Promoting democracy in the Middle East? – first do no harm

The Obama administration was “right to avoid emotionally satisfying but pointless… rhetorical interventions” in the Iranian events of June 2009, argues Middle East analyst Gregory Gause. “It should be equally poised in rejecting calls …. to make democracy promotion a major pillar of American policy” in the region, he contends.

Gause is dismissive of pundits and opinion-makers “jumping aboard the democracy promotion train” in the wake of recent setbacks for political Islamists in Kuwait, Morocco and Jordan. Moderates may have carved out a ‘virtual mosque’ of political space using new communications technologies and radical Islam pushed onto the defensive.

But Islamists performed strongly in Iraq, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, and Bahrain, while elections in Iran and Lebanon cannot be easily interpreted as Islamist defeats. “It is an analytical error to take single elections in an array of countries and extrapolate them into a regional trend,” he writes in The National Interest.

Rather than pressure authoritarian allies to democratize, the U.S. should have a “limited-but-achievable democracy agenda” based on three principles: do no harm; no hypocrisy; and sustaining rather than promoting democracy in places like Iraq, Turkey and Kuwait.

Highlighting the “resilience of regional authoritarians”, Gause contends that Middle East elites have little incentive to run the risks that democratic reforms entail:

With the fall of the Left globally in the 1980s, pro-American, right-wing authoritarians in Latin America and East Asia could open their political systems with little fear that their opponents, if they won elections, would completely reverse the course they set for their countries. The United States could encourage such openings without fear of disrupting its foreign-policy goals. This is not the case for American allies in the Arab world, where the Islamist opposition represents a real alternative to existing regimes and offers a distinctly different model of both domestic politics and foreign policy.

Democracy assistance practitioners will take issue with his contention that promoting democracy means pushing for “real elections” and that “strengthening liberal civil society organizations, promoting judicial independence and encouraging women’s rights – as laudable as they me be, are not about democracy promotion.”