Should America Still Promote Democracy?

How Not to Overcorrect

Thomas Carothers

Max Boot (“What the Neocons Got Wrong,” March 10) deserves praise for some serious soul-searching. Yet in renouncing his prior belief in military-led regime change, he commits the basic error of viewing efforts to support democracy as a purely idealistic endeavor, divorced from U.S. security interests. Although he acknowledges that “the United States should continue to champion its ideals and call out human rights abuses,” he advises Washington “not [to] be ashamed to prioritize its own interests.” Leaving aside the fact that the United States has not in recent memory exhibited much shame in prioritizing its interests globally, the problem with this formulation is that the strength of an ally’s democracy is often connected with U.S. security interests. 

This dynamic has been evident on many occasions in recent decades. In the Philippines, the 2016 election of an authoritarian populist—Rodrigo Duterte—led to the weakening of long-standing security ties with Washington. The replacement of Duterte with a less autocratic leader, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., in 2022, saw the country renew its defense cooperation with the United States. Washington’s security relationship with Ankara has diminished over the last 15 years in close parallel with the decline of Turkey’s democracy: the illiberal worldview of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan drew him away from his country’s traditional security partnership with the United States. Democratic decline in Hungary has led that country to become China’s and Russia’s best friend in the European Union, even during the years when U.S. President Donald Trump warmly embraced Hungary’s illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orban. Trying to limit or counter democratic erosion, therefore, can directly serve U.S. security interests even as it advances U.S. ideals. 

Several countries of major security importance to Washington are in the midst of troubling backsliding. Israel’s democratic troubles and growing polarization, for example, may hurt U.S. security interests in the Middle East by dividing and weakening the Israel Defense Forces or heightening tensions with the Palestinians or Iran. In India, the accelerating deterioration of democracy could hurt the country’s long-term reliability as a U.S. security partner by provoking serious domestic unrest that forces the government to divert attention and resources away from external engagement. Mexico’s troubling democratic erosion—vividly diagnosed by Denise Dresser in Foreign Affairs—may lead to less effective cooperation with the United States on drug policy, immigration, and other key concerns. Falling back on simple bromides about not apologizing for relations with autocrats and prioritizing interests over ideals fails to provide any useful guidance for assessing how democracy and security intersect.

The United States cannot direct or control the democratic trajectory of other countries.

The question of what the United States can do to strengthen an eroding democracy is, therefore, critical. Here, too, Boot’s account falls short. He presents a stark choice between doing too much (forcible regime change) or too little (criticizing human rights abuses). There are many other options for supporting democracy. Washington can use economic carrots and sticks alongside bilateral and multilateral diplomatic engagement. It can underwrite targeted political assistance programs, which bolster key democratic institutions and processes, including electoral management bodies and judicial systems. The United States cannot and should not expect to direct or control the democratic trajectory of other countries, but it can have a positive impact through smart engagement. This was seen in 2022, when the Biden administration made clear that any military-backed attempt to keep then Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in power after his loss in the presidential election would have serious consequences for the U.S.-Brazilian relationship. This action helped support a mostly peaceful transfer of power.

In short, I commend Max Boot for his effort to renounce military-oriented democratic maximalism. But he retreats too far into putatively rigorous realism, overlooking the crucial fact that democracy and security are often inextricably interconnected. I urge him to avoid trading one simplified dogma for another and instead embrace the complex realities of U.S. interests and choices relating to democracy and security as they play out in many countries around the world.

The Neoconservative Fantasy

Tom Malinowski

In 2003, a group of American intellectuals known as neoconservatives argued that the invasion of Iraq was justified, not just because of the country’s purported possession of weapons of mass destruction but because it was a dictatorship. They hoped to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power and transform Iraq, as Max Boot wrote at the time, into “a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East.”

Twenty years later, writing in Foreign Affairs (“What the Neocons Got Wrong, March 10”), Boot cringes at his youthful naiveté and declares he is “a neocon no more.” He acknowledges that in 2003, he was “wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force.” He is plainly right. It is an oxymoronic fantasy to think that democracy, a system rooted in freedom of individual choice and built on institutions trusted by the people they serve, can be exported to a country by military invasion.

