Angry Planet - How the West has aided democracy’s decline

Episode Date: February 15, 2017

According to Presidents John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, the United States is a shining “city upon a hill." It’s a beacon of democracy in a dark world full of cruel dictators and vicious despots. But history shows the United States has also been willing to side with despots in the name of stability. This week on War College, we talk to Brian Klaas, a Oxford University graduate and expert on political violence, about his new book – The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy. According to Klaas, powerful countries should stop forcing democracy down the throats of their less stable counterparts and avoid settling for despots to achieve stability. He makes the case for co-opting the rank-and-file of old regimes into new ones to prevent state collapse, and for using measured military force and foreign aid money to coax tyrants out of power. Plus, he explores “counterfeit democracies,” and a new city upon a hill in West Africa: The Gambia.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. I'm not advocating an ideal solution just about ever. I'm advocating the least bad option. On this week's War College, the tricky business of regime.

change, so-called counterfeit democracies, and reviewing the United States track record and siding with dictators. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. With us today is Brian Klaus, an Oxford University graduate, an expert on political violence, and a fellow at the London School of Economics.

He's worked in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and even consulted on U.S. political campaigns. He's the author of the forthcoming book, The Despots Accomplice, How the West is Aiding and Abedding the Decline of Democracy. Brian, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me on the podcast. So that's a weighty title. Can you break it down for us? Can you give us the thesis?

Sure. So democracy around the globe has been declining ever since 2006, and that means that we may have already hit the high watermark of democracy, or as I call it, peak democracy. And even though the real villains in this battle are obviously despots, dictators, and what I call counterfeit Democrats, people who pretend to be democratic but are not, I also point the finger back at the West itself and say that there is an enabling factor of Western foreign policy that makes it easier for those groups to get into retain and perpetuate their own power. And so this is a critical assessment of how Western

foreign policy is undermining democracy globally and how we can do better. 2006, why was that the pivot point? Well, it's not that there was some sharp pivot point in 2006. There was a clear and advancing improvement of democracy since the Cold War, and that was a major surge, particularly in Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. And in 2006, a few things happened. One is that the consensus with a unipolar world where the West is winning and has beaten the Soviet Union and the Cold War.

that factor has disintegrated into a multipolar world. And there's rising emerging markets. There's also the resurgence of both China and Russia. And you combine that fact with the Iraq War, which has had a seriously damaging effect on democracy globally, particularly because it has provided despots with plausible deniability when they purge pro-democracy activists and pro-democracy NGOs from their country by being able to say, look, these are just a Trojan horse for Western interventionism.

And so linking the Iraq war and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Libya to democracy has undermined the concept of Western interventionism more generally. I also think that there has been a tipping point in the sense that Russia has become much more aggressive on the global stage. I talk about that in the chapter, The Bear and the Dragon, outlining how China's passive authoritarianism and Russia's aggressive and virulent authoritarianism is something that is creating the conditions for authoritarian rule around the world. So there's a series of factors that are all happening at the same time. And unfortunately, I think

the election of Donald Trump, a person who does not care very much about human rights and democracy, at least in his public statements, is only likely to accelerate this trend and make things worse before they get any better. I have so many questions just off that one answer. The first I think would be, and I think this is kind of in the middle of your book, going back to the Iraq war, I want to explore that a little bit. Do you think that democracy can be spread at the end of a gun? I don't. I believe that democracy can be enforced at the end of a gun. And what I mean by that is I don't think that democracy gets built by dropping bombs. But I do think that you can enforce election results with military force. And this is something where it recently has happened in the

Gambia. I also talk about the Gambia and the, and the, we, recent developments there in a different chapter called Golden Handcups, but for the moment, let's think about what happened both in Cote d'Ivoire and in the Gambia more recently. There was an election result that was clearly internationally recognized that showed the incumbent lost, and yet the incumbent refused to step down. And I think at that point, it is totally legitimate to use military force to enforce the will of the people and to threaten military action if a clear election result is not respected. Now, that is totally different from an invasion aimed at a war.

