The United States and World Democracy: Overview

Introduction

The United States has long been seen as a model for achieving democratic government. Many countries, ranging from eighteenth-century France to twentieth-century China, have based their revolutions on the American experiment in self-government. This form of government refers to the notion of direct government of a nation by either its people or directly elected representatives whom the people can hold accountable. However, the United States has also been criticized for its active promotion of its own form of government as the best model for other nations. Those who believe that the United States should spread the democratic form of government argue that democratic nations are more willing to work together and less likely to go to war. Critics argue, however, that democracy is not necessarily suited to certain countries’ cultures and traditions and that elections sometimes bring dictators to power.

The connection between the expansion of democracy and US foreign policy has been especially strong since World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson took the nation to war to “make the world safe for democracy.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt reiterated this sentiment in World War II when he spoke of the United States as the arsenal of democracy in the fight against the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan). US foreign-assistance programs in place since the Cold War have included strong support for the development of democratic institutions and the rule of law.

In the early twenty-first century, President George W. Bush faced controversy for making the spread of democracy a key element of his national security policy. Bush argued that the promotion of democratic government in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East would help make the United States safer by removing the factors that promote terrorism. In 2016, after well over a decade of intensive US military involvement in the Middle East, another Republican, Donald Trump, was elected president in part on an "America First" platform of scaling back US involvement abroad. In 2020, Trump agreed to remove US troops from Afghanistan, which the following president, Joe Biden, completed in 2021.

Understanding the Discussion

Arsenal of democracy: The term used by Franklin D. Roosevelt in a 1940 radio address to describe the United States’ role in providing military equipment to democratic Allied nations fighting the Axis powers.

Internationalism: An approach to foreign policy that promotes cooperation among nations for the sake of mutual security. Organizations established to promote these goals have included the League of Nations and the United Nations.

Isolationism: An approach to foreign policy that involves staying out of international organizations and foreign alliances. This approach generally characterized US foreign policy until World War I.

Monroe Doctrine: The principle, announced in 1823 by James Monroe, that the United States would not tolerate further European colonization or interference in the Americas.

Wilsonianism: An internationalist approach to foreign policy based on the principles of Woodrow Wilson, who emphasized morality rather than power politics.

History

For more than two hundred years, the United States’ democratic government has been viewed as an example for other nations to follow. It is generally thought that while the United States has had its share of internal wars and conflicts, these were not fought over land or resources but in the name of freedom, as in the Civil War, an era largely associated with the abolition of slavery. Even if this picture is slightly distorted—for example, with regard to the treatment of the American Indian nations—the United States has long been considered the most stable and prosperous nation. Moreover, it is widely believed that this prosperity can be achieved by every member of American society, regardless of social, ethnic, or religious background. Freedom of speech, freedom to vote, and the freedom of markets have been hailed as the cornerstones of American prosperity.

Direct government support for spreading democracy to other lands was relatively rare until the twentieth century, when the United States entered World War I to make the world “safe for democracy.” Prior to this, in the first years of US independence, future president Thomas Jefferson was one of the most vocal supporters of spreading liberty to other countries. He strongly supported the French Revolution but failed in his efforts to convince President George Washington to ally more closely with republican France. Following his own presidency, Jefferson wrote that he hoped to see representative government spread throughout Europe and Latin America.

The Monroe Doctrine, articulated by President James Monroe in 1823, showed indirect support for South American independence movements by warning European nations not to interfere in the Americas. The South American revolutionaries were establishing independent republics in the former Spanish colonies, often along the US model. The Monroe Doctrine provided Monroe with a way to promote South American independence without getting the United States entangled in a war.

In the 1830s, as Americans began migrating westward in large numbers, many people started speaking of the nation’s “manifest destiny” to expand throughout North America. The columnist John L. O’Sullivan, who popularized the phrase in the 1840s, was one of those who argued that the United States had a mission to spread the principles of democracy and republican government throughout the continent. The vast territories gained in the Mexican-American War, however, also raised the question of whether to allow slavery in those lands.

The concept of manifest destiny gained new strength in the late nineteenth century, as the United States became a world power. Many Americans believed that the country should acquire a colonial empire like those of the European nations, arguing that it would not only benefit the nation economically and promote national defense but also create the opportunity to spread American ideals around the world.

World War I brought the first major effort by the US government to promote democracy around the globe. Woodrow Wilson believed that international relations should be guided by morality rather than power politics and secret deals. In April 1917, when asking Congress to declare war on Germany, he made it clear that this was intended to make the world “safe for democracy.” He argued that it was not about US self-interest but humanitarian principles. Months later, he presented Congress with a system of fourteen points that he believed should govern peace negotiations. These included the right of European ethnic groups, such as those ruled by the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire, to establish their own democratic nation-states.

