Stability and Security through Democracy?

Abstract

Taking the oath of office for a second term, George Walker Bush used the inaugural podium to reinforce America’s manifesto of global stability through liberty. It was no longer messianic but necessary in his mind for the United States “to seek and support the growth of democratic movements” because America’s security was linked with the stability that only democracy could ensure. Seeing “our vulnerability” in “tyranny,” Bush declared that now democracy around the world “is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security.”¹ U.S. presidents have long championed freedom but America’s forty-third chief executive went further than his predecessors. He dreamed of transplanting Americanized democracy first in Iraq and then the greater Middle East, seemingly oblivious to the defiant rejection of the Arab-Muslim host to this alien organ. In the White House’s judgment, a U.S.-engineered Westernized democratic stability replaced the earlier containment stance as America’s key doctrine for the post-Berlin Wall era. It was a shift that rankled the Islamic world, major powers, such as China and Russia, and even most allied nations. In the end, the policy brought neither self-sustaining democracy nor stability to the invaded peoples. But this new manifesto first penetrated deep into the U.S. military and civilian bureaucracies.

Make no small plans, for they have no power to stir the soul.

Niccolò Machiavelli

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

Thomas Jefferson

We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient— that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population; that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind; that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity; and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.

John F. Kennedy