HOW TO SUPPORT THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

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• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 30, 2010
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How to Support the Democratic Revolution
Michael Ledeen
T xE streets and campuses of our cities principle of our foreign policy, it should be to
once again resound with the voices of support this movement-which some observers
demonstrators calling for the United States to have called a democratic revolution-around the
"get tough" with its allies. Whether demanding world. Our task is actively to encourage non-dem-
that we sever all economic ties with the Union ocratic governments to democratize, and to aid
of South Africa, or that we pressure Philippine democratic movements that challenge totalitarian
strongman Ferdinand Marcos to share power with and authoritarian regimes. Not only should this
his opponents, many Americans are clearly un- be our objective, in a sense it must be our objec-
happy with the close embrace between their coun- rive, for without this organizing principle and
try and such regimes. In short order we can expect central theme, even the most brilliantly conceived
similar calls concerning our relationship with Gen- Realpolitik will fail.
eral Pinochet's dictatorial regime in Chile. Such is the power of our own traditions and of
Such protests are by now a standard feature of our commitment to the universal value of democ-
public life in this country, but the issues raised by racy that Americans will not, for example, sup-
the protesters-which have to do with the nature port along-term friendship with a repressive dic-
of our alliances and the objectives of our foreign tatorship; our basic alliances must be with demo-
policy-remain among the most controversial in cratic countries, or with countries that are seen to
our national debate. The persistence of confusion be moving toward greater democracy. There is an
about the basic purposes of American foreign important corollary to this axiom: except in ex-
policy, above and beyond the latest tactical wrin- traordinary circumstances, the American people
kle ("Nixon Doctrine," "Reagan Plan," or what- will not long give their approval to a foreign
ever), suggests that we have yet to come to terms policy based purely or even primarily on abstract
with the requirements for America's proper role considerations of the balance of power.
in the world. What, then, are those requirements? Some decry this American characteristic, argu-
ing that it makes it impossible to conduct a (pre-
I N RECErrT years we have seen aremark- sumably more effective) foreign policy, one based
able series of transformations from dic- on a traditional conception of the national inter-
tatorship to democracy, in countries ranging from est. Such criticism, however, is misguided, for the
Turkey and Spain and Portugal to Argentina and spread of democracy is the most basic of our geo-
Honduras. There is no question that these examples strategic interests. If the democratic revolution
encourage other countries, especially those with should succeed, our security will be greatly en-
a Spanish or Portuguese tradition, to move in the hanced; if the democratic revolution is defeated
same direction (Brazil, Uruguay, and El Salvador and rolled back, our security will be diminished.
are instances). In addition, there is the encourag- These principles are often less well understood
ing story of Grenada, where armed American in- by ourselves than by our enemies, who recognize
tervention overthrew a Marxist dictatorship and only too clearly that the existence of free societies
returned the country to democracy, representing threatens them. The vitality of democracy, its ap-
the first time that the Brezhnev Doctrine (accord- peal to human creativity, and the unlimited range
ing to which the Communist takeover of any coun- it gives to human development, strike fear into
try is irreversible) has been actively challenged. the hearts of those whose power depends upon
And, in Eastern Europe, there is the most ambigu- shackling free people and insisting upon a single
ous but perhaps ultimately no less hopeful case "truth." The most aggressive of our enemies, the
of Poland, where, despite all efforts to suppress it, Communist totalitarians, aim to remove democracy
Solidarity lives on. from the earth, in order that they may finally feel
If there is one central theme and organizing completely secure. This point was driven home by
the Central American leaders interviewed by the
Kissinger commission. Every head of government
MICHAEL LEDEEN is a senior fellow at Georgetown's Center testified that so long as the Sandinistas were in
for Strategic and International Studies. His new book, Grave power in Nicaragua, all chance for democracy in
New World, has just been published by Oxford University the area would be mortally jeopardized.
Press.
48
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49/COMMENTARY MARCH 1985
The implication is clear enough: if we are seri-
ous about the democratic revolution in Central
America, we must challenge Nicaraguan (and
Soviet-sponsored Cuban) totalitarianism there; if
we are serious about the democratic revolution in
general, we must challenge Communist totalitari-
anism in general. Indeed, our struggle with Com-
munist totalitarianism-like our previous war
with fascist totalitarianism, and like our struggle
with dictatorships of all stripes-is unavoidable,
a matter of political principle which is simultane-
ously astrategic national interest. It is not the
other side of the coin, it is the same coin as our
support of the democratic revolution.
