Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 23

Look Forward, Not Back

It is not altogether surprising that the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of communism has prompted many to question the choices made during post-communist transitions in the Central and Eastern Europe. In many places, Soviet-style planning was replaced by cronyism and mafia regimes, while other countries saw ethnic strife and war. And even the most successful post-communist societies, such as Poland, have been lately turning their backs on liberal democracy.

In a powerful essay in The Guardian, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that transitions prompted an inevitable backlash in the form of today’s authoritarian populism under which “political opposition is demonized, non-government media, civil society and independent courts are denuded of their influence and sovereignty is defined by the leadership’s determination to resist pressure to conform to western ideals of political pluralism, government transparency and tolerance for strangers, dissidents and minorities.”

In Dissent, meanwhile, Dimitrina Petrova writes that transitions were a missed chance to deliver on the promise of genuine equality, which had clearly been a non-starter under Soviet-style planned economies. Instead, 1989 created opportunities for the advancement of both old, communist, elites and new ones—oftentimes in ways that were perceived as deeply unfair, consequently inviting the kind of illiberal populist authoritarianism seen in Hungary and Poland today.

Yet, critics of the conventional wisdom of the 1990s—of, say, the “Washington Consensus” economic thinking and of democracy promotion—rarely articulate relevant counterfactuals. Disappointment is warranted only if there was an alternative path not that would have produced better outcomes, not simply because Central Europe has not reached Western European levels of per-capita income and quality of public services. The reality remains that the countries that faced the prospect of NATO and EU membership and that were the most susceptible of what Krastev and Holmes criticize as “enthusiastic copying of western models” have grown into dramatically more successful societies than otherwise similar countries that rejected the West, for one reason or another.

That progress has not been undone by the recent episodes of so-called democratic backsliding in countries such as Hungary and Poland. Those two, furthermore, are not necessarily paradigmatic examples of the region. While to a varying extent corruption and a strong nexus of politics and money are endemic to the “post-communist” world from the Czech Republic to Moldova, Orbán-style authoritarianism is not.

More fundamentally, it is not entirely clear how long the shadow cast by the region’s communist past and its 1990s experience is, particularly in the more successful post-communist countries and to what extent the current malaise is part of a much broader trend affecting the democratic world as a whole.

It seems odd to blame the “resentment at liberal democracy’s canonical status and the politics of imitation” for the illiberal turn in Central Europe at a time when similar realignments are underway in many other countries with vastly different histories, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Notwithstanding the genuine differences in voting patterns in the former West and East Germany, which do suggest a higher degree of receptivity of post-communist societies to some forms of political extremism, there is little that is distinctly “post-communist” about political realignments driven by the increased salience of immigration and national identity. Neither is Central Europe alone in its questions about the character of the EU, future of the transatlantic alliance, and its relationship with China and Russia.

And if there is a palpable sense disappointment in the Visegrad region about the fact that the region is still lagging behind wealthier societies, similar doubts exist in the West about its own social contract. The social-market economy served the West extremely well throughout the postwar era, yet the consensus is eroding in the face of new sources of economic concentration, driven by technology—and also by rampant kleptocracy, through which autocratic governments are in a position to poison our political conversations. From Trump’s voters, through the Gilets Jaunes, to those embracing populism and the politics of nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe, there is a shared sense of being left behind and pushed around by the anonymous forces of globalization and smug urban elites.

While the specific legacies of communism and of the reforms that followed (or, in some cases, did not follow) are alive and well, transitions in the form of far-reaching economic, social, and political reforms are effectively over, at least in the post-communist countries of the Visegrad region and the Baltics. Similarly, politics in Portugal, Spain and Greece continues to be shaped to the present day by a historic memory of authoritarianism. Perhaps that is what makes voters on the Mediterranean’s periphery less receptive to the demagoguery of right-wing populists. It has also helped embed specific forms of political patronage not seen in older democracies. Still, as these countries were signing up for the common European currency in the early 2000s, some 30 years had passed since the end of Salazar’s and Franco’s rule, and of the regime of the colonels. Yet few would refer at that time to Spain, Portugal, and Greece as being in transition in any meaningful sense of the term.

In the Visegrad region and in the Baltic states, which are by any formal or technical measure a part of the West, it is time to accept that “this is it” and that these countries have largely reached their destination, instead of seeing them as being in the process of actively continuing in, or seeking to reverse, the reform legacies of the 1990s. And what one thinks of the path taken since 1989 has no direct bearing on where they should be heading now.

Whatever flaws Visegrad and Baltic democracies might present, they are no longer going to be fixed by straightforward adoption of “best-practices” from the West, as they often were in the 1990s. For the first time in decades, Central Europeans are charting their own course, unmolested by aggressive foreign powers and without the pressing imperative of rejoining the community of civilized nations, of which they are already a part. Mistakes and dead ends are unavoidable in that process of trial and error, including the authoritarian turn in Hungary and Poland. Yet, because they are now part of the same conversations, Central Europeans may also provide unexpected answers to questions that are on the mind of democratic West at large.

In one important sense, Krastev and Holmes’ claim is more than just an interesting hypothesis. If taken to its conclusions, it justifies efforts to avoid, for fear of future backlashes, further attempts at instituting “politics of imitation” in the EU’s neighborhood—in countries that have seen their crony capitalist, gangster-ridden systems freeze shortly after the fall of communism. President Macron’s insistence that the EU stops its process of expansion is one practical application of that idea.

Yet it is precisely the gangster-ridden autocracies to the East and South-East of the EU that provide the best example of the relevant alternative to the ruthless pursuit of “politics of imitation”. It is not an encouraging one. The notion that there was, or still is, an alternative path forward, more appropriate to the realities of the post-communist world than the labors of liberal democracy and market economy may or may not be just unwarranted “pie-in-the-sky” thinking. At a minimum, its advocates have to articulate what that alternative path is and how exactly it would produce desired outcomes.

Otherwise, seeking to avoid inspiring “politics of imitation” is tantamount to the EU’s unilateral disarmament in its engagement with its neighborhood. For all of Europe’s problems, it is enough to look at Ukraine and its enthusiasm for everything Western and European to see how significant the EU’s soft power, based on example and the power of inspiration, still is.

More broadly, the liberal self-flagellation over the supposed failure of post-communist transitions is pointless. For one, the reforms worked in the overwhelming majority of cases when they were tried. Furthermore, transitions in those parts of Central and Eastern Europe that are now part of the EU and NATO are over. Communism is dead and has been replaced across the region by more or less flawed versions of liberal democracy and market economy—much like elsewhere in the West. Instead of dwelling on the supposed errors of the past, observers of Central and Eastern Europe should be looking forward. How young democracies of the region confront the challenges that they face and the flaws of their economic and political systems is bound to be among the most interesting stories of the coming years, with important lessons for much older democracies as well.

The post Look Forward, Not Back appeared first on The American Interest.

The Paradox of the Shrinking Center

One step ahead of authorities, coordinating themselves via a phone application created by the anonymous Tsunami Democratic group, a mob blockaded Barcelona airport on October 14. Angered by the day’s Supreme Court’s conviction of nine Catalan pro-independence politicians on sedition charges, one demonstrator lost an eye after riot police fired rubber bullets into the crowd. With no cars entering or exiting, a 65-year-old French tourist died of a heart attack after walking four kilometers in an attempt to make his flight. In the coming days, hundreds more were injured and millions of euros in property damaged in central Barcelona. A week later, a general strike brought Catalonia—a region responsible for 20 percent of Spanish GDP—to an economic standstill. Right about then, the far-right Vox party started gaining traction in polls.

In a survey completed by Madrid’s Center for Sociological Investigations (CIS) October 13, just 7.9 percent of Spaniards supported Vox. Two weeks later 13 percent did, and in Sunday’s general election 15.1 percent backed their hardline nationalist approach to Catalan separatism. Party leader Santiago Abascal pledged to lead a “patriotic alternative” to the mainstream parties. Though just 8 percent of Spaniards list the independence debate as a top concern (much like abortion in the United States) those who care are close to single issue voters. “Catalonia has never been an issue that benefits the Left,” Ana Sofía Cardenal, a political scientist at the Open University of Catalonia, told me.

There is a broader sense of unease that permeates Spain. In a recent Pew Research poll, just 25 percent of Spaniards believed their children will be better off financially than they are, and 76 percent said elected officials don’t care about them. Parliament has not passed a national budget in three years. The European Commission recently lowered this year’s growth forecast for the country from 2.3 to 1.9 percent. In Sunday’s second general election in seven months, and fourth in four years, the 69 percent voter turnout was down six percentage points from the vote April.

Though Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists again took the most votes—28 percent nationally (down 1 percentage point from the spring)—just weeks ago it seemed a reasonable bet that a new vote would help him consolidate power after a failure to form a government. But within days of Sánchez calling elections in September, the Supreme Court delivered the Catalan verdict, violence spiraled out of control, and Socialist poll numbers dipped. Now, Sánchez’s prospects for forming a viable governing coalition look even worse amid the collapse of the centrist Ciudadanos (Citizens) party, which lost 47 of its 57 parliamentary seats.

Ciudadanos, often labeled “the party of the OECD,” surged in the April vote, getting 16 percent of the national vote, and sparking hopes that they could play a stabilizing role in Spanish politics, acting as a kingmaker party between more established Left and Right alternatives. But in what Victor Lapuente, a professor at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg and a columnist for El Pais, called “one of the biggest mistakes in recent Western political history,” Ciudadanos leader Alberto Rivera refused to negotiate with Sánchez.

“It was something like treason to the party’s stated values,” says Toni Roldán, a former MP and head of policy for Ciudadanos, who resigned both posts in June. “Agreement with Sánchez blocks the nationalists, allows us to follow through on reforms that we have talked about for years and fight corruption.”

Together, the Socialists and Ciudadanos would have controlled a healthy 180 of 350 seats in Spain’s legislative lower house in April, paving the way for progress on reforms to labor markets, pensions, education and regional funding schemes that were placed on hold by years of revolving door of governments—a logjam that BBVA bank estimates costs the economy 200,000 jobs.

Instead, Rivera imagining himself a future Prime Minister, remained aloof. His miscalculation was reminiscent of the one made by Germany’s Christian Lindner of the Free Democrats, who in 2017 refused to form the so-called Jamaica Coalition with the Greens and Angela Merkel’s CDU. Just like in Germany, the decision has been costly.

The paradox is that polling shows that voters’ preferences haven’t shifted away much from centrism. Indeed “the announced policy positions of centrist parties are the closest to the preferred positions of a large segment of the electorate,” scholar Roi Zur noted in September’s British Journal of Political Science, but “few of these parties are electorally successful.” Tracking data from Germany, Finland, the UK and Canada, and amid a prevailing discourse that assumes government to be inept, Zur found voters no longer trust in centrism’s central claim—that of delivering sober, competent governance.

Ciudadanos’ best-ever showing in April was the result of taking advantage of a one-off collapse in support for a scandal-ridden center-right Partido Popular (PP). Rivera may have thought he could displace PP on the right of the political spectrum, but his voters were not interested. Ciudadanos’ failure to seize a coalition opportunity with the Socialists after the election signaled incompetence. “When he had the opportunity to change the country, he dropped it out of personal ambition,” Roldán says. “It is a humongous lost opportunity for Spain, and with all the party’s ideological travel people are now lost about what it stands for.” On Sunday, Ciudadanos dropped votes to the Socialists, PP, and even Vox, and Rivera looks set to resign as leader.

In Spain, policy centrism remains attractive. Polling by CIS emphasizes pedestrian pocketbook issues like unemployment, health, general economic problems, quality of work and corruption, and not Vox talking points like immigration or Catalonia, as top concerns. More than two-thirds of Spaniards think EU membership is a good thing. Even Catalonians are growing tired of turmoil, with support for independence declining 5 percentage points over the past two years (down to 43 percent).

About half the country has a positive view of the Socialists. Meanwhile, the country’s other establishment party (PP) finished second Sunday, adding 22 parliamentary seats. Though mutual enmity precludes a grand coalition, the Socialists and PP control a healthy 208 of 350 parliamentary seats. Amid zero appetite for a third straight election, under the guise of national interest, PP could look to abstain from the parliamentary vote, thus allowing Sánchez to form a minority government. “We’ll fulfill our responsibility because Spain can’t carry on being deadlocked,” the PP’s Pablo Casado said. While Sánchez said he is working to form a “progressive government,” a minority government will leave him forming ad hoc coalitions to pass legislation one bill at a time. There will be a total of 16 parties in parliament this session. This is hardly a recipe for stability.

Meanwhile, entrenched positions on key issues often preclude compromise—a Catalonian independence party has the fifth most seats, and Vox, which wants to abolish federalism in Spain, came in third. “You have party leaders that view this as a zero sum game, and new players with very little experience, it’s a bad mix,” Lapuente says.

Can the far-right Vox capitalize on the gridlock? It’s quite possible, and mainstream parties fear another election anytime soon would play into extremist hands. As Catalonia simmers, and Sánchez faces numerous hurdles to governing effectively, Vox has the potential to gain more ground. For now, polls show Vox’s abrasive rhetoric puts a hard cap on their fortunes. But should the economy falter further, and life get harder for the average Spanish voter, recent weeks show things can change quickly.

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Impeachable Offenses Are Not Necessarily Crimes

Amid the endless confabulations, contortions, and distracting cacophonies being manufactured by unscrupulous Republicans these days to defend their indefensible President (the remaining scrupulous ones, alas, are a tiny minority), one stands out below the rest. In an effort to exonerate Donald Trump from obvious wrongdoing in asking the Ukrainian President to dig up (or invent) dirt on a potential political rival, former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker stated flatly: “Abuse of power isn’t a crime” in the context of the Constitution. He said it on October 22 during a media interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News in which host and guest took turns pretending that no evidence of an impeachable act exists by equating such an act with a crime.

It is almost irresistible to dismiss this comment as the product of a political hack, who only ever got to be acting Attorney General because the White House made him Jeff Sessions’s Chief-of-Staff in order to keep an eye on “Mr. Recusal,” and then promoted him to acting AG because of his dogged loyalty to Donald Trump when Sessions was fired. Whitaker wasn’t even qualified to be a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, appointed to that job by President George W. Bush in 2004 at the request of Senator Chuck Grassley. (But that’s just standard patronage politics—Democratic as well as Republican.)

So of course Whitaker’s remark is crazy, right? Not so fast.

Whitaker may or may not be as dumb as he sounds, but he is clearly a lawyer, and some lawyers, at least, know their crimes and misdemeanors from their breaches of public trust. You may think that the latter are somehow subsumed by the former, but if you think that you are probably not a lawyer. It also may mean that you, like most of the mainstream media, do not actually understand the nature of impeachment under the American political system.

Insofar as there is an unimpeachable source in American sacred texts as to what impeachment is really about, it resides in Federalist 65. Here Alexander Hamilton, as Publius, wrote:

A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.

Note that Hamilton emphasizes the political nature of the subject, in the only way print technology allowed in 1788—all caps. And note that neither here nor in the entire rest of Federalist 65 is there so much as a single use of the word “crime.”

