This afternoon I had the pleasure of hearing a talk by Tom Carothers, vice president of the Carnegie Endownment for International Peace, as part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies’ Foreign Policy Distinguished Speaker Series. His topic: the future of U.S. democracy promotion under Barack Obama.
He began by pointing out that democratization is not some new strategy that was picked up by the Bush administration after 9/11. Democratization has been a central component of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, and democracy promotion will inevitably remain central to U.S. foreign policy as well as an important issue in many regions of the world.
Carothers argued that the Bush administration clearly damaged democracy promotion efforts in two ways: 1) Bush caused democracy promotion to be associated with aggressive interventionism. This produced general backlash in developing countries and facilitated the ability of authoritarian/semi-authoritarian regimes to sell their opposition to American democracy promotion efforts. 2) With the abuses of terrorist suspects, the Bush administration greatly tarnished its image as the main promoter of democracy around the world.
What does this all mean for Obama? Carothers maintained that it was important for Obama to dissociate from the previous methods/policies of democracy promotion but not to give up on democracy promotion all together. Obama has a sort of global appeal, Carothers said, and the United States now has a great opportunity to speed up the momentum of facilitating meaningful democratic change.
