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“Passion for Freedom” Usually Means Empty Rhetorical Support That Gets People Killed

Fred Hiatt recycles several tedious charges in his indictment of Obama’s “lack of passion for freedom”: More striking than his country-specific hesitancy has been the absence of any high-level, overarching embrace of the strategic opportunity. Two decades ago, as the Iron Curtain shredded, the United States led a Western alliance that jumped at the chance […]

Fred Hiatt recycles several tedious charges in his indictment of Obama’s “lack of passion for freedom”:

More striking than his country-specific hesitancy has been the absence of any high-level, overarching embrace of the strategic opportunity. Two decades ago, as the Iron Curtain shredded, the United States led a Western alliance that jumped at the chance to consolidate democracy from Slovakia to Estonia. The chance to nurture democracy in the heart of the Islamic world has not elicited a comparable response.

This is consistent with Obama’s record elsewhere. He remained aloof from the Green Revolution in Iran. In Iraq, he failed to maintain a residual force that might have helped protect the democratic gains of the past decade. He bolstered U.S. forces in Afghanistan but portrayed their mission almost entirely as safeguarding U.S. security, rarely, even secondarily, as helping Afghans live in freedom.

As Trombly explains at length, the U.S. response to the collapse of communism and dissolution of the USSR was cautious and likewise lacking in the sort of ideological exuberance that Hiatt projects back onto it. Remaining aloof from the Green movement was what the Green movement wanted. Besides, it is hard to see how more vocal and enthusiastic presidential cheerleading for a foreign protest movement would have changed anything, except perhaps to make the protesters suspect in the eyes of their countrymen.

Hiatt doesn’t explain how keeping a residual U.S. force from an unpopular occupation would allow the already semi-authoritarian Iraqi government to keep from becoming increasingly authoritarian. Perhaps if he acknowledged that there aren’t very many “democratic gains” in Iraq to protect, the decision not to keep American soldiers in Iraq as targets for militia attacks might start to make more sense to him. If there was any merit to the decision to increase the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, it was that it was serving U.S. security interests. Democracy promotion became the weak fallback justification for the war in Iraq when the stated reasons for invading proved to be false. Ending the U.S. presence in Iraq doesn’t tell us much of anything about Obama’s “passion” or lack thereof.

Hiatt continues:

In nations that received less attention, such as Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan, the administration has been content to work with the autocrats in charge and has been forced to scramble when, as in Kyrgyzstan, democrats upended dictators who had become partners.

The line about Kyrgyzstan is risible. Bakiyev, the dictator who had become a U.S. partner, was elevated to that position during the so-called “Tulip” revolution in 2005, and Kyrgyzstan’s “color” revolution was regularly cited as one of the supposed successes of the “freedom agenda.” This was the Bush administration’s view of Akayev’s overthrow. However, like another familiar “color” revolution in former Soviet space, the “Tulip” revolution simply involved exchanging one authoritarian ruler for another. Bush’s “passion” for freedom lent legitimacy to Bakiyev’s coup and provided cover to a regime that was arguably even worse than the one it had replaced. If that is the sort of thing that the “freedom agenda” produced, why should anyone mourn its passing?

As useless as Hiatt’s objections are, it is worth considering that it is better to avoid indulging in a lot of loose talk about promoting liberty. The dangers of too much enthusiasm for this project are arguably much greater and the consequences for the affected nations have been even more severe. The one time that the elder Bush gave into the temptation to indulge in reckless public cheerleading against a dictatorship was in the aftermath of the Gulf War when he urged disaffected Shi’ites to rebel against Hussein’s regime. This was in sharp contrast with his much more careful responses to political changes in Europe and the USSR. There was never any intention to provide military support to the rebellion, and as we all know the rebellion was brutally put down, which reminds us that there are much worse things than a “lack of passion” for promoting political liberalization in other countries.

During the Cold War, advocates of “rollback” seemed to be very passionate about freedom. They said they weren’t satisfied with that cold, callous doctrine of containment that condemned hundreds of millions to live under oppressive governments. In the end, all of the rhetoric about “liberation” and rolling back communism proved to be empty when one of the subject nations of central Europe took the “rollback” ideologues at their word, rose up, and found that there would be no support from the U.S. or anywhere else. Faced with the choice of following through on his administration’s earlier foolish rhetoric or avoiding a disastrous conflict, Eisenhower correctly chose the latter. Unfortunately, tens of thousands of Hungarians paid the price for the earlier mistake of indulging in easy, emotionally-satisfying rhetoric about freedom.

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