regime change before the people have a say. And I think that even though it's a worthy and very, you know, plausible benefit to democracy to imagine that we could try to force countries to become democratic, it generally doesn't work. And so I argue that not only is it counterproductive because it doesn't work, but also it's really damaging because it takes away from legitimate non-military interventions for democracy and allows despots to hide behind this idea that everything the West does in a country pushing for democracy is just the first step in imminent invasion. And that has been used by people like Vladimir Putin to shut down NGOs that are pushing for democracy saying, this is just a Trojan horse. And that's why I think ultimately military

intervention is not the right way to go. And one of the key chapters in the book says, basically, no more democracy wars. Stop trying to package interventions as these crusades for democracy. Can you tell us a little bit about the military force that is enforcing democracy there? I think that's interesting, and I think it's important to note its makeup and who's involved. Sure. So I think that the Gambia is actually one of the gold standards of how I'd like to see this done, because it wasn't a Western force that spearheaded this intervention or the threat of the intervention. In 2010 in Cote d'Ivoire, I looked at that example, and I talk about that considerably in the book, and it was mainly French-led. So there was

this sort of, it reeked of neocolonialism. Now, in the Gambia, after Yongevier, Aya Jemai announced that he was accepting the results of the election and was willing to step down, he quickly reversed tack when it became clear that his assets might be confiscated and he might face jail time. And so a group of nations led by those military powers like Togo and Mali and Nigeria and Senegal in the neighborhood decided to act. And they said, look, we're giving you an ultimatum. You accepted the results. It's time to go. And if you don't leave, we will intervene.

Now, the question is how scalable this is to countries that are larger than the Gambia. The Gambia is a tiny sliver within Senegal. And so, you know, to have military intervention be a credible threat might not work as well in Nigeria as it does in the Gambia. But nonetheless, this was a successful outcome to a country that looked like it was about to have another civil war. It feels as if the West no longer sees democracy as essential. while in other places such as Africa, like that we're talking about, it feels as if it's on the rise.

Do you think that's true? And do you think that, I mean, obviously you do based on your book. But how do you think the West has kind of sold out democratic values in the rest of the world? I absolutely think that. I think that there is a new consensus that I think is extremely dangerous and short-sighted that the dictatorial devil we know is superior to the democratic devil we don't know. And I had this conversation in various places around the world where I was doing research, speaking to diplomats and Western foreign policy experts who were saying things like in Belarus, a place that is known often as the last dictatorship in Europe, they were saying, this is not Ukraine and this cannot become Ukraine. And what they meant by that was not that Belarus is a shining example or a beacon of democracy. It's certainly none of those things.

but they decided that they didn't have the stomach to push for a democratic transition and all the potential risks that presents, and instead they were just going to accept stability under a dictator. And the problem that I have with that is one of the most influential maps I've ever seen was a political risk map drawn in 2010 by a consulting firm of the Middle East. And the countries that were green, the ones that were supposed to be the safe, stable countries, were listed as Egypt, Syria, Jordan, of course, and Tunisia. Now, three of those four collapsed, you know, months after that map was drawn. And so the point I try to make in the book is that a long-term commitment to democracy creates genuine stability, whereas this short-term idea that the dictatorial devil we know is better than the democratic devil we don't, just trades the mirage of

stability for what is very likely to be a catastrophic collapse as soon as the authoritarian regime breaks apart. And that's what we see across the world is that eventually people simply do not accept being ruled by despots and strongmen. And when they don't, things break apart very, very badly. At least in democracy, there's a safety valve for that sort of criticism and that dissent that provides people a legitimate pathway to challenge power without torpedoing the entire country. To your point about sub-Saharan Africa, I think there is more enthusiasm for democracy across the continent, and it's one of the few bright spots. But I also think that the bar has been set so low for what constitutes democracy in Africa, that there's a real risk of not just