This tells us, or ought to tell us, two simple things and one somewhat more involved one.

First, impeachment is a political, not a legal, concept. An abuse of the public trust is an impeachable offense but it is not necessarily a crime. Who is the judge of that abuse of the public trust? The Legislative Branch, sitting as a political body, not a legal one.

So in a narrow sense, at least, Whitaker’s statement is accurate. But it is also an act of obfuscation and misdirection—much like the tack of Mick Mulvaney’s now-infamous press conference of October 17. Whitaker and Ingraham probably know that the Trump-Zelensky conversation is plain evidence of an impeachable offense, but by saying that there was no crime they imply that there is also no impeachable offense. This is a quiet conflation with a purpose, in other words.

The reverse is, incidentally, also true. The Trump campaign’s soliciting foreign money for the campaign and, arguably too, the Inaugural ball was a crime, but not an impeachable offense because Trump had not yet been sworn in as President when the money was pocketed. Trump himself would not necessarily follow the argument; this is, after all, a man who once said he regretted not firing James Comey as soon as he had won the Republican nomination.

Second, this is why it is passing strange that the mainstream media keeps harping on the unwillingness of the White House to cooperate with the impeachment proceedings. Why on earth should the White House cooperate? Why would any White House cooperate under similar circumstances? Don’t our media mavens understand that this is a potentially zero-sum adversarial process between the Executive and Legislative Branches? Don’t they recognize, as Hamilton so clearly stated it, that this is a POLITICAL matter and not a narrowly legal one?

The question the media should be asking but, to my knowledge, hasn’t, is whether Donald Trump will voluntarily vacate the White House if he is impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. That the Senate would convict him still seems to be very unlikely under any imaginable circumstances, but getting Trump on the record answering “no” to that question might be construed as . . . an impeachable offense. It might change the definition of imaginable. It would certainly violate the public trust, because Trump swore an oath to defend the Constitution, not defy it.

There is another sense in which Whitaker’s seemingly outrageous remark is not as outrageous as it should be. In recent years the Courts, including the Supreme Court, has so narrowly defined corruption—specifically in the form of influence peddling, suborning one’s office for personal gain—that it has become almost impossible to get plutocrat-fawning politicians out of office and in jail where they belong.

Now, it’s one thing when a petty crook like William Jennings Jefferson, a former Louisiana Congressman, gets caught with tens of thousands of dollars packed away in his home freezer. No lawyer can help someone as flagrantly careless as that. But New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez is still in office when he, by all rights, should be behind bars. His corruption trial ended in a mistrial in 2017 and the Justice Department then dropped all charges against him because 14 years’ worth of SCOTUS rulings in the Roberts era have made it all but impossible to get a conviction absent physical evidence of a quid pro quo—written promises to do “x” in return for brown paper bags full of cash. (A good summary of these rulings may be found here.)

Thus when Mr. Whitaker asserts that abuse of power is not a crime, not only is he technically correct about impeachment, he is also de facto correct about most high-profile corruption cases these days thanks to the derangements of the Roberts Court. That says something possibly even more important than how current impeachment proceedings go. It says something both profound and disturbing about the foundations of the rule of law in this land that most Americans are still trying very hard to love.

When Bob Dylan wrote, “Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you king” in “Sweetheart Like You,” it was 1983. Arguably, that statement was not true at the time except in extreme or metaphorical cases. Now it is all but tediously true, most of the time. Want circumstantial evidence? A man who got his start in business as a casino predator is now President of the United States.

Is that technically a crime? An abuse of public trust? It’s not necessarily either. It’s what We the People have allowed to happen. That’s not a crime either. It’s political, and it’s a crying shame.

The post Impeachable Offenses Are Not Necessarily Crimes appeared first on The American Interest.

Who Do We Think We Are?

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of three essays, commissioned by the Ronald Reagan Institute , examining the legacy of Reagan’s Westminster Speech and its relevance for democracy promotion today. Read the first installment by Carl Gershman here. The second, by Daniel Twining, is here.

In retrospect, it all seems so clear. In June 1982, the world had reached “a turning point,” Ronald Reagan said, “a great revolutionary crisis” within the Soviet Union. Moscow was overstretched, pouring resources into armaments while central planning stalled economic growth. Despite the USSR’s routine use of force to quell any stirrings of discontent, the yearning for liberty was rising from Central Europe to Vladivostok. “The march of freedom and democracy,” Reagan said, “will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

The populations trapped behind the Iron Curtain were, the President announced, moving toward democracy. But their progress would not occur in isolation—they required the active support of the free world. “How we conduct ourselves here in the Western democracies,” Reagan said at Westminster, “will determine whether this trend continues.” And so, the United States would be no idle observer, silently cheering on the unfolding of freedom in lands where it was then denied. Democracy may be no fragile flower, the President observed, but “still it needs cultivating. If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy.”

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Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute

With his Westminster address, President Reagan set the course for an active and institutionalized American program of worldwide democracy support. Proposing “to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities,” Reagan set out the framework for what soon became the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and their sister organizations.

Within three years of Reagan’s speech, Mikhail Gorbachev would ascend to power in Moscow, ushering in an era of glasnost that ultimately proved combustible. Four years after that, the Berlin Wall—“that dreadful gray gash across the city,” Reagan called it—would crumble.

Another two years and the Soviet Union itself would disintegrate. A decade after Reagan’s speech, dozens of previously communist dictatorships were on their way to liberal democracy. It all seems so clear.

But, of course, none of this was actually clear on that day in 1982, when President Reagan spoke to the British Parliament at the Palace of Westminster. Reagan highlighted flickers of democratic hope in his remarks, but there were all too many counterexamples. Solidarity, the first trade union in a Warsaw Pact country not under Communist Party control, was facing serious pressure in Poland. The Soviet Union was fighting in Afghanistan to support that country’s communist regime. The Sandinistas had taken Nicaragua. Under such circumstances, Reagan’s claim, that “Around the world today, the democratic revolution is gathering new strength,” was bold—indeed, so bold as to be dismissed as the rhetorical excess of an American leader who was enjoying the warm embrace of British parliamentarians.

Nearly three decades later, however, it’s plain that Reagan’s diagnosis of the democratic condition was superior to that of the prevailing wisdom. Communism was in crisis; the forces of freedom were stirring.

Today, many suggest that it’s the democracies that are in crisis: riven by populism, politically divided, unable to deliver the goods their populations demand, and dwindling in number for more than a decade. And in a world of renewed great power competition, China and Russia are taking active measures to undermine democratic practice. Reagan said in 1982 that democracy is not a fragile flower. It’s hard to be so certain today.

As American political leaders confront these new challenges, they would do well to return to the spirit of Reagan’s Westminster speech. In its confidence, its optimism, its faith in the superiority and legitimacy of the democratic model, and, above all, its call to action, Reagan’s address imparts critical lessons. At a moment of division and disillusion for many of the world’s democracies, Americans could use a bit of Reagan’s Westminster spirit.

The Crisis of 1982

Most observers in 1982, hearing the American President speaking of a major crisis, would have naturally assumed he was talking about the crisis of Western democracy. Gross domestic product in the United States contracted by 2.5 percent that year, and unemployment topped 10 percent. In an effort to purge inflation from the economy, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to unprecedented levels; the prime rate in 1982 hit 21.5 percent. The 1979 oil shock continued to reverberate, with high prices harming the oil-dependent American economy and helping the oil-producing Soviet one.

Other Western economies were also faltering. In 1980, the year after Margaret Thatcher took office, British inflation stood at 18 percent. By 1982, some three million people—12.5 percent of the United Kingdom’s workforce—were unemployed. Canada’s unemployment rate hit nearly 13 percent in 1982, the highest level since the Great Depression, and inflation hovered around 12 percent.

The geopolitical conditions facing Western democracies also appeared less than incandescent. Three years before Reagan’s address, Iran’s West-friendly Shah had fallen to Islamic revolutionaries who harbored deep animosity toward the United States and Britain. Daniel Ortega’s leftist Sandinistas ousted America’s former ally in Nicaragua. Cuban troops fought in Angola, and the Communist Derg ruled Ethiopia. Poland’s Solidarity movement was alive, with help from the United States, but the regime had imposed martial law in 1981. Intellectuals even expressed concern about the attractions of Eurocommunism in Western Europe. For all of Reagan’s hopes, his administration could point to the rollback of Communism in not a single country.

Yet for all this, President Reagan insisted the problems lay not in the West but in the East. “The crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West,” he said,

but in the home of Marxist- Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep economic difficulty.

To perceive a march of freedom and democracy, and to describe Soviet Communism as destined for history’s ash-heap, must have appeared to many to be wrong—even outrageous.

Reagan marshaled evidence for his claims, pointing to declining economic growth rates in the Soviet Union since a high point in the 1950s. He referenced the increasing proportion of the Soviet economy diverted to weapons production rather than to meeting the population’s basic needs. And he pointed to positive developments—elections in India, the end of military rule in Nigeria, and developments in the Caribbean and Central America. “Around the world today,” Regan declared, “the democratic revolution is gathering new strength.”

One senses from Reagan’s remarks, however, at both Westminster and elsewhere, that such evidence was not the primary foundation for the President’s convictions. Instead, his faith that democracy would triumph appears to have been rooted in an understanding of basic human aspirations. “Freedom,” he declared, “is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.” Not only a right, he added, but a deep-rooted desire that compelled choice and action: “Who,” the President asked, “would voluntarily choose not to have the right to vote, decide to purchase government propaganda handouts instead of independent newspapers, prefer government to worker-controlled unions, opt for land to be owned by the state instead of those who till it, want government repression of religious liberty, a single political party instead of a free choice, a rigid cultural orthodoxy instead of democratic tolerance and diversity?”

Legitimacy and Universality

In this way, Reagan suggested a historical inevitability to the expansion of freedom and democracy. The rights to these principles might be abridged, but the desire for them inhabits every human heart. Democratic aspirations could be frustrated but never extinguished and, by so enduring, would triumph in the end. “The ultimate determinant in the struggle that’s now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets,” he said, “but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated.”

There was a material dimension to the contest between democracy and dictatorship, Reagan suggested, but the inherent superiority of the democratic ideal was more important still. Herein lay an insight worth remembering today, as the efficacy and attractiveness of liberal democracy are increasingly called into question. Democracy and the determination to support its expansion have changed history for the better.

Enlightened observers today, wishing to accommodate the full range of human differences, sometimes suggest that democracy is just one of multiple forms of legitimate government. It has been argued that other forms of government than those born of the unique historical circumstances of Western Europe and its diaspora may be better suited for particular cultures at particular times. Defenders of contemporary autocracy offer other arguments: China, for example, is too large, diverse and fractious to embrace Western-style elections; Russia’s history and geography require a nationalist strongman; the religiosity of Arab populations proves infertile soil for the recognition of basic rights; democracy is generally ineffective in delivering economic growth, infrastructure, industrial policies, and long-term plans.

Today, Beijing and others peddle a seemingly compelling story: that fractious, paralyzed democracies simply can’t muster the will to deliver the goods their people want. Better, they suggest, to embrace an effective, tech-fueled autocracy that can move nimbly to pursue national interests and spread prosperity. What’s a bit of free speech and the right to choose your leaders if those leaders merely squabble while strongmen lead their populations boldly forward? A state derives its just powers, they suggest, from the convenience of the governed.

To all this, one suspects, Reagan would have said: nonsense. His Westminster remarks echo the Founding Fathers’ belief, channeling John Locke, that legitimacy rests on the consent of the governed, measured by periodic, free elections. “From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea,” Reagan declared, “the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none—not one regime—has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.” To the dictators who so often invoke the love and support of their people, Reagan might say, put it to the test: hold free elections and let the people choose.

And to the dogmatic relativists, Reagan would have argued that the legitimacy of democracy lies in its universality, and that all people, everywhere, have a right to it. “Democracy already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences,” Reagan pointed out. “This is not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. . . . It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.” Here, the President’s words ruffle feathers on both the right and the left some 30 years later.

The Trump Administration, for one, has articulated a very different philosophy. The President’s National Security Strategy is nearly silent on issues like freedom and democracy, but not totally. Indeed, a small portion of the document commits the Administration to support individual dignity, freedom, and the rule of law. Such good things, however, are cast as “American values,” rather than rights to which all people are entitled. The strategy makes several references to “individual rights,” but the term “human rights” appears just once—to warn that the United States will deny admission to human rights abusers. “We are not going to impose our values on others,” the document assures readers. “The American way of life cannot be imposed upon others, nor is it the inevitable culmination of progress.”

President Reagan’s universal view of democratic rights and aspirations is at once both more defensible and more inspiring. Far from imposing American values on others, Reagan made clear that America asked “only that these [autocratic] systems begin by living up to their own constitutions, abiding by their own laws, and complying with the international obligations they have undertaken.”

Indeed, even the most repressive governments in the world today appeal to universal political ideals, though they are seldom if ever honored in practice.

There is nothing particularly “American” about Article 35 of the Chinese constitution, for instance, which states that “citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration,” or Article 36, which holds that no state organ may “discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in, any religion.” Russia’s constitution articulates similar guarantees: Article 29 states, “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought and speech,” and “The freedom of the mass media shall be guaranteed. Censorship shall be prohibited.” Even North Korea provides such formal guarantees. Article 67: “Citizens shall have freedom of speech, press, assembly, demonstration, and association. The state shall guarantee conditions for the free activities of democratic political parties and social organizations.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly, states simply, “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

Why would the drafters of such documents provide liberal guarantees that leaders have no intention of ensuring? Perhaps it is because they realize, like Reagan, that such aspirations are intrinsic to human nature, irrespective of culture and history and geography. Citizens of no nation enjoy being arrested for their thought or speech, or enduring beatings by secret police, or having to hide their religious beliefs or criticisms of government. Better, perhaps, to claim adherence to basic rights implicitly acknowledged by most of the world and then to abridge them in practice. This, too, offers lessons for confronting today’s challenges: Rather than indulge in the notion that certain peoples are insufficiently civilized or prosperous or secular to exercise basic rights, the United States should instead call on their leaders to fulfill the obligations they have freely undertaken.

Democracy in a World of Great Power Competition

Ronald Reagan believed in the intrinsic righteousness of supporting democracy, and he chided “the shyness of some of us in the West about standing for these ideals that have done so much to ease the plight of man and the hardships of our imperfect world.” The positive difference American efforts might make in the lives of foreign men and women was reason enough to act—itself evidence of the nobility of the cause. Why support democracy and freedom? Because in a country as great, generous, and blessed as America, it is self-evidently the right thing to do.

But Reagan suggested there was more to the case than this. He nodded to strategic reasons for acting in support of basic political rights. “I believe,” he said at Westminster, “the renewed strength of the democratic movement, complemented by a global campaign for freedom, will strengthen the prospects for arms control and a world at peace.” Interests, not just values, were at stake.

In our day, as in Reagan’s, embracing the cause of basic rights and freedoms gives purpose and direction to America’s role in the world, beyond its narrowly construed national interests. But again, as in Reagan’s time, interests are at stake as well.