But Boot goes much further than merely renouncing his belief in the use of military power to impose freedom abroad. Because he personally ascribed moral motives to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, Boot argues that the United States must never again make foreign policy an “altruistic exercise.” Neocons once misguidedly cast the invasion as a war for democracy; for this reason, he says, the promotion of democracy no longer “belongs at the center of U.S. foreign policy.”

I have long admired Boot as a writer. But I fear that like many true believers in a given faith, he has exchanged one dogma for another. Just as the neocons once saw every confrontation with a dictator through the prism of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis in Munich in 1938, Boot now views every attempt to advance American ideals globally through the prism of the mistake in Iraq. But there is a vast middle ground between these simplistic, opposing worldviews, and there is much more history to guide the United States than the examples of Munich and Iraq. What is needed today is not more dogma but better judgment.

FORGOTTEN SUCCESSES

Unfortunately for those who seek easy answers, history does not teach black-and-white lessons about the use of military power for humanitarian ends. Democracy promotion was not, in fact, the Bush administration’s reason for invading Iraq. Had it been, the war would still have been a catastrophe. The U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was in some ways a political success, producing vast gains for education and civic society, but it ended as a military failure.

Then again, when military power has been used to stop atrocities rather than impose democracy, it has often worked. The United States stopped genocides in Bosnia and Kosovo. The no-fly zone that Washington imposed over Iraq from 1991 to 2003 protected Iraqi Kurds from Saddam’s massacres and enabled them to build a relatively successful autonomous state. A NATO–United Nations intervention stopped political violence in Ivory Coast in 2011, and U.S. President George W. Bush’s use of the Marines helped end Liberia’s civil war in 2003. Some of these examples may seem obscure, but that is precisely because success is easily forgotten.

Boot pans the NATO intervention in Libya for not producing “the blooming of a Jeffersonian democracy.” We agree there! And yet for a year following Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi’s fall in 2011, the country did see a flourishing of free speech, independent media, and women’s rights. It held one of the most peaceful and free elections in the history of postconflict societies, which its most moderate parties won. Libya’s democracy was done in by warlord militias. They were armed with weapons raided from Qaddafi’s arms depots, which NATO had refused to secure, and supported by the United Arab Emirates, which flew mercenaries from the Russian Wagner paramilitary company into the country to overthrow the U.S.-backed legitimate government with barely a peep of protest from Washington. If Libya today is a “Hobbesian hell” (Boot’s colorful exaggeration), it is partly the result of decisions motivated by the amoral realism he now recommends.

Perhaps the most complicated recent case study is Syria. Plenty of non-neoconservatives, such as former U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, urged the imposition of a no-fly zone there to protect civilians. They lost that argument. The result was that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad pushed millions of refugees into Europe, prompting a rightward shift in many countries and contributing to the Brexit vote in 2016. U.S. inaction invited a Russian intervention that presaged Putin’s attacks on Ukraine and enabled the rise of the so-called Islamic State (or ISIS), unleashing carnage around the world and eventually forcing the United States to go to war in Syria anyway.

Even if the United States had been able to prevent these calamities with the kind of no-fly zone that had worked in Iraq in the 1990s, it would not have brought Jeffersonian democracy to Syria. There would still be violence and terrorism there. U.S. planes might still be patrolling its skies, and the Beltway consensus would probably be that the whole thing had been a mistake because, in that alternate universe, no one would know what intervention had prevented: the rise of ISIS, Assad’s chemical attacks, and a mass human exodus. The lesson is that often, all that can be done in such situations is to manage a problem. But the difference between a managed mess and an unmanaged catastrophe can be measured in hundreds of thousands of lives.

Washington has not pushed for regime change and had been willing, until recently, to work with Russia when interests overlapped.

How about the nonmilitary promotion of democracy by the United States? Boot says that economic sanctions have worked only in a few instances, such as in South Africa. But this is not entirely true. Sanctions played a crucial role, for example, in Myanmar’s real, although now interrupted, transition to democracy. Boot is correct that “the United States might be able to do more for the people of Cuba and Venezuela by easing sanctions in return for human rights improvements rather than demanding regime change.” But how could Washington offer to ease sanctions if it had not first imposed them?

