The United States has supported Autocratic Regimes. So what?

The United States has followed the Kirkpatrick Doctrine and the Truman Doctrine as it relates to Supporting Autocrats. Kirkpatrick stated that states in the Soviet bloc and other Communist states were totalitarian regimes, while pro-Western dictatorships were merely authoritarian ones. According to Kirkpatrick, totalitarian regimes were more stable and self-perpetuating than authoritarian regimes, and thus had a greater propensity to influence neighboring states.

The Truman Doctrine

American Cold War policy was not originally for democracy, but anti-communism. The Truman Doctrine set a precedent for American assistance to anticommunist regimes throughout the world, no matter how undemocratic, and for the creation of a set of global military alliances directed against the Soviet Union. For example, he governments of Greece and Turkey were themselves far from democratic at this time.

Following the end of WWII, the rise in communist insurgencies worldwide convinced Truman of the spread of Soviet influence and the need for containment of communism. Particularly, the establishment of the Iron Curtain and communist coups in Europe prompted the USA to adopt a principle of anti-communism, anti-Soviet stance in its foreign policy in the rest of the Cold War.

The Truman Doctrine, set in light of the Greek Civil War and the Turkish Straits Crisis:

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.

The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes. ..

The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.

If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world — and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.

However, given the realities of geopolitics, ideology often has to take a back seat in the advancement of US foreign policy worldwide. That means that it is more important to support countries in keeping a tight lid on communism, rather than risk having a democratic system which is often weaker in newly-independent countries recovering from colonialism and war which local communist movements could exploit. In this light, the USA, having the overarching goal of resisting global spread of communism in mind, had little qualms of propping up non-liberal democratic to totalitarian regimes in the Third World, going to the extent of supporting the continuation of colonial rule in several regions following the end of WWII.

While democratic Western Europe was able to stem the communist tide through financial support from the Marshall Plan and established institutions of governance, Third World countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa were not as well-endowed, and the suppression of communism by non-democratic means became the primary means of local non-communist governments to maintain their hold over their people and country from communist insurgencies.

This further goes to show that the principal motivation of US Cold War foreign policy was not about an advancement of democracy, but rather the containment and concerted resistance against Soviet interests, despite working with non-democratic regimes. From Iran to Latin America to Southeast and East Asia, the focus of the USA was never so much on the advancement of democracy as a viable political system, but rather on the containment of Soviet communism in tandem with local non-communist regimes.

The Kirkpatrick Doctrine

Kirkpatrick argued that by demanding rapid liberalization in traditionally autocratic countries, the Carter administration (and previous administrations) had delivered those countries to anti-American opposition groups that proved more repressive than the governments they overthrew. She further accused the administration of a “double standard” in that it had never applied its rhetoric on the necessity of liberalization to the affairs of Communist governments.

In “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Kirkpatrick distinguished between authoritarian regimes and the totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union; she suggested that in some countries democracy was not tenable and the U.S. had a choice between endorsing authoritarian governments, which might evolve into democracies, or Marxist–Leninist regimes, which she argued had never been ended once they achieved totalitarian control.

In such tragic circumstances, she argued that allying with authoritarian governments might be prudent. Kirkpatrick argued that by demanding rapid liberalization in traditionally autocratic countries, the Carter administration had delivered those countries to Marxist-Leninists that were even more repressive. She further accused the Carter administration of a “double standard,” of never having applied its rhetoric on the necessity of liberalization to communist governments. The essay compares traditional autocracies and Communist regimes:

Traditional autocrats do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope …

Revolutionary Communist regimes claim jurisdiction over the whole life of the society and make demands for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the tens of thousands …

According to Kirkpatrick, authoritarian regimes merely try to control and/or punish their subjects’ behaviors, while totalitarian regimes moved beyond that into attempting to control the thoughts of their subjects, using not only propaganda, but brainwashing, re-education, widespread domestic espionage, and mass political repression based on state ideology. Totalitarian regimes also often attempt to undermine or destroy community institutions deemed ideologically tainted (e.g., religious ones, or even the nuclear family), while authoritarian regimes by and large leave these alone. For this reason, she argues that the process of restoring democracy is easier in formerly authoritarian than in formerly totalitarian states, and that authoritarian states are more amenable to gradual reform in a democratic direction than are totalitarian states.

Kirkpatrick concluded that while the United States should encourage liberalization and democracy in autocratic countries, it should not do so when the government is facing violent overthrow, and should expect gradual change rather than immediate transformation. That should not imply that she was comfortable with despotism in any form.