having something like the middle income trap, but having a middle democracy trap. And I call this counterfeit democracy, where people get to this bare minimum standard of holding sham elections and then package it as democracy. And it's a disservice not only to the people, but also to the concept of democracy, because it basically causes people to believe that what they have is democracy when in fact they have a caricature or a cookie cutter version of it. Right. I believe in the book you tell the story, and forgive me, I've forgotten the country where they're talking about the values of their country and they ask, somebody asks them, well, what are the values? And the gentleman says, give me a moment. I need to go back to my car to look at the list. Yeah, that's right. So I was interviewing a head of a political party in Madagascar, and he said, you know, unlike the other parties were a party of values. And I said, okay, which values? And he got this deer in the headlights panicked look and said, I forgot the values in the car. Somebody got the values for the American. And it was this one of these small moments that was an insight into how many countries around the world are obsessed not with democracy, but with the illusion of democracy. And the reason they're obsessed with it is because of the West. The West requires a certain level of base democratization in order to get things like international legitimacy, foreign aid to join the Club of Nations, so to speak.

And the problem is that the benchmark for what clears that very low bar is incentivizing what I call, as I said, counterfeit democracy. So, for example, when I was an election observer in Madagascar, I saw a deeply flawed election. There was no census that had been done for over two decades, right? So the voter rolls was horribly out of date, which effectively meant that millions of people weren't able to vote. And yet the observers almost fell over each other, trying to be the fastest one to declare the election free and fair, because they wanted to be able to redistribute aid that they had already earmarked, and that was just sitting in a bank account being useless. And it was a lot easier to trade with Madagascar, a lot easier to have relations with Madagascar,

if you could call it a democracy. But the problem is going into the next elections, which happened to be in 2018 in Madagascar, why would they ever change tack? They rigged the election, they had a seriously flawed process, and they got away with it. And so my attitude is that if the West sets the bar much higher and says, look, we're going to only call things democracy that really fit the label, then countries in the developing world will have much more incentive to go beyond just this sort of very, very low benchmark. And that requires a serious conversation in Western foreign policy circles for how to encourage bad elections to become better while still saying they're not democratic.

So, for example, I advocate not using the words free and fair versus not free and fair because it's a binary sort of light switch style approach to democracy, but instead maybe something like a 1 to 10 scale, where observers can say, look, this was a 5. This was not a good election. But it's better than last time, which was a 3. so we're going to continue giving aid. But you're not going to get aid next time unless you hit six or seven or eight, right? And so it's a sliding scale that allows for rewards for improvement

rather than just this false dichotomy between good election, bad election. And the West here is using economic policy and aid money as the carrot and the withdrawal of it as the stick rather than military intervention. That's right. And I think that's appropriate because most countries around the world they're not realistically going to face the risk of military intervention, right? Like, it's something that you hate to break to the people of Madagascar, but there's not really plans to have any sort of interest in the country whatsoever,

let alone in military terms. So what the leaders really respond to is foreign aid. And in a country like that, 40% of the government budget is foreign aid. So it's a huge amount of leverage they have over the country's ability to basically stay intact because the loss of 40% of the budget can be. catastrophic, not just in social terms, but also in political terms. Another thing I'm wondering is we're kind of presenting this as a newish problem, but it feels as if American foreign policy during the Cold War and up till now has been

about, and please correct me if I'm wrong or talking out of turn, promoting strong men in the name of stability, especially in places like Latin America. So what's different now? Absolutely. So one of the chapters in the book called Spooking Democracy is about how, how Western foreign policy used to be much more direct and deliberate in undermining democratic regimes as long as they were on the West's side in the Cold War, right? And actually, the interesting thing about this was that the worst thing in the eyes of Western governments

was a democratically elected pro-Soviet regime because they knew as a democratically elected regime, they could sort of grab the mantle of legitimacy and present themselves as this legitimate counterpart to the West, right? So that actually meant that actions against, again, democratically elected regimes in Iran, in Chile, with Pinochet being installed in the place of Salvador Allende, and also Patrice Lumumba being overthrown in the Congo. All of these actions were aimed at ensuring that no democratic pro-Soviet state would exist. Now, what has changed is that there's a lot less direct jockeying for ideological stance. So the West is post-Cold War more interested in promoting democracy for the sake of democracy.

