RIGHTS & HOLLOW HEROES
IN 1990, Burma’s junta stripped opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi of her election victory and placed her under house arrest. The following year, the Nobel Foundation, citing “her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights,” awarded her its peace prize.
Soon, Suu Kyi’s empowerment became Washington’s metric for success in Burma. Pundits cited Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2011 visit to Suu Kyi as a “clear-cut triumph” for US efforts to bring Burma in from the cold.
Today, however, Suu Kyi provides cover for a campaign of ethnic cleansing that has killed thousands and made nearly a half million more refugees in Burma.
Alas, she’s not alone as the recipient of misplaced hope. For decades, Western diplomats seeking to reform rogue regimes have bet everything on dissidents and individual politicians. Yet for every Lech Walesa, there has been a Suu Kyi. Too often, subjects of liberal hope have ushered in not peace and liberalism but dictatorship and bloodletting.
Diplomats and pundits once celebrated Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki and Rwanda’s Paul Kagami as progressives, if not committed democrats; today, both men preside over repressive dictatorships. Fifteen years ago, officials likewise celebrated Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise to power as a man who could democratize Turkey. Instead, he has embezzled billions of dollars and transformed Turkey back into a police state.
Even when there was never any illusion about a partner’s commitment to democracy, misplaced hope in the ability of individuals to change themselves and transform society has backfired.
PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat was an exiled, has-been politician when Bill Clinton rescued him from obscurity, believing it would be easier to deal with a dictator than with grassroots activists. That subordinated the desires of Palestinians accustomed to co-existence to the venality of one man.
When in 2000, Clinton offered Arafat a comprehensive peace deal negotiated by Arafat’s own aides, the PLO leader walked away.
Still, the State Department seems impervious to the lesson. The logic of the Obama administration’s outreach to Iran was that by engaging President Hassan Rouhani and enabling him to deliver financial relief to his people, he could bolster the prospects of Iranian reformers and undercut the hold of hardliners.
President Barack Obama never understood that Rouhani’s smiling face masked the same deep commitment to Iran’s revolutionary ideology as the hardliners whom Obama imagined Rouhani opposed. Indeed, it was Rouhani himself who bragged about how he would use diplomacy to lull the Americans into complacency and then deliver the knock-out blow.
Obama got his deal, and Tehran got billions of dollars. But today Iran retains its nuclear infrastructure, has bolstered its missile programs and has put its effort to destabilize the Middle East into overdrive.
Authoritarians are resurgent and, across the globe, decades of human-rights progress is at risk. Individuals can be potent symbols for human-rights advocacy. Dissidents humanize struggles. During the Cold War, it could be hard for Americans to comprehend life under Soviet tyranny, but learning about Natan Sharansky, Andrei Sakharov or even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could illustrate its horrors.
But, while dissidents are an important tool, there are no shortcuts. During State of the Union addresses, presidents regularly cite individuals’ stories, but they do not substitute them for broader efforts to reform health care, immigration or education.
Diplomacy’s no different. If the US expects tyrannies to reform, terrorist states to give up their arms and dictatorships to embrace democracy, counting on one person to pull it off won’t be enough.
It takes cultivating a free press and, where one doesn’t exist, using Voice of America to fill the gap. It takes supporting not a single reformer, but dozens, so that if venality twists principle, others can step in to hold them accountable.
It means demanding not single elections but regular ones. And it means not tolerating the likes of Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, whose term expired eight years ago. And maintaining a robust military to remind adversaries the US will always be able to outfight them, if they refuse the diplomatic way out.