Nearly 40 years ago the Carter administration made a number of foreign policy blunders that cost the United States dearly. In 1979 alone, four nations fell into the hands of our enemies: Iran, Grenada, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan.

All four 1979 defeats eventually took an enormous toll of innocent victims. For the next decade, while working to reverse Carter’s ineptitude, the United States paid a high price in lives, treasure and prestige. In Iran, Afghanistan, and to a lesser degree Nicaragua, the United States is still paying a price.

One of the key problems of the Carter administration’s policy was it elevation of a short-term concern for “human rights” over our long-term interest in opposing Communism (and radical Islam). That’s what prompted the U.S., for example, to abandon authoritarian regimes in Nicaragua and Iran, at the expense of enabling the expansion or establishment of much more dangerous dictatorships.

This was one of the key changes made by the Reagan administration and particularly championed by Reagan’s UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. The “Kirkpatrick Doctrine” advocated support for all opponents of Communism, including authoritarian regimes in what we used to call the “Third World.”

In Iran, for example, the ayatollahs who replaced the Shah continue to kill political enemies, rig elections, support terrorism abroad, and to build an atomic bomb. In each case except Afghanistan, which fell to a Soviet invasion that Jimmy Carter said had surprised him, the United States stood by or even contributed as an authoritarian regime fell, from within, to a totalitarian.

Carter’s policy had the best of intentions: to encourage liberalization and democracy in autocratic countries. But, as Jeane Kirkpatrick explained in her classic 1979 essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Carter overlooked the fact that we should not help destabilize a government that is facing subversion by an anti-American group or movement. The Carter-era tragedies could have been avoided if the U.S. government had not been so naive about the intentions of others.

In practice, this meant putting our faith not in maintaining America’s military power in order to deter our foes and protect our security and interests, but rather in “idealism” and “moral principles,” as Carter put it in his memoirs, and the pursuit of lofty aims such as promoting human rights and limiting the world’s armaments. Now our support of other countries would be predicated on their adherence to these utopian ideals, rather than on their usefulness in protecting America’s interests.

Diplomacy and arms control treaties, along with cutbacks in American defense spending, were pursued as the means for achieving these boons. Many Americans no doubt felt righteous and redeemed by these policies, but abroad many countries began to doubt our commitment to vigorously containing communist aggression, and worried that in a world of violent aggressors, our support depended on their adherence to “moral principles” no matter how dangerous or inappropriate for their own security.

The bitter fruit of this posture of retreat was the feckless response to 1978–79 Iranian Revolution and the kidnapping of our embassy staff in November 1979. Iran’s geostrategic importance for the Cold War and the global economy was held hostage to Carter’s human rights idealism and a caricature of the Shah as a uniquely brutal, corrupt stooge of America’s neo-imperialist bullying.

In truth, by the standards of the region, the Shah’s use of violence was not remarkable, and pales beside that of the mullahs who succeeded him, let alone his neighbors at the time. The result of Carter’s vacillating policy was the hostage crisis, in which a military pygmy humiliated the greatest power on earth, and the Soviet Union was emboldened by our manifest weakness and failure of nerve, starting a rampage of aggression and subversion in Latin America, Afghanistan, and central Africa.

Central to the Carter administration’s failure was an inability to understand the origins of the Iranian revolution. The minds of his foreign policy advisors were hostage to the Vietnam paradigm and its anticolonialist narrative of revolution justified by America’s neo-imperialist interference in other countries’ business, and its propping up of brutal dictators in order to serve our greedy capitalists. In reality, the Iranian revolution was a religious phenomenon, a response to the Shah’s modernization and secularization policies such as emancipating women and protecting minorities like Jews and Baha’is. The Ayatollah Khomeini, godfather of the revolution, made this clear in 1963 when he said the Shah’s regime was “fundamentally opposed to Islam itself and the existence of a religious class.” Carter’s advisors ignored or downplayed these religious motives, with consequences we are living with today.

“Dictatorship and Double Standards” straightforwardly exposed the moral idiocy, delusional idealism, and self-abasement of the American foreign policy thinking that had led to the abandonment of flawed yet useful allies, and that had created openings to communist and totalitarian regimes much bloodier and more oppressive than the governments they replaced.

As Kirkpatrick pointed out, autocracies can evolve into democracies, as was happening in Spain, Greece, and Portugal, but communist regimes never do so without enormous external pressure and resistance. Kirkpatrick also scorned the self-abasing double standards that condemned pro-American authoritarian regimes while history’s most murderous abuser of human rights, the Soviet Union, was given a pass. Nor did she suffer the “posture of continuous self-abasement and apology,” as she called it, “vis-à-vis the Third World,” a masochism “neither morally necessary not politically appropriate.” One has only to remember Obama’s disastrous apology tours abroad to feel the truth of Kirkpatrick’s insight.