Today, Republicans and Democrats generally agree that the United States has entered another era of great power competition, in which Beijing and Moscow wish to contest the attractiveness of democratic government and shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model.

The result is a contest not just of nations but of political systems. Many policymakers are newly worried that alternatives to liberal democracy will gain currency, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle concur. Senator Mitt Romney, for instance, cautions that the alternative offered by China and Russia is “autocratic, corrupt, and brutal,” while Bernie Sanders has called for solidarity among democracies in the face of an “authoritarian axis.”

To overcome its geopolitical rivals, the United States should go beyond building a stronger military or enforcing economic rules; it must double down on its support for democracy around the world. Authoritarian powers are working to subvert democracy where it exists, snuff it out where it is new, and keep it away where it is lacking. They see their assault on democracy as a matter not of differing values but of strategic advantage; they can enhance their own power by eroding the internal cohesion of democracies and the solidarity of democratic alliances.

The importance of democracy to U.S. interests helps explain recent Chinese and Russian activities. Both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping see a contest of systems under way between liberal democracy and centrally guided rule. Xi offers China as an alternative model for developing countries that can deliver economic modernity without political choice, while Putin argues that Western democracies are decadent, lacking the discipline and vigor of his technologically empowered dictatorship. Both project their authoritarian models in order to subvert free societies, weaken U.S. alliances, and gain geostrategic advantage.

Sensing that a divided United States poses less of a threat to Russia, Moscow seeks to damage the democratic practice that lies at the core of American life. Through disinformation and interference, it works to sow distrust in elections and institutions, pit social groups against one another, and undermine the notion of truth on which democratic discourse depends. In dozens of Western countries, Russia has employed cyberattacks, fake news, propaganda, and social-media manipulation to undermine open societies, while providing material support to illiberal social and political groups, including radical populists on both sides of the ideological spectrum.

China takes a more subtle, long-term approach. In countries such as Australia and Greece, Beijing has used its economic weight to lean on corporations and civil society groups to limit speech China finds objectionable. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative threatens to catch countries in a web of debt dependency and increased corruption. Similarly, China’s development of a new “digital Silk Road,” a plan to promote information technology connectivity across Eurasia, may well export Beijing’s Orwellian domestic surveillance regime. Through such moves, China is deploying what the National Endowment for Democracy terms “sharp power,” designed to “pierce, penetrate, or perforate the information and political environments in the targeted countries.” Beijing is building political influence in target countries and constructing an expansive, illiberal sphere of influence that is hostile to U.S. leadership.

While the vectors of this contest span multiple domains, new threats to existing democracies reside in a sophisticated new set of technological tools—some of them now maturing, others poised to emerge over the coming decade—that seem destined to wind up in the hands of autocrats around the world. Automated microtargeting, facial recognition, the next generation of state-controlled bots, deep fakes, AI-enhanced surveillance tools, and advances in natural language processing will allow strongmen and police states to bolster their internal grip, undermine basic rights, and spread illiberal practices beyond their own borders. China and Russia are poised to take advantage of this new suite of products and capabilities, but they will soon be available for export, so that even second-tier tyrannies will be able to better monitor and mislead their populations.

The internet dispersed data, but new technological advances can concentrate its power in the hands of a few. With more than 30 billion devices expected to be connected to the internet by 2020, each one generating new data, those who can control, process, and exploit the information rush will have a major advantage. A regime bent on stability may feel virtually compelled to do so. Dictators from Caracas to Pyongyang will seek to exploit the enormous potential for political misuse inherent in the emerging technologies, just as they have over the decades with radio, television, and the internet itself. Democracies will need to be ready to fight back.

The implication for American interests, and not only our values, should be clear. Also plain is the need for cooperation among the liberal states. At Westminster, Reagan referenced the efforts of German stiftungs, which predated American ones. In the last decade, countries that have started or strengthened their efforts to support democracy include Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, and South Africa. Traditional supporters like Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Britain remain highly active. Such developments invite multilateral cooperation.

Washington needs to recast threats to democracy—and their solutions—as challenges to be faced in cooperation with U.S. allies. Russian meddling in Europe should be an issue for NATO, while Chinese interference in Australia should be dealt with as part of U.S.-Australian treaty commitments. By viewing such external assaults not just as matters of domestic politics but also as attacks on alliances, Washington and its partners can better share information and resources and coordinate joint responses. They can approach a common view of the authoritarian challenge and collaborate in the support of democracy.

The Action

Had Reagan’s Westminster speech merely articulated the case for democracy, it would be remembered today as one of many well-written and inspiring presidential addresses, but as little more than that. It was, on the contrary, much more: It represented a plan of action. “The objective I propose is quite simple to state,” Reagan announced. It was “to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.” The institutions to which his speech gave rise—the NED, IRI, NDI, CIPE, and the Solidarity Center—endure to this day, and their work around the world remains vital.

Today, amid questions about democracy promotion and the attractiveness of democracy itself, the task that animated President Reagan’s plan of action in 1982 re-emerges. To push back against modern authoritarian influence, the United States should make existing democracies more resilient, protect and support fragile democracies, and expand democratic choice in countries where it is today unknown.

The top priority should be to make open societies more resilient and capable of defending themselves against external threats. During the Cold War, U.S. grand strategy revolved around protecting democratic strongpoints in Asia and Europe. Today, the United States must first defend itself against autocratic penetration and subversion, while also looking to protect allies and partners such as Australia, France, Germany, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. Just as Washington would view any military intrusion into these countries as an unacceptable infringement of their sovereignty, so too must it view political interference as a hostile act worthy of a collective response.

The second priority should be to protect fragile nascent democracies—countries that have recently democratized but where democracy is still under assault from internal or external forces. Ukraine is an important example: Both its government and a majority of its population support democratic consolidation and integration into the West, yet Moscow is pursuing hybrid war to subvert the country’s sovereign institutions. Other important fragile democracies include Bangladesh, Georgia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Armenia, and Tunisia, which face threats as diverse as Russian aggression, Chinese economic coercion, and violent non-state extremism.

The third priority should be encouraging democratic openings in autocratic environments. Washington may lack the leverage to mitigate repression in countries such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, but there are other places where democratic practice may find more fertile ground, including Angola, Belarus, Central Asia, and Sudan. Washington’s objective in these countries should be not to foment regime change, but to support local actors working to incrementally expand democracy.

When it comes to the hardest cases, it will be critical not to give authoritarian challengers a free pass on internal repression. U.S. leaders have traditionally spoken out in favor of human rights and democracy in closed societies, including those with regimes with which they must do business. Yet today U.S. officials often defer to the governments of authoritarian countries, which are treated as unitary actors despite the fact that these undemocratic regimes do not speak for their citizens. In this contested space, Washington must consistently speak up for human rights, political freedoms, and minority protections, both generally and with respect to specific countries. The people of those nations will remember it, just as so many in Central and Eastern Europe recall Reagan’s stirring words.

Finally, we should take a page from Reagan’s playbook when it comes to questions of sequencing and pragmatism. To promote democratic values is not to call for immediate elections everywhere, even when the exercise of such franchise is likely to bring into power an illiberal regime. “One man, one vote, one time,” is not democracy. At Westminster, Reagan asked “only for a process, a direction, a basic code of decency, not for an instant transformation.” America should urge countries forward, friend and foe alike, understanding that the attainment of full democracy takes time.

The Necessary Confidence

Reagan was right about the idea: Democracy is no fragile flower. But put into practice, democracy today looks disconcertingly fragile indeed. According to the most recent Freedom House report on Freedom in the World, democracy faced its most serious crisis in decades in 2017, which saw the 12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. Since the decline began in 2006, 113 countries have seen a net decrease in basic freedoms—free and fair elections, minority rights, freedom of the press, and rule of law—compared to only 62 countries experiencing a net improvement. In 2017 alone, 71 countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties, with only 35 seeing improvements.

Even within some democratic nations, democratic ideals are wavering. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey of 27 democratic countries found that 51 percent of the people polled are dissatisfied with how democracy is working in their country, mostly due to corrupt politicians, unfair courts, and a lack of economic opportunity or public safety. Indeed, the 2018 Corruption Perceptions Index, published by Transparency International, found that more than two-thirds of countries scored below 50 in a scale of zero (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean), and that the vast majority of countries made little to no progress in corruption levels.

Many in Washington now believe that the autocratic resurgence is simply a fact of life. Pointing to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, they argue that the United States has a poor record of promoting human rights and democracy and say it should be careful what it wishes for. During the 2010 Arab Spring, for instance, the fall of autocrats ushered in not liberal democracy but instability and violent extremism. As a result, the proportion of Americans believing the Arab Spring would lead to lasting improvements dropped from 42 percent in April 2011 to 25 percent two years later. Nearly two-thirds prioritized stable governments as a long-range foreign policy goal, while only 28 percent saw democracy as a priority. The post-Soviet countries of Europe, it is sometimes argued, have turned out to be the easier cases; dictatorships elsewhere often lack the necessary preconditions for democracy to flourish.

Perhaps. And yet in 1982, many similarly believed that Communist dictatorship was a fact of life. History showed otherwise. In 2019, global support for democratic ideals remains strong. Chinese respondents in one survey were three times more likely to want their government to become more like the American system than less. Seventy percent of Brazilians surveyed liked American ideas of democracy and reported feeling generally disappointed with their own democracy. And twice as many Egyptians surveyed liked American ideas of democracy as those who disliked them. The ground remains fertile for democratic flowering.

While the United States supports the growth of democracy abroad, it must quite clearly attend to its own. In January 2018, amid a U.S. government shutdown, China’s official news agency published a commentary saying, “What’s happening in the United States today will make more people worldwide reflect on the viability and legitimacy of such a chaotic political system.” In January 2019, during yet another shutdown, the Global Times, Beijing’s jingoistic, English- language outlet, doubled down: “Americans boldly portray their democracy as a global model and sell its standard worldwide,” the newspaper said. But “the government shutdown has been going on for nearly three weeks and involves 800,000 government employees not being able to work normally. This is too much even for the US. Developing countries that are exploring a development path can hardly afford it.”

Those shutdowns ended, and they certainly did not on their own pop the democratic balloon. But if one were to combine episodes like those with fiscal cliffs and battles over raising the debt limit, seasoned with the effects of sequestration and an inability to pass basic legislation, then one would have a recipe that is bad for America, and bad for the cause of democracy. Our leaders should support democracy abroad. They should also demonstrate that it works at home.

This, in turn, requires a measure of confidence that has seemed to slip from America in the past few years. Less certain of our own convictions, less convinced of our own tendency to succeed, there is a temptation to turn inward, let others sort out their own problems, and muddle along. Nothing would be worse for American interests or the universal values we hold so dear.

“What kind of people do we think we are?” Reagan asked in 1982. His answer was clear and stirring. We are “free people, worthy of freedom, and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.” That’s not a bad starting point for locating American identity in the world of 2019.

The post Who Do We Think We Are? appeared first on The American Interest.

The Narcoregimes Strike Back

After Venezuela’s narcoregime survived a U.S.-backed campaign to depose Nicolas Maduro, the well-financed criminals are counterpunching. The sight of burning subway cars in Chile, violent marches in Quito, renewed armed struggle in Colombia, and repression aimed at stealing an election in Bolivia are disturbing evidence that the criminal Left will give no quarter in the struggle for power. That also was the clear message when an army of Mexican gangsters poured into the state of Sinaloa and coerced the release of “El Chapo” Guzman’s son from outgunned security forces.  

Certainly, these incidents reflect very different domestic problems. However, there is a common enemy at work: revolutionary states with a decades-long track record attacking democracy and the rule of law—collaborating with transnational organized crime and commanding massive financial resources and a network of radical activists.

Street battles against “austerity measures” are not new, and protests turning violent is not unique to Latin America. However, communists and criminals in the Americas have made no secret of their destructive agenda. While Cuba once organized guerrilla wars with Soviet backing, the struggle has moved to urban street battles, funded by narcodollars and looted Venezuelan oil revenue.

In June, the 25th meeting of the Forum of São Paulo, a gathering of leftist activists from 20 countries in the Americas, attacked the “aggressive agenda” of President Sebastian Piñera in Chile, denounced the “reactionary offensive” of President Lenin Moreno in Ecuador, and endorsed the unconstitutional candidacy of Evo Morales in Bolivia. The final communique from the meeting in Caracas also condemned the “genocide” in Colombia and the recycled “neoliberals, authoritarians, and profascists,” naming presidents Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Mauricio Macri of Argentina, Ivan Duque of Colombia, and several others.

Earlier this month, referring to the unrest in several countries whose governments have criticized Venezuela’s narcoregime, the dictator Nicolas Maduro declared that the Forum’s plans “are advancing perfectly.” His cohort Diosdado Cabello bragged gleefully, “This is just a gentle breeze, with the hurricane coming now.”

The Organization of American States did not equivocate, blaming “the recent currents of destabilization” on the “Bolivarian and Cuban dictatorships.” This October 16th statement, issued by the current OAS Secretary General, Uruguayan Luis Almagro, rebuked Cabello’s warnings, saying, “For years, the Venezuelan dictatorship, with the support of the Cuban dictatorship, institutionalized sophisticated co-optation, repression, destabilization and media propaganda structures in the region.” 

Of course, there are legitimate grievances that have fostered discontent in the region. However, the role of willful dictators in the region in manipulating that discontent into a political weapon cannot be dismissed. Indeed, these regimes excel at stoking popular unrest to advance their political agendas. Their mastery in internal security tactics has enabled them to subdue their countries, even as they have destroyed them. Rough estimates are that chavista insiders, with Cuban involvement, have looted $350 billion—a fraction of the $5-7 billion in annual Soviet subsidies that kept the Castro regime afloat while it was sowing mayhem in Central America. Stoking mob violence is much cheaper and exacts a heavy price on democratic leaders trying to preserve order without shedding blood.

Flush with cash and led by criminal caudillos for 20 years, today the Venezuelan narcoregime is integrated fully into a transnational organized crime network. Smashing government institutions and destroying security forces are part of their criminal business model. So, too, is funding corrupt political parties and candidates, propping up corrupt leaders, and attacking anyone who gets in the way.  

There may be little U.S. diplomacy can do to help a government grapple with domestic woes. However, U.S. political support, intelligence sharing, law enforcement resources, and aid dollars should be mobilized to detect, expose, and counteract criminal interference. At the very least, the United States must encourage Mexico’s president to adopt a credible internal security policy to confront organized crime groups operating with virtual impunity today. A large-scale breakdown in order in Mexico has staggering implications for U.S. border security and economic well-being.

Chilean leader Piñera should make clear that, while he has overhauled his cabinet to address the legitimate grievances of the poor and middle class, he will not surrender to mob rule. Responsible Chilean leaders on the center-Left should cooperate with Piñera to shape a reform agenda; and they should declare that a president being forced from office by rioters would be a blow to Chile’s restored democracy.  

