OxBlog

# Posted 9:02 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

MAN WITH A PLAN: With all due respect to the Socratic method and its advocates, I believe there is an obligation to present an alternative to those ideas and policies which one tears down. When it comes to grand strategy, I think the Bush administration might benefit from more time spent reading the work of Mike McFaul.

In the Sunday Times, McFaul demonstrates how the absence of strategy for dealing with Soviet disintegration led to significant failures which still damage US interests today. If the Bush administration is seroius about creating a new Middle East, it will have to learn the lessons of the post-Soviet experience. Lesson No. 1: The US must leverage its military dominance to ensure full democratization of post-totalitarian states. NATO has expanded, but a lack of democracy in Russia and Central Asia is holding back the war on terror. In the new Middle East, there must be a US-led security organization which provides nascent democracies with security in exchanges for a guarantee that they will consolidate domesitc reforms.

For those of you who want to know more about how McFaul thinks, check out his article in Policy Review entitled "The Liberty Doctrine". I recommend it highly.

I am also quite enamored of the following point made by McFaul, which supports my pet argument that all cultures are compatible with democracy:

Thirty years ago, experts believed that Slavic nations and Communist regimes could never become democratic. They were wrong. Experts now warn that Arab nations, particularly aristocratic or despotic regimes in North Africa and the Middle East — and perhaps Muslims generally — just cannot join the democratic world. They should go back and read what Sovietologists were saying as recently as the 1980's.

Boo yah!

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