A Great Example of this is Chile and Pinochet. It is true that he was, as the editorial arbitrators untiringly remind us, a dictator, and his crimes were real enough. As much has been conclusively confirmed by Chile’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Commissioned after the country’s transition to democracy in 1990, it found that some 3,197 Chileans had been killed, 29,000 tortured, 957 “disappeared,” and untold thousands banished into exile during Pinochet’s 17-year reign.

In her Commentary essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” she gave it a prescient twist. Kirkpatrick drew a distinction between revolutionary Marxist regimes “of the Soviet/Chinese/Cuban variety” and “traditional autocracies.“ Where the former depended on repression for survival, the latter were potentially susceptible to liberal and democratic reform. Using Chile as one of her examples, Kirkpatrick speculated that, in due course and with the right incentives, these autocracies could join the community of democratic nations.So it proved in Chile’s case as Chile ranks at the top of Economic and Political Freedom lists. : The Pinochet regime was replaced by democratic governments that have so far has endured.

The coup of 1973 was not intended to advance the cause of the Chicago school of economics. It was meant to halt the spread of Communism in Latin America. Pinochet did not have to be good to do that. As our (that is, America’s) sonofabitch, he just had to be less bad than the alternative.

Was he? The answer is that we can’t be sure. Like so many questions about the Cold War, it implies the kind of counterfactual question that can never be resolved definitively. Allende was certainly backed by the KGB (who gave him the codename Leader); indeed, without Soviet funds he might never have been elected. Under his leadership, Chile plunged into economic chaos. Moreover, his Servicio de Investigaciones was not above using torture. Would there have been an even worse terror of the Left, directed against Chilean conservatives rather than by them, if Allende had remained in power? With the benefit of hindsight and historical research, it seems unlikely. At the time, however, it was not so obvious: a point made memorably by Jeane Kirkpatrick.

As Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick was among the most articulate, not to mention feisty, voices of the New Right of the 1980s. As a reminder of how the world used to be, her essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards”, published in Commentary in November 1979, repays re-reading (not least by the teenagers who pen leaders for The Economist).

Writing just as American foreign policy touched its post-war nadir under Jimmy Carter, Kirkpatrick drew a sharp distinction between “moderate autocrats friendly to American interests” and “less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion”. The particular autocrats she had in mind were the Shah of Iran and Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the Nicaraguan dictator, but she clearly bracketed them along with Pinochet, not to mention their fellow sonsofbitches in such countries as El Salvador and Guatemala.

Kirkpatrick did not claim that these men were good. She simply argued that they were preferable to the alternatives, just as Chiang Kai-shek had been preferable to Mao in China, and Fulgencio Batista had been preferable to Fidel Castro in Cuba. South Korea was no democracy in the 1970s, but it was better than North Korea. Taiwan was still a one-party state, but one that was much preferable to the People’s Republic of China, to say nothing of Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

The reason our sonsofbitches were better than theirs, she argued, was that while conservative dictatorships undeniably preserved “existing allocations of wealth, power and status”, they also “worshipped traditional gods and observed traditional taboos”. Communist regimes, by contrast, tended to “create refugees by the millions” because their ideological demands “so violated internalised values and habits that inhabitants fled”.

Moreover, conservative dictatorships were much more likely than Communist ones to make the transition to democracy, because they permitted “limited contestation and participation”.Much more than 1989, in my view, 1979 was the decisive turning point of the 20th century: the moment when the bipolar world of the Cold War began to mutate into something altogether new. More than a quarter of a century later, it is fascinating to see which parts of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s analysis have stood the test of time, and which have not.

The most glaring error was her inclination to see the red hand of the Soviet Union lurking behind every popular revolution. It was already becoming clear, even as she wrote, that the Iranian Revolution was inspired more by radical Shiite clerics than by Leonid Brezhnev and his merry men. And it has become even more apparent since then that populism in Latin America can thrive without the need of sponsorship from Moscow. Just ask Hugo Chavez.

Another miscalculation was the assumption that Communist regimes could not make the transition to democracy. Just 10 years later, nearly all the Soviet client states in Central Europe would do just that, with scarcely a shot fired.

