Not surprisingly, many in Washington, both on the Left and on the Right, are pressing for a change in US foreign policy objectives. In a German Marshall Fund survey of European and US attitudes on foreign policy in 2007, a solid majority (71 percent) of Europeans believed the European Union should promote democracy in other countries, but US support for this project declined to 37 percent, down from 45 percent in 2006, and 52 percent in 2005. When broken down along partisan lines, Democrats in the United States are about one-half as likely to support democracy promotion as Republicans. Among foreign policy elites, only those at the extreme on each end of the political spectrum advocate completely abandoning democracy promotion as a US foreign policy objective. Instead, skepticism is largely couched as “realism” and a return to a greater focus on traditional US national security objectives. From this perspective, democracy promotion should take a back seat to strategic aims such as securing US access to energy resources, building military alliances to fight terrorist organizations, and fostering stability within states.
Although focusing on the more traditional goals of national security is important, a zero-sum trade-off does not exist between these traditional security objectives and democracy promotion. Moreover, the Bush administration’s mixed if not disappointing efforts to promote democracy in the past few years do not mean that democracy promotion should be downgraded or removed from US foreign policy priorities. The United States should promote democracy, but there are new strategies and better modalities for pursuing this objective.
