Explaining Myself on Obama and Democracy

My posts on this blog tend to address three themes. One, topical stories that don’t always make the front page, such as my recent posts on Honduras and Switzerland. Two, Afghanistan because of its importance to US foreign policy and because better governance is integral to ending the war.  Three, criticizing the Obama administration for its apparent preference for stability over democratization.  Sometimes a post from the third category has been a bit of a rant, so I want to explain myself.

I do not criticize the administration because I want it to fail, but because I want it to succeed.  I was and remain a supporter of the Obama administration.  I am critical of its policies of engagement with Egypt and Iran because, first, I don’t think they are yielding concrete results and, second, because the administration countenances repression of democratic reformers in both of them.  I don’t like the message the administration sends when the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize refused to meet with the Dalai Lama, another recipient of the prize, because it will complicate the US relationship with the country that represses him (China).  I am not an idealist.  Some powerful autocratic regimes are strategically important to the US, such as China and Russia, and I don’t think we ought to be attempting to impose democracy on them.  Not least because demand for democracy in them is weak, we must deal with them as they are.  Nevertheless, I do think we ought to support democratic reformers abroad, not only because we can constructively engage regimes and support reformers at the same time (as we did with the Soviet Union), but also because I believe in the importance of democracy in the US.

And it is this final point that is most compelling.  Placing the Obama administration in a historical context makes the importance of supporting democracy, even at the cost of stability, starkly clear.  Barack Obama is not individually responsible for becoming president of the United States.  He owes a large debt to those who fought hard and even died to bring political equality to African-Americans in the United States.  Those courageous individuals not only understood that they were a destabilizing force; they knew that only by causing instability could they get the system to change.  I am not arguing that Barack Obama would have been against the civil rights movement, but does he want to stand on the same side of history as those who would have denied him the right to vote, much less become President, because of the instability it would create?  I hope not.