record though—from Nazi Germany to generals’ rule in Latin American—shows that such governments soon load the courts with their supporters or recast the constitutions to suit their purposes. True, when democracies are well-established, and anti-democratic parties are small and more of an annoyance or a gadfly than a genuine threat, they can be tolerated. However, when democracies are just being formed, such parties—especially if they are strong and the liberal forces weak—must be kept at bay, at least until the liberal forces have a chance to develop.
Unfortunately the current trends run in the opposite direction. The authoritarian regimes of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, among others, have largely wiped out reformist, liberal pro-democracy forces. As a result, these regimes have pushed most of whatever opposition remains into the extremist camps. Hence, if the oppressive lid of these governments were suddenly lifted, the well-prepared Islamist groups would take over, never giving a chance to the liberal forces to recoup and grow.
The United States and its allies hence should neither promote free-for-all elections nor support the continued repression of the opposition, but favor selective and gradual opening to allow liberal forces to find their legs. This is what the United States did for a while when it promoted local and limited elections in Saudi Arabia and fair and free general elections in Egypt and Kazakhstan. And this is what is happening to one extent or another in Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait and Qatar. One may argue that if these nations are opening fast enough then they are opening in the best ways, and one may protest when they retreat from whatever progress they had made without questioning the merit of the basic approach—that of gradual opening.
On a separate note, let me also say it is a grave mistake to equate these liberal reformist forces with secular ones, as many progressive Americans instinctively tend to do. They associate progress with secularization and unwittingly presume that religious people tend to be fundamentalists and, hence, anti-democratic. However there are significant pro-democratic religious parties in many European countries and in Israel. In effect just as Social Democrats were often the best antidote to Communists (rather than the conservative parties), the best antidote to radical Islamists may end up being moderate Muslims groups—a point I recently made in these pages.
Amitai Etzioni is a professor of sociology and international relations at The George Washington University and author of Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy (Yale University Press: 2007).
08.06.07
Thomas Carothers argued
that the Bush Administration's foreign policy doesn't revolve around democracy promotion, incurring
Tony Smith’s wrath
. Carothers responds to Smith's criticisms.
06.05.07
"The most powerful weapon in the struggle against extremism is not bullets or bombs—it is the universal appeal of freedom", President Bush
told
an audience on Tuesday. Though President Bush talks the talk, he has not walked the walk, says Thomas Carothers.
06.01.03
It's a mistake, argues Fareed Zakaria, to conflate constitutional liberalism with democracy. It's a mistake, says Thomas Carothers, to exaggerate the extent to which that mistake actually characterizes U.S. policy.
03.02.09
Man-in-the-field and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen returns from battle and examines our war on terror. Instead of turning back Islamism, military interventions lead large swaths of local populations to pick up arms in defense of their homelands. The United States should stay out of these battles in the first place.
08.29.07
Geoffrey Roberts treads through morally hazardous territory portraying Stalin as a great statesman.
05.01.07
Managing the Pentagon and managing wars are two different things, a lesson Robert McNamara learned the hard way.
06.01.02
America's post-9/11 tryst with the authoritarian regimes of Central Asia should not be transformed into a longer-term "marriage of convenience." It would end badly.
06.01.01
Despite the rhetoric, the new administration's foreign policy bespeaks not change, but continuity with the Clinton era.
12.01.99
War on the silver screen. A new film refights the Gulf War--but this time for a higher purpose/
01.18.08
With the closing of two British Council offices in Russia, the ghost of Alexander Litvinenko has come back to haunt Britain and Russia.
07.28.04
07.21.04
06.01.00
Jeffrey Sachs, Anders Aslund, Marek Dabrowski, Peter Reddaway, Igor Aristov, Wayne Merry, Michael Hudson, Daivd Ellerman, Steven Rosefielde, Janine Wedel
03.09.09
Some American officials are smitten with Syria, thinking it could help us realign the Middle East. But a closer relationship with Bashar Assad will not weaken the mullahs in Tehran.
10.28.08
The best way to solve insurgency issues in Afghanistan is to adopt policies that succeeded in Iraq—work with local tribal leaders instead of nation building.
03.17.08
What does experience teach us about foreign policy? Thoughts from
Amitai Etzioni on Samantha Power and enemy combatants and
Gordon N. Bardos on Hillary Clinton’s Balkan credentials.
03.13.08
The brouhaha over ex–Obama advisor Samantha Power raises another issue: should suspected terrorists be treated as garden-variety criminals or something else altogether?
01.29.08
Reflecting on Monday’s State of the Union address,
Paul J. Saunders comments on the president’s disappearing freedom agenda;
Amitai Etzioni asks why Washington doesn’t deal with Tehran the same way it handles Tripoli and Pyongyang.
01.29.08
President Bush has adopted one strategy for dealing with Libya and North Korea, but he outlined a different one toward Iran in his State of the Union address on Monday. It’s time for some coherence in American foreign policy.
01.17.08
Working with local tribes in Iraq and Afghanistan has yielded encouraging results so far. Continuing this approach holds the greatest promise for stabilizing those two countries and reducing the role of U.S. troops.