N EEn-.x~ss to say, however, solid unflinch-
ing support for the democratic revo-
lution does not mean the abandonment of good
sense. American policy-makers cannot be deprived
of such essential tools as the choice of the lesser of
two evils, the strategic pause, and the wait-and-
see. Although we certainly prefer democratic re-
gimes to anti-democratic ones, we should by now
also have learned that many of the world's worst
tyrants (Stalin, for one) wrap themselves in the
mantle of democracy, while some of those we have
viewed as hopelessly repressive have actually
paved their countries' way from dictatorship to-
ward democracy (Generalissimo Franco providing
perhaps the most interesting example). All too
often in the recent past, moreover, we have seen
dictators friendly to the United States replaced by
hostile totalitarians, to the benefit of our enemies
and the detriment of our own interests and those
of our allies.
Some American policy-makers and intellectuals
have concluded from this circumstance that forth-
right, universal support for the democratic revolu-
tion is in fact a dangerous and counterproductive
policy, one that will bring us into conflict with
some of our most important allies, in areas vital to
our national security. The objection is a serious
one. How can we continue to maintain close
friendships with foreign leaders when we are sim-
ultaneously intruding into their internal affairs,
trying to get them to dilute their authority and
significantly change their political system? More
ominously, if we start demanding that South
Africa end apartheid or that Marcos share power
with his opponents, are we not inviting a reprise
of the North Vietnamese takeover of the South
and the replacement of the Shah of Iran by the
ayatollah Khomeini, two cases in which a mildly
repressive (and friendly) ally was defeated and a
far more evil force (both from the point of view
of the people living in those countries and of
American interests) soon came to dominate the
scene?
Yet our having failed in the past does not mean
that we must continue the pattern in the future.
Our various errors of judgment and omission
should not lead us to abandon a policy essential
to our interests and of a piece with our national
traditions. In part, the Vietnamese and Iranian
disasters occurred precisely because we lacked the
courage and wisdom to fight for those traditions.
Our failure to support the Shah during the crisis
of 19i9 was criminal, but we could and should
have acted in such a way over the preceding quar-
ter-century as to have made the crisis unnecessary.
That would have required years (not just months)
of steady pressure on the Shah to undertake a
gradual liberalization of his regime, to share
power with the emerging new middle class (most-
ly trained in the United States), and to limit his
own authority. In this sense intelligent American
"meddling" in the internal affairs of other coun-
tries is fully justified, for if we encourage allies to
become more democratic, it is in order to make
their own governments more stable and our alli-
ances more durable.
That having been said, one must add immedi-
ately the qualification that it is exceedingly diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to achieve a successful
transition from dictatorship to democracy in the
midst of a violent crisis. When one of our undem-
ocratic allies is under attack from anti-democratic
forces that are also hostile to us, our first obliga-
tion is to support the ally, and only then to address
ttxe question of greater democracy. In Vietnam,
we often acted as if its leaders (and perhaps even
the system of government) could be changed with-
out undermining the high morale necessary to sus-
tain the war effort in the South. In Iran, having
failed over the years to nudge the Shah toward
liberalization, we then conspicuously failed to
come to his side in his time of crisis.
THERE are of course factors inhibiting
the successful prosecution of a long-
term policy of critical support for undemocratic
allies. One of them has to do with the way the Left
and the Right in domestic American politics line
up on the issue of repressive governments. The
Left condemns out of hand governments ranging
from South Africa to Honduras to the Philippines
while tending to turn a blind eye to left-wing dic-
tatorships and/or actively to support Marxist-Len-
inist guerrilla movements like the FMLN in El
Salvador or SWAPO in Namibia. Moreover, this
support often continues even after the guerrilla
movements seize power and establish single-party
dictatorships. As for the Right, it denounces Com-
munist regimes while tending to take a benign
view of even such extreme dictatorships of the
Right as Pinochet's Chile, Stroessner's Paraguay,
and Argentina under the generals who preceded
Alfonsin.
Both the Right and the Left are wrong. The
error of the Right is to confuse alliances of con-
venience with principled, durable rapport. We
may indeed sometimes be forced into close work-
ing relations with undemocratic or even antidem-
ocratic countries, but as a practical matter we
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have to be able to show either that our ally is
moving toward greater internal democracy or that
there is a crisis so grave as to require our holding
firm. If the crisis is of insufficient proportions, or
if the democratic credentials of the society fail to
pass muster, the American public will not long
remain convinced of the necessity of the alliance
and it will be broken by the winds of political
storms. Marcos and Pinochet, as well as their
friends in the United States, should have realized
long ago that without movement toward greater
democracy, America's support would eventually
be called into question.
