The Foreign Service Journal, June 2005

Even when democracy does come, it sometimes does not produce the outcome Washington wants. Pales- tinians overwhelmingly elected Yasser Arafat as their leader long before the Iraqi elections, yet the Bush adminis- tration refused to deal directly with him; then, after Arafat’s death, Washington suddenly revived its sup- port for the democratic process in Palestine, claiming a linkage to its Iraq policy. Lebanon is not Ukraine; it is a countrythat actually had a functioning democracy for decades, whose return was demanded because the Syrians may have overreached with the death of Hariri Rafik. All these political events in the Middle East are desir- able, but do not answer the long-term problems of economic drift and tribal- ism in the region. While the promotion of democracy may be a useful element of a broader strategy, it is not even clear that it is being effectively supported by the U.S. government today. The vast bulk of our funding devoted to the Middle East and the battle against terrorist o rganizations goes to support regimes that are autocratic if not authoritarian, such as Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan, or that have established only a thin veneer of democratic elections, such as Afghanistan. And assistance direct- ly supporting the advance of the rule of law and democratization in other parts of the world, including the for- mer Soviet Union, Asia, Africa and Latin America, has been cut, not increased. For all these reasons, the United States needs to develop a more inte- grated focus on the underlying dilem- mas facing a substantial part of the world. Implementing such a vision will require fundamental changes in the way the U.S. conducts its state- craft, to integrate and take advantage of the synergy of all the tools of state- craft. It will require a genuine willing- ness to seek international partners in the effort. And it calls for a recogni- tion that the U.S. is neither a “savior nation” nor a “benign hegemon,” but another, powerful actor in an interna- tional system — whose past and pre- J U N E 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 61 No rhetoric and no public relations effort can conceal the reality that the U.S. is unpopular today virtually around the world.