The incoming administration is not short of advice on how to rescue democracy promotion, how liberals should spread liberal democracy internationally and how it can reinvent U.S. leadership in a networked world.
But liberals are “less excited about the idea of democracy promotion in the aftermath of the Iraq War,” writes Ilan Goldenberg, policy director at the Obama-friendly National Security Network. He draws on a classic article addressing Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy (PDF) to outline four basic strategic choices for the new U.S. administration:
- neo-isolationism – in effect a marginalized non-option;
- the selective engagement associated with the 1990s realists as well as President George W. Bush’s first campaign commitment to a “humble foreign policy“;
- co-operative security – typified by the first Clinton Administration’s contention that stability and peace are best secured through international institutions and by spreading democratic values and freedom; and
- primacy – which is divided into a neo-conservative hard primacy and the soft primacy of Liberal Hawks.
Goldenberg detects a broad consensus emerging among liberals, liberal hawks and realists:
There is relatively universal agreement among these groups that we need to begin withdrawing from Iraq, focus more on Afghanistan, opt for direct diplomacy with Iran, reengage with the world, improve our image, strengthen our alliances, close Guantanamo and deal with global warming and energy security.
One liberal hawk, the New Yorker’s George Packer, doesn’t think there’s “much point in having a Democratic president if his foreign policy will be all about China and Russia and have nothing to say about Burma and Zimbabwe.” He suggests that President-elect Obama is right to stress the centrality of the conflict with the Taliban:
Afghanistan is where nation-building, multilateral counterinsurgency, democracy promotion, and the other elements of liberal internationalism as it operates in global flashpoints are going to survive or go to their grave.
Whatever discontinuities in policy occur, Nathan Sharansky hopes that President Obama will continue the current president’s practice of meeting with democratic dissidents:
Meeting with democratic leaders is terribly important for dissidents because, even when they are not in prison, they are generally isolated in their own countries. Meeting the leader of the free world transforms the dissident in the eyes of his people from a lonely Don Quixote to the person who can expose the truth about their suffering to the outside world and influence the world to take action to address it.
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