AIDING DEMOCRACY ABROAD: The Learning Curve.

• Author: Neier, Aryeh
• Position: Review

AIDING DEMOCRACY ABROAD: The Learning Curve

by Thomas Carothers The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, $39.95

THE PROMOTION OF DEMOCRACY worldwide was articulated as a goal of American foreign policy in a June 8, 1982 address by President Reagan to the British Parliament. Reagan's espousal of this cause had an opportunistic element. At the time, his Administration was preoccupied with developments in Central America where it had "drawn the line" (in Secretary of State Alexander Haig's words) in El Salvador by assisting the armed forces there to fend off a leftist insurgency while covertly organizing a rightist insurgency to topple the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Reagan encountered resistance in Congress to providing the funds he sought for the Salvadoran war because of accounts by human rights groups and the media of severe abuses by the military there, including massacres of peasants and thousands of death-squad killings. Some in Congress also attempted to obstruct Reagan's war in Nicaragua. Though the Sandinistas persecuted political dissenters and harassed an opposition newspaper, their rule was not so bloody as in nearby El Salvador.

In an attempt to make the case that the human-rights situation was actually worse in Nicaragua, Reagan focused on political developments. The Sandinistas had deferred elections until 1985, six years after they seized power. In contrast, El Salvador had just held elections for its National Assembly that produced televised images of long lines of people in the sun waiting their turn to vote. President Reagan told the British that Salvadorans "braved ambush and gunfire, trudging miles to vote for freedom." Equating human rights with elections, Reagan committed the United States to a global effort to promote democracy. "What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term," the President said, "the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history."

As Thomas Carothers--who is Vice President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and widely...