Doomed From the Start

In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead muses over the decline of “human rights diplomacy”:

Think back to 2011, when President Obama knew where the arc of history was headed and planned to steer American policy accordingly. As the Arab Spring toppled Hosni Mubarak, Ben Rhodes told reporters the administration believed “there is not going to be a return to the way things were in Egypt.” The people had spoken, tyranny was broken, and Egyptian democracy was here to stay.

Those were heady times. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was creating an “Islamist democracy” in Turkey. Aung San Suu Kyi was being compared to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela for her reformist advocacy in Burma.

Also in 2011, the “international community” proposed a new concept to change the way the world worked: the “responsibility to protect.” The U.S. intervention in Libya, we were told, established a new principle in international law that dictators could no longer massacre their people with impunity.

This sunny worldview couldn’t long withstand the cold realities of geopolitics. After Libya, Mr. Obama’s appetite for human-rights interventions diminished abruptly. Here he was reflecting public sentiment. Americans still believed in human rights and democracy, but they had lost confidence in the ability of policy experts to advance these principles effectively on the world stage.

Let me answer Dr. Mead. The effort was doomed from the start. Here in the United States, increasingly ruled by Hamiltonians, we have Wilsonians who, unlike the progressive interventionists of the first part of the 20th century which rose from the missionary tradition, urge promoting American values at the points of guns wielded by someone else while actually profiting from it, the guns are actually being wielded by Jacksonians who deeply resent the constraints being placed on them by the Wilsonians and Hamiltonians, in a country that would promote its putative values more effectively with a Jeffersonian strategy of practicing them at home while wishing the promoters of liberal democracy outside our borders well without insisting on being their vindicators.

It is much harder to practice one thing while preaching another than it used to be. People in far away countries have videocameras in their mitts, too, and what happens a world away will be shown on the Internet in all its horror before you can mount a propaganda campaign. And we have plenty of enemies who will rejoice in the opportunity of bringing our flaws into the light of day.