5 Attitude Adjustments America's Foreign-Policy Leaders Need Now

Daniel L. Davis

Gobal Governance, Americas

The United States is not a magician. It can't grant democracy wishes.

I’ve often railed against the foreign policy elite in this country and the often illogical and ineffective plans they support. But it occurs to me there is a much bigger problem at play. It’s not merely a matter of a flawed policy here or a bad decision there. The heart of the problem is much deeper. The majority of America’s increasingly defective foreign policies grow out of an unsustainable and flawed worldview.

Many on both the right and left in the United States believe America has an obligation and a responsibility to help those who want democracy to have it. There are some major problems with this belief.

On the first point is the very definition of democracy itself. When we say it is a universal human desire to live free, we subconsciously mean freedom in the American style. Thus, we believe that all who live under any other type of government are oppressed and in need of deliverance. That is one of the key beliefs that have underpinned our support of regime change as enduring American policy.

We claimed the people of Iraq deserved liberation from Saddam Hussein, even aside from the weapons of mass destruction claim. Libya was suffering under a totalitarian rule, and we supported the downfall of Qaddafi. We currently believe that Assad in Syria and the ayatollah in Iran don’t deserve to rule and should be overthrown or replaced. We celebrated the Arab Spring when many “threw off the shackles” of oppression, and we rejoiced during the Color Revolutions that took place in Europe following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Yet not a single one of those countries is better off today than they were before the regimes fell or governments upended. In the aftermath, some are muddling through while struggling to keep things together. Others are flatly worse off and a few—like Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan after their leaders were removed by the application of lethal military power by the United States—have been unmitigated disasters. We supported, encouraged or directly overthrew the existing governments in each of those nations (and in a few cases covertly aided in the upheaval), yet our avowed goal of giving the people more freedom and a better life has not been realized in a single case.

Not one.