On the other hand, Kirkpatrick was surely right that conservative autocracies would be more likely to make that transition — and more likely to make it successfully. Not only Chile itself but also South Korea and Taiwan were among the many non-Communist autocracies to democratise in the 1980s. By contrast, the former Soviet republics, including Russia itself, have struggled to make a success of political freedom. It is tempting to say that the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, personifies the disturbing tendency for ex-Communist countries to slide back into autocracy. Central Europe may be the exception that proves the rule.

Kirpatrick’s critique of an idealistic American foreign policy also reads rather well today. “The American effort to impose liberalisation and democratisation,” she wrote, alluding to the Carter administration’s tendency to desert pro-American strongmen in their time of need, “not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy.

“No idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans,” she observed, “than the belief that it is possible to democratise governments any time, anywhere, under any circumstances.” But autocracy is sometimes the only thing that could hold a society together. “The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American policy-makers.” It is all very well playing the part of “midwife to democracy”, in other words, but not so smart if the delivery suite turns into a war zone.

It served no American interest to replace friendly dictatorships with Soviet-aligned totalitarians. Instead, “policies to advance human rights had to be very carefully considered in their context and in relationship to alternatives in every case, including in places like Iran and Nicaragua.”

This even remains true today. With the best of intentions, the Obama administration put enormous pressure on the de facto Honduran government headed by the former head of the Congress, Roberto Micheletti. The United States insisted on restoring to power the former strongman, Manuel Zelaya because, it said, Zelaya was elected democratically, removed illegally by the military, and thus Micheletti’s government was illegitimate. What the United States said was inaccurate and the resulting policy was naive.

Zelaya was elected democratically, but like so many Latin strongmen, once in power he ruled undemocratically. In his elected autocracy, Zelaya joined a group of famous Latin American presidents: Juan Peron (Argentina), Alberto Fujimori (Peru), Jean Bertrand Aristide (Haiti), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), among others.

Moreover, following Kirkpatrick’s prediction, Zelaya had taken Honduras into an anti-American alliance, the so-called Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas, or ALBA, created by Castro and Chavez. ALBA’s purpose is to oppose U.S. “hegemony” in this hemisphere by creating a cartel of undemocratic “21st Century Socialist” governments in the model of Castro’s Cuba. In addition to Cuba and Venezuela, ALBA includes only Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras and Nicaragua, plus three energy-starved Caribbean island nations, which have been coerced into joining by Chavez’s petroleum extortions (“You join, and I’ll subsidize your energy; you don’t and you pay world prices”).

Obama’s failures reflect the same abiding sin that wrecked Carter’s foreign policy: assuming that our adversaries think as we do, and so respect the same principles and desire the same goals. Because we value peace, cooperation, and prosperity above everything else, we forget that other peoples instead prefer obeying God, restoring national honor, or expanding their power and influence.

Because we prefer diplomatic words to violent deeds, we assume our adversaries do too, forgetting that for much of the world violence is an acceptable tool for achieving a people’s aims, and diplomatic engagement a tactic for misdirecting the enemy and buying time. Based on that mistaken assumption of universal goals, Obama’s “outreach” to Russia and Iran has been a dismal failure, one facilitated by a diplomatic engagement that has merely given our rivals the time and cover for achieving their aims. As a result, our standing in the world has declined, our allies are disheartened and disgusted, and our enemies are emboldened just as they were in the 1970s after Carter’s weak and vacillating handling of the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis.

“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” By 1979 it was clear: Terrible results can come from good intentions if we are blind to the consequences of our actions.

Jeane Kirkpatrick ridiculed the liberal demand that Nicaragua and Iran shed their authoritarianism as a precondition of U.S. support. “No idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans,” she wrote, “than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. This notion is belied by an enormous body of evidence.” If we thought it utopian to believe Washington could rapidly end poverty, they thought it equally utopian to believe Washington could rapidly instill democracy. In both cases, they believed, such hubris was a particularly liberal vice.

From a long-term perspective, after the end of the Cold War, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine has been vindicated. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a liberating event that did so much for the cause of freedom and representative government that it makes our short-term support for “friendly dictators” look like it was worth it. That’s especially true when we observe how many of those “friendly” dictatorships Chile, El Salvador, Argentina, Taiwan, South Korea, South Africa have since made a peaceful transition to become free societies. Meanwhile, it is the old leftover Marxists, in places like Cuba, North Korea and Zimbabwe, who are still stubbornly clinging to power.

Our sonsofbitches are dead (mostly). So are theirs. But the world has not seen the last of self-propelled dictatorship, alas. As Jeane Kirkpatrick rightly said, democracy is unlikely to survive without “an economy strong enough to provide decent levels of well-being for all, and ‘open’ enough to provide mobility and encourage achievement, a pluralistic society and the right kind of political culture”.

