Subject: Making the world safe for dictatorship
From: "Ken Wollack" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2017 12:12:47 -0500

Another interesting article on democracy promotion by Jim Traub, who writes
for *Foreign Policy* and the *New York Times Magazine.*

Best wishes for the new year.

Ken

Kenneth Wollack
President
National Democratic Institute
455 Massachusetts Ave., NW, 8th Floor
Washington, DC 20001
202-728-5500 (Tel)
888-875-2887 (Fax)
email: [email-masked]
website: www.ndi.org

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/03/donald-trump-is-making-
the-world-safe-for-dictators/

Donald Trump: Making the World Safe for Dictators
<http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/03/donald-trump-is-making-the-world-safe-for-dictators/>

For 100 years, the United States has championed democracies around the
world. Trump is about to undo this pillar of American security and decency.

On April 2, 1917, in the course of a speech asking Congress to declare war
on Germany, Woodrow Wilson delivered
<https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Wilson's_War_Message_to_Congress> one of
the most resonant lines in the history of the presidency: “The world must
be made safe for democracy.” A generation later, Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Winston Churchill issued <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp> the
Atlantic Charter, committing the World War II allies to protect “the right
of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will
live.” Since then, all U.S. presidents have insisted that America’s
national security depends upon the spread of democracy and individual
rights abroad.

But Donald Trump, who will take office on the centenary of Wilson’s famous
address, may be the first president since America became a world power who
simply does not believe that. We should tremble for the consequences.

The president-elect’s unstinting and often ugly attacks on journalists,
critics, and political opponents show clearly enough his contempt for
democratic norms. He has demonstrated zero regard for such principles of
international law as the obligation to accept refugees, or to refrain from
the use of torture. His interest in democratic rights abroad is even more
negligible. The foreign leaders he has most consistently praised, including
Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Egypt’s Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi, are strongmen who put their critics in jail, and sometimes
in the grave. Trump is already such a pal of Sisi that he was both willing
and able to persuade him last week to drop a Security Council resolution
condemning Israel’s ongoing settlement building.

Trump has now nominated or appointed the key members of his national
security team. National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Defense
Secretary-designate James Mattis are retired generals, while Trump’s choice
for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, is the chief executive of a giant
oil company. Any of these three (and especially Mattis) may prove
sympathetic to the Wilsonian claim, but their experience has taught them to
pay far more attention to the military and economic strategy of foreign
leaders than to the domestic political arrangements those men fostered.
None of them may be prepared to hinder Trump’s intuitive fondness –perhaps
“envy” is the right word — for dictators.

This really would be something new in American life. Both the neocons who
supported George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda and the advocates of Barack
Obama’s far more chastened rhetoric of long-term institution-building have
much more in common with one another than with the coldly transactional
mentality that may guide the Trump administration. As Henry Kissinger wrote
in *Diplomacy*, we are all (except perhaps Kissinger himself) children of
Wilson. All but the most hardened realists accept the premise that it is in
the interests of the United States to shape a better life for people in
other countries, even if they disagree about which instruments to use and
how effective they are likely to be.

Some skeptics of America’s self-assigned global mission of reform, like the
diplomat-scholar George Kennan, have argued that the United States will
serve its interests better by practicing democracy at home than by
promoting it abroad. That may be so; but it’s not a proposition that a
President Trump — with his nonchalance toward the First Amendment and his
newfound devotion to the Second, as well as his steady promotion of
crackpot theories and outright lies on Twitter — is likely to test.

 In all likelihood, the United States in years to come will neither seek to
incarnate nor to inculcate the virtues of democracy.

Why should the United States want to “make the world safe for democracy”?
Wilson believed that autocratic governments, guided by the selfish
interests of leaders rather than the wishes of citizens, would destroy
efforts to establish a “concert for peace” such as he envisioned. Only
democracies would “keep faith” with one another. Subsequent history may
have shown Wilson’s faith to be naive, but it has not discredited the
premise that democracies will make more law-abiding and peace-loving
custodians of the world order than will dictatorships.