But as I argue in the book, the real problem is that when other priorities collide with democracy promotion, so mostly that means security or economic gains, then democracy very quickly falls by the wayside. And this is why you've made the sort of devil's bargain with Saudi Arabia in the West and with many other countries like that. So there is a subtle shift, but an important one in a sense that, Democracy genuinely is a goal in a way that it wasn't really during the Cold War. But the approach that's being used is, in my view, myopic. And so the approach that I advocate for is a foreign policy that has a consistent and principled approach to democracy over the long term because it pays dividends both in security terms and in economic growth because democratic trading partners are much more lucrative markets for the West.

Unfortunately, though, I think that the West's most likely attack is going to be to be, towards the Chinese style of dealing with countries in this vortex of democracy and authoritarianism. And what I mean by that is that Donald Trump sees the world so transactionally as what does this deal mean in dollars and cents now, as opposed to thinking long term, that he's probably going to have a foreign policy that mimics China where they don't really care if you're a democracy or an authoritarian country so long as you can do business with them. And that, to me, is the number one driver of this acceleration of the decline of democracy globally that we're likely to see in the coming four years. Why do you think that we're so short-sighted? Why can't we play the long game?

This is one of the ironies of democracy forces us to be. Something that's really, you know, unfortunate about democracy is that it does not reward people who think long-term because election cycles mean that politicians that think about what will it look like in three or four years when I'm up for re-election. And they don't think. think about what will it look like in 10 or 20 or 30 years. And sometimes it's the worst thing for them to think about what will it look like in five years because they figure, I'll do all the work, all make all the hard decisions, and my successor will get all the credit, right? So democracy builds in short-term thinking. And it's one of the things that's a real weakness of

democratic systems is that it provides also knee-jerk reactions to global events. So public opinion can shift extremely rapidly in democracies and it can force leaders to pursue strategies that are not in the long-term interests of their citizens. That's actually something that authoritarianism has over democracies. Authoritarian rule has a much easier time of setting out long-term planning and long-term priorities. Now, overall, I think that the tradeoffs that come with that territory and authoritarianism are so much worse that it doesn't make it a better or more alluring system. But I do think that in terms of long-term planning, it's one of the key assets that has allowed some authoritarian regimes to do well. So the key is to create an intellectual consensus that says this is really a core value of Western foreign policy.

Unfortunately, I think now more than ever, this is at least in the short term, a pipe dream, because it is so clear that partisanship is overriding principle in foreign policy determinations, particularly with the recent swing in how Republicans view Vladimir Putin, that there is really a very weak consensus on how important these goals are for Western governments. And I think the more we go down this road of pragmatic transactional diplomacy, the more we're going to realize that the true triumphs in sort of think about 20th century history are things that shed that view of diplomacy. So like the Marshall Plan, rebuilding Europe, was extremely costly in the short term.

But it was the best investment the West has probably ever made or the United States has ever made on the global stage. And it requires a type of thinking that doesn't conform to what is popular in this election cycle. And that's where you need real leaders to step up to the plate and make difficult decisions, but it is harder to do in a democratic state. Speaking of those kinds of things, do you think the Arab Spring was a missed opportunity for the West? I do think so. I think that the Arab Spring is one thing that's really hurt democracy globally since 2011, primarily because many people look at it as a catastrophic failure that induced far more

volatility than democracy and that has provided greater credence to the idea that we shouldn't bother promoting democracy the risks are too great right i think that's an absolute mistaken read of what the arab spring was to me the arab spring is a clear sign that authoritarianism eventually breaks apart so the solution that we should just have more authoritarian governments is a backwards reading of it it's like thinking about syria okay we just need assad to be in power or we need Assad 2.0 and everything will be okay. It's like, no, all that is doing is kicking the can down the road and replicating the system that broke apart violently in the first place. So that's another aspect of short-term thinking that I think has really come out of the Arab Spring. But the other aspect of it is that nobody declared Japan a failure when it didn't become a thriving democracy by 1950, right, five years after World War II. And yet very quickly, five years after the Arab Spring are now coming to, you know, to six years after the Arab Spring, everything is clearly seen as a failure. But what it did that's below the surface that people have not seen is that some people got

