The Dream of Democratic Peace: Americans Are Not Asleep

In defending the Clinton administration's policy of promoting democracy abroad, Strobe Talbott cites H. L. Mencken's remark, "The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy" ("Democracy and the National Interest," November/December 1996). Mencken's reaction to finding himself quoted to support basing U.S. foreign policy on the notion of the "democratic peace" -- if printable -- might be, "The most common of follies is to believe passionately in the palpably untrue." He would be the first to point out that the Achilles' heel of this passionately held argument is that it has palpably little to do with the experience of the country that presumably ought to confirm it: the United States.

The democratic peace is essentially a historical hypothesis, a set of propositions based on past experience. In Talbott's version, "Countries whose citizens choose their leaders . . . are more likely than those with other forms of government to be reliable partners in trade and diplomacy, and less likely to threaten the peace." American experience suggests another view: a country may feel solidarity toward other countries with similar political values and institutions, but countries become reliable partners only when their interests require it.

When this is the case, the nature of their respective systems does not seem to count for much. American security has been seriously threatened at four points: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Second World War, and the Cold War. On the first and third occasions, indispensable help came from tyrannical sources: Louis XVI's France and Stalin's Soviet Union. During the Civil War, the North's best European friend was czarist Russia. And calling our most reliable partners in the Cold War democratic would seem to be confusing democracy with dependence on the United States. But the democratic peace hypothesis does more than misrepresent the way the world actually works: it is a dangerous and misleading recipe that, if followed, will cause America's leaders to neglect the country's true security needs.

A FRIEND IN NEED . . .

The United States's non-democratic but reliable-because-dependent friends have included Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Tito's Yugoslavia, Salazar's Portugal, Franco's Spain, Turkey under military rule, and much of Latin America before the democratic trend. Autocratic governments may at times be less stable, but that does not mean the United States can easily dispense with them as allies. Nor does it mean that democracy will make them more reliable. The Philippines, South Africa, and Taiwan may be happier as democracies, but will they be more reliable partners for the United States? The new Eastern European democracies will prove reliable only if they receive American protection. By the way, if democracy is such a vital factor in state behavior, is it worth jeopardizing the democratic transition in Russia by extending NATO to the east?

Japan, Germany, and Italy have respected, and to a degree emulated, the United States, but they became reliable partners because the United States defeated them, helped rebuild them, and protected them from an outside threat. Two of the world's most important democracies have been rather less reliable: India and France. One reason, certainly, is that as relatively secure, nuclear-armed states, they have felt less dependent on the United States. Shared democratic norms and institutions link Britain and the United States, but shared language, ethnicity, and Britain's strategic dependence on the United States are more important. Britain was a liberal democracy before World War II but not a reliable partner -- nor was the United States for Britain. Britain became a reliable partner when it ceased to be a rival and grew dependent on the United States for its survival after 1939.

Let us examine another Clinton administration proposition at the heart of the democratic peace hypothesis. Talbott writes, "The larger and more close-knit the community of nations that choose democratic forms of government, the safer and more prosperous Americans will be, since democracies are demonstrably more likely to maintain their international commitments, less likely to engage in terrorism or wreak environmental damage, and less likely to make war on each other." This statement would seem to confuse American history with a liberal fairy tale. As they waged the Revolutionary War against the most liberal of the great powers, aided by one of the more despotic, the 13 original American states adopted the most democratic constitutions ever seen. The Clinton administration view implies that after the war, in the absence of a strong central authority, the 13 democracies would have lived in peace. We will never know, but it is doubtful whether the democratic peace hypothesis would have passed this intriguing test. The most acute contemporary observers saw ample reason for future conflict among the American states -- commercial rivalries, apportionment of the national debt, attachments to rival European powers, and above all, control of what was then the west.

The United States declared a war of dubious necessity, promoted by liberal democratic forces, against Britain in 1812. Britain was engaged in a struggle with Napoleonic France, not the least democratic of the powers but the greatest threat to peace.

Only 50 years later, and whatever else it may have been, the Civil War was a struggle for power in North America between two democratic states. Had he been alive, Jefferson, the symbol of liberal democracy, may well have backed Virginia and the South. During the Civil War the North came dangerously close to war with Britain when, in 1861, a Northern captain halted the British steamer Trent and imprisoned two Confederate officials on board.