THE END OF DEMOCRACY PROMOTION….Marc Lynch, after running down the evidence that the Bush administration has “effectively given up on democracy promotion” in the Arab world, makes the following observation:
On al-Arabiya last week, Hisham Milhem led a discussion on “Bush and democracy in the Arab world.”….I was most struck by a remark by Amr Hamzawy. He pointed that the fact that most of the Arab media and political class were now discussing the “retreat” of American commitment to democracy demonstrates that at least at one point they were prepared to entertain the thought that there had been some credibility to that campaign. No longer, Hamzawy argued ? America’s turn away from democracy and reform had badly hurt its image and its credibility with this Arab political class….This seemed to be a well-received notion.
But that’s really just a single piece of a broader, and even more remarkable turn of events: the Bush administration literally seems to have no foreign policy at all anymore. They have no serious plan for Iraq, no plan for Iran, no plan for North Korea, no plan for democracy promotion, no plan for anything. With the neocons on the outs, Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, and Dick Cheney continuing to drift into an alternate universe at the OVP, the Bush administration seems completely at sea. There’s virtually no ideological coherency to their foreign policy that I can discern, and no credible followup on what little coherency is left.
As near as I can tell, George Bush has learned that “There’s evil in the world and we’re going to stand up to it” isn’t really adequate as a foreign policy for a superpower but is unable to figure out anything better to replace it with. So he spins his wheels, waiting for 2009. Unfortunately, the rest of us are left spinning with him.