a taste for democracy in the Middle East. And maybe over the long term, there will be more of an attitude that, look, we actually do want some political freedoms. We just want them to come with economic and political stability. And I think that the more that this false dichotomy is created in the intellectual argument around democracy, the more dangerous that becomes. because as long as people believe democracy equals instability, the fewer people will push for it. And I think that there are risks to democracy. I'm not trying to downplay the fact that

transitions can be brutal and volatile and violent. But they also produce far better long-term outcomes. So to my mind, some of that risk is worth stomacking for the long-term payoffs it provides. How do you promote that stability during a democratic transition? Do you think, like we said, the Gambia and foreign aid money is a good example? Yeah, so I have a chapter in the book that deals with this question, and it's called the unthinkable olive branch. And counterintuitively, what I argue is that one of the key aspects of democratic transitions that works is to incorporate as much of the old regime as is feasibly possible into the new regime. Now, let me explain what I mean by this, because I think it's a controversial statement. In 2003, the first order and the second order of the

coalition provisional authority in Iraq, which was led obviously by the West, was to send hundreds of thousands of men with guns home without a paycheck. And their second order was to disband anybody who was affiliated with the bath regime, which effectively purged not only the politicians, but also many bureaucrats and people in civil society. So it meant that you had this lack of continuity that was so bad that the people with guns and no money had a reason to torpedo the new order and all the powerful people who knew how to run the government also were left out in the cold and had no reason to buy into the new democratic transition. This also happened in Libya after Gaddafi fell. There was a thing called the political isolation law and the purge really

damaged the transition and created state collapse. Now in Tunisia, one of the places where I did field work in 2013 while this law was being debated, they talked about a purge and ultimately step back from it. And the most amazing person I think I've met in my travels is this man, Saeed Fijani, who was tortured by the Tunisian regime, Ben Ali's regime. And then when he, after he fled into exile and then returned more than two decades later to Tunisia, he's the guy who single-handedly torpedoed the law that would have banned his former torturers from entering public office. And the thing that was really prescient about what he did was he realized correctly that it was far more effective to give those people reason to participate in the system

and then defeat them through legitimate channels than it was to make them martyrs. And so one of the people who was allowed to participate was a man named Kamal Mourjan, who I interviewed and talked about a little bit in the book, who was formerly a Minister of Foreign Affairs for Ben Ali's regime. And he ran for president, he wasn't banned, and he got just over 1% of the vote. And as I say in the book, you know, nothing cuts somebody down to size, like realizing that 99% of the country does not want you back in office.

And that was so much more effective than it would have been to ban him, even though that's a very reasonable and understandable impulse for a country that's undergoing a transition away from a brutal regime. But I say that this is one of those pragmatic calculations that new transitions need to face and think about carefully is do we throw everything out the window and try to start from scratch with all the risks that presents, or do we try to make sure that we make sure that we co-opt the old institutions, the old stability into a way that's a democratic framework. And I think that model is much more effective for most transitions. But I also think that, you know,

it is preferable whenever possible to defeat ideas like authoritarian rule democratically than to ban them. Because banned movements get forced underground. They don't go away. And they don't get rejected by the populace in a very visible way. And so they have this sort of staying power where they They go underground and they become, you know, under the surface, but they're still very much prevalent. They're still on people's minds. And they can then research. And I think that the much more effective way is to have constant open debate that deals with those unpopular viewpoints and actually shows how many people reject them in an open way and in a competitive way that allows viewpoints to sort of clash in a democratic space. It's preferable to them metastasizing into an insurgency of some kind.

