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To better understand how the U.S. and the West can successfully promote democracy, Carnegie Europe convened a panel of experts to discuss the Bush administration’s past mistakes, challenges to democracy in the Middle East, and the European perspective on democracy promotion and the ‘League of Democracies.’
Robert Kagan believes a war is coming. Not necessarily one with guns and bombs, but his new book argues that a fundamental global divide is emerging between liberal democracies and autocratic governments—namely Russia and China. He and presidential hopeful John McCain call for a League of Democracies, which the Republican candidate has pledged to pursue if he wins the November election. NEWSWEEK's Christopher Werth spoke with Kagan about the ascendancy of great-power competition.
Pakistan has experienced uneven performance in achieving human development goals. These poor results are due to a lack of investment: the country spends only about 2.5% of GDP on health and education, whereas most countries that have grown on a sustained basis have spent at least 7%.
America has elected a president from a once-marginalized social group before. But the country has rejected such a candidate, too. Barack Obama represents a social group that was once on the margins of American politics, but now aspires to put one of its own in the highest office. This has happened once before in U.S. politics: when American Catholics saw one of their own nominated to be president.
The conventional wisdom today is that a small group of neoconservatives seized the occasion of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 to steer the nation into a war that would never have been fought otherwise. There is another and arguably simpler interpretation: that after September 11, 2001, American fears were elevated and their tolerance for potential threats lowered.
The greatest challenges the United States faces—including nuclear proliferation, energy, Iraq, Middle East peace, and climate change—all require close U.S. cooperation with autocratic regimes. As a result, the proposed League of Democracies would unnecessarily antagonize and alienate countries central to the future of U.S. foreign policy.
The issue of race is the longest-lasting cleavage in American politics. It is also perhaps the least understood. The open exploitation of racist sentiment by vote-hungry politicians was for centuries a durable American tradition. More recently, race has assumed a subtle, often unspoken form during campaign season, as Republicans have sought white votes by slyly associating their Democratic opponents with controversial black figures like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, or with topics--welfare, crime, federal funding for "midnight basketball"--that many voters identify with African Americans.
Washington insiders are calling for the establishment of a League of Democracies to tackle the world's problems. But the last thing people in other countries are looking for from the next administration is a high-profile initiative tying democracy promotion to the global U.S. security agenda.
My esteemed colleague Noam Scheiber has suggested that Barack Obama’s results in the Philadelphia suburbs did not possess the significance I attributed to them. Clinton’s advantage there, he suggests, didn’t show that she was cutting into Obama’s prior advantage among affluent, educated voters--voters that have made up much of his white support.
The Democratic primary is over. Hillary Clinton might still run in West Virginia and Kentucky, which she'll win handily, but by failing to win Indiana decisively and by losing North Carolina decisively, she lost the argument for her own candidacy. She can't surpass Barack Obama's delegate or popular vote count. The question is no longer who will be the Democratic nominee, but whether Obama can defeat Republican John McCain in November. And the answer to that is still unclear.
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