January 31, 2005 U.S. Edition

High Hopes, Hard Facts
The world's a stage: His ideals are soaring, but now Bush must live and lead by his own code.
By Fareed Zakaria

It was a speech written for the ages, and it will live in history as a powerful affirmation of American ideas and ideals. George W. Bush's second Inaugural Address was the culmination, in style and substance, of a position he has been veering toward ever since September 11, 2001: that the purpose of American foreign policy must be the expansion of liberty. It is not a new theme for an American president. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan all spoke in similar tones and terms. Bush, however, has brought to the cause the passion of the convert. In short declarative sentences, influenced by the King James Bible and by his most eloquent predecessors, Bush used virtually his entire speech to set out the distinctively American world view: that "the best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

To borrow an old saw about the mission of journalism, Bush's words will "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Democratic reformers around the world will surely take heart. Dictators will nervously ponder what it all means. This, too, is in a great American tradition. When Wilson and Roosevelt spoke out against empires, it rattled Europe's great powers. When Kennedy and Reagan spoke about freedom, it worried the juntas of Latin America and the despots of East Asia. When the Carter administration began issuing annual reports on human rights, it unnerved regimes across the world. In speaking honestly and openly about the importance and universality of freedom, America—and, to be fair, Europe—have made a difference. They have put freedom on the global agenda. Bush has aimed to push it even higher.

In doing so, however, Bush has also pushed higher on the agenda the question of American hypocrisy. I often argue with an Indian businessman friend of mine that America is unfairly singled out for scrutiny abroad. "Why didn't anyone criticize the French or Chinese for their meager response to the tsunami?" I asked him recently. His response was simple. "America positions itself as the moral arbiter of the world, it pronounces on the virtues of all other regimes, it tells the rest of the world whether they are good or evil," he said. "No one else does that. America singles itself out. And so the gap between what it says and what it does is blindingly obvious—and for most of us, extremely annoying." That gap just grew a lot bigger.

The gap is pronounced because Bush has done more with this speech than praise liberty. He has declared that promoting freedom is now American policy. In 1947, Harry Truman announced the "Truman Doctrine" that turned into the containment of the Soviet Union by saying, "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Echoing that formulation, Bush declared, "So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The president goes on to outline various stances that the United States will adopt in the future, all suggesting a broad shift in American policy.

The chasm between rhetoric and reality, while inevitable, is striking. The Bush administration has not been particularly vociferous in holding dictators to account—no more or less, really, than other recent administrations. Vladimir Putin has presided over the most significant reversal of freedoms across the globe, only to be praised by Bush as a soulmate. More scandalously, the president has sided with Putin in his interpretation of the Chechen war as a defensive action against terrorists. In fact, while it is a complicated story, the Russian Army has killed about 100,000 Chechen civilians in a brutal campaign to deny them the right to secede.

The president said in his speech to the world's democrats, "When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you." But when democratic Taiwan stood up to communist China last year, Bush publicly admonished it, siding with Beijing. When brave dissidents in Saudi Arabia were jailed for proposing the possibility of a constitutional monarchy in that country, the administration barely mentioned it. Crown Prince Abdullah, who rules one of the eight most repressive countries in the world (according to Freedom House), is one of a handful of leaders to have been invited to the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas. (The elected leaders of, say, India, France, Turkey and Indonesia have never been accorded this courtesy.) The president has met with and given aid to Islam Karimov, the dictator of Uzbekistan, who presides over one of the nastiest regimes in the world today, far more repressive than Iran's, to take just one example.

I do not mean to suggest that in all these cases the president should invade or break ranks with or even condemn these leaders. There are understandable reasons why the United States must look after its security, as well as its political and economic concerns. But President Bush has suggested in his speech that there is no conflict between America's ideals and its interests. The record of his administration—as all previous ones—highlights the opposite.

The place where the president is fundamentally right to assert this convergence of interests and ideals is the Middle East. At base, the terror emanating from the region is produced by the absence of freedom and openness—economic, political, social, intellectual. In a familiar pattern, extreme and violent repression by governments has produced a culture of extreme and violent opposition. (There are other causes and complaints, such as American foreign policy. America has been guilty of injustices in countries like Vietnam and Chile, however, and it has not produced a culture of suicide bombers and jihadis.) In the Middle East, advancing freedom is, in Bush's words, "the urgent requirement of [America's] security, and the calling of our time."

President Bush's impulse to stop supporting the status quo in the Middle East and promote reform and freedom has broad support within America. The question is, how to do it? The answer is not always obvious. In Jordan, for example, the unelected monarch is more liberal, more open and more progressive than most of the elected democrats, many of whom are deeply reactionary. The United Arab Emirates is rated one of the least free countries in the world, yet its biggest city, Dubai, is quickly becoming an open, free-market haven.

While Bush has been visionary in his goals, he has not provided much practical wisdom on how to attain them in a complex world. This lack of attention to the long, hard slog of actually promoting democracy might explain why things have gone so poorly in the most important practical application of the Bush Doctrine so far—Iraq. Convinced that bringing freedom to a country meant simply getting rid of the tyrant, the Bush administration seems to have done virtually no serious postwar planning to keep law and order, let alone to build the institutions of a democratic state. If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider the extraordinary words in the "after-action report" of the most important division of the American Army in Iraq, the Third Infantry Division, quoted in a recent essay by Michael O'Hanlon. It reads: "Higher headquarters did not provide the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) with a plan for Phase IV [the postwar phase]. As a result, Third Infantry Division transitioned into Phase IV in the absence of guidance."

From Versailles to Vietnam, this has always been the danger of American idealism. Not that the ideals were wrong or dangerous, but rather that, satisfied by the virtues of their grand goals, American policymakers lost sight of the practical realities on the ground.

In Iraq, the administration is tackling the right problem, even if it has not been adept at constructing a solution. But outside of the Middle East, is the problem of tyranny the "calling of our time"? Is it the dominating issue for the world at large today?

Bush has self-consciously echoed one Inaugural Address more than any other: John Kennedy's 1961 speech, which JFK also addressed mostly to the world, promising to "pay any price, bear any burden ... to assure the survival and the success of liberty." When John Kennedy was speaking, the vast majority of the world was unfree. Some of the largest and most productive regions of the world were ruled by powerful, totalitarian regimes that controlled every aspect of their subjects' lives and threatened the free world with armed might. Today, we live in a world that is mostly free. In 1972, when Freedom House began its practice of ranking countries on a scale of free and unfree, it placed 54 (of the world's 149) in the unfree category, with scores of 6 or more (with 7 being the most unfree). Today only 25 of the world's 192 countries score 6 or higher. Condoleezza Rice listed some of this ragtag bunch in her Senate testimony: Cuba, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe. Is ending Burmese tyranny the urgent requirement of America's security? Is battling Cuba's decrepit regime the calling of our time?

We live in a democratic age. Many countries that are not liberal democracies are often strange mixtures of freedom and unfreedom. Russia, for all Putin's faults, is a far more open society and economy than any communist country ever was. China, often described as a totalitarian state, is actually a similar kind of mixture: a country in which people can increasingly live, work, travel, buy, sell, trade and even worship where they want, but without any political freedom. Talk to a young Chinese official, and he will tell you that his country will loosen up those restrictions over time. This does not make Russia or China free, but neither are they the totalitarian tyrannies of old.

For much of the world, the problem is not the will for democracy but the capacity to build and sustain a stable, effective and decent government. Pakistan, for example, has not lacked a will for democracy; it established one in 1947. But since then, because of weak social structures, economic stagnation and political crises, it has often veered toward dictatorship and, even worse, collapse. Recently, while democratic, it was careering into an almost-failed-state status. Dr. Rice now says that it is on the path of moderation, but it is doing so under a military dictator. The United States has tried to bring democracy to Haiti almost a dozen times, in different ways. None of them has stuck.

For much of the world, the great challenge today is civil strife, extreme poverty and disease, which overwhelms not only democracy but order itself. It is not that such societies are unconcerned about freedom. Everyone, everywhere, would choose to control his own destiny. But this does not mean as much when the basic order that precedes civilized life is threatened, and disease and death are the most pressing daily concern. Much of Africa is reasonably free, holds elections and is far more open than ever before. The great challenge in, say, Senegal and Namibia is not freedom but an effective state. The author of American liberty, James Madison, wrote in The Federalist papers that "in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." Order and then liberty (we might have remembered this in Iraq).

The writing is on the wall. The remaining tyrannies will eventually perish. And the world will move slowly toward greater and greater freedom. The United States is right to push this trend forward. The president is wise to articulate the path ahead. But we should also note the trends toward chaos, plague and poverty, which consume the attentions of much of the world. These are also great evils, and we should propose ways to lead the world in tackling them. That, too, would make for an interesting and important speech.  

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