Well, obviously an insurgency is the worst possible outcome for a transition. But I think that there are some examples where, for example, Islamic radicalism and Islamic terrorism, it's very unlikely that you're going to incorporate those elements into the regime, right? So you have to have clear defining lines of what you're able to reincorporate and what you're not. But you can basically extend an olive branch to groups that used to participate in something that was abhorrent, right, an authoritarian regime, and say, look, if you play by the nubrowery, new rules and you commit to the values of the Constitution and you commit to the democratic process, we will allow you to become part of this new regime. And I think that's important because in many

of the places where I've done field research, a lot of the people I talked to did not exactly buy in to the old order. It's just that it was the only thing that existed, right? And you think about all the students in America who are political science students and they want to get jobs in government or in NGOs or in think tanks. Well, if they lived in Tunisia or they lived in Thailand, now, they would have to get a job towing the party line, right? And so I think a lot of those people are not true believers, and that's why it's important during a transition to differentiate between the people who are true believers and who could not possibly reform and the people who participated in an old system, but did so begrudgingly and are very willing and eager to be

co-opted into a new democracy. That sounds like that's a difficult task to take on, depending on how entrenched the ideology is, though, to sort those people. people out during a transition? Absolutely. I mean, this is, you know, this debate about democratization and Western foreign policy with it is extremely complicated, and it's not just that it's extremely complicated. It's also morally difficult, right? You're making decisions that potentially reward people who have done terrible, terrible things. And so throughout the book, I'm very upfront with the fact that I'm not advocating an ideal solution just about ever. I'm advocating the least bad option. And that's very often how foreign policy works. And it's one of the things that I think

as people put themselves in the shoes of Western governments, they will understand some of the misguided decisions that have been made because there are several very bad options. And Syria, I think, illustrates this better than just about anything, right? That Obama was not somebody who is willingly helping Assad all along. He was not somebody who was willingly letting Russia dictate terms, but he had very, very difficult choices. And many people will criticize what he did, and I think those are fair criticisms. But it's just to say that there wasn't some obvious silver bullet. And that's very, very commonly the case in democratic transitions, not just from the outside, but also from the inside, with how you deal with these people that have done terrible things, or how you deal with

possible insurgencies, or how you deal with the victims of the old regime feeling legitimately and very understandably, betrayed by a government that's not willing to just throw everyone in jail, right? And that's why these are not just pragmatic calculations, but also morally difficult ones. What do you think about what's going on in Columbia right now, speaking to that? Sure. So I wrote an article about this, and I think that the pragmatism should win out here. I think that ultimately my viewpoint on this is that a peace deal that is overly favorable to people who have done terrible things is better than creating more victims. And I think that there is a process by which you can ensure that they don't get a sweetheart deal,

that perpetrators of extreme violence do not get some sort of special treatment, while simultaneously bringing them back to the table and making the insurgency go away. And I think, you know, for a lot of people who are victims, there's a sharp dividing line. Some of them could never forgive their perpetrators and will never accept anything short of everyone in FARC going to jail. And I think others will say, you know, I have suffered so much that the most important thing of our politics is to ensure that nobody else suffers like me. And that shows you the dividing line in a lot of the transitional justice debates is do you try to prioritize stability and the survival of democracy long term? Or do you try to ensure that there's some sort of punitive justice? My dividing line comes down on the idea that you make a pragmatic calculation insofar as that calculation will,

lead to a long-term possibility of democracy taking root. Because if it's just something that's going to create state collapse again, then that doesn't help anyone, right? But if it is something where Colombia can go into a long-term peace plan and long-term stability, then I think that that is worth much more than some people being upset, understandably, and justifiably, about a possibly too light of a deal on people who perpetrated terrible crimes. Brian Klaus, thank you so much for joining us on War Call.

The book is The Despids Accomplice, How the West is Aiding and Abedding the Decline of Democracy. Thanks for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heedek. Matthew Galt hosts the show and Wrangles the Guest. It's produced by me, Bethel-Habte. If you want to keep War College going, review us in iTunes, please. Thanks to Three-Pito, who called our drum music Goofy, but gave us a decent reading. We're not changing the music. Thanks for listening.