Brazil’s Bolsonaro has made clear that his government is ready to quell violent protests. Still, the Workers’ Party (PT) is deeply integrated into the international Left and has massive ill-gotten resources to fuel unrest. Bolsonaro should do a better job implementing and explaining his efforts to jumpstart and share prosperity. He must also deploy urgent measures to dismantle the criminal networks supporting the PT. 

Colombia is dealing with an explosion of coca, resurgent guerrillas, and the economic impact of 1.5 million refugees from neighboring Venezuela. President Duque should invoke the Rio Treaty to counter the Venezuelan-backed terrorist groups plotting attacks and amassing fortunes from their smuggling of cocaine and gold.

The OAS should continue its efforts to prevent Morales from stealing a first-round victory in Bolivia. It remains to be seen whether an audit will detect suspected fraud, if the opposition can sustain its peaceful protests, or how far the Bolivian security forces will go to help Morales evade a runoff.

The OAS Technical Group on Transnational Organized Crime should convene a conference among willing states to share information on the movement of suspicious persons, funds, or weapons across borders to foment political violence. The United States should share what its Drug Enforcement Administration and intelligence community know about the sprawling criminal network—bankrolled by the Venezuelan narcoregime—that threatens democratic states. And all governments should commit to cooperating to investigate, expose, condemn, and dismantle that subversive foreign interference. 

Like-minded governments should organize a summit of political leaders, civil society activists, and entrepreneurs to launch a constructive alternative to the Forum of São Paulo, committed to promoting economic and political freedom and individual empowerment.

Finally, as long as there is a narcostate operating in Venezuela, masterminded by Cuba, the recent upheaval in Latin America will continue. Washington must urgently overhaul its policy toward Venezuela and enlist the support of front-line states to bring to justice the criminals who lead the illegitimate regime in Caracas.  And, at long last, it is time for Cuba’s dictatorship to pay a price for sowing violence against the region’s democracies.

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The Silent War in Mexico

A war is raging in Mexico, but silence from newspapers, international organizations, and politicians has prevented most U.S. citizens—and indeed many publics around the globe—from taking notice. The war is not dissimilar from the violent conflicts in the Northern triangle in Central America. The immigration flows from Central America into the United States have, however, provided greater visibility for the plight of countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, polities beset by seemingly intractable wars between governments and drug trafficking criminal gangs. There is more awareness—even among those Americans who support the Trump Administration’s approach to Central American would-be migrants—of the insecurity that characterizes everyday life in places like San Pedro Sula, San Salvador, or Guatemala City. But in the case of Mexico, the combined effect of a Mexican foreign policy premised on “aquí no pasa nada” (nothing happens here), and a U.S. foreign policy establishment habituated to looking far beyond its own borders, has made Mexico’s plight somewhat invisible.

For the past ten years, the government of Mexico has actively worked to downplay the seriousness of the security situation. Beyond national pride, these efforts were motivated by a perceived need to dispel any notion of Mexico being at risk of becoming a failed state. Back in 2009, when some analysts began talking about state failure in the Mexican context, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a trip south in order to display explicit U.S. support for the Mexican war on drugs and to dispel any notion of the lack of capacity of the Mexican state. The Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs regularly instructs its ambassadors and consular officials to neutralize discussions related to violence and drug trafficking, emphasizing that the vast majority of the national territory is actually safe, notwithstanding the detailed travel advisories issued by the State Department. And Mexican federal administrations have been reluctant to seek out help from multilateral aid agencies in fears that it may reinforce any image of state fragility.

The downplaying strategy has worked in part because the security situation in Mexico is geographically uneven. A Level 4 State Department travel advisory—“Do not travel”—has been established for the Mexican states of Colima, Guerrero, Michoacán, Sinaloa, and Tamaulipas. Presumably these places in Mexico are as unsafe as the other countries in that category—namely Afghanistan, Central African Republic, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Yet U.S. and European tourists continue to flock to Mexican beach resort enclaves, to a large extent because they correctly perceive they are in no greater risk in those hotels and towns than in any island of the Caribbean.

Similarly, business-as-usual continues among those involved in managing North American supply chains; major economic players in the region are not particularly interested in highlighting the current levels of violence. Indeed, the profound economic integration of the North American economies under NAFTA (now USCMA) has not been visibly disrupted by the drug war. Meanwhile, Mexicans who have done well for themselves live in their gated communities and hire private security to protect them. This is, after all, one of the privileges they get from living in such an unequal country: their incomes are high enough, while the salaries of their private guards are low enough, that they can afford to pay for their own protection.

The war in Mexico has taken more than 200,000 lives in the past ten years, mostly young men in their prime. Mass graves dot the Mexican landscape, with tens of thousands of people gone missing, most presumed killed. Entire towns have been displaced.

Among political scientists, a conventional definition of an interstate or civil war is when a conflict involves over 1,000 war-related casualties per year, with a minimum of 100 from each side. Mexico surpassed this conventional threshold more than a decade ago. The last few weeks alone have seen the deaths of Mexican law enforcement, community police, and soldiers numbering in the triple digits. Just a few weeks ago, at least 14 state police officers lost their lives in an ambush in Aguililla, Michoacán. In that same state, at the end of May, municipal police stations in the city of Zamora were attacked, leaving three police officers dead and ten seriously wounded. In Tepalcatepec, one of the most infamous Mexican drug cartels, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, clashed with the local militia in a declared war against their leader “El Abuelo,” leaving nine dead and 11 wounded. Although Michoacán is currently a hotspot of violence, the war is raging in many other states, including Guerrero, where a confrontation left 14 civilians and one soldier dead in the village of Tepochica three weeks ago.

The Guerrero Violence Project offers perhaps the most comprehensive effort to document violent death in another Mexican state, where the now infamous resort of Acapulco is located. Chris Kyle and his collaborators document 372 violent deaths between June 1 and July 31 of this year, including dozens of police officers—most of them volunteer indigenous community police—as well as drug traffickers. There is also the collateral damage of the deaths of taxi drivers, peasants, students, car-washers, peddlers, tourists and their guides. This source also documents dozens of unidentified bodies found in the streets or in mass graves. In many other states in Mexico we simply do not have such detailed documentation of the death toll from the war. Violent death has become routinized for millions of Mexicans who live amidst the conflict.

The administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO as he is generally known) came into power a year ago with the promise of taking a different approach toward violence and drug traffic organizations than that of his predecessors. The hawkish administration of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012) embraced a callous stance against organized crime, responding with an escalation of a declared war on drug traffic organizations. The strategy was based on the faulty premise of believing that the best way to weaken drug cartels was by beheading the organizations, capturing or killing the leaders and lieutenants. The strategy turned out to produce even more violence, as fragmented and undisciplined criminal organizations competed for the vacuums of power left by captured or missing kingpins.

The administration of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) did not shift the core elements of this national security strategy, except that it used a different approach of public communication, choosing to downplay events related to violence and public safety. AMLO has promised to change the strategy into one that seeks to emphasize peace, reconciliation and prevention. He has created a National Guard, mostly drawing form the military that were already carrying out police activities throughout the territory. But beyond the surface rhetoric and these symbolic moves, it’s hard to say if there is a more developed strategy waiting to be deployed.

The scenarios for a more coherent security strategy in Mexico are not very promising, and there seems to be little room for maneuver. It is possible that violence will continue to gradually spread, while a few enclaves will concentrate federal manpower and security resources to ensure that their inhabitants are protected. This scenario would imply a normalization of the current violence. Mexico City, some of the main tourist resorts, and maybe some of the border cities would remain somewhat safe, while the rest of the country will bleed more and more profusely.

That’s a projection of what maintaining the status quo would yield. But there is also a more catastrophic scenario, of which we recently got a foretaste in Culiacán, Sinaloa. There, a botched attempt to capture the son of “El Chapo” Guzmán led to an urban siege, shootouts, and the eventual liberation of the criminal—a controversial decision made by the Federal government on the argument that Guzman’s release prevented mass bloodshed of civilians and soldiers alike. The seriousness of what happened in Culiacán cannot be downplayed. It was not just one more episode of political violence, unrest, or the display of incompetence by the government. The Mexican state was unable to exercise its legitimate monopoly on the use of force.

Criminal organizations may take the example of Culiacán as a signal that they can operate openly, with impunity, threatening mass civilian deaths any time their activities are challenged, terrorizing entire towns and cities, and bribing or killing public officials, police chiefs, mayors, and judges. Their extortion of economic activity would spread, threatening the everyday life of most citizens. Migratory flows to the United States would doubtless increase, due to the displacement of peoples typical of any war.

The AMLO administration, however, could still avert the worst. And the United States could and should play a role. Mexico ought to accept more aid and technical support to sustain institutional reforms to strengthen the rule of law and train its police officers. The Mexican government should ask its northern neighbor to help with the sharing of intelligence, and the two countries should work seriously on better ways to coordinate the fight against organized crime.

Of course, the temptation for the President of each country to pander to his own constituencies—to either bash Mexico as an electoral piñata or to play the nationalist anti-American card—unfortunately remains. Such shortsightedness, however, needs to be avoided. The costs of maintaining the status quo, and the very real danger of far worse outcomes, are far too real to ignore.

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Voices from the Berlin Wall

Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth

Iain MacGregor

Scribner, 2019, 352 pp., $30

At the beginning of his classic spy novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carré sets the scene by mapping the lay of the land. We are in Berlin at the height of the Cold War and an East German double agent is about to defect. The obstacle in his way is the seemingly insurmountable Wall, “a dirty, ugly thing of breeze blocks and strands of barbed wire, lit with cheap yellow light, like the backdrop for a concentration camp.” Not that the surrounding landscape is any prettier: “East and west of the Wall lay the unrestored part of Berlin, a half-world of ruin, drawn in two dimensions, crags of war.”

Le Carré’s game-changing third book was published in 1963, two years after construction began on the Berlin Wall. Many a novel, thriller or otherwise, has played out in this “half-world of ruin” and in the shadow of that infamous edifice which defined a regime, divided a city, and curtailed the freedom of its people. And far more nonfiction works have been written about the subject—so many, indeed, that one might suspect any new publication would constitute a redundant rehash of what has gone before.

With Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth, British author Iain MacGregor shows that this need not be the case. His narrative is neither a catch-all history nor an in-depth analysis. Rather it comprises a collection of stories told by a wide range of ordinary people who lived, worked, and served in both East and West Berlin and their hinterland. Many interviewees give their versions of events for the first time. Some were previously silenced from speaking out. Others make up a chorus of unsung heroes. The majority came in contact with the Wall’s most well-known gateway in some shape or form. All are worth listening to and help enlarge our understanding of day-to-day life in a fractured city during a period of high tension and higher stakes.

MacGregor’s early chapters trace the postwar clashes between the authorities in Germany’s Allied and Soviet zones. Hostilities come to a head when the Soviets mount a blockade of the German capital in 1948. Instead of capitulating and withdrawing from the city the Allies respond with the Berlin Airlift, delivering more than 2.4 million tons of aid in more than 200,000 sorties over 300 days. In the early 1950s Stalin clamps down again by officially drawing up a demarcation line between East and West Germany, from the Baltic Sea to the border with Czechoslovakia. It is not so much an iron curtain as a porous frontier through which flow a steady stream of refugees seeking sanctuary in the West. German Democratic Republic leader Walter Ulbricht declares that “Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!” (“No one has the intention to erect a wall!”). But this turns out to be a hollow assurance. In the early hours of Sunday August 13, 1961, the East German military begin sealing off the east sector to West Berlin and the zonal border to the Federal Republic of Germany with barbed-wire barriers. “The Wire” will be the first incarnation of the Wall.

MacGregor continues by sketching the origins and the functions of Checkpoint Charlie, which was quickly designated the major crossing point for Allied personnel, foreigners, and diplomats in the center of Berlin. He then emphasizes that it was also far more than this: “Checkpoint Charlie physically may have been a small wooden hut, but it stood as a beacon of hope to the east – for freedom.” There follow recollections from reporters who worked on both sides of the Wall and who traversed through the checkpoint on a daily basis (“never once did I see a GDR guard smiling”). Others cross less openly. We hear of the exploits of Detachment “A,” an elite Special Forces unit tasked with penetrating East German territory, sabotaging key installations and, if possible, eliminating enemies. The various tales of derring-do come prefaced with a sobering statistic: the life expectancy of a Det A member on a “suicide mission” was figured at just 72 hours.

As Berlin becomes “a city of spies,” smaller-scale covert operations are carried out on a daily basis. MacGregor explains how the “liaison officer” involved in diplomatic duties was all too often a false front for a sanctioned secret agent. Fact feels very much like fiction: the life of an Allied agent is made up of “high-speed off-road car chases, furtive photography, ingenious concealment, sangfroid in the face of the enemy, and a looming risk of injury or death.” MacGregor charts Allied intelligence triumphs concerning East German military might, many of which allay fears of the Cold War heating up and bubbling over.

That it never does is a miracle. Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is hard not to be shocked by MacGregor’s accounts of the ruthlessly—and at times recklessly—dangerous game both sides played, and just how close we came to the brink of another all-out war or nuclear catastrophe.

By 1989 the GDR teetered on a different kind of brink. No longer just morally bankrupt, East Germany faced the prospect of financial ruin. MacGregor reveals how on November 9 Günther Schabowski, the press spokesman for the East German Communist Party politburo, “inadvertently fired the starting gun” at what should have been an insignificant press conference. Misreading his instructions, Schabowski announced to the assembled journalists and television crews that citizens of the GDR were free to leave the country through any of the border crossings “immediately, without delay.” As the news spread, stunned disbelief gave way to waves of hysteria and tears of joy. For news networks, the opening and subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall was “their D-Day, JFK assassination, moon landing, and death of Elvis all rolled into one.” For Berliners who lived on either side of the divide it was the end of an era, the start of a new chapter, and a huge first step in a crucial healing process.

MacGregor’s book is thoroughly researched and routinely fascinating. It loses its way on the few occasions that it strays from its remit and attempts to build a larger geopolitical picture by encompassing the thoughts and deeds of world leaders. Certain snippets are of interest (JFK confiding to his younger brother Robert that negotiating with Khrushchev was “like dealing with Dad. All give and no take!”) but a whole chapter devoted to the President’s crowd-pleasing visit to West Berlin in 1963 offers no fresh insight and sees MacGregor panning out rather than homing in, and prioritizing the general over the particular.

The book is at its most absorbing when MacGregor’s Berlin-based interviewees share their varied first-hand experiences. Western journalists relay how they went about their business fully aware that they were being tailed, tapped and photographed by the Stasi, East Germany’s sinister secret police. One reporter declares that surveillance was more widespread. “You lived with secret services. We had the Reuters offices in West Berlin bugged not just by the Stasi, but by the French, the Americans, and the British. I don’t know whether the West Germans did it as well – probably.” A former American soldier explains how all personnel believed they were just a “trip wire”—there not so much to defend Berlin as to be the first ones the Warsaw Pact nations would take if war broke out. Although they regularly made light of their dilemma, they were also forced to discuss an emergency exit strategy: “Our idea for escaping the city was to change uniforms with the street cleaners […] It sounds ridiculous now and it sounded ridiculous then, but that was probably the only thing we felt we could do.”