A generation of Cold War leaders believed that democracy and broadly
diffused prosperity offered the only secure bulwarks against communism.
Presidents from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan may have contradicted their
expressed principles by backing anti-Communist dictators; but they were
right that a democratic Europe would resist the ideological appeal of
communism. Today, in the face of terrorism, the United States makes common
cause with Middle Eastern autocrats in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and
elsewhere, but nevertheless sees the diffusion of democracy and the rule of
law as the best long-term cure for the problem. In the aftermath of 9/11,
George W. Bush for the first time elevated democracy promotion to a core
national-security interest, insisting
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4460172> that “the
survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of
liberty in other lands.” That, too, miscarried; but the premise was not
wrong.

Presidents keep returning to these formulations because Wilson was right
about the relationship between democracy and the modern world order.
There’s another reason as well: At least since the end of World War II, the
idea that the United States stands for something more than its own
self-interest has underwritten its claims to world leadership. That idea is
the basis of America’s “soft power.” The Marshall Plan, to take the most
famous example, did almost as much for the United States, by enhancing its
global prestige, as it did for its European beneficiaries.

So what happens if we abandon this tradition? The silver lining of Trump’s
chilly agnosticism toward democratic values might be this: No more
hypocrisy. The Obama administration has shaken a finger at autocratic
allies in the Middle East without inflicting or even threatening serious
consequences, thus offending foreign governments without mitigating their
brutalities. On the other side, Obama has halfheartedly supported Syrian
rebels without making any effort to tip the scales of the horrendous civil
war there. Trump will deliver no lectures, and may openly join Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad in his alleged campaign against Islamic
extremism. Honesty bought at such a price, however, is a commodity not
worth having.

President Trump might well feel more comfortable with the increasingly
illiberal states of Eastern Europe — including Russia, the fountainhead of
anti-liberal doctrine — than with the social democratic West. One can all
too easily imagine him launching a fusillade of tweets at Atlantic allies
who stubbornly persist in using the language of universal rights, including
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who not-so-subtly warned
<http://www.towleroad.com/2016/11/german-chancellor-angela-merkel-warns-cooperation-with-trump-is-dependent-on-respect-for-equal-rights/>
the
incoming president to abide by Western values. How long will it be, in
fact, before “Western values” can no longer be used as a taken-for-granted
synonym for secularism, individual freedom, or tolerance for diverse
opinion?

But there’s a more subtle consequence to forswearing America’s traditional
moral claims about its global role. The United States is able to serve as
honest broker in disputes all over the world because it is not seen, as for
example China is, as a prop to existing regimes, however odious. Thus the
Obama administration’s patient diplomacy in Myanmar has given the United
States influence with both new democratic leaders and the former military
regime. What happens if any of Trump’s favorite strongmen are overthrown
or, God help them, voted out of office? What influence will Washington have
with the successor regime? How, more broadly, will America compete with
China’s growing soft power, or even Russia’s?

Putin’s greatest windfall in recent years has not been his stealth conquest
of Crimea or winning the war in Syria for Assad, but rather the growing
eclipse of liberal values across the West. Trump’s election is a crucial
part of that bounty. (It seems increasingly clear that Putin deserves some
credit for that outcome thanks to Russia’s hacking of damaging emails from
Democratic Party leaders.) The prestige of liberal democracy has not sunk
so low since the 1930s. Anti-liberal parties lead the polls in much of
Western Europe and now govern in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. It is a
matter of greater urgency today than it was after 9/11, that the United
States act as a beacon of, and spokesman for, democracy. Yet under a
President Trump it will cede that role. Who will inherit it? Germany,
perhaps. But Merkel, gravely weakened by her open-door policy toward
refugees, may well lose her bid to return as chancellor in September. In
any case, Germany is a lesser power that in any case has very strong
historical reasons for speaking softly and modestly.

If the United States does not lead in the promotion of democratic and
liberal principles, as it has for the last century, no one else will. And
that vacuum will be filled by someone else whose values are neither
democratic nor liberal. Donald Trump’s promise to make American great again
will have descended to tragic farce