After World War I, many Americans became disillusioned with efforts to spread democracy internationally. They were tired of war and wanted to focus on domestic problems. Rather than ending centuries-old disputes between the European powers, the Treaty of Versailles had created strong resentment in Germany and the other defeated nations. The Great Depression, which struck the United States in 1929, made the country even less willing to worry about democracy abroad.

This attitude changed in the early 1930s, which saw the rise of ultranationalist authoritarian regimes in Italy, Germany, and Japan. As war approached in the late 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt looked for ways to support the world’s democracies without committing the nation to an unpopular war. Ultimately, he convinced Congress to authorize the sale of war equipment to Allied powers such as Great Britain and France. In a 1940 radio address, Roosevelt called the United States the “arsenal of democracy” whose contributions would help the Western democratic nations stop the Nazi conquest.

After World War II, foreign-assistance programs became a major part of US foreign policy. The Marshall Plan, which provided economic aid to war-torn Europe, was established by the administration of President Harry S. Truman partly as a way to prevent Communism from taking hold there. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy established the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to administer nonmilitary economic assistance. Equally important were US programs for public diplomacy, such as the Voice of America radio network, which broadcast American news and music to Communist countries. In the 1980s, Congress established a federally funded nonprofit corporation known as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to promote global democracy.

The United States and World Democracy Today

Support for democracy, combined with foreign economic assistance and support for human rights, remains a key part of US foreign relations in the early twenty-first century. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration restructured its public diplomacy to highlight common ground with the Muslim world and to reduce the influence of terror groups. On November 6, 2003, Bush highlighted “a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East” as a key part of his foreign policy, arguing that the establishment of democratic institutions in Iraq and Afghanistan would increase the region’s stability and help end terrorism.

Critics argued that Bush, with his Wilsonian approach, was making the same mistakes that Woodrow Wilson did in World War I—namely, being too idealistic about the prospects for democracy worldwide. They pointed to the difficulties in establishing democratic institutions in countries such as Iraq, which had lived under dictatorship for decades. Other difficulties involve transferring American concepts of democracy to countries such as China or Iran, whose cultures differ dramatically from that of the United States. A close relationship apparently exists between economic growth and political democracy, but observers disagree about the effectiveness of foreign-aid programs. Even supporters of foreign aid argue that the United States needs to take a long-term approach to aid in order to achieve lasting results. The legacy of Bush's actions in the Middle East has been decidedly mixed: the US conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the shaky progress of democracy and stability in both those countries, have again called into question the efficacy of democracy promotion abroad.

Bush's successor, Barack Obama, signaled that the United States would use a more diplomatic approach to relations with the Islamic world than the Bush administration had. Obama also expressed a willingness to listen “rather than dictate” and said it was his job “to communicate to the Muslim world that the Americans are not your enemy.” Then, in January 2011, Egyptian citizens revolted and overthrew the country’s longtime dictator, Hosni Mubarak. The revolution was part of a wave of popular pro-democracy uprisings throughout the region that had started the previous month in Tunisia, a phenomenon that came to be known as the Arab Spring. However, despite the initial optimism surrounding these movements, the promises of democracy proved difficult to realize. Egypt's first democratic election in thirty years in 2012 yielded a president, Mohamed Morsi, who took steps to consolidate executive power and introduce a constitution that limited certain freedoms and drew heavily from Islamic law; the next year he was overthrown by the military and replaced with General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, who was himself elected president the following year.

Other Middle Eastern and African nations faced ongoing or increasing instability and violence in the wake of their pro-democracy uprisings. In Syria, protests against repressive leader Bashar al-Assad led to a protracted civil war with casualties in the hundreds of thousands, and millions of refugees worldwide. Concurrent with this was the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a terrorist group that seized large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and also sponsored or encouraged an ongoing rash of terrorist attacks around the world. Further military action, much of it led or supported by the United States, had beat back the territorial gains of ISIS by 2016, but the entire project of democracy promotion in the Middle East seemed to be in tatters. In this environment, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in November 2016. His nativist and protectionist platform emphasized promoting American interests at home and abroad and avoiding conflicts that did not immediately involve threats to US national security; this echoed the old counterpoints to Wilsonian idealism in foreign policy. At the end of his term in 2020, Trump reached an agreement with the militant Taliban to remove US troops from Afghanistan by May 2021. President Joe Biden kept to this agreement following his election, but moved back the timeline, beginning to remove troops in May and finalizing the removal of all troops in September 2021. The removal of troops played a role in the Taliban's success in capturing the capital city of Kabul and overthrowing the democratic Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

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