But it is the real-life escape stories over the Wall that truly command our attention. People throw their belongings out of high windows then leap into blankets, eiderdowns, or nothing at all. A father and his young daughter take a colossal risk (“Prison for him and a state-run home for Peggy”) by hitching a ride in the trunk of a car belonging to a U.S. Army sergeant. One great escape is recounted over the course of a chapter with verve, pace and excitement: instead of clambering over the Wall or smuggling themselves through it, three East German men spent three arduous and suspenseful weeks tunneling under it using only a small shovel, a knife and a tin box to remove the earth.

Not all the fugitives—or in GDR parlance, “border violators”—were civilians. MacGregor informs us that in the early days, the Stasi compiled a report alerting—and alarming—the regime about the defection of 85 Volkspolizei (People’s Police) officers, border guards, and militiamen. And of course not all the fugitives made it out alive. At least 140 people were killed or died at the Wall in connection with the East German border authorities. MacGregor lists some of the ill-fated escape attempts. One particularly tragic case was also one of the earliest. In August 1962, 18-year-old Peter Fechter tried his luck but was shot in the back and legs. Volkspolizei and American GIs at Checkpoint Charlie looked on as he bled to death in No Man’s Land. Thousands of West Berliners stood on car roofs and watched with despair and horror. West German police made the noble yet futile gesture of scaling the Wall and throwing a first-aid kit to the victim. He died in vain, for instead of relaxing their iron grip, Khrushchev and Ulbricht tightened it, issuing orders to shoot to kill any individuals attempting to escape the GDR fortress.

Harrowing stories such as these alternate with the gripping accounts of standoffs, skirmishes and secret missions. MacGregor also ensures we remain engrossed by the less sensational testimonies about everyday life in the GDR. In the final analysis it is anything Wall-related that keeps us immersed and turning the pages, so much so that the book’s title starts to feel like a misnomer: the Wall is the dominant force throughout and therefore deserves top billing. It attracts and repels in equal measure. We follow its hideous construction, from barbed-wired barrier cutting Berlin in two (even bisecting a cemetery and separating guests at a wedding) to 11-foot-high, 79-mile-long “anti-fascist protective wall,” complete with Todesstreifen (“Death Strip”), watchtowers, searchlights, minefields, bunkers, anti-vehicle traps, and machine-gun-toting guards. East German police block people with cameras as it is being erected, shouting—somewhat comically—“This is Free Berlin, taking photographs is not allowed here!” One old woman learns the hard way when she asks a transport police officer when the next train for West Berlin is due. “That is all over now, Granny,” he sneers. “You are all sitting in a mousetrap now.” Much needed relief comes in the book’s last section as those who witnessed the opening of the Wall relive their blissfully happy memories of history in the making. Ecstatic crowds climb atop the Wall, chip away at it, and sing and dance on it to a much-repeated yet strangely inappropriate song: Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.”

The publication of MacGregor’s book chimes with the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. The physical barrier may have been dismantled but old habits die hard and many Germans still talk about the Mauer im Kopf, or “wall in the head.” MacGregor makes no mention of this sensibility, nor does he note the friction that exists between some Wessies and Ossies. These omissions aside, it is hard to fault this oral history. MacGregor has produced not just a worthy new addition to Cold War literature but a vital one.

The post Voices from the Berlin Wall appeared first on The American Interest.

America’s Security Is Still Tied to the Fate of Freedom

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of three essays, commissioned by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute , examining the legacy of Reagan’s Westminster Speech and its relevance for democracy promotion today. Read the first installment by Carl Gershman here. Coming Friday: a contribution by Richard Fontaine.

The world of 1982 looked nothing like the world of today. The Soviet empire and its armies controlled most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Kabul to Vladivostok. Japan, not China, was the rising power in the East. Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia were military dictatorships. Dictators ruled in Brazil, Mexico, and Chile. There was no internet. Soviet power had not yet begun to visibly crack and many Americans believed Moscow was winning the Cold War. Yet Ronald Reagan gave a speech in London that not only foresaw the Soviet Empire’s demise and the wave of global democratization that followed, but anticipated many of the challenges Americans confront today from authoritarians wielding new technologies and tools of disinformation, as well as novel threats to peace stemming from strongmen wielding illiberal ideologies.

Reagan’s Westminster speech, in which he famously called for the United States to support a global campaign for democracy, is not simply a historical relic or a snapshot of a moment in time. Its themes are highly relevant today—as America looks ahead to a world of great-power competition in which authoritarian challengers are pursuing systematic campaigns to weaken democratic practice and erode democratic alliances. Reagan’s words also bear new resonance in our time, as political polarization across the West raises new questions about the democracies’ capacity to sustain the rules-based international order built from the ashes of the Second World War and enlarged after the Cold War. And even as America’s current President believes global competitiveness stems from hard power, Reagan’s words remind us that the universal appeal of America’s values—of individual dignity, the open society, and democratic choice—must be central to any successful strategy to navigate the dangers and opportunities of the 21st century.

Democracy on Defense

Democracy feels on the defensive in the world of 2019. Strongmen in previously resilient democracies like Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary have hollowed out liberal institutions and strengthened executive power at the expense of legislative and judicial checks and balances. Russia is assaulting European democracies from Ukraine to Britain with disinformation designed to weaken the West. China is using state-financed investment to capture and corrupt foreign government officials as part of a policy to expand its strategic and economic footholds in key countries. Free media and human rights organizations are under attack from neo-authoritarians focused on expanding political power by repressing civil society.

Democracy also felt very much under assault in 1982, when Reagan delivered his Westminster address. In the second half of the 1970s, North Vietnam’s communists had overrun Saigon and Soviet armies had invaded Afghanistan. Poland was under martial law, and the Iron Curtain that had fallen across Europe after 1945 was firmly in place. Millions of West Germans were protesting America’s efforts to upgrade its missile posture to defend Western Europe from Soviet armies, arguing instead for accommodation with the totalitarian regime in Moscow and risking a decisive breach in the NATO alliance that had kept the peace in Europe since 1949.

Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 1982 survey showed a map of the world in which most of Earth’s landmass was marked in black for being “not free”—including nearly the entire territory stretching from the center of Germany to the Korean peninsula and down though China to mainland Southeast Asia, the entire Middle East excepting Israel, all of Africa except Nigeria and Botswana, and most of Latin America apart from the Andean nations and, ironically, Venezuela. America itself, as the most powerful democracy looking out on a world that was mainly unfree, was anything but economically robust—U.S. GDP actually shrank by two percent in 1982 following the stagflation of the late 1970s and an inflation rate in 1981 that exceeded 10 percent.

Reagan’s Optimism

Amidst this gloom, Reagan was optimistic. “Beyond the trouble spots lies a deeper, more positive pattern. Around the world today, the democratic revolution is gathering new strength…. In the Communist world as well, man’s instinctive desire for freedom and self-determination surfaces again and again,” he maintained. He went on:

Now, I don’t wish to sound overly optimistic, yet the Soviet Union is not immune from the reality of what is going on in the world. It has happened in the past—a small ruling elite either mistakenly attempts to ease domestic unrest through greater repression and foreign adventure, or it chooses a wiser course. It begins to allow its people a voice in their own destiny. Even if this latter process is not realized soon, I believe the renewed strength of the democratic movement, complemented by a global campaign for freedom, will strengthen the prospects for arms control and a world at peace.

Standing at that podium in the British Parliament, Reagan made a bold prediction, rooted not in his assessment of the Soviet Union’s material power, but in his faith in the aspirations of human beings: “The march of freedom and democracy . . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash- heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self- expression of the people.” His words—as well as those of the naysayers who doubt their currency—resonate today, as many elites view China as the coming superpower whose success in rapid development through state capitalism and autocratic control will lead it to eclipse America as the world’s predominant power.

Reagan’s insight was that the people—of the Soviet empire in his day, and of the Chinese party-state today—may have different priorities from rulers who stifle individual rights in service to state power. Seven years before the Berlin Wall came down and nine before the Soviet Union collapsed, Reagan sensed “an uprising of the intellect and will” against totalitarian rule— characterized by “rejection of the arbitrary power of the state, the refusal to subordinate the rights of the individual to the superstate, the realization that collectivism stifles all the best human impulses.”

The Enduring Quest to be Free

In the United States and other democracies today, polling shows an ambivalence, particularly among young people, about the merits of democracy versus other systems of government. For example, in 2017, 40 percent of Americans surveyed told Pew that “rule by experts” would be a good way to govern the country, and nearly a quarter answered the same way about “rule by a strong leader.” In India, the world’s largest democracy, 55 percent of people surveyed viewed “rule by a strong leader” as a good way to govern, while 65 percent agreed that “rule by experts” could improve governance. The messiness of democratic political processes, as well as political polarization intensified by social media, apparently makes many citizens of democracies at least toy with surrendering freedoms for a strong hand. But those who live under a strong hand in authoritarian states know better.

Of course, in closed societies, public opinion is difficult to measure with accuracy. But as street protests from Armenia to Algeria to Venezuela have shown over the past year, citizens living under autocratic control often crave the basic political liberties that citizens of democracies take for granted. They cannot afford the casual approach to basic rights and freedoms that sometimes seems trendy in free societies where those rights are guaranteed under the law. Citizens deprived of their liberty may have a deeper appreciation of why individual rights are inviolable. Reagan understood this even as he spoke during a period of repressive martial law in Central Europe: “Poland’s struggle to be Poland and to secure the basic rights we often take for granted demonstrates why we dare not take those rights for granted.” Those who cherish freedom are often found where it is absent, which is why so many authoritarians today, from Maduro in Venezuela to Putin in the Kremlin to al-Sisi in Egypt, live in fear of their own publics.

The Authoritarians’ Fatal Flaw

The Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes is their lack of legitimacy. Reagan understood this instinctively, irrespective of the army divisions they could mobilize or the global reach of their missiles and navies. As he said at Westminster,

From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none—not one regime—has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root. The strength of the Solidarity movement in Poland demonstrates the truth told in an underground joke in the Soviet Union. It is that the Soviet Union would remain a one-party nation even if an opposition party were permitted, because everyone would join the opposition party.

Today, the Communist Party leaders of China not only refuse to hold any kind of national elections; they have lifted term limits on President Xi Jinping, potentially enabling him to rule the world’s most populous country for life. Most authoritarians take a more subtle approach. Iran’s hold elections, but only after an unelected body eliminates any candidates who could challenge the theocratic basis of the regime, depriving its citizens of meaningful political choice. Russia holds elections, but opposition candidates are either assassinated, imprisoned, or precluded from running by politicized rulings from a judiciary that answers to the Kremlin.

The national constitutions, and the international commitments of China, Russia, and Iran to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, commit them to uphold these rights—which they do not, just as the Soviet Union did not in Reagan’s time. As he put it then, “Chairman Brezhnev repeatedly has stressed that the competition of ideas and systems must continue . . . . Well, we ask only that these systems begin by living up to their own constitutions, abiding by their own laws, and complying with the international obligations they have undertaken. We ask only for a process, a direction, a basic code of decency, not for an instant transformation.”

Reagan’s revolutionary vision of a world safe for democracy everywhere was in that sense evolutionary. But he understood what leaders of the autocracies today, believing themselves empowered by new digital tools of surveillance, do not—that the human craving for individual dignity is more powerful over the long run than tools of authoritarian political control. As he put it:

We cannot ignore the fact that even without our encouragement there has been and will continue to be repeated explosions against repression and dictatorships. The Soviet Union itself is not immune to this reality. Any system is inherently unstable that has no peaceful means to legitimize its leaders. In such cases, the very repressiveness of the state ultimately drives people to resist it, if necessary, by force.

We have seen this resistance, in peaceful forms, play out only recently—in Venezuela against Maduro’s kleptocracy; in Russia against Putin’s czarism; in Iran, from the Green Revolution of 2009 to the ongoing protests today; and in Algeria, where popular protests led the governing establishment to abandon plans for a physically and mentally incapacitated President Bouteflika to run for a fifth term. And this logic remains the central source of political risk in China, where a dynamic middle-class society will not forever tolerate arbitrary rule by a strongman in a vacuum of checks and balances.

Parallels to China Today

Reagan’s confidence that the free world had a better political model than the Soviet Union should inspire Americans today. China’s catch-up growth miracle of the past four decades has led many to assume that it will inevitably sideline the United States as the world’s leading power. The fact that the Chinese economy had been destroyed by the excesses of Maoism before the late 1970s—just as the Soviet economy was laid waste by the ravages of the Second World War, leading to decades of catch-up growth before economic crisis set in during the 1980s—seems forgotten. China is the latest of the Asian Tiger economies to rise—a trend that started with Japan after 1945, proceeded to South Korea and Taiwan in subsequent decades, and then spread to Southeast Asian nations like Malaysia and Indonesia. Each of these economies was governed by a one-party system—until decades of rapid industrialization created a middle class that demanded political reforms, leading to transitions to multi-party democracy.

The great exception to this trend has been China—which has only just entered the middle-income range with a per capita GDP of roughly $10,000, a level of prosperity at which political reform has occurred in nearly every other Asian nation. Yet China’s growth lately has been accompanied not by political opening but by tighter state control of both economy and society and the increasingly personalized rule of President Xi Jinping, who abandoned the Communist Party’s habit of rotating power by securing the party leadership’s consent to rule without term limits.

The intensification of CCP control over the Chinese people and Chinese business, both state-owned and private-sector, has been accompanied by a rapid slowing of economic growth. China’s ratio of debt to GDP is approaching 300 percent, the country is awash in industrial overcapacity, and China’s rapidly aging society means its workforce as a percentage of population is shrinking even as labor rates make China less competitive in mass-manufacturing for export. A country that until recently served as workshop for the world now runs a current account deficit, and Chinese politicians worry about the social instabilities slower economic growth may produce.

None of this would surprise Reagan, who correctly understood that the Achilles’ heel of the Soviet Union was a rigid political system that could not meet its people’s higher-order needs. As he put it:

In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens . . . . What we see here is a political structure that no longer corresponds to its economic base, a society where productive forces are hampered by political ones.

Modern China’s political structure clearly no longer corresponds to its economic base. Mao Zedong built a Leninist state atop a nation of peasants that had been ravaged by 15 years of war with Japan and a civil war. China today possesses world-class infrastructure, some of the world’s most modern cities and biggest companies, and a thriving middle-class population, many of whom travel as tourists outside the country. However, in a 21st century that will be driven by innovation, can the Chinese fully compete when speech and thought are controlled and they cannot access the global internet due to the Great Firewall? How can such a sophisticated society’s future be governed by the whims and preferences of one man at the top, without institutions of accountability and transparency?

As he did with the Soviet Union in 1982, Reagan would have looked at China today and seen a country ripe for political change. And he would have assured Americans that we can compete successfully with such a nation because our culture of individual freedom and democratic institutions is a source of strength and dynamism in the face of a repressively rigid superpower competitor.

