Cheney, his vice president, was known as somebody who practiced such realism. Rice, like Scowcroft, was a strong believer in a balance of "power politics" and the need to prioritize American national interests above any idealistic vision based on morality, freedom or nation building. As Bush himself promised during the 2000 presidential election campaign, his administration wanted to follow a "humble foreign policy." And then Sept. 11 happened. The whole world turned upside down and realism was thrown out the window. Overnight, Bush turned into a Wilsonian idealist and embraced the "freedom agenda" as a cornerstone of his war on terrorism. Now America is taking a sharp turn toward what appears to be realism again. President-elect Barack Obama has signaled that foreign affairs will not be his primary concern. As Fouad Ajami recently wrote: "If Mr. Bush believed he could remake that old and broken and wily region, Mr. Obama signals a fatigue with it, an acceptance of its order of power. If Mr. Bush believed that he could insert himself into the internal affairs of distant Islamic lands, Mr. Obama and his foreign-policy advisers portend a return to realpolitik and to a resigned acceptance of the ways of foreign autocracies. We have erred, the Obama worldview preaches, and overreached. We have over-read the verdict of 9/11, and it is time to make our peace with regimes we have offended in the Bush years. It is the Scowcroftian way -- other lands, other ways."
We know Obama wants to talk to Iran and Syria. We also know that he wants to revitalize the moribund Arab-Israeli peace process. But Obama is conspicuously silent about democratization in the region and beyond. So will Obama's presidency be the end of American idealism and the agenda of freedom? The answer is likely to be "yes." It looks like the fixing the US economy will trump all other pursuits and temptations of the next administration. And the Democrats are simply tired of the Middle East and Bush's theology of freedom.
As Ajami rightly argues, the last eight years have provided an odd spectacle: " … a conservative American president preaching the gospel of liberty for lands beyond, [while] his liberal detractors at home [are] giving voice to a deep skepticism about liberty's chances in inhospitable settings. No one was more revealing of the liberal temper -- and of things to come -- than Vice President-elect Joe Biden (then the point man for foreign policy among the Democrats) speaking in December 2006 about the hazards of believing in liberty's appeal to Muslim lands. Of President Bush, he said: 'He has this wholesome but naive view that Westerners' notions of liberty are easily transported to that area of the world.' Mr. Biden knew better: He warned the president, he said, that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's view of liberty differed from 'our view of liberty … I think the president thinks there's a Thomas Jefferson or Madison behind every sand dune waiting to jump up. And there are none'."
Part of Obama's reluctance to push for democracy comes from familiarity with the region. "Obama's reticence about those burning grounds of the Islamic world is, in part, a matter of biography," argues Ajami. "The Islamic faith was the faith of his father. A candidate with the middle name of Hussein could not afford soaring rhetoric about the ability of freedom to survive on Islamic soil." Having lived in Indonesia as a child and having studied and traveled the world, Obama is intellectually much better equipped than Bush about the Muslim world. But with too much knowledge, confusion, hesitation and nuance often come.
Ajami is quick to remind us: "Bush had been free and confident enough to take up the cause of reform and drastic change in the Islamic world, because he did not know much about the ways of those lands. But Wilson did not know the region either. Yet, his doctrine of self-determination in the aftermath of the Great War, and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, 'endures as the most consequential and revolutionary American message taken to the lands of old empires'."
It is with a certain sadness that I agree with Ajami. Pushing for democracy in the Islamic world requires idealism and sometimes "blind" faith. The world needs America's determination to push for democracy and I hope Obama will not turn his back to democratization in the Islamic world. Bush was right when he identified the absence of freedom as the root cause of problems in the Islamic world. Yet, he had no clue about how to promote it. Let's hope Obama knows better. Because without democracy, neither radicalism nor poverty is likely to come to an end in the greater Middle East.
