Freedom's long march: advancing democracy in the post-Bush era.

• Author: Clark, Wesley K.
• Position: The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy - Just Not the Way George Bush Did - Book review

The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did)

by James Traub

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pp.

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Every American soldier who served from World War I through Vietnam and into the 1980s was familiar with the M1911 Caliber .45 Colt semiautomatic pistol. The sidearm was the technological legacy of a nasty little war fought more than a century ago, designed and issued to U.S. forces in the Philippines after Admiral George Dewey forced his way into Manila Bay in 1898. Today the rationale for that incursion, not to mention its aftermath, sounds familiar: America felt an obligation to bring democratic self-government to the Philippines. It was nation building, with all the attendant dilemmas we have so recently rediscovered in Iraq. American soldiers fought against a viciously nationalistic independence movement while trying to promote education, economic development, and a new set of cultural and institutional values. We spent lives and treasure, delivered services and hope, proselytized for new institutions, and committed atrocities.

The Philippines are, of course, an independent nation now, one with its own unique variant of democracy. But as journalist James Traub writes in The Freedom Agenda, the most penetrating look yet at the historical and theoretical basis for democratization, the war there was an expensive, messy, and long entanglement for the United States, and we never really changed the social structure that had formed during the country's four centuries of Spanish occupation. We hadn't the heart to uproot it directly, and lacked the resources and time to overcome it.

In short, George W. Bush is not the first American president to attempt to nurture democracies elsewhere in the world, nor is he the first to discover firsthand the perils of doing so. The Bush administration's cowboy rhetoric, its rushed invasion of Iraq and haphazard follow-through, and its stubborn refusal to dialogue with those who disagreed have, in the eyes of some nations, robbed the United States of its moral authority to promote democracy. But, as Traub argues, it would be damaging to allow the Bush administration's clumsy execution to permanently tarnish the idea of democratization. This is in part a matter of national security, which is a function of our leverage and influence in the world: if we retire to our own borders and forego the enlargement of our democratic legacy, we are likely to find...