The Dangers of the Surveillance State

But he would not have underestimated the challenge. The repressive capacity of the modern state is far greater than it was under the absolute monarchs of Europe in the pre-modern age. “If developments like the Industrial Revolution . . . and the gifts of science and technology have made life much easier for us, they have also made it more dangerous,” said Reagan. “There are threats now to our freedom, indeed to our very existence, that other generations could never even have imagined.” The totalitarian model of the Soviet Union was scary enough—and that was before modern tools of surveillance and social control made possible by the digital revolution became available to authoritarian leaders.

In 2019, facial recognition and gait technology, total surveillance of social media accompanied by a vast state censorship apparatus, closed-circuit video monitoring of all urban spaces, and a social-credit scoring system made possible by big data, allow China’s leaders to control their population and snuff out political challenges to one-party rule before they metastasize. Citizens living under such forms of social control may not even realize what information they have no access to or how they are being surveilled. So sophisticated are the technological possibilities for a state-directed form of social engineering that even George Orwell’s novel 1984 could not have foreseen them. Reagan warned us: “History teaches the dangers of government that overreaches—political control taking precedence over free economic growth, secret police, mindless bureaucracy, all combining to stifle individual excellence and personal freedom.” Modern China is not immune from this reality, despite its perceived developmental successes.

The Neo-Authoritarian Challenge

Nonetheless, authoritarian competitors to the free world have momentum nearly 40 years after Reagan’s indictment of dictatorship as a political model. The end of the Cold War brought not the end of history but a new era in which democracy has come under assault—from violent extremists, from social media-powered political polarization, and most importantly from the return of great-power competition after a quarter-century in which American primacy was unchallenged. Many are despondent about the future of democracy: Freedom House reports that democratic practice globally has now declined for 13 years in a row. Authoritarians are innovating. Reagan’s words ring as true today as they did when he uttered them: “Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.”

Yet democracies have a long history of lamenting democratic decline. From the earliest days of the 18th-century Republic through the Civil War and the rise of German, Soviet, and Japanese power in the 20th century, Americans have feared that their best days were behind them and that new powers would eclipse their standing and way of life. Reagan was not one of these people, despite having immediately followed a predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who gloomily warned the American public one year before Reagan’s election as President that “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.”

Reagan’s message in Westminster was different: “[O]ptimism is in order, because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not-at-all-fragile flower.” He correctly argued that, earlier in the 20th century, democracies had paid a terrible price for allowing the leaders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to underestimate their fortitude. They should not make the mistake of doing so again. Nor should Americans underestimate the innate strength that derives from a society of free people determined not to submit to any totalitarian challenger. “So, let us ask ourselves, ‘What kind of people do we think we are?’ And let us answer, ‘Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.’” In the face of a new challenge from an ideological competitor today, Americans must rediscover that fortitude.

No Appeasement

Today, some argue for an accommodation with Beijing that would cede Taiwan and other U.S. allies to its influence, so as to preempt the superpower rivalry they otherwise foresee from the clash of American and Chinese interests in the Indo-Pacific. Others maintain that Washington’s rivalry with Putin is not a function of the Kremlin’s attempts to reconstitute the Russian empire by seizing the territory of neighboring states like Ukraine and Georgia, but rather is a product of Washington’s desire to push democracy in Eastern Europe—and that American and Russian leaders should come to a new agreement, as they did at Yalta seven decades ago, recognizing Russia’s suzerainty over its near neighborhood.

Reagan was clear that such accommodations with authoritarian competitors yield not peace but the greater possibility of conflict over time—since dictators’ revisionist appetites only grow with the eating. “Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?” In our time, conceding the international waterways of the South China Sea to China, or the legitimacy of Russia’s illegal occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas regions, would only reward armed aggression in ways that undermine American security – just as President Obama’s refusal to enforce his red line against Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria encouraged greater battlefield aggression against free Syrian forces and the Syrian people by the Syrian army and its military patrons in Tehran and Moscow.

America’s response in 2019 must be—as it was in 1982—“that armed aggression must not be allowed to succeed, and the people must participate in the decisions of government under the rule of law. If there had been firmer support for that principle some 45 years ago,” Reagan said to the children of the Blitz, “perhaps our generation wouldn’t have suffered the bloodletting of World War II.”

Parallels: North Korea, China, and Venezuela

The Cold War was characterized by divided societies—including the Germanies and the Koreas—that provided a real-world test of competing economic and political models. Those characterized by command economies in which one party monopolized power fared poorly compared to those governed by more liberal norms. “Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies —West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam—it is the democratic countries that are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people,” argued Reagan.

His prescience was about more than what he called “the decay of the Soviet experiment”: societies ruled by strongmen during his time, including South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia, subsequently went through transitions to democracy when middle classes empowered by capitalist economic growth demanded greater political rights. Economic modernization produced political openings, not just in the European societies of the Warsaw Pact but in Asia too—notwithstanding all the arguments about “Confucian cultures” and “Asian values” that apologists for dictatorship made during Reagan’s age to explain away what was then the lack of democracy in the societies of the Pacific rim.

Four decades after Reagan, Leninist regimes in China and North Korea continue to monopolize political power. The fact that both are nuclear-weapons states should not deter the United States from speaking out on behalf of the natural rights of their citizens; Reagan correctly characterized as “preposterous” the notion “that once countries achieve a nuclear capability, they should be allowed an undisturbed reign of terror over their own citizens.” As the Trump Administration pursues negotiations with the regime of Kim Jong-un to contain and roll back North Korea’s nuclear program, Reagan’s admonition is worth bearing in mind.

The same is true of U.S.-China relations, even though the stakes are sky-high between the world’s existing superpower and the rising one. A China that governs its citizens more justly, including the more than one million Uighurs currently detained in concentration camps in China’s rugged west, will be a better partner in world affairs than one that oppresses its citizens with impunity. Just as the Berlin Wall, “that dreadful gray gash across the city,” was a symbol of Soviet tyranny, so are the vast detention facilities in Xinjiang symbols of autocratic control from Beijing.

Forcibly detaining vast numbers of Chinese citizens in camps is not dissimilar as an abuse of government authority to the North Korean military’s orders to shoot on sight any citizens fleeing across the border into South Korea. At Westminster, with an eye on the Soviet empire, Reagan reminded us that “Of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today, on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.” Then as now, no citizen flees a justly governed democracy.

That fact remains true not just of autocracies wielding nuclear weapons but also of tyrants in our own hemisphere. The Venezuelan crisis of misrule and kleptocracy has produced as many refugees as the Syrian conflagration. Nearly 90 percent of Venezuelans are malnourished, despite having grown up in what was, until the horrors inflicted by Chavez and Maduro, Latin America’s richest nation. Reagan’s description at Westminster of El Salvador’s tribulations eerily parallels the conflict in Venezuela today, as citizens take to the streets to demand the restoration of democracy: “And then one day those silent, suffering people were offered a chance to vote, to choose the kind of government they wanted. Suddenly the freedom-fighters in the hills were exposed for what they really are—Cuban-backed guerrillas who want power for themselves and their backers, not democracy for the people.”

Substitute “freedom-fighters in the hills” for Maduro’s security forces, including the Cuban-trained “Bolivarian militias,” and Reagan could have been describing the standoff today between a Venezuelan public desperate for change and an illegitimate regime reliant on brute repression and foreign sponsorship to remain in power. It cannot endure forever. Quoting a Salvadoran woman saying “You can kill me, you can kill my family, kill my neighbors, but you can’t kill us all,” Reagan reminded his audience, “The real freedom-fighters of El Salvador turned out to the be the people of that country.” The same is true in Venezuela, as its people rise together against an oppression fueled by narco-corruption and criminal misuse of the country’s energy resources to enrich the Chavista elite.

America is Not Morally Neutral

Throughout its history, the United States has never been a neutral observer in the struggle between freedom and tyranny. A nation founded on its belief in the ability of free people to shape their own destiny cannot be indifferent to the effort of citizens of other nations to do the same. As Reagan argued, “We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.” And not only must Americans remain intellectually and morally committed to this proposition, they must act: “How we conduct ourselves here in the Western democracies will determine” the course of freedom’s progress. Democracy is not “a fragile flower” but “needs cultivating”; it does not flourish in the absence of political will to defend and protect it against authoritarian backlash. “If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy.”

But support for democracy does not mean promoting revolutionary change in any kind of messianic fashion. It is striking to note that Reagan’s vision of democratic progress was evolutionary, even though his belief in universal human freedom was radical. Just as President George W. Bush was caricatured for seeking to “export democracy” through the “barrel of a gun,” so Reagan has been occasionally projected as a naive utopian in his Wilsonian idealism. In fact, it was his supreme confidence in “man’s instinctive desire for freedom and self- determination” that convinced him—just as it had convinced previous American presidents, from Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy—that the United States had a national interest in standing on the right side of history. The justness of the cause meant that “we must not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward them.” Reagan proposed “a crusade for freedom” that “will long outlive our own generation” and “will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation.”

The Democratic Peace

This was no argument for regime change through military force—if anything, the Cold War context of mutually assured destruction reinforced Reagan’s belief in being “cautious about forcing the pace of change.” Reagan understood that a world of more democracies would be a more peaceful world—that security was directly tied to justice: “For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.”

He recalled how the democracies did not use their nuclear monopoly following the Second World War for territorial or imperial gain. He admiringly cited Winston Churchill, who argued that to counteract Soviet expansionism it would be necessary to prevent further conflict through “the establishment of conditions of freedom and democracy as rapidly as possible in all countries.” Reagan understood an enduring truth: that a more democratic world is a safer world for America. Polling by the George W. Bush Institute, Penn-Biden Center, and Freedom House shows that two-thirds of Americans continue to understand the link between democracy abroad and security at home.

Allied Solidarity

American leaders today could benefit from Reagan’s understanding that democracy in the world, and the security it generates, is on better footing when democracies act together. His speech is laden with references to “our sister democracies” and the logic of how “free peoples can work together” in a “spirit of cooperation and solidarity.” In the world of 2019, authoritarian revisionist powers like China and Russia pursue policies to divide democracies and weaken allied solidarity; their focus on undercutting cooperation among democracies is another reminder of its strategic value, since American competitors consider it a challenge to their interests.

Reagan was no unilateralist—he was also animated by a vision of an international architecture of support for democracy. In calling for a renewed campaign for democracy, he cited the inspiration of the European party foundations, international gatherings of parliamentarians and judges, and meetings of technical experts on elections from different countries in common efforts focused on “assisting democratic development.” Reagan not only situated his ambitions for a global campaign for democracy in this context, he believed the United States could learn from others, especially European allies, about “how to turn principle into practice and further the rule of law.”

A Contest of Systems

Reagan understood that the Cold War was not primarily a military-nuclear confrontation but a contest of systems pitting market-democracy against totalitarianism. He called the Cold War “a competition of ideas and values” that need not end in nuclear Armageddon but could be “conducted on a peaceful and reciprocal basis.” He was confident that in any such contest, universal rights of liberty and individual equality would prevail over those of the Soviet party-state.

Reagan is often associated with the aggressive defense build-up he pursued during the 1980s, which many historians argue outspent the Soviets and convinced their leadership that Moscow could never compete in material power. But Reagan viewed the U.S. relative advantage differently. “Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace,” he maintained. But “the ultimate determinant in the struggle that’s now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets, but a test of wills and ideals, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated.” In a period when another U.S. President approaches geopolitical competition by leveraging the hard power generated by American military supremacy and economic vigor, Reagan’s words are a reminder that the soft power generated by America’s democratic culture was central to the struggle, and ultimately determinative in ending it. Today, U.S. support for freedom and democracy is what dictators from Caracas to Khartoum fear most.

Conclusion: Democracy and Sovereignty

The world of 2019 is dangerous and messy. Thanks to conflicts and state failure in countries like Syria and Venezuela, there are more refugees and displaced people than at any time since the Second World War. Russia and China are projecting their authoritarian values beyond their borders, in a foundational challenge to the American-led world order and the market democracies it has fostered. Many Americans are tempted by arguments to pursue what Barack Obama called “nation-building at home” and what Donald Trump has termed “America First”—even if that means ceding strategic space to authoritarian rivals hostile to U.S. values and interests.

When he delivered his Westminster address in 1982, the world was also dangerous and messy, and many Americans were no doubt tempted by the same impulse to accommodate dangerous autocracies. But in that dark time, when the United States faced a strategic challenger more formidable than any today, Reagan called on his people to have confidence in their creed, or what he called “the great civilized ideas: individual liberty, representative government, and the rule of law under God.” Addressing the same kind of doubts that exist today among relativists who do not recognize that authoritarian competitors are working actively to weaken democratic practice for strategic purposes, he “wondered about the shyness of some of us in the West about standing for these ideals that have done so much to ease the plight of man and the hardships of our imperfect world.”

Most powerfully, Reagan reminded his listeners that “foster[ing] the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, [and] universities” was not any kind of imperial project but was the truest means to allow “a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.” Supporting other nations’ democratic sovereignty is “not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity.” After all,

Who would voluntarily choose not to have the right to vote, decide to purchase government propaganda handouts instead of independent newspapers, prefer government to worker-controlled unions, opt for land to be owned by the state instead of those who till it, want government repression of religious liberty, a single political party instead of a free choice, a rigid cultural orthodoxy instead of democratic tolerance and diversity?

Today, sophisticates on both the political Left and Right argue that the United States has no business supporting the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people, or claim that Iraqis were somehow better off living under Saddam Hussein’s police state than they are under freely elected politicians, or maintain that people in China don’t care about political liberty because they enjoy the economic kind. Reagan would tell them that they are wrong, and he would be right: “It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.” The fate of free peoples is linked, and America is safer and more secure when it supports the aspirations for liberty of people beyond its borders.

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The Impeachment Conundrum

The growing accumulation of evidence that President Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate the son of his possible 2020 election opponent has placed Democrats—and more broadly, democrats—in a quandary. The allegations involve deeply serious presidential wrongdoing in multiple respects. First, it appears that the President sought valuable assistance from the government of a foreign country for his 2020 presidential reelection campaign. Second, it has been reported—and confirmed by compelling testimony—that he withheld military assistance from Ukraine as a way of extorting this concession from a vulnerable new Ukrainian government. And third, it is the case—though this point has not been adequately stressed in the controversy to date—that Trump’s actions risked doing grave damage to U.S. national security interests, by leaving perhaps the most vital democratic bulwark against Russian authoritarian expansionism in the region—Ukraine—unable to defend itself.

The reported testimony of the distinguished career officials who have paraded before the House Intelligence Committee in the past few weeks has been so specific, so credible, so consistent, and so damning—with the public version on live television soon to commence—that Republicans have now been forced to retreat from “no quid pro quo” to “no harm no foul.” In other words, it was just this unconventional—well, okay, slightly roguish—President doing his odd shtick again. It doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offence, Republican members of Congress are now insisting. There is no demonstration that he had “corrupt intent.”

