I am sitting in the back-left corner, squeezed between security guards and cocktail waiters, in a ballroom at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, California. More than 50 Ambassadors, local business officials, and Los Angeles political elite gathered for a conversation with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about strong institutions, civil society, and, of course, President Donald Trump’s tweets. I am used to listening to Secretary Rice speak candidly since I spent a winter in her political science seminar at Stanford University, but her comments that night feel markedly different in tone and message. Rice is more adamant now that democracy promotion should be both a goal and a necessity of American foreign policy.
What has changed since the last time? The glitzy ballroom is nothing like an intimate classroom setting, and Rice is speaking to experienced professionals, not to students. In my mind, the biggest difference is clear: Donald Trump is now President of the United States and may be the cause of the next democratic recession. As a young professional in the field of international relations, I wonder how the international community will advance democracy when its biggest advocate has extricated itself from the global arena?
In her new book “Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom” (Twelve, 2017), Rice uses dynamic stories of democratic transition to demonstrate that American foreign policy must be unhesitating and steadfast. “Democracy” is a memoir, an astute international relations textbook, and a playbook for foreign policy officials. Each case study in the book – ranging from Colombia to Iraq – conveys a lesson for the new administration: to be wary of “historical messianism;” to embrace NATO wholeheartedly; to support liberal and progressive forces of change within countries; and to increase foreign aid funding to trustworthy governments abroad.
Rice’s Soviet expertise shines through in the book, especially in her nuanced portrayal of Vladimir Putin. As Rice explains in one of the early chapters, Vladimir Putin’s conviction that “Russia is only great when led by great men” makes him an unpredictable and unreasonable actor on the world stage. Weak democratic institutions give way to leaders like Putin and his savior complex shuts down any opposition that threatens the potential for a multiparty government in Russia. As Rice writes, “The problem is that the interests of these [progressive] elements of the Russian [opposition] population have found no institutionalized way to express their views, mobilize around particular reforms, and seek political change.” I got chills reading the sentence knowing that on the very same day, Putin critic Alexei Navalny was jailed after he sparked a wave of record protests in Moscow. Rice’s interactions with the messianism of leaders like Putin, or Daniel Arap Moi in Kenya, shows that it is almost impossible to execute diplomacy with leaders that situate their defiance and rejection of international norms in dangerous historical narratives.
Donald Trump’s record on NATO has been shameful, from calling the 68-year old alliance “obsolete” to pushing the Prime Minister of Montenegro aside to get to the front of a group of leaders. Rice situates her discussion of democracy in Eastern Europe in the perfect NATO history lesson. In 2008, Germany was reluctant to admit Georgia and Ukraine into the NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP), in part because it felt that NATO was no longer needed to deter Russian aggression. Rice powerfully recounts how Georgia and Ukraine were promised future entry into MAP, due to the bold sponsorship of the United States. The United States embraced the newborn democracies and provided an incentive for the corrupt governments to reform. Given that Rice claims “the annexation of Crimea propelled Putin to new highs,” the United States needs to persist as a strong advocate for Eastern Europe. The Trump administration should consider NATO both a defense alliance and an important guarantor of European cohesion.
“Democracy” is not only a valuable guide to the “equation” of progressive development, but also a story about the value of agency in sparking democratic change. “Democratic transitions do not happen magically; they require people to have a view of a better future and the will to achieve it – and more than that, they require planning and determination,” writes Rice in the compelling narrative about her experience during the civil rights movement. The theme of instrumentality introduced in the chapter on the civil rights movement reappears throughout the book, from descriptions of the Catholic priests that rallied the Polish people in support of the Solidarity movement to sketches of “the people in the streets” during the overthrow of Tunisian President Ben Ali. The support that the White House lent to grassroots forces of democratic change during both Bush administrations stands in stark contrast to the total disregard that the current White House has for pro-democracy reformers abroad. President Trump’s administration must understand that such reformers are secondary allies of US democracy.
The Trump administration has often been labeled as “the end of foreign aid as we know it” due to the White House plans for cutting funding worldwide. The administration does not understand that effective and strategic foreign aid has defined the best US moments of leadership abroad. For instance, Rice’s most poignant anecdote is the recollection of her involvement in wrangling more funds for the Solidarity-led Polish government. It is hard to say that the resulting IMF standby loan and the currency float sparked by the loan package were not the most influential factor in the success of the Polish democracy the world knows today.
The entirety of the eloquent and insightful writing in “Democracy” made me extremely nostalgic for our seminar discussions because Rice always offered concrete and realistic policy solutions. In this new era of uncertainty for American foreign policy, in which democracy promotion seems to be a low priority for the Trump administration, “Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom” is a reminder that democratic development is the best accessory for the United States.
