Debates about democracy promotion cannot be couched solely as a balance sheet of material benefits and liabilities for the United States. American values must also enter the discussion. Since the beginning of the American republic, US presidents have invoked America’s unique, moral role in international affairs; the loss of this identity would weaken domestic support for US involvement in world affairs and undermine American ability to gain the support of other countries.

Apart from serving US strategic interests, democracy promotion is also the right thing to do. First and foremost, democracy is the best system of government. Leaders who have to compete for popular support to obtain and retain power are compelled to respond to the preferences of the people. The marketplace of political competition is also a built-in driver of better governance. At a minimum, democracy provides a mechanism for removing bad rulers, and when political competition is absent, as in autocracies, it produces complacency and corruption, with no mechanism for producing new leaders. Second, democracies provide more, and more stable, welfare for their people than do autocracies. Third, the demand for and appeal of democracy as a system of government are widespread, if not universal. The United States, therefore, has a moral interest in promoting democracy. Clearly, American leaders constantly face situations in which immediate security interests require cooperation with autocratic regimes, but such policies should not be defended on moral or ethical grounds.

Even if the United States has strategic and moral interests in the spread of democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the United States can spread democracy. Domestic factors, not external forces, have driven the process of democratization in most countries. While the authors acknowledge the limits of America’s ability to promote democracy abroad—limits that have become more severe in the past few years—they believe that US policies are often critical in helping nurture democratic development. The war in Iraq has fostered the false impression that military force is the only instrument of regime change, when in fact it is the rarest used and least effective way to promote democratic change abroad. A wiser, more effective, and more sustainable strategy must emphasize nonmilitary tools aimed at changing the balance of power between democratic forces and autocratic rulers and, only after there has been progress toward democracy, building liberal institutions.

The first step toward becoming a more effective promoter of democracy abroad is to get our own house in order. To begin with, the political costs to American credibility far outweigh the value of indefinitely holding prisoners at Guantanamo, and so the facility should be closed. In place of legalistic attempts to pretend that the United States does not engage in torture, a broader range of prohibited techniques should be explicitly defined and ruled out (a point also made in another paper in the Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide paper by Kenneth Anderson and Elisa Massimino).

It is naive to believe that the United States should only deal with other democracies. Nonetheless, American policymakers can conduct necessary business with autocratic regimes, while simultaneously supporting democratic development in these same countries. US foreign policy officials must reject the false linkage between cooperation and silence on human rights abuses whenever autocrats make it a precondition of engagement. Few friendly autocratic regimes have ever stopped working with the United States on an issue of mutual benefit in response to US criticism of their antidemocratic practices. American leaders have real leverage over friendly regimes to press for evolutionary change, especially with countries dependent on US military protection or economic assistance. Rather than coercing them, US officials must emphasize that such leaders can ultimately best protect their material and security interests by leading a process of evolutionary change, rather than by resisting it. American officials did exactly this, when they helped coax allies in South Korea, Chile, and South Africa into embracing democratic change. And paradoxically, the same logic of engagement applies when considering the promotion of democracy in dictatorships hostile to the United States; attempts to isolate or sanction these regimes have rarely worked.

Recent debates on how the US government is organized to provide democracy assistance have been helpful, but the reform ideas to date have not been ambitious enough. Any strategy for more effective democracy promotion must include significantly greater resources as well as a complete reorganization of all US government bureaus and agencies that are tasked with providing democracy assistance. A new Department of International Development must be created, and its head must be a member of the Cabinet. All foreign assistance resources currently funneled through other agencies and departments—with the exception of military training and assistance—must be transferred to this new department.

This document is part of the Stanley Foundation's "Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide" series.