Democracy Has Been Demoted

Burma's monks missed word that it is now out of favor.

By Daniel Henninger
Thursday, October 4, 2007 12:01 a.m.

During a respite in Europe last week, my contact with politics took two forms. The first was watching CNN International's constant coverage of Burma's Buddhist monks and some 100,000 other Burmese in the streets of Rangoon. Hour after hour, CNN ran the smuggled video of robed monks in the streets, while its news anchors in London conveyed with untiring tones of urgency that the world" was "concerned" about Burma.

The second contact with politics--related to the first in Burma, I'd argue--was the inclination of one's European hosts to bring to the attention of American guests the U.S. government's unpopularity, which apparently extends like a dark fog from the Thames to the Danube. One host summed up the source of this ill wind in two words: "the neocons."

Ah yes, "the neocons." The phrase has become global shorthand for what the wise men of the world now agree was a very bad idea. This is that the U.S. would spread to the world's unfree people the idea described in the first sentence of the presumably neocon-inspired Bush Doctrine: "a single sustainable model for national success--freedom, democracy, and free enterprise."

In the U.S. and Europe, the notion of creating "a balance of power that favors human freedom" as a counterweight to terror networks is now routinely mocked as "a dream," "a fiasco" and "a failure." And as soon as the abominable Bush and the neocons are gone, their "oversold" democratic pipe dream will be replaced by an American foreign policy that is more "modest."


As it happens, the opposition party in Burma, the one getting shot, is called the National League for Democracy. Not the National League for Stability, but Democracy. One hopes the monks, reported by the BBC to be headed for internment camps, aren't expecting too much from "the world," because not much is coming. If before deciding to fill Rangoon's streets the "saffron-robed" monks had spent more time reading pundits and foreign-policy intellectuals in Washington or Western Europe, they would have known that democracy has been demoted.

The Bush Doctrine's critics will say this is unfair, that they support aspiring democracies, that their critique of the neocons is mostly about Iraq. Perhaps, but I would argue that this tidy distinction--"we only mean Iraq, we're all for Burma"--has been lost on the popular imagination. The anti-Bush, anti-neocon obsession has been so constant, so often pegged to the broader Bush "dream" for democracy and freedom, that its critics have tossed out the world's democratic babies with the Iraqi and Afghan bathwater.

An overstatement? In a July 2006 Foreign Affairs article, "The End of the Bush Revolution," Philip Gordon of Brookings, now an advisor to Barack Obama, tries to deflate what he describes as a "revolutionary" Bush foreign policy, which argues that "the spread of democracy and freedom is the key to a safer and more peaceful world." He finds "such thinking" still afloat in the president's 2006 State of the Union message. Mr. Gordon places this as "on the idealistic end of the U.S. foreign policy spectrum" and a departure from "the realist view that the United States should avoid meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations."

This March, in the Washington Post, Tony Smith of Tufts, writing from the Democratic left, derides both neocons and neolibs for promoting "market democracy" and urges the Democratic presidential candidates to articulate "a more modest U.S. role in the world."

The New York Times' Frank Rich late last year took the Iraq Study Group to task for failing to admit "even that modest goal, a radical devaluation of the administration's ambition to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, has long been proven a mirage."

Again, the point here is not to argue the success or failure of the Bush policy in Iraq, a legitimate subject for argument. Instead, it's that the president's critics felt compelled not only to refute Iraq but every jot of the Bush foreign policy, including its espousal of democracy and freedom. They have come very close to displacing the Bush Doctrine with the idea that promoting democracy in difficult places is, very simply, a mistake. Bye-bye, Burma.

A similar dynamic occurred earlier this year during the expulsion of Paul Wolfowitz from the World Bank. Mr. Wolfowitz's purpose at the Bank was to link loans to declines in public corruption, a sine qua non of progress in many African nations. But Mr. Wolfowitz was a neocon and advocate of the Bush Doctrine; ergo, the press joined with the Bank's tenured bureaucracy to throw out the anti-corruption baby with the neocon bathwater. The critics said the neocons devalued "institution-building." The Wolfowitz purge revealed the deeper purpose behind that charge.


Overkill has become a habit in our politics. In this case (and setting aside those who really do want America's world-role marked down), the result has been an erosion of support for political values nearly all once believed to be worthwhile.

His critics will reply this was Bush's fault. But it was not all Bush's fault. The vaulted rhetoric that announced the Bush Doctrine in 2002 was standard presidential issue. They all do it. JFK did it. Barack Obama did it in a major foreign-policy statement this summer, quoting JFK. The argument for democratic government in places such as Iran is in fact crudely pragmatic: Nations with freely operating political parties are likely to be centripetal; their energies bend inward, fighting with each other. In places without real politics, they sit in cafes plotting how to kill innocent civilians 2,000 miles outside their borders. The Bush critics know full well that no president would ever announce a pro-democracy doctrine in such cynical terms, though it'd be fine by me.

The damage has been done. The Burmese or the voters this week in Ukraine's fitful democracy or Russia's Garry Kasparov--who all want what Mr. Bush described in that doctrine--should understand how far down in importance their goal has fallen in the affairs of men. Foreign chanceries, the U.N. and our own State Department (led by an author of the Bush Doctrine) will welcome being unburdened of the harder task of advancing political rights in hard places. This frees the clerks of foreign policy to do their traditional job, which is to fly in again to talk with the junta the next time Burma's saffron-robed monks are overcome with the "dream" of democracy. We'll watch it on TV. It's the least we can do.