Freedom House 2010 report and threat to American security
Jamie Kirchick reads the 2010 Freedom House report and concludes that freedom is no longer on the march:
When President George Bush left office with the lowest approval ratings ever recorded, it appeared that his "Freedom Agenda" would go down the tubes with him. Bush committed the United States, at least rhetorically, to the cause of global democracy promotion more explicitly than any of his predecessors. Whatever the faults of his administration's execution of these policies, it would be foolhardy to distance the United States from the cause of democracy, not only because doing so would be inimical to our values, but because totalitarianism overseas inevitably threatens our own security.
This is an interesting claim - that totalitarianism "inevitably" threatens American security. Looking at Freedom House's own rankings in map-form here it sure doesn't look like that. There's unfree Africa, not posing much of a threat. And parts of Southeast Asia, not free and not particularly threatening. There's the unfree Middle East, populated mostly with U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Jordan. All not free. There's unfree China, which isn't exactly an ally of the U.S., but it's not an overt threat either. There's unfree Russia, which is contesting American influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but is pale shadow of the Cold War threat to American interests it once was.
Indeed, scan the list of unfree countries and quite a few of them pose no threat whatsoever to the United States. Far from being an inevitable threat, the existence of political repression appears to be just what it always was, an unfortunate expression of man's inhumanity to man.
The question isn't whether we'd like the map to be all green, but the extent to which the U.S. federal government and the American taxpayer can be the engine of that transformation. And while I think there is a role for democracy promotion in American foreign policy, it's the patient work of decades and is ultimately up to the host nation itself to embrace and cultivate. Kirchick acknowledges that President Bush committed himself "rhetorically" to the cause of freedom, but also notes that during Bush's tenure, freedom retrenched. So what practical good did that "rhetorical" commitment produce?
The U.S. has survived and thrived as a free nation when most of the world was unfree and she surely can survive in today's freer world just as well. American liberty is secured at home and by ensuring that the productive, industrial centers of the world remain basically friendly to the U.S. The universalist conceit that we'll never be safe until the world orders its affairs according to our designs is a recipe for destroying the domestic freedom that should be our first priority.
(As a side note, be sure to check out the main Freedom House 2010 report page. Chock full of interesting data.)
