There’s a game that kids (and, OK, me too) like to play with the fortune cookies you get at Chinese restaurants. Read the fortune, but append the phrase “in bed” to whatever it says. Hilarity ensues. The game illustrates that in fortune-telling, as in everything else, context matters. A couple of additional context-setting words transform platitudes into dirty jokes. Much the same could be said of the ongoing debate about the role of democracy promotion in American foreign policy.

Shadi Hamid, as he explained first in The American Prospect and again for Tom Paine, thinks it should be at the center of progressive foreign policy. Spencer Ackerman, also writing in the Prospect, disagrees, preferring a focus on human rights. John Hulsman and Anatol Lieven take yet another view, preferring a focus on what one might call the construction of a liberal state infrastructure, “the rule of law, a reasonably independent and efficient judiciary and police, a law-abiding, honest and rational bureaucracy and a population that enjoys basic rights of labor, movement, and free discussion.”

The way I see it, there’s less to this dispute than meets the eye. The real problem is what’s missing — those crucial additional words that determine context. And context makes all the difference. From my perspective, you can take any of these proposals — “let’s promote x,” “let’s promote y” — and add the phrase “through legitimate international institutions and mechanisms of international law” and it’s all to the good. Absent that phrase, it’s not so good. In particular, the neoconservative contention that we should promote x and y through unilateral military action is a terrible idea. ~Matt Yglesias, The American Prospect

Via Jim Antle

Personally, I think Michael’s fortune cookie idea was much more entertaining.