Advancing democracy – a resilient element of U.S. foreign policy?

Democracy Digest had this really interesting article on the place of democracy promotion in US foreign policy.

Is democracy promotion a core element of America’s foreign policy identity? Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice believes so, but others are not so sure.

U.S. foreign policy is overdue for a rebalancing, one that would curb military deployments in more than 100 countries and instead revive a more multidimensional approach to strengthen democracy and make the world safer, The New York Times recently observed:

James Goldgeier, a professor of international relations at American University, said that a recent roundup of progressive and conservative views on reimagining foreign policy, in the Texas National Security Review, showed potential for a bipartisan consensus. It would be based, he said, on “the growing belief among many progressives and conservatives that the United States should be engaged in fewer military interventions in the world, given the failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Moral responsibility is integrally linked to the national interest, says Tod Lindberg, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a member of the Committee on Conscience of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. That we aren’t very good at preventing humanitarian crises is no reason to ignore the moral aspect of foreign policy.

See full story here.