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PDFAmid speculation about the new U.S. administration’s commitment to democracy in the Middle East, at least incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is committed to promoting Arab democracy, the Council on Foreign Relations reports. “We want to continue to export democracy, but we want to deliver it in digestible steps,” she said in reference to Iraq. Clinton also stressed the importance of sustaining democracy through institution-building, noting that “we’ve done a good job talking about democracy, but we sure haven’t done a comparable good job in promoting the long-term efforts that actually build institutions after the elections are over and the international monitors have gone home.”
That view would seem to chime with what David Brooks describes as the new orthodoxy of bottom-up, multi-disciplinary “full-spectrum operations” that marry democracy, security and development. “The U.S. is not about to begin another explicit crusade to spread democracy,” he suggests. “But decent, effective and responsive government would be a start.”
But Middle East analyst Gilles Keppel is placing his hopes on a Euro-Mediterranean initiative, with liberalization resulting from “an economic renaissance centered on the Mediterranean would bring together, in one dynamic region, Europe’s industrial and technological wealth and its academic and scientific expertise; the Gulf’s petroleum assets and financial clout; and the human resources and rich cultures of the Levant and North Africa.”
