Free In Defense of America by Bronwen Maddox Page B

exports. The United States has, however, found capital markets easier to promote than its own version of democracy. The next chapter argues that in American foreign policy, the pursuit of democracy is also an admirable goal.

Chapter 5
    THE PURSUIT OF DEMOCRACY
    I was in the Karachi villa of a well-connected Pakistani couple on the night of October 19, 2007, just after Benazir Bhutto had returned from exile and a suicide bomber had killed 140 in her homecoming rally. The hosts were unsurpassably cosmopolitan, with museum-quality Islamic and European art on the walls (“Mummy picked it up over the years”), a sophistication compromised only by an impossible request for names of bargain restaurants in Mayfair, London’s district of ambassadors and hedge funds.
    For all their Western tastes, they maintained an absolute conviction that America had been the perpetrator of the attack, through its agent President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence services. There was no sense that these accusations might be proved or disproved by forensic analysis (and indeed, the police made little attempt to collect it —then or when Bhutto was later assassinated). It was preferable to assume an obscure purpose; there always had been one, in America’s manipulations of Afghanistan and Pakistan, they said.
    My Pakistani acquaintances are hardly alone in that preference for conspiracy as the prime technique of explanation. It is suffocatingly common in societies where people cannot readily establish the truth. This is a view of the world which finds incredible the innocence of politics in the West: those wide-eyed speeches in which Tony Blair professed his convictions; Gordon Brown’s invocation of his “moral compass”; George W. Bush’s declarations that Arabs want democracy, too; or even that disarming technique of State Department officials of explaining their country’s foreign policy by projecting a neat list of American aims onto the wall before their audience, the PowerPoint file carried with them in their pockets on a computer thumb drive.
    To call America naive in its foreign policy and particularly in its promotion of democracy, as so many have done after Iraq, is not wrong. But it captures only one reason for the gulf between the United States’ own vision of its mission to improve the world and the suspicion of critics that America’s actions are determined by its own interests and are only coincidentally benign. That is an unfair judgment. This chapter makes three points in defending the broad thrust of American foreign policy, particularly in the last century.
    First, America’s actions abroad, from its origins up to the Iraq invasion, have been inspired by a complex mixture of imperialism and idealism —a belief in its special mission to export its own values. That can be heavy-handed, but it is also admirable in many ways. Second, it has oscillated between introversion and engagement, and the rest of the world should overwhelmingly prefer America’s engagement, through which the United States has helped write international laws and arms control treaties. Third, the promotion of democracy, now mocked for its unforeseen consequences, is the idealistic essence of American policy. The United States’ best defense in its recent actions abroad is that it was acting in that honorable cause, and this goal should be salvaged from the icy bath of “realism” that has followed the Iraq debacle.
    A Moral Mission
    American foreign policy represents a long debate about whether it should intervene abroad or not. In two centuries, it has tried out both answers. In one of the earliest descriptions of the country’s intent, John Quincy Adams, then the secretary of state and later the sixth president, in a speech to the House of Representatives, declared, “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search