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The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did)
The Freedom Agenda Why America Must Spread Democracy - Just Not the Way George Bush Did Author:James Traub As we leave behind an era in which America tried to assert democracy by force (and often failed), the question arises: what part of our efforts to spread democracy can we preserve for the future? In The Freedom Agenda, James Traub traces the history of America’s democratic evangelizing, offering an assessment of the George W. Bush admin... more »istration’s failed efforts abroad. And he puts forth the argument that democracy matters--for human rights, the resolution of conflicts, political stability and equitable development. But America must exercise caution in spreading it, both internationally and at home. James Traub is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has written four books, including The Devil’s Playground and The Best Intentions. He lives in New York City. Americans have been trying to shape democracy around the world for more than a century. It is the American mission, our distinctive form of evangelism. But when President Bush declared, in his second inaugural address, that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” he elevated this cause—the “Freedom Agenda,” as he called it—to the central theme of American foreign policy. Yet the war in Iraq has proven the folly of seeking to impose American democracy by force. As we leave the Bush era behind, the question arises: What part of our efforts to spread democracy can we rescue from this failure?
The Freedom Agenda traces the history of America’s democratic evangelizing. James Traub, a journalist for The New York Times Magazine, describes the rise and fall of the Freedom Agenda during the Bush years, in part through interviews with key administration officials. He offers a richly detailed portrait of the administration’s largely failed efforts to bolster democratic forces abroad. In the end, Traub argues that democracy matters—for human rights, for reconciliation among ethnic and religious groups, for political stability and equitable development—but the United States must exercise caution in its efforts to spread it, matching its deeds to its words, both abroad and at home. "Unfreedom is on the march. Freedom House’s annual report for 2007 grimly noted that there had been reversals for liberty in one-fifth of the world’s countries, including places like Egypt, Kenya and Venezuela, as well as both Russia and Georgia. China’s one-party state, which props up brutal governments in Myanmar, Sudan and Zimbabwe, has been preening in the Olympic spotlight. And Russia is on the march in a totally nonmetaphorical way. In his second Inaugural Address, George W. Bush thundered, 'It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.' Instead, the bloody fiasco in Iraq threatens to discredit the whole enterprise of democratization—particularly if done by Americans. As James Traub asks in The Freedom Agenda, his fast-paced and absorbing new book: 'How, today, can we promote anything, much less democracy?' . . . Traub is blistering on American torture of detainees, correctly tracing it back to Bush’s own decision to duck the Geneva Conventions. Interviewing senior administration officials, Traub finds them oddly oblivious about what torture has done to America’s image in the Middle East and far beyond. One tells him that the idea that anger at America hurts its ability to promote democracy is 'a dictator’s argument' . . . Traub sensibly argues that foreigners can do much more to influence Mali or Zambia than they can Russia or China. One of his success stories is American support for Serbian democrats, who ousted Slobodan Milosevic after he tried to steal an election in 2000. He’s impressed with Barack Obama’s calls for curbing global poverty as well as authoritarianism. With so many other Western democracies and civil society organizations busily at work, and with the lure of the European Union a powerful force for democratization, Traub wants Washington to stop alienating the rest of the world by touting democracy as uniquely American—doubly wise given how globally despised America currently is."—Gary J. Bass, The New York Times Book Review
"In Freedom Agenda, James Traub eschews both the grand prophetic style of Niebuhr and the sometimes biblical thunder of Bacevich. His book is an even-tempered but critical study of America's self-imposed obligation to bring freedom and democracy to the world . . . Traub's excellent book presents a fascinating account of the progress, or lack of it, of liberty. He is an imperturbable ironist, brilliantly portraying longstanding American dilemmas like copious freedom rhetoric at home alongside expedient support of repressive autocratic states abroad. He shows how education, potential prosperity, existing public, and nongovernmental institutions, and, in some cases, previous experience of democratic government favor the poster states of successful democratization—Germany, Japan, and the Eastern European countries. he describes, among many fascinating examples, the failure to promote democracy in Russia and its unexpected success in Serbia . . . James Traub has written a thoughtful and splendidly informed book on a vast subject that in the wrong hands can very easily become elusive, even boring. As he writes in conclusion, 'Liberty at home may not depend on liberty abroad.' His book is very much in tune with the content and the tone of the new administration's ideas, and it should be a valuable guidebook for those working on them. It can also be read with enjoyment and great interest by anyone hoping for ways to make the world more livable for all its inhabitants."—Brian Urquhart, The New York Review of Books
"Every American soldier who served from World War I through Vietnam and into the 1980s was familiar with the M1911 Caliber .45 Colt semiautomatic pistol. The sidearm was the technological legacy of a nasty little war fought more than a century ago, designed and issued to U.S. forces in the Philippines after Admiral George Dewey forced his way into Manila Bay in 1898. Today the rationale for that incursion, not to mention its aftermath, sounds familiar: America felt an obligation to bring democratic self-government to the Philippines. It was nation building, with all the attendant dilemmas we have so recently rediscovered in Iraq. American soldiers fought against a viciously nationalistic independence movement while trying to promote education, economic development, and a new set of cultural and institutional values. We spent lives and treasure, delivered services and hope, proselytized for new institutions, and committed atrocities. The Philippines are, of course, an independent nation now, one with its own unique variant of democracy. But as journalist James Traub writes in The Freedom Agenda, the most penetrating look yet at the historical and theoretical basis for democratization, the war there was an expensive, messy, and long entanglement for the United States, and we never really changed the social structure that had formed during the country’s four centuries of Spanish occupation . . . When it came to nation building, the record was similarly mixed. Just as America discovered in the Philippines, it was one thing to bring down the bad old order, but another thing entirely to build something better in its place. Traub correctly points out the difficulties in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. But the basic mot« less