I have long contended that the Bush Doctrine is the worst foreign policy except all the others. Imagine my excitement when I saw that Francis Fukuyama and Adam Garfinkle had penned a piece for the WSJ arguing for "A Better Idea." Imagine my disappointment when the article seemed to be mostly a catalog of complaints about the Bush Administration. Its positive suggestions include such oddities as:
Just as it proved possible to stigmatize and eventually eliminate slavery from mainstream global norms without having first to wait for the mass advent of liberal democracy, it should be possible to effectively stigmatize jihadi terrorism without having first to midwife democracies from Morocco to Bangladesh.
The international move against slavery is essentially located in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. I shouldn't have to tell these men that it was much easier to to "stigmatize and eventually eliminate" slavery from global norms when the globe was controlled by a few European imperial powers, some of whom bought at least certain essentials of liberal thought. Indeed the leading voice against slavery was that era's super power, the British Empire, the most liberal of the imperial powers. Their task was made easier by the fact it only had to work on the self-interest of a few European powers, rather than against a whole ideology spread across three continents. Also, it facilitates the argument slavery when certain notions of equality have already taken root to some extent in the slave holding societies. And the continued presence of slavery in the United States well into the 19th Century shows the limits of that persuasion.
About the only prescriptive plan I see in this essay is that the U.S. should work through NGOs and friendly third-party nations to distribute aid to democratic forces in the Muslim world, rather than having that aid tainted by the hands of an unpopular United States government. The authors also counsel decoupling democratization and fighting terrorism by adopting a "go it slow" attitude toward the former. The authors write:
Authoritarian political cultures do function as enablers of radical Islamism, but the essential cause of the latter--today as before, in dozens of historical cases concerning violent millenarian movements--is the difficulty that some societies and individuals have in coming to terms with social change. That is why rapid modernization is likely to produce more short-term radicalism, not less. Muslims in democratic Europe are as much a part of this problem as those in the Middle East. This is not a trivial point; it is a central one that directly challenges a key tenet of the administration's view.
I guess this is all wise as far as it goes, but it hardly seems like a direct challenge to the Bush Doctrine as part of modernization is democratiztaion. Think of entering a cold swimming pool as an analogy. Fukuyama and Garfinkle say that the Muslim world dip its toes in the waters of modernization while the Bushies say they should just jump right in. But both agree that modernizing the Muslim world is the long term solution to terrorism/Islamic extremism. The question is whether or how much you should put up with short term unrest in order to obtain long term goals. I guess I will have to wait for the better idea.
Update: Joe Knippenberg has further thoughts.
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