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# Posted 6:09 PM by Patrick Belton

PROMOTING DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST: Carnegie and an ad hoc trans-Atlantic roundtable sponsored by the German Marshall Fund have both released interesting pieces on the subject of democracy promotion in the Middle East. They're worth closer comment, but for now, I'd like to just extract a few ideas from the Marshall Fund piece:

as institutional innovations, McFaul and coauthors call for the establishment of a Department of Democracy Promotion, headed by an official of cabinet rank; a trans-Atlantic Forum for Democracy Promotion to coordinate bilateral and multilateral democracy initiatives; and a Trust for Democracy in the Middle East to which both the United States and Europe would contribute funds;
in the area of security, they suggest an OSCE-like regional security regime for the Greater Middle East, and an expansion of Nato's Partnership for Peace programme into the area;
they call, too, for massive increases in the democracy promotion budget, to the level of $400 mn in the States and 500 mn Euro in the EU;
and finally, the authors would like western diplomats to greatly expand their attention to local imprisoned democracy activists, and for human rights and democracy to be raised by every visiting head of state on every trip to the region.

These are all good ideas, it seems to me, but they could be augmented by an effort to restore some form of a bipartisan consensus to this aspect of American foreign policy - a commitment to assist usefully in the democratization of the Middle East would at the very least need to be sustained at a high level of funding and political attention for a large number of administrations, and a new centrist grand strategy of democracy promotion would have to be guarded not only against realists on the right and isolationists on the left, but against the inevitable desire to associate a policy with the party of the president who originated it.

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