Leslie H. Gelb:

PROFESSORS TUCKER and Hendrickson so devastate the Bush Doctrine of democratizing and bringing freedom to the world as to raise questions about whether the administration actually believes its own rhetoric.

First of all, the real policymakers in the administration come down to six people, and while President Bush might well believe his new doctrine, he has no track record on the subject before entering the White House. Nor did he say much on this subject broadly during his first term. Vice President Cheney, on the other hand, is a hard-headed conservative pragmatist whose history would suggest great skepticism about policies designed to transform the world. Secretary of State Rice spent most of the Clinton years calling that administration dangerously naive for fomenting notions like human rights and democracy. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld delights in debating doctrines, not advancing them. Stephen Hadley, the national security advisor and consummate policy lawyer, never met a generalization, let alone a high-falutin' idea, he liked. Karl Rove, the key White House political strategist, probably doesn't object to promoting democracy abroad as long as it helps Mr. Bush and hurts the Democrats at home. (And who could be surprised to find such noble motives in American politics?) One other, now departed, was present in the Pentagon at the creation of the democracy doctrine-Paul Wolfowitz, who almost certainly believed it then.

Before Mr. Wolfowitz and many other top officials left the administration, they wedged hordes of neoconservative acolytes into the bureaucracy. They remain true believers. As for the throngs of career underlings throughout the government, they generally convey careful reserve, bordering on insouciance, about the doctrine.

So, we can say with confidence that at least one senior member of the administration is devoted to the doctrine, namely, Mr. Bush himself. His adherence to his own doctrine is no trivial matter. It means that he will insist on repeating it and that the secretary of state will join in regularly. The doctrine will not be discarded as was the anti-nation-building doctrine.

Nor, it seems, will it be implemented. The administration did publicly twist President Mubarak's arm to hold free elections for Egypt's presidency. Much to everyone's surprise, he emerged victorious. Now Egypt is freer and more democratic, and we can turn our gaze elsewhere. But the administration doesn't appear to be cashing in its chips to democratize Saudi Arabia. Karen Hughes, the State Department's anti-anti-America chief, visited there to offer Saudi women help in being free, but those who attended the meeting said they were already free.

About the only place where the administration seems to be applying the doctrine is Iraq, and there only barely. We plow ahead, as we should, promoting the constitution and elections. But the realistic aim is now much more to avoid a civil war than to transform the country into a free-market democratic paradise.

None of this is to suggest that I would remove democracy and freedom promotion from their pride of place in U.S. foreign policy. These principles deserve that place. And here, perhaps, I part company with the authors. They come close to suggesting that the only way to promote these ideals is by example, by being a city on a hill at home. In other places, they hint at advancing democracy and freedom, but doing it without war. They don't say how.

I suspect they and I would agree on how, and I wish they had added something to their fine piece that covered the issue. The United States has in its power the skills to promote our ideals by helping other societies build the necessary institutions and attitudes. I mean the obvious things like a free press, the rule of law (first commercial, then civil), NGOs and labor unions-that is, civil society. And we should never shrink from standing up for human rights, women's rights and minority rights, sometimes publicly where it will help, always privately. We know how to do these things; we've done them successfully. And most certainly to me, the United States must use military force or provide arms and other support to prevent and stop genocide, quite apart from promoting democracy and freedom.

All of Mr. Bush's reasons for moving other nations toward democracy and freedom are the right reasons. Truly democratic societies would be generally better for their peoples and safer for the world. But wherever these good ideals have taken root, it has taken time-along with a steady and consistent effort by the United States. We cannot escape the laws of history and the patterns of economic and political development simply by rhetorical lurches or military victories. We cannot realistically say, "here, we got rid of your dictator, now make yourselves into a democracy", or "here, hold an election or have a constitution and get on with it." That is not policy, it is folly!

Messrs. Tucker and Hendrickson have stripped away the historical, ideological and political claptrap about the Bush Doctrine of democracy and freedom. Now, it seems to me, the think tank and university warriors should move on and tackle the harder job-actually helping to figure out how the United States can use its power and influence in individual countries to square our good ideals with their different ways.

Leslie H. Gelb is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Daniel Pipes:

THE DEBATE over promoting democracy is hardly a new one for Americans; indeed, the locus classicus for the ambitious argument is Joshua Muravchik's 1991 study, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny, where he argues for democratization as the central theme of U.S. foreign policy. "The American president", he wrote, "should see himself not merely as custodian of the country, but as the leader of the democratic movement." This is full-bodied idealism, implying American exceptionalism and its special calling.

