fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Folly of Optimism

He [Reagan] was, in fact, a great optimist who saw, seized and created strategic opportunities — in Poland, Nicaragua, Grenada, Angola and elsewhere — to rollback communism. In Egypt today, the United States has a similar opportunity to rollback radical Islam. ~John Guardiano It’s one thing for supporters of Egyptian democracy to claim that Egyptians […]

He [Reagan] was, in fact, a great optimist who saw, seized and created strategic opportunities — in Poland, Nicaragua, Grenada, Angola and elsewhere — to rollback communism.

In Egypt today, the United States has a similar opportunity to rollback radical Islam. ~John Guardiano

It’s one thing for supporters of Egyptian democracy to claim that Egyptians have the right to choose their own government, and that they should be encouraged in this for the sake of “values,” but it is very hard to take seriously the idea that this represents a cunning strategy for securing U.S. objectives abroad. Of those Americans taking an interest in the Egyptian protests, I see them splitting into three groups regardless of party or political persuasion. There are the skeptics of rapid political change effectively aligned with supporters of the status quo, there are democratists who cannot or will not see the contradiction between U.S. interests and ideological imperatives to promote democracy, and there are those who acknowledge and celebrate that contradiction in the hope that continued democratization abroad will force the U.S. to change its foreign policy. The latter two are both different expressions of optimism, and so both are fundamentally flawed. I’ll focus on the democratists in this post.

It’s true that Reagan was an optimist, but I try not to dismiss everything he did on account of this basic flaw. As I was saying yesterday, when Reagan saw an allied despot challenged by the majority of his people he turned against the despot very grudgingly and only when there was absolutely nothing else to do. If one wants to talk about what is or is not “Reaganesque,” it helps to look at the examples that are comparable with the current situation. Subverting communist and/or pro-Soviet regimes was an easy and obvious thing to do during the Cold War. It would have been much less obviously desirable if democratization had meant turning anti-Soviet governments into pro-Soviet ones. Indeed, Reagan dragged his feet on dumping Marcos until the very end (almost exactly 25 years ago) because he feared that communists would take advantage of the situation. If Corazon Aquino had been allied with communists, do you suppose Reagan would have agreed to stop backing Marcos?

It’s odd that Guardiano mentions Nicaragua as one of Reagan’s successes in an argument intended to make conservatives more sympathetic to the Egyptian protests. After all, Nicaragua was one of the main examples Kirkpatrick used in “Dictatorships and Double Standards” to attack Carter for undermining Somoza and enabling the Sandinista takeover in Nicaragua. Reagan’s questionable policy in Nicaragua was to try to undo Carter’s mistake by backing the enemies of the Sandinistas. Far from supporting Nicaragua’s ostensibly popular (and, post-1984, elected) government, Reagan was dedicated to overthrowing it. One of the main examples Guardiano uses to praise Reagan shows that Reagan was not only unsympathetic to popular movements when they posed a perceived threat to U.S. policy, but also that he actively tried to defeat them.

Even if the Muslim Brotherhood remained only one force among many in a new regime, a new Egyptian government would almost certainly be much less interested in security cooperation with the U.S., and some or perhaps most members of any new government are going to look askance at U.S. policies. Put another way, the less influence the military has on any future Egyptian government, the less cooperative it is probably going to be. For some Americans, that is an argument in favor of regime change, but it simply doesn’t make sense to argue that empowering the Muslim Brotherhood helps “roll back radical Islam.” If “rolling back radical Islam” is the goal, it is hard to see how empowering some fairly radical Islamists will do that.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here