LITTLE ROCK — An apocryphal story holds that Franklin Roosevelt once said of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, “He’s an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.”
While the history behind the purported statement is murky, the concept it animates isn’t. The world is populated with all sorts of unsavory leaders who sit atop governments of questionable legitimacy. When the free world was standing up against German Nazism or Soviet Communism, it was far better for the United States to have some influence on those governments than to have none at all.
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who became a foreign policy adviser to Ronald Reagan, formulated a Cold War doctrine around this notion. The totalitarian regimes of the Soviet bloc were brutally efficient at maintaining power, while the dictatorships the United States supported tended to ameliorate over time.
There’s even an echo of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine today in the Middle East. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt departed their decades-long dominions with relatively little violence. Moammar Gadhafi is defending his 42-year dictatorship to the last bullet.
What accounts for the difference? American aid and close ties between the U.S. military and the officer corps in Tunisia and Egypt made it possible for the United States to exert a moderating influence and prevent the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes from turning their guns on the protesters. Gadhafi, with weapons from Russia and, pathetically, Western European nations, bombed his own cities.
Gadhafi is a bastard. Ben Ali and Mubarak were our bastards. But why, in 2011, does the United States have any bastards at all?
Up through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a reasonable argument could be made that in foreign affairs the United States often had to choose unpalatably between the lesser of two evils. And as Kirkpatrick correctly surmised in countries as diverse as Chile, South Korea and the Philippines, American influence eventually encouraged those lesser authoritarian evils to evolve into greater democratic goods.
Occasionally, today, that argument can be made to sound barely plausible in places such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. But in a global sense, there’s no threat to freedom and prosperity so great that it requires the United States-a nation founded on the principles of individual liberty and the consent of the governed-to sully itself with tin-pot dictators.
The events of the last month have demonstrated that the choice between stability and liberty is a false one. The real choice now for the United States is whether it will be a defender of bastard regimes in the Middle East and beyond or be an advocate for democratic change.
Rarely in international relations do interests and principles perfectly align. They didn’t during World War II, when the United States had to sidle up to Josef Stalin-another murderous S.O.B.-to partly liberate Europe. They didn’t during the Cold War, when the United States temporized with dictators.
Today, those interests and principles align pretty well. Brave democratic reformers from Benghazi to Beijing who peacefully challenge illegitimate tyrants should know the United States has an interest in seeing them succeed. The tyrants, friend or foe, should know that as a principle the United States will no longer suffer S.O.B.s.
Editorial, Pages 10 on 02/28/2011