But what other intent could Trump have had in asking, on his “perfect” July 25 phone call, Ukraine’s new President Volodymyr Zelensky to “do us a favor.” The request came after Trump had stressed, “We do a lot for Ukraine. Much more than the European countries are doing.” “The United States has been very very good to Ukraine,” the President goes on. There is clearly a tone of “you want it to continue, don’t you?” Zelensky leaves no doubt that he does. He offers Ukraine’s deep appreciation and expresses its urgent need for U.S. Javelin anti-tank missiles to defend against Russian encroachment on Ukrainian territory. And then the famous Trump line, “I need you to do us a favor, though”: work with “Rudy and Attorney General Barr” to investigate Biden’s son.

If the President did not have corrupt intent—to turn the instruments of U.S. foreign policy to personal political advantage, even at risk to the U.S. national security interest—if it was such a “perfect call,” then why did National Security Council lawyers take the very unconventional step of moving the transcript of the call (which contained no classified information) to a highly classified computer system? If there was no corrupt intent, if this was merely a friendly suggestion rather than an act of national extortion, then why did the White House hold up the nearly $400 million military aid package for Ukraine for nearly two months—a hold that began a week before the “perfect call” and that was not lifted until September 11 under growing congressional pressure. Throughout the summer, the Pentagon had been warning the White House that if its portion of the aid package wasn’t released soon, it wouldn’t be able to deliver the military assistance before the end of the fiscal year on September 30.

In the end, it has always been up to the Congress to determine whether a presidential act rises to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But there is broad agreement that such impeachable behavior is not strictly limited to criminal offenses. A President putting the national security of the United States at risk in order to pressure a foreign government to aid his reelection campaign seems a far more serious offense than lying under oath about a sexual affair.

It might be possible to view this differently if Trump’s behavior was an aberration. But it is his regular mode of operation. As candidate, Trump busted norm after norm of civility, tolerance, and unconditional commitment to the democratic electoral process, inviting violence from his campaign supporters and threatening to reject the results of the election if he lost. As President, he has warmly embraced by an array of ruthless dictators—from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-un—while demeaning and undermining our most vital democratic allies and alliances, and our democratic values. From the day he took office, Trump has pursued an authoritarian style of governance, one in which truth is denied and distorted on a daily basis and the awesome powers of Executive Branch leadership are deployed to serve the personal political ends (re-election), financial interests (revenue to his hotel properties), and sheer vanity of the President. Independent media are dismissed as fake news and critics as disloyal to the country. Beginning with his welcoming of and indeed public appeal for Russian assistance in his 2016 election campaign, through to his violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution (which forbids Federal officials from accepting benefits from foreign states without congressional approval), and on to his repeated efforts to obstruct justice in the investigation of Russia’s election interference, Trump has been a serial violator of his presidential oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” With the release of the Mueller Report in April 2019 (with its abundant evidence of presidential obstruction), the substantive and legal case for impeachment became, in my view, compelling. But it was a complex case to make to the public, it had dribbled on for far too long, it was preempted by Attorney General William Barr’s hasty mischaracterization of the conclusions, and then it was further undermined by Mueller’s own failure to clearly enunciate the grounds for impeachment. With 31 of the Democrats’ 235 House seats in districts carried by Trump in 2018, Speaker Nancy Pelosi thus felt compelled to slow-walk the process.

Some House Democrats and strategists also intuited what political science scholars were finding from their comparative research. An all-out battle over the President’s alleged violations of the Constitution and the law risked playing into his polarizing narrative of an effete Washington elite that was mired in political stalemate and detached from the “real majority” of hardworking people, whose needs for relief and redemption were too urgent to be held hostage to arcane procedural norms. From this perspective, the focus needed to be on addressing substantive issues like economic security and health care, where Democrats could appeal to and peel away a portion of Trump’s support base. A head-on collision over impeachment would only force Trump supporters into their partisan trenches. Yale political scientist Milan Svolik has confirmed this tendency in his experimental research across several countries: “In sharply polarized electorates, even voters who value democracy will be willing to sacrifice fair democratic competition for the sake of electing politicians who champion their interests.” And the degree of polarization matters; the bigger the partisan and policy gulf between candidates, the more voters may overlook the democratic misdeeds of an incumbent leader or party in order to avoid handing over power to the dreaded alternative.

This now is the conundrum that confronts the Democrats. On the one hand, the defense of democratic constitutional norms demands that something be done to hold the President accountable for his offenses. The low probability that the Senate will vote to convict him is not the issue. Impeachment alone imposes both indictment and disgrace. And Trump has been desperate to avoid it. It is revealing that Trump calls impeachment a “dirty, filthy, disgusting word.” A self-confessed germaphobe who is obsessed with the fear of contamination, Trump reserves the images of filth for what he most abhors. And he abhors the thought of being impeached. Even if every Republican Senator votes to acquit him, it will be a recorded stain on his presidency that he richly deserves and that, more importantly, might deter similar wrongdoing by a future President.

On the other hand, impeachment carries a serious political risk, not so much that he will be acquitted in the Senate (a nearly foregone conclusion), but that he will use the conflict to intensely mobilize his support base in the same way that a hurricane draws heat energy from warm ocean water. Thus, the Democrats face a difficult and hugely consequential balancing act. On the one hand, they need to establish both the truth and the gravity of what happened. On the other hand, they need to do it quickly, so that they can pivot back to the substantive issues of the 2020 campaign. Recent elections in Turkey and Greece show that when opposition forces craft broad appeals that focus on people’s economic concerns and emphasize inclusion over polarization, they can defeat illiberal populism at the polls. When they double down on polarizing appeals to their base, they play to the strengths of the populist.

From the standpoint of defending democracy against presidential transgression, the Democrats are right to pursue Trump’s impeachment. From the standpoint of saving American democracy from a second Trump term, they will have to find a way to quickly move past the impeachment crisis to campaign on the substantive policy issues that more heavily motivate most voters.

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The Rallying Cry We Need

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of three essays, commissioned by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, examining the legacy of Reagan’s Westminster Speech and its relevance for democracy promotion today. Coming Wednesday: a contribution by Daniel Twining. Coming Friday: a contribution by Richard Fontaine.

In his compendium of Great Speeches in History, William Safire wrote that Ronald Reagan’s Westminster Address was included in the collection because it’s an example of “presidential oratory with prophetic power.” The address, which was delivered in the British Parliament on June 8, 1982, was certainly prophetic. Speaking not long after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when Moscow’s power seemed to be inexorably on the rise, Reagan boldly declared that the Soviet Union faced “a great revolutionary crisis.” Its protracted economic decline, he said, was rooted in the nature of the communist system that denied people the freedom necessary for economic progress in the modern world. Calling the dimensions of the communist failure “astounding,” he famously predicted that Marxism-Leninism would end up “on the ash heap of history.”

Reagan was indeed correct in his prediction. Before the decade was over, communism had collapsed in Central Europe, and the Soviet Union then imploded two years later. But the Westminster Address was much more than presidential oratory with prophetic power. It was also a democracy manifesto that proclaimed the coming global triumph of liberty and human dignity.

Reagan laid out in the speech what he called “a plan and a hope for the long run.” He said that as “the end of a bloody century” approached, the world had reached “a turning point,” and it had become possible to think of a new era of expanded freedom. To help bring about such a transformation, he proposed launching “a global campaign for freedom” that would strengthen the prospects for democracy and world peace.

Safire said that “a great speech is made for a high purpose—to inspire, to ennoble, to instruct, to rally, to lead.” The Westminster Address did all of those things with exceptional power and eloquence. Remarkably, the address continues to serve that high purpose today. It has enduring relevance because it evokes fundamental American values and connects them to a vision of America’s transformative role in the world. As a result, the core principles it embodies can still inform and guide how we respond to difficult international challenges almost four decades later, and in a profoundly altered political and international context.

The current global situation is starkly different from the optimistic vision of the inexorable progress of democracy that Reagan projected in the Westminster Address. The political scientist Larry Diamond has written that democracy is in the throes of a global “recession.” In 2017, democracy advocates from around the world issued a statement, called “The Prague Appeal for Democratic Renewal,” that opens with the dire declaration that “Liberal democracy is under threat, and all who cherish it must come to its defense.”

Democracy is threatened by authoritarian regimes like those in China, Russia, and Iran that have intensified repression at home and are projecting their power internationally with increased confidence and belligerence. Other countries like Turkey, Venezuela, Thailand, and the Philippines that were once stable democracies have become increasingly authoritarian and unreceptive to international efforts to strengthen democratic accountability. Even long-established Western democracies have been plagued by the rise of illiberal and nationalist political movements and parties. One measure of the new crisis of democracy is that political and civil rights in the world have declined for 13 consecutive years, according to the latest Freedom House survey.

The Westminster Address doesn’t offer a roadmap for dealing with a crisis of this magnitude. But there are five ways that the address continues to inspire, instruct, and inform contemporary efforts to renew democracy.

The first is that the Westminster Address remains the foundational document for efforts to aid democracy internationally. In the part of the speech that is most often quoted, Reagan said, “The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their differences through peaceful means.” It’s hard to remember how revolutionary the idea of promoting democracy was in the early 1980s when these words were spoken. At the time, the foreign-policy debate was dominated by two camps—the realists, who focused exclusively on geopolitical and economic interests as well as interstate bargains; and the human rights advocates, who sought to advance moral norms that transcended state interests. Democracy promotion didn’t preclude attention to such issues, but it shifted the focus to empowering people at the grassroots and challenging communist regimes ideologically. For the realists, this was irrelevant if not reckless, while human-rights campaigners worried that it politicized the defense of moral norms.

But Reagan’s proposal quickly took hold, sparking the growth of programs to assist people around the world who are fighting to build democratic societies. The speech also provided the political and intellectual arguments to support such work and the core principles to guide its effective implementation.

The immediate policy objective of the Westminster Address was the creation of a new institution to advance democracy, and that objective was achieved with the establishment in 1983 of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its four associated party, labor, and business institutes. The NED was a controversial new idea in its early years, but its budget has grown tenfold since then—from $18 million to $180 million—and it now supports programs in more than 90 countries, manages a renowned research center on democracy and a global network of activists called the World Movement for Democracy, and publishes the Journal of Democracy. In addition, democracy assistance is now a large and well-funded field of international activity. Nongovernmental democracy foundations like NED have been established in Great Britain and other democratic countries, and many governments also provide democracy support as a component of development assistance. Even large multilateral bodies like the United Nations and the European Union now provide funding for programs that strengthen government accountability, the rule of law, and free elections.

The rapid growth of democracy assistance, along with the support of democracy promotion as a goal of U.S. foreign policy by both the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and the Republican administration of George W. Bush, inevitably provoked a backlash by authoritarian governments and their apologists. One line of attack was advanced in the 1990s by Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew, who argued that “Asian Values” were inconsistent with democracy, which was a Western idea with no indigenous roots in Asia. Another line of attack emerged after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, when Russia’s President Vladimir Putin charged that democracy assistance was really a policy of regime change with the goal of instigating “colored revolutions” in Russia and other authoritarian countries unfriendly to the United States.

These self-serving arguments were refuted by events that reinforced Reagan’s conviction that “democracy is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.” Years before Lee pronounced his doctrine on the incompatibility of democracy and Asian values, millions of ordinary citizens in South Korea had brought down the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan in the June Democracy Uprising of 1987. Before the end of that year, a new constitution guaranteeing basic democratic freedoms was approved in a national referendum and elections were held to choose a new President. A democratic transition in Taiwan soon followed with the election of Lee Teng-hui in 1996, and just two years later the Reformasi movement in Indonesia brought about the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime and initiated a successful process of transition that also led to the establishment of an independent and democratic government in East Timor.

Less progress was made in Russia, where Putin used the argument of defending Russian sovereignty against U.S. democracy assistance to consolidate his political control and to repress civil society organizations and independent media. But the Russian democracy movement has shown impressive resilience. Mass protests were held in 2011-12 in opposition to Putin’s return to the presidency; youth rallies took place in 100 cities across Russia in 2017 to protest massive corruption; and mass marches of remembrance were held throughout the country in February 2019 on the fourth anniversary of the murder of the martyred democracy leader Boris Nemtsov. The fact that many thousands of Russians have defied Putin’s threats and continued to demand basic rights and accountable government is further proof that Reagan was correct when he said that “man’s instinctive desire for freedom and self-determination surfaces again and again.”

Reagan’s vision stressing the power and dynamism of indigenous democratic actors also has had implications for the work of democracy assistance that he called for in his address. As the field expanded in the decades after 1989, the programs became increasingly bureaucratized and were often driven more by the priorities of the large donor agencies than by the needs and goals of the grassroots democracy activists and organizations whom Reagan extolled in his address.

A new report assessing the effectiveness of European programs makes the distinction between what it calls top-down and bottom-up approaches to democracy assistance. The top-down approach supports the reform of the judiciary or other public institutions in a technocratic way and often in partnership with governments that may be only superficially committed to democratic reform. The alternative bottom-up approach responds to and seeks to empower local activists to tackle the immediate challenges they face, and to develop the capacity to pressure for reform and institutional accountability. The report recommends a “substantial strengthening of the bottom-up instruments” such as the European Endowment for Democracy, an independent, arms-length organization modeled on NED that the report says has been more effective than large government programs in aiding democracy in often hostile political environments.

In effect, the report corroborates Reagan’s view that the work of aiding democracy should empower people by responding to their needs and building upon their capacity and vision. He said that “the renewed strength of the democratic movement” should be “complemented [emphasis added] by a global campaign for freedom,” meaning that the courage and commitment of frontline activists, and not the campaign, should be the driving factor. Such an approach is based upon the idea that democratic development is not something that can be exported, which is how some people mistakenly think of democracy assistance, but is an organic process of growth and democratic learning through which people develop the capacity over the long term to promote reform and institutional accountability. It’s not just more effective than a top-down approach of social engineering, but also more cost-effective, since it doesn’t rely on paying large numbers of outside—and expensive—technical specialists.

The second way the Westminster Address continues to inspire and instruct is that it offers a hopeful vision of democracy’s future, something that is especially needed during the present period of democratic recession and pessimism.

Reagan was not unaware of the grave threats to democracy. He said that “optimism comes less easily today,” at the end of “a bloody century” when “democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.” He was also speaking at a moment when there was widespread concern about the prospects for democracy at home and abroad. The United States was still reeling from the defeat in Vietnam, the Solidarity movement had just been suppressed in Poland, and the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Not long before Reagan spoke at Westminster, President Jimmy Carter had said that a “crisis of confidence” in America threatened the country’s “social and political fabric,” and Daniel Patrick Moynihan had declared on the occasion of the nation’s bicentennial in 1976 that democracy ”is where the world was, not where it is going.”

Nonetheless, Reagan countered the voices of pessimism with a remarkably hopeful vision of the future. He said that “optimism is in order, because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not-at-all-fragile flower.” He went so far as to proclaim that “around the world today the democratic revolution is gathering new strength.” Though Reagan was speaking at the very early stages of what Samuel P. Huntington would later call “the third wave of democratization,” no one at the time could have foreseen the dramatic changes that lay ahead. According to Freedom House, the number of free countries in the world increased from 52 to 88 in the 15 years following Reagan’s 1982 Westminster Address, and the number of electoral democracies climbed to 125 by 2005, almost two-thirds of the world’s countries. This really was “the democratic revolution” that Reagan had foreseen—the greatest and most rapid expansion of democracy in human history.