The implications are sobering. For despite the strides forward that democracy has made since 1979, a remarkably large number of old dictatorships limp on, despite the senescence of their leaders, from Cuba to North Korea to Zimbabwe. What’s worse, a new generation of strongmen is now emerging, who are more skilled than their predecessors at disguising the mailed fist of intimidation in a velvet glove of rigged elections.

Conclusion:

Supporting Democracies whom were almost always extremely weak with no tangible support in their armed forces inviting the possibility of their naivety being exploited by those attempting to cural them into the Soviet sphere of influence, and often it was these democratic leaders themselves. To me it was a result of rational calculation in pursuit of liberal democracies abroad which were forced to confront strategic realities with more than Wilsonian rhetoric. Liberal democracies face some of the most unscrupulous oppontents imaginable and these kinds of opponents often neccessiate unscrupolous behaviour. The democratic credentials of these leaders are often extremely exaggerated by people with little to no knowledge of the political nuances of Iran in the 1950s or Chile in the 1970s but simply want to compile an impressively long list of instances intended to show what a big meanie America is.

Particularly the context of the cold war, certain democratic leaders abroad did grave disservice to the general cause of democracy abroad by making their alliances and associations abroad without regard to the characteristics of these governments, namely the USSR. Liberal democracies are virtually the only social order to ever develop a judicious attitude towards international borders, which have been explicitly rejected by their ideological adversaries for centuries; be it imperialists, radical clerics or proletarian “internationalists” all have directly eschewed the relevance of these boundaries. Theres simply no way to oppose ideologies bent on the destruction of the very concept of sovereignty while simultaneously respecting their alleged sovereignty, regardless of their ambivalence towards the very notion.

US support of many unsavory regimes were necessitated by the context of the intense geopolitical rivalry of the Cold War. From a sort of liberal-utilitarian perspective, at the time it made perfect sense to support authoritarian leaders who at least where a) there was little to no organic advocacy for democratic institutions from a politically viable faction b) cooperative with the geopolitical order desired by liberal states.

Other examples, like say contemporary Saudi Arabia are complex relationships that both sides have entered into begrudgingly in common goals like energy security and the containment of Iran. The difference between these regimes is that the latter repudiates the liberal world order itself, it doesn't just claim to be an exception. Without cooperating with authoritarian leaders, in some extraordinary circumstances, would leave the US virtually entirely isolated in some regions, obviously not in the global interests of democracy.

The People who criticize this aspect of Americas foreign policy believes it to be insufficiently ideological. Which funnily enough, is a Descendant of Woodrow Wilson’s “Moral Diplomacy”, which is a larger part of the idea of Wilsonianism.

Wilsonianism is rooted in the American Exceptionalist belief that support support should only be given only to countries whose moral beliefs are analogous to that of the nation. Many of Woodrow Wilson’s ideas about moral diplomacy and America’s role in the world come from American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism is the proposition that the United States is different from other countries in that it has a specific world mission to spread liberty and democracy.

In this view, America’s exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire. This observation can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville, the first writer to describe the United States as “exceptional” in 1831 and 1840.In Woodrow Wilson’s 1914 address on “The Meaning of Liberty” he stated alludes to Americas potential to be “the light which will shine unto all generations and guide the feet of mankind to the goal of justice and liberty and peace” and he later puts those ideas into action through moral diplomacy.

In each case of the United States supporting an Authoritarian Leader, in each of these cases, the United States eventually turned against these dictatorial regimes and actively aided in its ouster. Reagan and Bush I supported democratic transitions in Bolivia, Honduras, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Guatemala, Suriname, El Salvador, Panama, Chile and Nicaragua once the Cold War ended and KGB backing of Communist Guerrillas did as well.

These outcomes help to highlight a crucial principle of foreign policy: the principle of the lesser evil. It means that one should not pursue a thing that seems good if it is likely to result in something worse. A second implication of this doctrine is that one is usually justified in allying with a bad guy in order to oppose a regime that is even more terrible. The classic example of this was in World War II.

The United States allied with a very bad man, Josef Stalin, in order to defeat someone who posed an even greater threat at the time: Adolf Hitler. Once the principle of the lesser evil is taken into account, many of America’s alliances with tin-pot dictators become defensible. America allied with these regimes to win the Cold War. If one accepts what is today almost a universal consensus-that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire”-then the United States was right to attach more importance to the fact that Marcos and Pinochet were reliably anti-Soviet than to the fact that they were autocratic thugs.