The Western promotion of democratic ideals through diplomacy, the funding of local activists, and the enticement of EU and NATO membership has clearly made a huge difference in Ukraine and its post-Soviet neighbors. Perhaps Boot thinks that democracy promotion in this part of the world meets his test of humility and restraint—since Washington has not pushed for regime change and had been willing, until recently, to work with Russia when interests overlapped.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin clearly disagrees. From his standpoint, the United States has supported activist groups that publicized his corruption, exposed his theft of elections, and spread the ideas that endanger his survival. Putin tried to help Donald Trump win the 2016 U.S. presidential election and to snuff out Ukraine in part because he saw even modest efforts to promote democracy as an existential threat.

It is possible to conclude from this experience that challenging powerful dictatorships on human rights is too dangerous to attempt at all (which is not Boot’s argument). Or Washington could recognize that it is in a genuine, high-stakes contest with autocracy and take it seriously. Even if the United States deprioritizes calling out the abuses of dictatorships and supporting their opponents, it will eventually do something that an autocracy cannot tolerate, and the autocracy will lash out, as Putin has. Or an autocracy will do something that the United States cannot tolerate, such as Russia’s poisoning of dissidents in London. So I would prefer to meet this challenge head on, rather than by pretending it is not central to U.S. foreign policy. And if, as Boot writes, “great-power competition is back,” is it not worth considering what that competition is about and what the United States’ comparative advantages are?

THE WORLD AS IT IS

When I served as U.S. President Barack Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, the commander of U.S. Pacific Forces, Admiral Harry Harris, told me that from his standpoint, China’s threats to Taiwan, incursions in the South China Sea, and repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang were “the same issue.” He meant that China, like Russia, was trying to undermine the global norms that favor the democratic, rule-of-law-respecting powers and constrain the freedom of action of the authoritarian powers. “Whenever we’re strong on human rights,” Harris told me, “it helps me on my issues.” I replied that “whenever we’re strong on the South China Sea or trade, it helps me on mine.” The tired distinction between “values” and “interests” in U.S. foreign policy is absolutely meaningless in the competition with China, as it is in Ukraine.

No serious person argues against maintaining “close contact with Beijing” or insists that the United States should “cut off” Saudi Arabia—the straw men Boot uses. But hesitation to enforce one set of norms with these countries invites the violation of other norms. The focus of U.S. foreign policy should be on building and expanding alliances with governments that genuinely share American values and goals, not competing with China for the favor of kleptocrats and sociopaths.

Boot should not ascribe to today’s advocates of a pro-democracy foreign policy the messianic faith in American power that confused him in 2003. It is widely understood that democratic progress can be elusive and that the United States can do little on its own to guarantee it. Boot quotes a study by the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth that charts the declining success rate of peaceful mass protests around the world. But even that study says that protests are still successful 34 percent of the time. If there is even a 20 percent chance that a protest movement could change China or Iran or Russia for the better, those are as good or better odds for advancing U.S. interests than anything else tried in the last few decades. If the United States could increase those odds by even a few points, it would be rational to try.

A foreign policy true to U.S. ideals aligns Washington with people everywhere who share them, demonstrates confidence, distinguishes the United States from its adversaries, lends legitimacy to its use of power, and helps its leaders maintain domestic support. That is a foreign policy for people who see the world as it is and are willing to work patiently to make it better. Policymakers should not let the mistakes that others made 20 years ago blind them to its necessity and continued utility.

Max Boot Responds

I am grateful to Tom Malinowski and Thomas Carothers for their close reads of my article and for their thoughtful responses. Both of them caution that the fact that the Iraq war was ill advised and ill fated does not mean that democracy promotion and human rights have no role in U.S. foreign policy. I completely agree with them, and said so in my essay. “I am trying harder than I did in my callow youth,” I wrote, “to reconcile the aspirations of idealism with the restraints of realism. . . . I still believe the United States should continue to promote human rights and defend democracy, but I have sadly concluded that U.S. foreign policy should not fixate on exporting democracy.”

