For Democracy to Take Root, It Must Be the Work of Many Hands

[papau]

The biggest problem with President Bush's inaugural address last
week was not that he set too broad a goal, but that he offered too
narrow a vision of how to achieve it.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-outlook24jan24.story
WASHINGTON OUTLOOK
For Democracy to Take Root, It Must Be the Work of Many Hands
Ronald Brownstein

January 24, 2005

The biggest problem with President Bush's inaugural address last week was not that he set too broad a goal, but that he offered too narrow a vision of how to achieve it.

Applied with a proper sense of humility and limits, Bush's goal of spreading liberty is an appropriate, and even traditional, lodestar for U.S. foreign policy. But expanding freedom does not need to be an entirely, or even principally, American mission, as Bush's speech implied.

Indeed, Bush can advance his goal of extending freedom probably only to the extent that the cause is not seen as an American crusade. Only by broadening his approach to more clearly include others — to make the spread of democracy the work of all of the world's democracies — can Bush move from aspiration to achievement.

The ardor and unqualified sweep of Bush's language might have surprised previous presidents, but his cause would not. The first president to argue that America would be more secure in a world with more democracies was Thomas Jefferson. Over the last century, from Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, "no theme has figured more prominently in … American foreign policy" than presidential calls for the spread of democracy, wrote Tufts University political scientist Tony Smith in his book "America's Mission."

Every president has balanced that ideal against conflicting priorities and practical constraints. During the Cold War, the U.S. routinely supported (and sometimes installed) autocratic anti-communists. Conversely, even the most fervently anti-communist presidents accepted Soviet domination of Eastern Europe as a fact that America could not reverse at an acceptable cost.<snip>