In his 2005 inaugural address, then-President George W. Bush unveiled a new policy, which came to be called the “Freedom Agenda,” that placed the promotion of democracy abroad at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Bush asserted the 9/11 terrorists’ rage had been forged in the tyranny of the Arab world; only “the force of human freedom” could dampen those fires and thus ensure “the survival of liberty in our land.”
Bush’s theory turned out to be wrong on all counts. The Arab states that were the object of the Freedom Agenda proved to be hopelessly intractable to U.S. influence; nevertheless, the United States has succeeded in reducing terrorism to a manageable threat through the classic instruments of domestic security, armed force abroad, and diplomacy. What’s more, the Bush administration’s willingness to cast aside those sacred precepts of liberty in the name of the “war on terror” turned the very language of democracy promotion into gross hypocrisy.