But if the Right frequently misunderstands the
role of the democratic ethos in our foreign policy,
the Left all too often performs the more damag-
ing role of rendering that policy impotent, by
devising abstractly moralistic standards of democ-
racy that no country can possibly live up to. This
extremely dangerous tendency was at work during
the fall of the Shah of Iran, when the Carter ad-
mii-istration-egged on by elements of the media
and the universities-contributed to the paralysis
of one of our most important allies. In the opin-
ion of many in the Carter administration, the rec-
ord of the Shah in human rights justified cutting
off support in his hour of need. They held to this
opinion even though, in the context of the Mid-
dle East, Iran was a remarkably decent place, and
even though there was every prospect that a
change in regime would make things far worse.
At the same time that the Left holds our allies
to impossible standards, it tends to exempt our
left-wing opponents altogether, taking their every
encouraging word at face value and even urging
patience and understanding in the face of barba-
risms committed by self-proclaimed "revolution-
ary" regimes. The cases of Cambodia and Com-
munist Vietnam leap to mind, as does that of the
Ayatollah's "revolution," which at the time was
mistaken for a movement of the Left and de-
fended as such. During the 1982 war in Lebanon,
to cite another example, the systematic terror vis-
ited by the PLO upon southern Lebanon over the
previous seven years was hardly ever mentioned
in the liberal press. (David Shipler did finally
write about it in the New York Times, but only
after the first wave of fighting was over.) It is not
as if the Cambodian and Vietnamese Communists,
or the Iranian Shiites, had neglected to provide
detailed descriptions of what they were planning
to do once they came to power, or as if the PLO's
activities in Lebanon were a secret. The Left sim-
ply declined to believe what was there to be seen;
it thereby contributed its own decisive share to
the American policy fiascos of the recent past.
I F oux support of the democratic revo-
lution is to have any chance of suc-
cess, then, the first thing we must learn to do is
to assess, realistically, the difference between our
friends and our enemies. The second thing we
must learn, or relearn, is the difference between
authoritarian and totalitarian dictatorships. As it
happens, most of our undemocratic allies fall into
the former category, most of our enemies into the
latter. As it also happens, the prospects for achiev-
ing democratization are much brighter in the for-
mer than they are in the latter.
The reason is a simple one. In authoritarian
dictatorships, the repressive power of the regime
generally rests with a single individual or ruling
group, and if that individual or group passes
from the scene, then meaningful change becomes
possible. In authoritarian Spain, once Franco died,
the system evolved in a very few years into afull-
fledged Western democracy. In totalitarian dicta-
torships, by contrast, it is the system itself that
performs the evil work, generally through the in-
strumentality of institutionalized terror. Nor does
the perpetuation of the system depend upon any
single individual: in the Soviet Union, with the
death of Lenin, Stalin stepped forward, and after
him there have been others, while the system has
remained fundamentally unchanged.
The capacity of authoritarian regimes to change
does not even depend upon the death or removal
of their leaders; in Central America, the military
regimes of EI Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala
have shown themselves quite able to provide for a
smooth transition from dictatorship to democracy.
The Salvadoran army has been a driving force be-
hind the successful democratization of the coun-
try. In Honduras, the army stepped aside in favor
of a freely elected civilian government, while in
Guatemala free elections have been promised and
a new constitution is being drafted, under the
eyes of the current military dictatorship. Farther
to the south, Uruguay and Brazil are following
suit.
Not only is the democratic revolution more
likely to succeed in authoritarian countries than
in totalitarian ones, where transitions of this kind
are not possible, but our own best chance at help-
ing to bring about the necessary transformation
is in countries friendly to us-provided that we
are perceived by them as steadfast allies who,
while calling for change, nonetheless respect and
are willing to defend their integrity against our
common enemies. That such a strategy can work
is demonstrated by the example of Turkey, where
we recognized the legitimacy of a military dicta-
torship that was installed because the country had
fallen prey to a violent wave of terrorism, but
urged the generals to restore power to the civilian
politicians as soon as possible. Once the terrorist
threat was quelled, this is exactly what the gener-
als did.
