by CKR
My Rebuttal II (with previous links)
Mark’s Rebuttal II
Mark’s Rebuttal III
Mark and I have agreed that we will end the formal debate with this round of rebuttals. Having the slight advantage of laggard posting on this round, I’ll agree with him that it’s been productive. We’ve found some points of agreement on method and specifics.
As Mark notes, we have turned up many, many topics that are worthy of further discussion. I’m sure they’ll turn up again.
There are many experiments that have been run (they’re called history) that give us some insight into how democracy might be spread. We’ve focused on Iraq in this debate, but I’d like to survey, very quickly, some of the other possibilities with hints at their historical precedents.
Containment worked, a là Kennan’s long telegram, to turn the Soviet Union around. It took 75 years, but Russia, the Soviet republics, and the satellites are all on the road to democracy. They could slip back, and that’s where outside influence comes in.
Economic interactions, for example, membership in the European Union and the economic growth promised by that membership, pulled the newly independent Soviet satellites and republics into democratic paths. Most of them were headed in that direction already, but EU membership helped to put aside some of the second thoughts that might have appeared with economic difficulties. Economic ties with China are a work in progress with regard to democracy promotion. Availability of new communications equipment makes dictatorships harder to maintain. People who are well-fed are less desperate for the promises of dictators.
Living up to one’s own ideals doesn’t necessarily sell democracy by itself, but without it, nobody’s going to buy. The Soviet Union had some valid ideas about workers being treated well, but their slave labor camps and hardline political repression undermined their pitch.
It all takes time. Mark’s example of the Second World War shows how it it worked in Japan and Germany. Overnight change didn’t happen in Iraq, as expected.
Promoting global Democracy and economic liberalization is a good American strategy for eventually achieving a better, freer, more prosperous, world. If it is approached as a goal to which policy makers have maximum flexibility to prioritize the resources and timing of our tactical moves over decades then it George W. Bush will probably stand alongside Truman, FDR, Lincoln, Marshall and Kennan in history's eye someday. If global democracy becomes a prescription to simultaneously treat all countries exactly alike with preemption being a hammer and all problems looking like nails then it won't make it as a policy until 2008.I’m not sure whether promoting democracy, as the Bush administration is practicing it, is a strategy or a goal. It makes good campaign rhetoric, but either the strategy of how it is to be applied or the tactics to be used in its service haven’t been made clear. There seems to be a strategy that is willing to treat different countries differently—North Korea hasn’t been preemptively attacked yet. But the tactics toolbox seems to be severely limited by an ideological bent.
The discussion doesn’t end here. I’ll continue, and I’m sure Mark will, to dip back into that store of data called history and try to make sense of events.