In contrast, the realist approach argues, along with David C. Hendrickson and Robert W. Tucker, that promoting democracy (or anything else) is neither practical nor desirable. It tends to see the United States as a more ordinary country with more limited goals. American realists share the same assumptions about foreign policy as realists everywhere else around the globe. American idealists, in contrast, point to America's unique role in the world, and therefore bear the burden of justifying their views.

A three-fold assumption undergirds the suggestion to "export democracy." First, that democracy in some fashion belongs to Americans, in the sense that virtually every country that democratizes has drawn on the American experience. Second, that democracy can indeed be exported. And finally, that non-Americans, given a choice, want democracy.

The historical record supports these three contentions, argue Muravchik and others. Democracy has been an American trait for over 200 years. Washington has indeed exported this form of government, sometimes at the point of a bayonet. And democracy's spread from its North Atlantic strongholds to eastern Europe, Latin America and much of East Asia proves its attractiveness.

Personally, I am somewhere between idealism and realism, sometimes encouraging the United States in its unique career of exporting social and political institutions (think Japan) and at other times fearful that such efforts will overextend the American reach and end badly (what I expect in Iraq). I encourage the vision of spreading American-style democracy even as I worry that the circumstances are not propitious (whereas the Japanese had been defeated in war, war liberated the Iraqis).

Turning to George W. Bush's policies, the focus of the Hendrickson and Tucker article, I should begin with two observations: The Middle East will define his presidency, and with regard to each of the region's major issues (terrorism, radical Islam, Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict and perhaps yet Iran), he has proven himself to be a radical innovator prone to reject decades-old, bipartisan policies, tossing them aside with Žlan and even disdain.

I admire the spirit but worry about the practicalities. The vision of a free and prosperous Middle East is incontrovertible, but a characteristic American impatience wants it all done yesterday. Experience shows that full democracy requires decades of preparation, rehearsals and mistakes (look at the troubled careers of Russia and Mexico).

In all recent Middle Eastern moves toward democracy-such as elections in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt-a too-quick removal of tyranny threatens to create conditions for Islamist ideologues to take power and enduringly install their totalitarian ideology. Islamists have what it takes to win elections: the talent to develop a compelling ideology, the energy to found parties, the devotion to win supporters, the money to spend on electoral campaigns, the honesty to appeal to voters and the will to intimidate rivals.

The Middle East currently suffers from a severe case of totalitarian temptation, so democracy could well bring even worse regimes than the unelected tyrants of old. Enthusiasm for the Cedar Revolution has already quickly tempered in Washington after Hizballah did well at the polls and joined a new government in Lebanon. A pro-Iranian Islamist became prime minister of Iraq, leading to the ironic situation noted by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, that, after fighting hard to keep Iran out of Iraq, "we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason."

As for the "pothole theory of democracy"-the idea that the imperatives of governance will absorb the attention of extremists and reduce them to moderation-it has never worked. Mussolini made the trains run on time, the Soviets cleared the snow efficiently, and the Islamists can likewise do well practically, even as they nurse their ambitions.

Voting should not start the democratization process, as has been the case in the Middle East of late, but culminate it. For democracy to take root means leaving behind the bad habits of tyrannical rule and replacing them with the benign ways of civil society. This includes such difficult steps as creating voluntary institutions (political parties, lobby groups and so on), entrenching the rule of law, establishing freedom of speech, protecting minority rights, securing private property and developing the notion of a loyal opposition.

For Iraq, this tempered approach implies lowering expectations, for building democracy will likely require decades, especially because Iraqis do not accept American guidance. And so, as I have argued since early 2003, we should have accepted a democratically minded strongman. The Iraqi population has unquestionably benefited from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but remaking Iraq in the American image is the wrong standard by which to judge the coalition venture there. From the U.S. point of view, the immediate goal in Iraq is a regime that does not endanger America. Protecting themselves, not creating a better Iraq, is why taxpayers spend and soldiers fight.

The president was overly harsh in arguing, as he did in November 2003, that sixty years of "excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe." The old approach did have faults, creating problems that worsened over time, but it must not be summarily thrown out. Stability does have some virtues.

A new foreign policy calling for the gradual democratization of the region requires programmatic details, financial support and consistent execution if it is to be successful. Americans, in brief, need to learn to be patient and modest idealists.

Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures: Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics (2003). He is also a member of the Advisory Council of The National Interest.