It’s very unlikely that we’re now at the threshold of a fourth wave of democratization. The negative trends of authoritarian resurgence, political backsliding, illiberal nationalism, and democratic malaise show no signs of weakening. Moreover, as Huntington wrote in The Third Wave, the political, cultural, and economic obstacles to democracy in the world’s remaining authoritarian countries in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia are formidable. Nonetheless, it’s significant that, despite all the obstacles and setbacks, democracy has continued to make important incremental gains in a number of countries.

In 2018, for example, surprising breakthroughs were achieved in Ethiopia, Armenia, and Malaysia, all countries with considerable influence in their respective regions. Ethiopia, which is the second most populous country in Africa and has a terrible history of tyranny and repression, experienced a rapid and historic liberalization after Abiy Ahmed became Prime Minister on April 2, 2018. He immediately released thousands of political prisoners, opened up democratic space for civil society, freed the media, liberalized the state-driven and deeply indebted economy, and even made peace with Eritrea. To be sure, Ethiopia faces formidable challenges, with inflation at more than 15 percent and nearly three million people having been forced to flee their homes as a result of fighting among some of the country’s 80 different ethnic groups. But the progress so far has been breathtaking, and a successful democratic transition in Ethiopia could have ripple effects far beyond the country’s borders.

Armenia also experienced its own “Velvet Revolution” after street protests last April swept from office a corrupt and autocratic President who wanted to manipulate the constitution to retain power. In subsequent elections held in December, the party alliance of new Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan won 70 percent of the vote, setting the stage for building accountable and effective government ministries, reforming the judicial system, and strengthening the media as a critical watchdog over government performance. The change was so dramatic that the Economist selected Armenia as its Country of the Year in 2018, meaning that it had improved more in the past 12 months than any other country.

In Malaysia, the change came about as the result of an electoral revolution on May 9 that ousted a kleptocratic Prime Minister and his entrenched ruling party. The transition in Malaysia remains uncertain, with 94-year-old former Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad still holding power and seemingly reluctant to transfer it as he had pledged to do during the election, to his coalition partner Anwar Ibrahim, a former political prisoner and a devoted advocate of reform and economic inclusion. Still, a transition has started, with “the delicious spectacle,” as the Economist put it, “of police removing big boxes of cash, jewelry, and designer handbags” from the home of the ousted leader Najib Razak’s home and a high-level committee appointed with the task of investigating the massive 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) embezzlement scandal that had sparked public outrage.

Significantly, the changes in these three countries appear to be part of a larger trend of popular uprisings against corrupt and abusive autocratic regimes. One study has noted that there have been corruption-driven leadership changes in more than 10 percent of the world’s governments over the past five years. These changes included the ouster of President Jacob Zuma in South Africa as a result of the courageous efforts by the Public Protector Thuli Madonsela to expose government corruption in two explosive reports. Occurring almost at the same moment with these dramatic changes in South Africa, Ethiopia, Armenia, and Malaysia were local elections in Tunisia that the moderate Islamist leader Rached Ghannouchi, in his keynote address to the Dakar assembly of the World Movement for Democracy, called “a landmark moment in Tunisia’s history and the realization of the promise of the Arab Spring.” As Reagan said, “democracy is not a fragile flower.”

The third way that the Westminster Address can inform contemporary efforts is that it reminds us that even the most formidable authoritarian systems have great and possibly even fatal vulnerabilities. “Any system is inherently unstable,” Reagan said, “that has no peaceful means to legitimize its leaders. In such cases, the very repressiveness of the state ultimately drives people to resist it. . . .” While the Westminster Address was focused on the Soviet Union, Reagan was very explicit in emphasizing that his words had universal relevance. “It would be cultural condescension, or worse,” he said, “to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.” When he predicted that the march of freedom would leave Marxism-Leninism on “the ash-heap of history,” he was careful to add that this is where “it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

The authoritarian resurgence of recent years and the resilience of the dictatorships in Cuba, China, and other countries do not contradict Reagan’s belief in democratic universalism and the inherent instability of dictatorial systems. Even in this relatively gloomy period, none of today’s authoritarian strongmen sits securely on his throne. Putin and other strongmen repeatedly warn about the danger of foreign-instigated “color revolutions.” This is an implicit admission that they fear the test of a real election that they might lose, knowing that the trigger for a color revolution would be an attempt to reverse an unacceptable result, as happened with the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004. The many repressive measures taken by authoritarian regimes—among them the crackdown on civil society, the passage of harsh NGO laws, the repression of independent media, and the attempt to bring cyberspace under government control—also show that they lack popular support and know that their rule would not survive a process of free and fair political competition.

Many of these regimes today are experiencing grave and, in some cases, systemic crises. The most obvious example is Venezuela, where the economy has imploded and millions of desperate people have fled to neighboring countries. More than 50 governments have recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the country’s legitimate President, while gangs of paramilitary thugs and thousands of Cubans embedded in the Venezuelan army continue to prop up the abysmal regime of dictator Nicolás Maduro. Cuba, which “is now facing its worst economic crisis since the 1990s,” according to Carmelo Mesa-Lago, fears that its own survival could be endangered by the fall of Maduro, which is why it is doing whatever it can to keep him in power. Similarly endangered is the Ortega regime in Nicaragua, which has used massive force in an effort to suppress a popular uprising that erupted in April 2018.

The Islamist regime in Iran is yet another dictatorship whose survival is being threatened by economic failure and popular uprising. Since the end of 2017, hundreds of thousands of people across the country have protested against worsening economic conditions, even as the regime has spent vast resources on foreign adventures in Syria and Lebanon and on subsidizing state-controlled Islamist institutions. Unlike the Green Revolution in 2009, which was concentrated in Teheran, the current protests have spread to more rural parts of the country and to cities like Qom and Mashhad that traditionally have been strongholds of the Revolutionary Guards. An indication of the regime’s instability was a recent article published by the Revolutionary Guard’s news agency Tasnim, titled “Is the Islamic Republic on the brink of collapse?” The article included an interview with Mohammad Reza Tadjik, a prominent sociologist and deputy at the Intelligence Ministry, who said that Iran is “in a traumatic situation,” caused by corruption, mismanagement, and wrong-headed strategies. “Iranian society is breaking up,” Tadjik said, “in a state where the past is dying and the future cannot arise, including the capacity for reform.”

There has also been a revival of political unrest in the Middle East, where massive street protests have ousted Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika as well as Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, leading in Sudan to an agreement between leaders of the military and the protest movement to establish a new civilian government. Elsewhere in the Middle East, youth have marched for jobs and an end to corruption in Jordan. In Morocco, thousands of teachers and their supporters have marched on Rabat demanding better pay and benefits, while demonstrations in the northern Rif region have broken out demanding an end to marginalization and government neglect. The dictatorial regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia have used brutal repression to keep the lid on social protest, yet the Washington Post observed recently that these countries “are not looking stable” as they squander pubic resources on wasteful projects, like a new capital in Egypt costing a reported $45 billion, and neglect the growing resentment of swelling youth populations. Almost a decade after the abortive Arab Spring, the potential for rebellion against repressive and unaccountable rulers in the Middle East is as great as ever.

The biggest test is China, where President Xi Jinping has claimed in his 2017 speech to the Communist Party’s 19th Congress that China is “blazing a new trail” of authoritarian development that is “a new option” for countries seeking modernization. Xi hopes that the “surveillance state” he is constructing, using the most advanced tools of facial-recognition technology and other digital tools to monitor and control the population, will enable China to avoid the kind of political opening that has occurred in almost every other middle-income autocracy that is not a petrostate. This is unlikely, according to Minxin Pei, because the four principal symptoms of decay in an autocratic regime are already far advanced in China: 1) The official communist ideology has completely atrophied; 2) the economy is growing at the slowest rate in 30 years, eroding the regime’s performance-based legitimacy and increasing its fears of social unrest; 3) official corruption is pervasive, by the regime’s own admission; and 4) unity within the party has collapsed as Xi has increasingly centralized power in his own hands. 

Analyst Xi Chen has reported that the $95 billion the regime spent on internal security in 2011 exceeded its military budget, yet protests are spreading in China and the number of labor confrontations almost doubled to 1,700 in 2018. As the “sensitive anniversaries” of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and the student protests of 1919 were approaching, the New York Times reported that Xi told party officials that the regime “faces major risks on all fronts and must batten down the hatches.” The Chinese regime’s deep anxiety confirms Reagan’s belief in the inherent instability of dictatorial political systems.

The fourth way the Westminster Address can guide us today is that it provides a framework for understanding why democratic political ideas and values must be part of a comprehensive U.S. policy for promoting national security and a stable and peaceful world order.

While Reagan believed that the United States and other democracies needed credible military power to counter the threat posed by totalitarianism, he also understood that preserving a balance of power was not enough to meet this challenge. “Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace,” he said at Westminster, “but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that’s now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets, but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated.” Like William Faulkner, who once said that “man will not merely endure: he will prevail” because of his indomitable spirit, Reagan understood the importance of democratic ideas in the contest between free societies and their opponents. He welcomed “the competition of ideas and values” and hoped that it could be conducted with the Soviet Union “on a peaceful and reciprocal basis.”

Many people believe that this competition had ended with the anti-communist revolutions of 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, which brought an end to the Cold War. But the ideological struggle between liberal democracy and authoritarianism did not begin with the Cold War, nor did it end with the collapse of communism. The United States was a champion of liberal values and an opponent of authoritarianism from the moment it rebelled against Great Britain in 1776. It was a beacon of hope for 19th-century European liberals like Louis Kossuth and Giuseppe Mazzini, and it has continued to represent liberal values even after the fall of communism, when people fighting for democracy against the world’s many remaining authoritarian regimes have looked to the United States for political support and moral solidarity.

One of the people who immediately saw the new shape of global ideological competition after the Cold War was the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who wrote extensively about the idea of “American exceptionalism.” He noted in 1995 that “almost everywhere outside the older democracies, there is a democratic and an anti-democratic party, or to put it less elegantly, an American and an anti-American party. The global struggle is no longer linked to nuclear weapons or submarines, but it goes on. . . . America, having succeeded in the Cold War, must not abandon the field of battle in the continuing and far less costly struggle to build free societies for the twenty-first century and beyond.” More recently, following the global backlash against liberal democracy, Robert Kagan has written that “authoritarianism has emerged as the greatest challenge facing the liberal democratic world—a profound ideological, as well as strategic challenge . . . with strong nations such as China and Russia championing anti-liberalism as an alternative to a teetering liberal hegemony.” Reagan’s call at Westminster to affirm and promote democratic values has lost none of its relevance.

The fifth and final way that way that the Westminster Address can guide us today is that it provides a model of civic nationalism that is essential for the successful defense of liberal democracy in the ideological and geopolitical battle against resurgent authoritarianism. Reagan demonstrated in the Westminster Address that there is no contradiction whatsoever between a proud American affirmation of liberal values and a commitment to democratic universalism. It was precisely because he believed that “democracy already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences” that he wanted the United States, Great Britain, and other Western democracies to promote democratic values and institutions throughout the world. And he did so with immense patriotism and confidence. “Let us be shy no longer,” he proclaimed. “Let us go to our strength. Let us offer hope. Let us tell the world that a new age is not only possible but probable.”

No democratic leader today speaks with such confidence and conviction about the importance of democracy and human freedom. On the contrary, the United States and other Western democracies are suffering from a profound crisis of confidence that has three fundamental causes. The first is that democratic leaders and liberal intellectuals have been demoralized by the rise of populist and nationalist movements that have become a powerful and divisive force in many Western countries. Such movements are a reaction to the erosion of traditional religious, communal, and cultural institutions during a period of rapid political, technological, and social transformation. Many people feel that their identity is being threatened by cultural, generational, and demographic changes, and this has opened the way for populist political leaders who appeal to their anxieties. Kagan notes that since the “assault on traditional customs and beliefs has been launched” in the name of liberalism by what he calls advocates of “progressive liberalism,” the reaction has taken the form of an anti-liberal backlash.

The second cause of the crisis of confidence has been the rise of globalization and the bias against the nation-state of the intellectual and professional elites whose thinking dominates global institutions. According to economist Dani Rodrik, their globalist mindset alienates ordinary citizens and is also analytically mistaken, since the critical economic decisions that affect their well-being are taken at the domestic and not the international level. The nation-state, he writes, is “the foundation of the capitalist order,” and the globalist mindset that weakens it will open “political paths for Right-wing populists to hijack patriotism for destructive ends.” Rodrik fears that the backlash could sweep away “not only our open global economy, but also our liberal, democratic order.”

The third cause of this crisis is the way the technological revolution and the rise of social media have affected politics in democratic societies. Writing about “The Threat of Postmodern Totalitarianism” in his introduction to a collection of articles in the Journal of Democracy, Larry Diamond describes three ways that social media have a deleterious effect on democratic politics. The first is that it increases polarization by isolating different groups into their separate “social-media echo chambers.” It also undermines truth and civility, “two of the most precious requisites for sustainable democracy,” thereby degrading the culture of democracy which depends on citizens having “mutual tolerance, respect, and restraint.” And finally, it gives “wide scope to post hateful language, absurd rumors, and outrageous lies,” a tendency that has been encouraged by Russia and other malign foreign governments.

The critical question is how to preserve in democratic societies a liberal political center at a time of political polarization and a growing gulf between progressive elites that disparage sovereignty, national identity, and traditional values in the name of global progress and universal values, and more conservative parts of the population that are drawn to political leaders who play upon their fears and encourage a reactive and malignant form of nationalism. This issue was addressed by a group of democratic intellectuals and activists who met in Prague in May 2017 and adopted the aforementioned Prague Appeal for Democratic Renewal. The Appeal asserted that civic nationalism is not just compatible with liberal democracy but a necessary component of it. “While democracy embodies universal values,” the Appeal said, “it exists in a particular national context, what Vaclav Havel called the ‘intellectual, spiritual, and cultural traditions that breathe substance into it and give it meaning.’ Democratic citizenship, rooted in such traditions, needs to be strengthened, not allowed to atrophy in an era of globalization. National identity is too important to be left to the manipulation of despots and demagogic populists.”

The civic nationalism that this statement affirms is an essential feature of the Westminster Address and the spirit that Reagan brought to the issue of democratic internationalism. He affirmed a very powerful sense of identity when he asked, quoting Churchill rallying the British people against the Nazis, “What kind of a people do they think we are?” The answer, Reagan said, was “Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.”

We hear such words today as a faint echo from a distant and very different era. Yet they remain relevant at a time when new and very dangerous threats to liberal democracy have appeared. These threats are likely to grow in the years ahead, and at some point a leader will emerge who may once again feel the need to ask, “What kind of a people do they think we are?” When that time comes, the Westminster Address will offer a model of how to respond with eloquence and practical ideas, and with a vision that can rally people to the cause of human freedom.

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