Integrating Democracy Promotion into U.S. Middle East Policy

Presenter:
Michele Dunne, Visiting Scholar, Democracy and Rule of Law Project, Carnegie Endowment

Commentators:
Scott Carpenter, Director, Middle East Partnership Initiative, U.S. Department of State
Geoffrey Kemp, Director, Regional Strategic Program, Nixon Center
Robert Satloff, Executive Director, Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Moderator:
Thomas Carothers, Director of Democracy and Rule of Law Project, Carnegie Endowment

Michele Dunne outlined the principal arguments of her Carnegie paper, "Integrating Democracy Promotion into U.S. Middle East Policy." The paper addresses the challenges associated with U.S. efforts to promote political reform in the Middle East in congruence with its often crosscutting economic and security interests. She argued that the United States can, and should, pursue its multiple geo-strategic goals in the Middle East while simultaneously pushing democratic reform in the region. Dunne emphasized that while many Arab governments and reformers tend to reject the United States as the messenger of reform and democratization, the message itself still has wide resonance in the Middle East. With this caveat in mind, Dunne asserted that the United States needs to reformulate its approach toward the Middle East, first by genuinely placing the democracy promotion initiative high on its priority list. She pointed out that this was not the case in the 1990s when the U.S. government overlooked the issue of internal reform in Palestine and Egypt for the sake of pursuing progress in the Arab-Israeli peace process. Second, to effectively promote democracy in the Middle East, the United States should be careful not to invest too much time or effort in regional approaches, such as the Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) Initiative. Instead it should concentrate on the formulation and implementation of state-by-state policy strategies tailored to the specific situation of the different countries in the region.

Dunne also advocated another type of policy integration that coordinates different levels of democracy promotion assistance. She described the emergence of a gap between two levels of policy reform strategies. One level involves encouraging reform from above by implementing high profile public actions through engagement between U.S. state administrators and Arab government officials. While this type of assistance can inject momentum for change in the Middle East, Dunne argued that it also consumes tremendous bureaucratic resources. The second level of assistance involves more concrete, on-the-ground programs, such as the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) that promote bottom-up reform, but seem to do little to effectuate change at the top. Dunne asserted that it is necessary for these two levels of democracy assistance to operate in tandem, and that the United States should promote bilateral negotiations to propel democratic reform.

Scott Carpenter, Geoffrey Kemp and Robert Satloff provided comments on Dunne's presentation and a general discussion followed.

Synopsis prepared by Hania Kronfol, Junior Fellow with the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment.