Indiscriminate Judgments
The Democratic Imperative: Exporting the American Revolution.
by Gregory A. Fossedal.
A New Republic Book/Basic Books. 293 pp. $19.95.
The Democratic Imperative is one of the more sweeping interventionist broadsides in memory, urging the use of any and every lever at our disposal to implant democratic institutions and free-market capitalism everywhere. It is all the more striking that it should appear at a time when the vital idea of exporting democracy is increasingly under suspicion, both within government and among the foreign-policy elites. Unfortunately, in order to contrive what he apparently regards as an evenhandedness in these matters, and thus to orient himself as neither on the Left nor on the Right but rather always on the side of an ever-expanding concept of “democracy,” Gregory Fossedal makes a host of exaggerated claims and indiscriminate judgments which, taken together, detract seriously from his book’s credibility.
Actually, Fossedal’s main effort in this regard is to separate himself from the “Right.” That is interesting in itself. As a young journalist first at the Dartmouth Review and later on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, Fossedal made something of a name for himself as a conservative bomb-thrower. Now in residence at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, he spends a good deal of time here throwing bombs, instead, at conservatives.
The main sin of these “pessimists,” in Fossedal’s judgment, is to have constantly overstated the Soviet threat. He writes:
One way to freeze a nation into inaction is to insist that its opponents are not worthy of concern. . But when apathy is absent, despair will do, and in painting the Soviet Union as a sort of infallible, monolithic giant, anti-Communists in the West promote the same result.
Yet since it was, after all, the “pessimistic” critique of Soviet expansionism in the 1970’s that led to the reassertion of American power in the 1980’s, which in turn paved the way for the trend toward democracy Fossedal wishes to promote, it is hard to understand this statement as other than an effort to “position” himself at some undefined but assuredly non-Right point on the ideological spectrum.
Even more puzzling is Fossedal’s reading of the entire postwar period as a succession of democratic gains and Soviet “concessions and retreats.” Thus, the period from 1945 to 1970 in Eastern Europe is listed as a setback for the Soviets because “they must initiate what they greatly preferred to avoid: a crushing, all-out assault on Hungary in 1956, construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.” Similarly, we learn that the occupation of Angola, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the backing of the revolution in Nicaragua were defeats for the Soviets, because they were unable to wipe out the forces that took up arms against their puppet regimes.
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So gross a misrepresentation of the historical record is not without a purpose. It helps to create the impression that the world is quite hospitable to the sort of democratic crusade Fossedal envisages. A similar purpose is served by his assertion that Third World democratization “narrows the sphere” for Soviet subversion. This leaves unconsidered the Soviet-backed guerrilla wars being waged against democratic governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Philippines, not to mention the Soviet military build-up in Asia, despite a decade of democratic progress there, and recent Cuban efforts to destabilize Argentina and Venezuela.
Fossedal’s optimistic notion of democracy as a “third force” everywhere extends to the Soviet Union itself, where, he predicts, there is “glasnost today, democracy tomorrow.” But even Fossedal knows that there is not really a democratic force in every country, not even in most countries, at least as the concept of democracy is understood traditionally in the West. So he takes an injudicious turn, labeling all manner of movements for change as “democratic” and then implicitly embracing them all. Unfortunately, the broad-based civilian opposition in Panama can hardly be compared to the radical student movement in South Korea, just as there is simply no equivalence between the Nicaraguan resistance and the hard-core Leninist African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. In the same fashion, Fossedal puts all unelected governments in one basket, with no regard for the rather large differences among the regimes of, say, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Rumania’s Nicolae Ceausescu, and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew.
In his attempt to define a single “standard by which we judge what groups to support,” Fossedal raises more questions than he answers. If we arm the ANC, as Fossedal proposes, should we support the leftist guerrillas in Chile? Should the United States impose economic sanctions on all nondemocratic countries? What should be done about one-party rule in Mexico, or in most of Africa or the Middle East? What if a Marxist-Leninist should be elected to the presidency of Peru? Fossedal does not address such hard questions.
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But it is in his treatment of Ronald Reagan, and in particular of the Reagan Doctrine and its architects, that the contradictions, if not the dishonesty, in Fossedal’s thinking are most glaringly revealed. One major distortion of the Reagan record occurs in Fossedal’s discussion of human rights, where he argues that the Carter and Reagan approaches to this issue were marked more by continuity than discontinuity. Yet the Carter policy turned over Iran to the Ayatollah Khomeini and Nicaragua to the Sandinista junta, while the Reagan approach resulted, in more than a dozen countries, in a transition from authoritarian dictatorship to democracy. The Reagan success is explained by Fossedal as owing to a “turnaround on human rights” in the liberal direction, in which Reagan came to reject the advice of his hard-line advisers. This is simply not the case.
As for the Reagan Doctrine, with its promise of support to democratic freedom fighters, on the one hand that policy is derided here as a species of “mere anti-Communism” and is said to have invited “contempt from Americans and the world.” On the other hand, the same Reagan Doctrine, unrealistically hyped-up and just as unrealistically “universalized,” serves as one of the main inspirations of this book.
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Fossedal rests his case for exporting democracy on a domestic political calculation—that “the Republican animus for Communism [can] simply be fused with the Democratic animus for fascism.” Leaving aside the questionable nature of each of the terms here, it is a folly to think that such a “fusion” could be achieved or made workable, and even greater folly to think that, if achieved, it would answer to the task of building democracy where it is most needed, let alone of protecting it where it is most threatened. If Fossedal’s recommendations were followed, the Left—both here and abroad—would be happy to take its victories in South Africa and against other authoritarian allies of the United States while refusing to support “mere” anti-Communist initiatives and persisting in its efforts to undermine democratic governments in places like El Salvador.
What President Reagan said in a message to Congress on exporting democracy in 1986 still remains the case today: “Soviet-style dictatorships . . . are an almost unique threat to peace, both before and after they consolidate their rule.” From Central America to Eastern Europe, this statement could serve as a guidepost for the Bush administration, in the admittedly unlikely event that it should decide to listen to some of Fossedal’s advice and pursue a foreign policy based on the democratic idea.
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