Robert W. Merry:

DEEP IN "The Freedom Crusade", Messrs. Hendrickson and Tucker employ a word that captures, more than any other in their penetrating essay, the essential foolishness of the George W. Bush foreign policy. It emerges within a discussion of what they call "the general lesson"-that no nation can seek to delegitimize regimes and make their demise a declared policy objective while at the same time expecting to reach agreements with those regimes on vital issues. We may need to cooperate with states whose civic structures we despise in order to minimize external threats.

Of course, they aver, anyone is free to imagine a world in which all regimes are free and democratic, and conflict among peoples ceases to generate violence. They add: "On this side of utopia, however, security arrangements . . . need to be made with existing regimes."

And there it was: utopia. The word popped off the page like the smart crack of a whip. We have a president whose view of the world is distinctly utopian. As Hendrickson and Tucker point out, not even Woodrow Wilson was willing to expand his dreamy desires to salve the hurts and wounds of humanity into a hegemonic vision of the kind that drives this president. That's because not even Woodrow Wilson was willing to venture so boldly beyond this side of utopia.

Where, we might ask, did Bush get this utopian vision? After all, he is a president who embraces the conservative label. And, as Samuel Huntington of Harvard University wrote a half-century ago, "No political philosopher has ever described a conservative utopia." Bush of course is no political philosopher. But neither is he a true conservative. He is simply a product of his time, a child of the zeitgeist that descended upon America at the end of the Cold War.

Utopianism emerged out of that hoary Western idea of "progress", the notion that history is the story of mankind's inexorable rise from blindness and folly to ever higher levels of civilization and enlightenment-and that, since this progress is part of the human condition, it will continue as long as mankind resides on earth. Along the way, many thinkers and intellectuals found that the idea of progress as part of the human condition was leaving them cold. If progress would continue forever, they asked, how do we know where it is going? How do we even know it is going in a good direction? No, they concluded, it was going to a particular end point, a culmination of human development. And they could reveal what that was because it happened to be their own vision of nirvana on earth.

Thus was born Western utopianism, father of Hegelianism, Marxism and any number of other gauzy visions of human culmination. And, with the end of the Cold War, this outlook clutched the American consciousness. It is reflected in Francis Fukuyama's famous 1989 "End of History" essay in this magazine-which has had far more lingering influence than anything Fukuyama has written since, including subsequent musings that seem to question his own endist thesis. It is reflected in Thomas Friedman's dreamy glorification of "globalization" as the final universal culture, which turns out to be essentially American culture. Both men saw a new era of relative world peace emanating from their particular visions.

And this utopianism is reflected in George Bush's foreign policy, so effectively punctured by Hendrickson and Tucker. Whereas the Bush Administration's utopian vision sees Iraqi democracy as a spur to the larger democratization of the entire Arab world, they write that "the persistent anarchy that has enveloped Iraq makes it an example to be avoided rather than emulated."

The authors begin their assessment by establishing that Bush does indeed embrace a "crusader state" outlook. That is the easy part. The president's own words make the case. More difficult-and more seminal-is the question of whether America was founded as a missionary democracy mandated by destiny to spread freedom around the world. Bush of course believes the advancement of self-government "is the mission that created our Nation."

Hendrickson and Tucker demolish this conceit, demonstrating that our Founders and those who helped shape and mold our republic in the early decades never embraced any such missionary impulse. On the contrary, they believed such an outlook-nakedly embraced by many French officials at that time-ran counter to the essential American creed that every nation should be free to adopt whatever civic structure it desired. True, say the authors, from the beginning our Founders saw universal applicability in the principles underlying American democracy, "yet this belief existed happily alongside the idea that the United States had neither a right nor a duty to bring others to an appreciation of these truths through force."

All this changed with Woodrow Wilson, whose presidency, say the authors, "marked a departure from the classic doctrine in certain respects." True. But it is here, in the authors' discussion of Wilson and subsequent Wilsonians that one may introduce a quibble. They let Wilson off rather easy, and they see in the Reagan Doctrine a greater departure from the country's historical norms than would seem appropriate.

"Only with the Reagan Doctrine", they write, "was the nation's power openly and directly committed to extending freedom through force." Thus they see Reagan as a progenitor of Bush. This is false. Like Lincoln, who subordinated all other issues to the imperative of saving the Union, Reagan subordinated all other foreign policy issues to the imperative of winning the Cold War. The spread of freedom in and of itself was never an animating impulse.

