How American Foreign Policy Inspires Resistance, Insurgency, and Terrorism | Stephen Walt

Well, the United States really since the end of the Cold War has launched a project to try to spread what you might call a liberal world order in many parts of the world. We started the 1990s thinking that democracy, free markets, and lots of other good things were spreading almost automatically. But the Clinton administration decided to give it a shove with NATO expansion, with a number of other programs designed to spread democracy in various places, and then, of course, the Bush administration took it to the next level with the invasion of Iraq.

But this didn’t stop under the Obama administration which, of course, tried to topple Muammar Gaddafi, as well. So this is a bipartisan product of democratic liberal internationalists and republican neoconservatives, and the basic idea is to try to spread something like the American system in as many places around the world as we could. The problem is: this doesn’t work very well. It failed in Iraq, it’s failing in Afghanistan, it failed in Yemen, it failed in Libya, and it’s not looking particularly good in places like Hungary and Poland, which are starting to show certain illiberal signs.

Moreover, the optimism people once had about Russia becoming a member of the democratic family of nations, I think, have been disappointed as well. Now why has this failed? Well, the first problem, of course, is that spreading democracy into other countries inevitably means regime change. You’ve got to get rid of the existing government and replace it with something new. But of course when you take apart an existing order you can’t be sure what the new order is going to look like, and you’re going to create a lot of angry losers, people who are resentful at their loss of power and status.

And in some places like Iraq or Libya they’re able to take up arms to resist this effort. So simultaneously you create an incentive for resistance, an incentive for insurgency, and by destroying the existing order you also create an open space where terrorists and other extremists can flourish. So a big problem first is: you’re beginning by tearing apart a new order without knowing how to replace it.

And that really is the second problem: we don’t know how to create viable democracies in other countries, and especially in countries that have never been democratic before, where there are deep ethnic divisions, where they’re not necessarily very prosperous. And we ought to remind ourselves that it took 200 years or more for democracy to emerge in the West; that was a violent and contentious process. And to believe, as we did in say 2003, that we could invade Iraq and create a shiny new pro-American democracy in five or ten years was positively delusional.

And I think you see this in one final way: when the United States ends up owning one of these countries it has to occupy it, it has to try to keep order, but it doesn’t know enough about the inner workings of that society: which people are reliable? Which people can be trusted to do the kind of social engineering that creating a new nation or creating a new system of government would entail?

So, recently in Afghanistan a local American commander had to apologize for issuing a propaganda leaflet, which included the flag of the Taliban, some Quranic verses, and an image of a dog. Dogs are regarded in parts of the Islamic world as unclean, and to associate that with the Quran, of course, was deeply offensive to many of the Muslims for whom it was intended.

Now I mention this only because the United States has been in Afghanistan for 16 years and we still haven’t fully figured out how to operate in that society in order to have reliable positive effects. And the bottom line here is this well-intentioned effort to spread American values, American institutions, into many different corners of the world has been an almost complete failure.

And if the United States wants to promote its values it ought to devote much more effort to creating an exemplary democracy here in the United States so that other countries will look at the United State...