HOW IT SHOULD BE

I agree with Malinowski that there is a “vast middle ground” between wars designed to foster democracy by force and a completely amoral, realpolitik policy that does not acknowledge any imperative to promote democracy or human rights. The former extreme may be said to be represented by U.S. President George W. Bush, and the latter by President Donald Trump. Malinowski is right that what we need “is not more dogma but better judgment.”

That is why I wrote that I still “favor maintaining U.S. military advisers in Iraq as a hedge against the power of Iran and the resurgence of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS).” Likewise, “I still opposed the pullout [from Afghanistan] negotiated by Trump and executed by President Joe Biden because I thought it was possible to keep the Taliban out of power at relatively low cost, and I feared the dangerous signal that a U.S. exit would send to other aggressors.”

I also noted that I remain a firm advocate of supporting Ukraine and Taiwan in their struggles against despotic neighbors. “Even though I am no longer as idealistic as I once was,” I wrote, “I have not become the kind of self-styled realist who blames the United States for Russian aggression or thinks that it should sacrifice Ukraine as the price of peace. Nor do I approve of a president kowtowing to dictators (as Trump did). The United States remains the world’s most powerful liberal democracy, and it has a moral obligation to at least speak up for its principles.” In other words, contrary to what Malinowski suggests, I have not “exchanged one dogma for another.” I am, instead, trying to articulate a dogma-free foreign policy that looks at every situation on its merits rather than seeking to reduce complex realities to simplistic ideological slogans.

I fully agree with Carothers that it is far easier for the United States to work with democracies than dictatorships, and that we should try to do what we can to avert democratic backsliding in Hungary, India, Israel, Mexico, Turkey, and elsewhere. I noted that the United States has a better track record of defending democracy than exporting it. But I am also enough of a realist to acknowledge that in cases where those countries turn into autocracies, we do not have the option of sanctioning them or cutting them off altogether. India, for example, remains an invaluable counterweight to China, despite Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appalling attacks on democracy and civil liberties.

We do not have the luxury of refusing to deal with the leader of as important a country as Saudi Arabia.

Malinowski claims that “no serious person argues against maintaining ‘close contact with China’ or insists that the United States should ‘cut off’ Saudi Arabia” and describes these positions as “straw men” that I have invented. In fact, plenty of people are intensely critical of  Biden when he meets with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or Chinese President Xi Jinping. For example, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders said of Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia in July 2022: “I don’t think that that type of government should be rewarded with a visit by the president of the United States.” And after Biden met with Xi in November and proclaimed that the United States and China could avoid a “cold war,” Republicans accused him of naiveté and appeasement. These critics may not argue that we should cut off diplomatic relations with Riyadh or Beijing, but they do seem to oppose any substantive outreach.

Indeed, Malinowski introduced legislation in 2021 to deny the Saudi crown prince entry into the United States. Although I am horrified by the crown prince’s role in the murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi—and by Saudi Arabia’s broader crackdown on liberal dissidents at home and abroad—I do not think we have the luxury of refusing to deal with the leader of such an important country. Saudi Arabia is not only the world’s largest oil exporter but it is also a critical check on Iranian expansionism. If the United States abdicates its diplomatic role in the region, others will step in. This was seen recently, when China brokered an agreement to restore diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

I agree, in theory, with Malinowski when he writes, “The focus of U.S. foreign policy should be on building and expanding alliances with governments that genuinely share American values and goals, not competing with China for the favor of kleptocrats and sociopaths.” But in the real world, the United States often has to deal with kleptocrats and sociopaths to advance its own interests, however distasteful that may be.

Finally, I did not try to lay out a formula for balancing interests and ideals in U.S. foreign policy, because I acknowledge both to be important. My only point, really, was that Americans should not be so blinded by fantasies of exporting democracy—whether by military force, covert operations, or sanctions—that they exaggerate their ability to determine the internal politics of foreign countries or that they do damage to their ability to protect their national security. As both Carothers and Malinowski point out, there are many ways that the United States can and should promote democracy and human rights “with humility and restraint.” On that, we can agree.