Sometimes the news-cycle fates align nicely to highlight a question deserving of more discussion. Today, that question was what role democracy promotion should play in the Obama administration's foreign policy and how the U.S. should interact with odious but strategically useful authoritarian regimes. Full Story »
Posted by Kaizar Campwala
The authors spotlight a question that has haunted us for the better part of a hundred years: "To what extent should we interact with nations that, with respect to our raison de etre (government of the people, by the people, for the people--democracy), are our enemies. The record is far from clear. Investment and cooperation with Hitler's Germany during the early 1930s enabled him, made Nazi aggression possible, and led to WWII. Yet our more nuanced approach with respect to the Soviet Union, especially the citizen diplomacy of the 1980s coupled with a determined nuclear defense effort, ended that regime peacefully. As this article points out, only one thing is clear: we must give this central foreign policy question sufficient attention and our best efforts.
