The Democratic Imperative: Exporting the American Revolution. - book reviews

AS THIS CENTURY of dictatorship and chaos draws to a close, liberalism and democracy seem to many observers to be on the march. In much of Asia, the Muslim world, and Africa, autocracy remains securely in the saddle, it is true. In the Spanish-speaking world, -however, many military dictatorships .have given way to civilian regimes. The Soviet Union is experimenting with limited liberalization, and is encouraging similar reforms in its satellites. Students in China are testing their Communist government's toleration of increased criticism. The relationship among these diverse trends, if any, and their significance for American foreign policy would make a timely subject for a carefully researched and sober book.

The Democratic Imperative.- Exporting the American Revolution is not that book. Light on analysis and heavy on assertion, this tract by a former Wall Street Journal columnist is more in the nature of a Fourth of July oration. According to Fossedal, America has sinned in neglecting its mission as the messiah of international democracy; but it is not too late for the makers of American foreign policy to redeem themselves and save the world.

One might object that the United States has done more than most great powers to promote the rule of law and popular government. After all, the United States reconstructed Germany and Japan in its image after a war that could have justified a Carthaginian peace. Fossedal is not satisfied. He believes that the U.S. could have "saved" Iran from the mullahs in 1978, and approvingly quotes an Iran expert who asserts that "with U.S. backing, members of the National Front, the military, and the clergy could have been induced to agree to a transition to democracy, based on a restoration of the constitution of 1906."

Fossedal-whose bibliography includes few original sources, and none in languages other than English-finds similar missed opportunities in other regions of the world. He criticizes the "lazy assumption" of the Eisenhower Administration that there was little it could have done to prevent the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. But Eisenhower is not the only incompetent. "For all his anti-Communist rhetoric, Ronald Reagan lost Poland." Reagan is also blamed for "losing" Nigeria to a military coup in 1984. No doubt Hoover and Roosevelt could have prevented the accession of Adolf Hitler, as well. Like many leftists, the Neoconservative Fossedal assumes American omnipotence. If liberty or democracy suffer anywhere in the world, it is because of American laziness, or American stupidity.

How exactly does Fossedal define the "democracy" he would have the United States make its chief export? The only definition he offers-which comes in a footnote at the end of chapter two-is apparently an afterthought: "For the purposes of this book, where an advance of economic or civil freedom occurs, even without the formation of a representative body, it will be equated with an advance of 'democracy' . . . For one thing, it is easier than saying 'freedoms that tend to go hand in hand with democracy.'" It is undeniably easier to call several different things by one name, rather than to distinguish them carefully. Succinct himself-he refers at one point to the rights of man, "such as ftee speech, a fair trial to those accused of serious crimes, and so on"-Fossedal makes short work of rival political philosophers. He allots only a few sentences to Plato, Rousseau, and Madison, spending far more time in wrestling with the thought of George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Elliott Abrams.

That wrestling comes in chapter two, "Skepticism," in which Fossedal attempts to pre-emptively refute objections to the crusade he calls for in subsequent chapters. As this suggests, The Democratic Imperative is written in reverse order. First come objections to the proposal, then a discussion of the means for implementing the proposal-economic sanctions, propaganda, U.S. bankrolling of insurgent armies around the globe. The proposal itself is stated explicitly only in the book's final chapter"A Democratic Century." Fossedal calls for "a higher purpose than mere Republican anti-Communism or Democratic antifascism" in American foreign policy. "That higher purpose is a diplomacy of democracy, for democracy, by democracy: a diplomacy for securing the rights of man."

What exactly the rights of man "and so on" have to do with American nati onal-security interests, Fossedal attempts to make clear in the next section, entitled, in high-school valedictory fashion, "A Flame Eternal": "Either America will help secure the rights of man for all, everywhere, or America itself, as a free and democratic state, will perish." Somehow, though, the United States has managed to survive as a reasonably free and democratic state for two centuries in which most of the world has been ruled by vicious autocracies, very few of which have had either the inclination or the means to threaten America.