In the Philippines, what the future holds is un-
certain. We have, currently, given Ferdinand
Marcos two messages: we will support him, but
there is a limit to our patience. This tacit threat
has real credibility in the Philippines, where we
have considerable economic and political lever-
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age, and where we can also contemplate without
alarm the possibility that Marcos might be re-
placed by his most outspoken opponents. Over
time, the Philippines will either evolve toward
greater democracy or undergo violent internal
contiict. 'I?he country will not put up with 1~Iarcos
forever, and neither should we: if Marcos is un-
willing to reform, we should seriously contem-
plate organizing the opposition and supporting it
against him, provided the opposition is demo-
cratic and its leaders are talented and mature
enough to see the country through the difficult
transition. If these qualities are lacking, then we
will be faced with the unpleasant but unavoid-
able task of selecting among several poor alter-
natives.
South Africa is a different matter altogether,
because we are morally opposed to the very basis
of South African society. No American govern-
ment can long refrain from outspoken criticism
of apartheid, and over the long term, barring a
major crisis, if there is no evidence of evolution
toward democracy the American people will make
it impossible for an administration to work close-
ly with Pretoria. But there is also no gainsaying
the fact that we are in almost complete agreement
with Pretoria in international affairs, and there
are good reasons to fear that a drastic change in
South Africa might prove so destabilizing that we,
and the entire West, would pay an enormous
strategic price for it.
Had Robert 1\Iugabe's Zimbabwe turned out to
be more democratic and more tolerant of its white
and black political opponents, one might be more
sanguine about demanding one man~one vote in
South Africa; but as things stand today, the
United States can hardly urge South Africa to
follow the example of what was once Rhodesia.
Then again, had we the capacity for real covert
action, we might secretly support the democratic
element of the South African opposition while
openly supporting the Pretoria government; but
this strategy is not available to us, because we can
no longer keep such actions secret. The problem,
in short, is probably the most agonizing one we
face in our foreign policy.
Y rr with regard to the regime in Pre-
toria, as well as similar, less hateful
regimes elsewhere, it cannot be emphasized too
strongly that whatever influence we do have will
be frittered away entirely unless our allies can be
confident that we will not abandon them. That
is why today, the great touchstone of American
credibility is Central America. 1t is there that
the democratic revolution has the brightest pros-
pects, and there that our commitment to the
democratic revolution is being most severely tested.
The challenge is all the more dramatic because it
is taking place close enough to our borders to con-
stitute an issue of national security.
~ti~e have quite vocally stated in Central Amer-
ica that we will not tolerate any further expan-
sion of Soviet~Cuban~Nicaraguan power. Yet we
have not acted in accordance with that declara-
tion. Despite the near-universal recognition that
Nicaragua is heading internally toward Commu-
nist totalitarianism, that it represents a major
Soviet beachhead in our hemisphere, and that it is
indispensable to the guerrilla war conducted by
the FMLN in El Salvador and by other like-
minded groups in Honduras and Guatemala, Con-
gress has decreed that we may not challenge the
Sandinista regime in Managua. Nor has the Rea-
gan administration fought hard enough to retain
financial support for the contras.
"I'he net result is that it is now an open ques-
tion whether the United States will bring any
meaningful pressure to bear on our Cuban and
Nicaraguan enemies, or whether we will leave
them free to set the level of contiict in El Salvador
and the timing of their attacks throughout the
hemisphere. If the latter should turn out to be the
case, then we will have sent another depressing
message to those around the world who contem-
plate taking up the struggle for the democratic
revolution and who have looked to us as its ulti-
mate defender. ~h'e will have told them that Viet-
nam and Iran are the enduring models of Ameri-
can policy, and that Grenada was simply a mo-
mentary aberration.
If we fail in Central America, regimes from
Manila to Pretoria will be the more likely to
reject our suggestions for change, reasoning that
they have only themselves to depend upon in the
face of their enemies. The same goes for southern
Asia, where the government of Pakistan must de-
cide how much support to give to the freedom
fighters of Afghanistan; after all, if the United
States cannot protect a nearby ally against Nica-
ragua, can it be expected to shelter a distant
friend against the Soviet Union itself? And the
same goes too for northern Africa, where the foes
of Libya's ltuammar al-Qaddafi may be tempted
in desperation to seek an accommodation if Libya
should offer it.
The list can be extended, from Solidarity in
Poland to the refuseniks in the Soviet Union,
from the opposition to Castro in Cuba to the
democratic foes of Pinochet in Chile. It is only by
remaining true to our principles-which in Cen-
tral America means supporting the democratic
revolution in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guate-
mala, while exerting our utmost effort to thwart
and ultimately reverse the totalitarian advance-
that we can confidently expect to find others will-
ing to take their own risks for freedom and de-
mocracy.
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