Indeed, as a presidential candidate in 1979, Reagan embraced Jeanne Kirkpatrick's influential Commentary article excoriating the Carter Administration for attempting to force democratic reforms on America's autocratic allies. Democracy couldn't be established in such countries within any reasonable time span, she argued, and thus Carter's actions would only lead to greater global instability and greater harm to U.S. interests. Reagan bought this argument completely.

Or consider Reagan's reluctance to destabilize the Marcos regime in the Philippines, even after serious questions had been raised about its legitimacy and longevity. One perceptive historian, James Mann, has described in dramatic detail the actions taken by Reagan's staff and some members of Congress to overcome his resistance to deposing Marcos to enhance democratic prospects there.

The Reagan Doctrine was a direct response to the Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that no country defined as "communist" would be allowed to change that status. Reagan could see that accepting this doctrine left America at a distinct disadvantage in the Cold War, perpetually on the defensive in seeking to prevent countries from going communist while the Soviets could concentrate on offensive efforts to bring more nations under their influence.

Moreover, however novel in its directness, the Reagan Doctrine was not really a significant departure from past policy. To argue otherwise is to ignore significant Cold War history in such places as Guatemala, Iran and Cuba-all sites of American action aimed at overthrowing real or perceived hostile regimes.

No, the first real neo-Wilsonian was George H. W. Bush, who sent 28,000 troops into Somalia on a purely humanitarian mission utterly devoid of any argument that American interests were involved. That truly was an unprecedented action and reflected the essential Wilsonian impulse to employ American power on mankind's, as opposed to Americans', behalf. Wilson's rhetoric is replete with proudly delivered pronouncements that America was marching onto the world stage on behalf of humanitarian ideals that transcended American interests. Thus, he was the anti-nationalist, the supreme internationalist.

That was the outlook that eventually led George H. W. Bush into Somalia, Bill Clinton into the Balkans and George W. Bush into Iraq. But, as Hendrickson and Tucker point out, the younger Bush has gone further than his predecessors, fusing this missionary impulse to the notion that it serves not only humanitarian goals but also America's vital imperative to protect its citizens from being killed on their own soil by evil terrorists. The authors reject this formulation, arguing correctly that the fruits of the Bush foreign policy "show plainly that the equation drawn between vital interests and 'deepest beliefs' is false."

Indeed, their essay lays bare both the philosophical and real world deficiencies of Bush's "war system" foreign policy-based on a tendency, as Andrew Bacevich has put it, "to see international problems as military problems and to discount the likelihood of finding a solution except through military means." By effectively dissecting this outlook, Hendrickson and Tucker make a significant contribution to the foreign policy discourse of our time.

Robert W. Merry, president and publisher of Congressional Quarterly, is author, most recently, of Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy and the Hazards of Global Ambition (2005).

Joseph S. Nye, Jr.:

DEMOCRACY PROMOTION might be considered the "default option" of 20th-century American diplomacy. Thus it is not surprising that many passages in George W. Bush's second Inaugural Address could have been uttered by Woodrow Wilson or Harry Truman. Yet Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson argue that Bush's doctrine of democracy promotion as the defining mission of our foreign policy is incompatible with the central elements of American tradition. In my view, this claim is in some ways correct, in others misleading. Presidents faced with crises have often turned to American exceptionalism and the promotion of democracy, as both Wilson and Truman did. The narrative of democracy has been a powerful force in American foreign policy, as in American life.

But Tucker and Hendrickson are correct that Bush's doctrine differs from those of his predecessors. As they point out, Wilson's League of Nations was to protect any state against aggression, democratic or not. Although Truman's doctrine spoke of defending free people everywhere, his policy was containment of communism, not rollback or short-run regime change. The Bush Administration's neo-Wilsonians failed not by pursuing the goal of democracy promotion, but by the means they chose. They are truncated Wilsonians, ignoring his emphasis on multilateral institutions, and inadequate Trumanites, ignoring his prudence.

The correct charge against the people who developed the Bush Doctrine is not idealism. As Henry Kissinger has pointed out, prudent realists do not ignore values. Rather, the neo-Wilsonians who promoted the Iraq War were guilty of illusionism, a cognitive failure to produce an adequate roadmap of means that would balance the risk and realism in their vision. If one doubts this description, look again at the neoconservative proclamation that Iraq would be a "cakewalk" or Paul Wolfowitz's claim that General Eric Shinseki was wildly wrong in his estimates of the number of troops that would be required to win the peace (not just the war) in Iraq.

