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Implementing Bush's Vision
To Effectively Spread Democracy, We Must Balance Values and Geopolitical Challenges
By Henry A. KissingerMonday, May 16, 2005;
Extraordinary advances of democracy have occurred in recent months: elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine and Palestine; local elections in Saudi Arabia; Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; the opening up of the presidential election in Egypt; and upheavals against entrenched authoritarians in Kyrgyzstan. This welcome trend was partly triggered by President Bush's Middle East policy and accelerated by his second inaugural address, which elevated the progress of freedom in the world to the defining objective of U.S. foreign policy.
Pundits have interpreted these events as a victory of "idealists" over "realists" in the debate over conduct of American foreign policy. In fact, the United States is probably the only country in which "realist" can be used as a pejorative epithet. No serious realist should claim that power is its own justification. No idealist should imply that power is irrelevant to the spread of ideals. The real issue is to establish a sense of proportion between these two essential elements of policy. Overemphasis of either leads to stagnation or overextension.
Values are essential for defining objectives; strategy is what implements them by establishing priorities and defining timing.
Strategy must begin with the recognition that the freedom agenda does not make geopolitical analysis irrelevant. There are issues for which crusading strategies tend to be off the mark. The rise of China is, in essence, a geopolitical challenge, not a primarily ideological one.
U.S. relations with India are another case in point. During the Cold War, India saw no imperative to support the cause of democracy against communism. Its national interest was not involved in issues such as the freedom of Berlin. Now India is, in effect, a strategic partner, not because of compatible domestic structures but because of parallel security interests in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, and vis-a-vis radical Islam.
In its own terms, a clear-eyed commitment to the freedom agenda should keep these principles in mind:
· The process of democratization does not depend on a single decision and will not be completed in a single stroke. Elections, however desirable, are only the beginning of a long enterprise. The willingness to accept their outcomes is a more serious hurdle. The establishment of a system that enables the minority to become a majority is even more complex.
· Americans need to understand that successes do not end their engagement but most probably deepen it. For as we involve ourselves, we bear the responsibility even for results we did not anticipate. We must deal with those consequences regardless of our original intentions and not act as if our commitments are as changeable as opinion polls.
· Elections are not an inevitable guarantee of a democratic outcome. Radicals such as Hezbollah and Hamas seem to have learned the mechanics of democracy in order to undermine it and establish total control.
As the world's dominating democratic power, we must relate values to power, institutional political change to geopolitical necessities. In countries where a vacuum must be filled and U.S. forces are present, the American capacity to affect events is considerable. Even then, however, it is not possible to automatically apply models created over centuries in the homogeneous societies of Europe and the United States to ethnically diverse and religiously divided societies in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. In multiethnic societies, majority rule implies permanent subjugation of the minority unless it is part of a strong federal structure and a system of checks and balances. To achieve this by negotiation between parties that consider dominance by the other groups a threat to their very survival is an extraordinarily elusive undertaking. It will, however, determine the degree to which democratic goals in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Afghanistan can be achieved.
Lebanon illustrates another aspect of these considerations. The upheaval that expelled Syrian forces is a testimony to the growth of popular consciousness but also to the changed strategic environment. Syria, too weak to resist international pressures, may calculate that withdrawal eventually will return the situation to the chaos that triggered Syrian intervention in the first place.
Three times since 1958 -- the United States that year, Syria in 1976 and Israel in 1981 -- foreign intervention held the ring in Lebanon to prevent collapse into violence and to arbitrate among the Christian, Sunni, Shiite and Druze groups that constitute the Lebanese body politic. The internal conflict is made all the sharper because the established constitutional arrangement no longer reflects the actual demographic balance.
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May 19, 2005, 04:30
Syria is the main conduit for foreign militants fighting for al Qaeda-ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, a senior US administration official said yesterday. "We're concerned that Zarqawi is supported by a foreign fighter network that gets foreign fighters largely through Syria," the official said to a small group of reporters on condition of anonymity."There are locations in Syria where foreign fighters and money and logistics come together and then transit to Iraq, and those foreign fighters and money come from elsewhere in the Muslim world. That's really been the Zarqawi connection we have been most focused on," the official said. Jordanian-born Zarqawi is a main figure behind the bombings, kidnappings and other attacks which have disrupted U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion which ousted President Saddam Hussein.Syria has taken "some cosmetic steps" to address the concerns of Iraq and the United States about the infiltration of foreign fighters into Iraq, but "not nearly what they ought to be doing," the administration official said. The Bush administration has made building democracy and stability in the Middle East a top priority but has had little success in its efforts to engage Syria. "They are a major disruptive force, they are disruptive in Iraq, they are disruptive of the efforts between Palestinians and Israelis to come up with a Middle East peace," he said.The United States has also appealed to Syria to stop interfering in Lebanon, let elections move forward and stop supporting militant groups like Hamas and Hizbollah, the official said. Lebanon is set to hold its first general election without direct Syrian influence for 33 years starting on May 29."Syria in some sense has been a source of instability in the region, it is time for them to make a strategic choice and get on the other side on these issues," the official said. - Reuters