ANALYSIS/OPINION
It’s not easy being the Shining City on the Hill. The need to deal with dictatorships has bedeviled American foreign policy since the birth of the nation, and our track record is decidedly mixed.
Our most recent presidents have made a particularly poor job of it. George W. Bush inveighed against his Axis of Evil, but had some unsavory foreign friends as well. (Perhaps, most famously, he looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes “and saw his soul.”)
President Obama has tried awkward — and, arguably, unsuccessful — bear hugs with leaders in Moscow, Havana, Tehran and Beijing. There were strongmen he didn’t embrace, but his interactions with leaders like Gadhafi, Mubarak and Assad ended badly as well.
The next occupant of the Oval Office will have to do better. “Dictators at War and Peace,” a recent book by Jessica L.P. Weeks, has some good tips.
Figuring out how to handle hard-to-handle nation-states has been the prime challenge for America presidential leadership in the modern era. Our record is an admixture of success, failure and questionable calls from our dealings with Imperial Japan prior to World War II to managing relations with apartheid South Africa. When history failed with the end of the Cold War, finding ways to work with difficult, nondemocratic states became a recurrent post-Cold War problem as well.
In “Dictators at War and Peace,” Ms. Weeks, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offers guidelines for determining which autocratic leaders to work with and which to worry about. The research “tends to focus on the differences between democracies and dictatorships rather than variation among dictatorships,” she writes.
The author observes that some despotic regimes can be as peaceful as democratic states. That simple fact, she says, challenges popular assumptions that “democracy promotion” has to be an essential component of foreign policy, or that converting all states to freedom-loving regimes is crucial for achieving a stable international order.
Ms. Weeks suggests that we classify authoritarian regimes by how internal forces constrain the leaders who decide the issues of war and peace. She stresses the importance of determining whether there is a domestic audience that can hold the leader accountable, and whether the influencers and leaders are civilian or military.
The least aggressive and most cautious states, she finds, are civilian-led “machines” — regimes controlled by civilian dictators answering to nonmilitary elites. “[W]hen it comes to promoting international peace,” the author concludes, “mass-level democratization may be no more important than making sure the government is led by civilians and that no single all-powerful leader emerges.”
“Dictators at War and Peace” has its critics. Alexander B. Downes at The George Washington University takes issues with Ms. Weeks’ interpretation of civil-military relations in authoritarian states, arguing that it “contradicts much work on civil-military relations that highlights the salience of leaders’ vulnerability to military coups.” Rather, he maintains, the “literature suggests that even in civilian-led authoritarian regimes, the military may still be an important audience that can influence the behavior of the state.”
This raises a key problem with trying to rack and stack authoritarian rulers. Do we really know who is running the show?
In “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror” (2004), Natan Sharansky not only does a great job explaining the difference between free and unfree states, he also highlights why dictatorships are so troubling. Closed regimes are by definition nontransparent. Accountability, responsibility and authority are obfuscated by webs of corruption, disinformation, secrecy, oppression and deceit. Thus, while it may be true that not all evil empires are equally threatening to their neighbors, making that call is harder than it looks.
Still, Ms. Weeks’ call to analyze what kinds of dictators we are dealing with and not treat all not-nice states the same is useful and important advice. While the U.S. should be an advocate for freedom and liberty, America should also be a cheerleader for the sovereignty of nationhood.
Nation-states have done more to advance and protect human liberty than any political institution since the dawn of time. Respecting individual liberty and national sovereignty demands that the U.S. directly intervene in the affairs of other states only under the most dire of conditions — when the safety, security and freedom of our own citizens are gravely threatened.
• A Heritage Foundation vice president, James Jay Carafano is director of the think tank’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy. A longer version of this commentary originally appeared in the journal The National Interest.
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