The Bush Doctrine portrays the roots of terrorism in the Middle East as growing out of the undemocratic nature of the regimes in the region. Removing Saddam's dictatorship and creating democracy in Iraq was supposed to address the root causes of terrorism. While there were risks to altering the status quo in the region, there were even greater risks in leaving it unchallenged. But is this an accurate diagnosis of the roots of terrorism? Does increasing democracy diminish terrorism? Violent extremists exist in nearly all societies, and democracy often gives them more leeway to act than some authoritarian states do. The terrorist attacks in London were carried out by British citizens in one of the world's oldest democracies. Timothy McVeigh, an American citizen, carried out the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult arose in democratic Japan. Even if one focuses solely on the salafi or jihadi strain of contemporary terrorism, it is far from clear that elections in Egypt would have changed Mohamed Atta's mind. As Olivier Roy pointed out in Globalized Islam (2004), many Islamic extremists are nurtured by their alienation in European democracies. They invent an imagined community of a global umma and an obligation of jihad that is politics wrapped in religion.

Even if democracy might reduce the recruitment of terrorists in the Middle East, the Iraq War was the wrong way to promote democracy and has increased the recruitment of new terrorists. Robert Pape's statistics in Dying to Kill (2005), for example, show a positive relation between foreign occupation and the incidence of suicide bombers. As Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the summer of 2005, the American occupation of Iraq provided Islamic militants with a historic opportunity to win popular support. Official American estimates of the number of insurgents in Iraq increased rather than decreased from 2003 to 2005.

The main lesson to be learned is that, while the development of democracy can be aided from outside, it cannot easily be imposed by force. Germany and Japan became democratic after American occupation, but only after their total defeat in a world war and a seven-year occupation. In addition, nationalism had been temporarily discredited in both countries, and there was no insurgency against the occupying forces. Moreover, Germany and Japan were relatively homogeneous societies without the deep communal divisions that mark Iraq. Our instruments also included the soft power of the Marshall Plan. It is hard to see such conditions repeated in today's world.

Even if the Bush Administration is correct that the risks of promoting democracy are less than the risks of allowing the status quo of authoritarian regimes to persist indefinitely, the means matter as much as the ends. The administration placed too much emphasis on American hard power and paid insufficient attention to our soft power. The development of civil societies, economic growth and openness to the world are crucial. But such changes are a slow process. Even if democracy removes some of the sources of rage and reduces the prospects of terrorism in the long run, it is unlikely to solve our problems in the short run. In some cases, a messy transition could even make the short-run terrorist problem worse.

To be fair to Bush's argument, it is still too early to give a definitive answer to these questions. A historical assessment of the Iraq War and its effects on the Middle East will take a decade or more. The January 2005 Iraqi elections were a positive step for the region. As Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader, said, "it's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq." The columnist David Brooks observed, "if there is one soft power gift that America does possess, it is the tendency to imagine new worlds." With the invasion of Iraq and his increased rhetoric of democracy, Bush transformed the status quo. In the last year, there have been national elections in Lebanon and local elections in Saudi Arabia. Egypt amended its constitution and allowed a limited challenge in its presidential election. Moderate steps have been taken in Oman, Bahrain and Morocco. Some of these things would have occurred without the Iraq War; some might not.

Democracy, however, requires the tolerance of minorities and individual rights, as well as the development of effective institutions for the resolution of political conflicts in divided societies. It is much more than just elections. As Fareed Zakaria has pointed out, it is the liberal rather than the plebiscitary dimensions of liberal democracy that are essential for freedom. Iraq is a long way from liberalism.

Yet there is something to be said for Bush's policy. In an information age, what matters is not only whose army wins, but whose story wins. Democracy will not convert the current crop of extremist jihadists to peaceful change. If anything, too rapid a transition may destabilize governments and enhance the extremists' opportunities to wreak havoc. But in the longer term, a credible narrative that speaks of the slow steady progress of democratization and freedom provides a vision of hope for the moderates. That narrative about a better future undercuts the message of hate and violence promoted by the extremists and enhances our soft power. As Tucker and Hendrickson quote Lincoln, belief in the progressive expansion of free institutions "gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time."

Bush is correct that America needs to create a narrative about a better future that undercuts the message of hate and violence promoted by the extremists. But we have to learn to do it with our soft or attractive power and not succumb to the illusionists' belief that we can impose it by force. And it has to be credible to others. Grandiose rhetoric merely leads to charges of hypocrisy. In the long run, a democratic future may help reduce some of the sources of rage. But if we continue to choose inappropriate means in the short run, we may never get to that long run.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr., is Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University and author, most recently, of The Power Game: A Washington Novel (2004).