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U.S. Foreign Policy and the “Cause of Freedom”

The Wall Street Journal repeats a piece of ideological claptrap: So it is that when America retreats from the world, freedom retreats too. To say the cause of freedom is directly correlated with an active and muscular American foreign policy is not fashionable these days. Whether it’s fashionable or not, it isn’t true. This is […]

The Wall Street Journal repeats a piece of ideological claptrap:

So it is that when America retreats from the world, freedom retreats too.

To say the cause of freedom is directly correlated with an active and muscular American foreign policy is not fashionable these days.

Whether it’s fashionable or not, it isn’t true. This is a typically self-obsessed and self-serving argument for hegemonists to make, but it’s a falsehood based on a gross exaggeration of U.S. influence and of our government’s ability to affect the political developments of other countries. In the WSJ’s case, this also happens to be a nakedly partisan and dishonest argument, since the decline in global freedom as measured by Freedom House began at the height of the so-called “freedom agenda” in the second term of George W. Bush. By Freedom House’s measurements, political rights and civil liberties in other countries were losing ground when U.S. foreign policy was at its most activist and “muscular” in decades. To the extent that the “freedom agenda” had a discernible effect on political freedom in other countries, it was mostly negative. That doesn’t even touch on the harm that has been done to the “cause of freedom” in the name of the “war on terror” and its related “muscular” policies abroad.

The cause of freedom doesn’t depend on an “active and muscular” U.S. foreign policy. No one should view claims to this effect as anything more than propaganda, and lazy propaganda at that. In practice, those that promote the false idea of this connection between global freedom and U.S. activist foreign policy are among the first to rationalize support for any strongman or military dictator who happens to have the right domestic or foreign enemies. Because they identify the advance of the “cause of freedom” with the increase of U.S. influence, democratists will make excuses for abusive governments as long as they are aligned with Washington, and they are frequently taken in by local rulers that spout the right rhetoric while trampling on the rights of their opponents. For them, to be “pro-Western” is sufficient proof of having the right “values,” and genuine democrats and liberals that don’t want to align with the U.S. for their own reasons are usually viewed with suspicion.

The only sensible way to judge whether the U.S. is aiding or hindering political liberalization in other countries is to look at U.S. relations with other countries and their internal politics on a case-by-case basis. Of course, that would force us to acknowledge that local political actors and interests are overwhelmingly more important than anything that the U.S. is or isn’t doing. That doesn’t help with conveniently blaming domestic political opponents for events beyond their control, but it has the virtue of not being tendentious and inaccurate. For example, Thailand has experienced military coups against its elected governments under both Bush and Obama, but this is entirely because of internal tensions in Thai society and the growing disillusionment of the Thai middle class with mass democracy. Whether the U.S. is more or less “active and muscular” has nothing to do with anything that has happened there. Similar backlashes have been occurring elsewhere. Over the last decade, Turkey has become more democratic in some ways and considerably more illiberal in others because an illiberal majority has been empowered. This process began in the Bush years and continued without interruption until now. As a rule, it would be delusional to think that U.S. foreign policy could have somehow prevented these developments or that it could reverse them once they happened.

Much of the “retreat” in global freedom that has taken place over the last nine years has come from the tightening of government controls inside authoritarian states that were already mostly unfree. To the extent that this can be linked to U.S. foreign policy one way or the other, it is arguable that authoritarian regimes have intensified their repressive tactics in part because they are guarding against what they perceive to be U.S.-backed protest movements aimed at overthrowing them. Regardless, this trend isn’t going to be checked or reversed by an even more activist and “muscular” foreign policy, and in some cases it is conceivable that such a foreign policy could make things worse.

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