Didn’t Get The Memo

Daniel Henninger from the Opinion Journal points out the sad fact that the monks in Burma didn't get the memo from the western elite. It isn't about democracy, it is absolute stability.

In the U.S. and Europe, the notion of creating "a balance of power that favors human freedom" as a counterweight to terror networks is now routinely mocked as "a dream," "a fiasco" and "a failure." And as soon as the abominable Bush and the neocons are gone, their "oversold" democratic pipe dream will be replaced by an American foreign policy that is more "modest."

As it happens, the opposition party in Burma, the one getting shot, is called the National League for Democracy. Not the National League for Stability, but Democracy. One hopes the monks, reported by the BBC to be headed for internment camps, aren't expecting too much from "the world," because not much is coming. If before deciding to fill Rangoon's streets the "saffron-robed" monks had spent more time reading pundits and foreign-policy intellectuals in Washington or Western Europe, they would have known that democracy has been demoted.

The Bush Doctrine's critics will say this is unfair, that they support aspiring democracies, that their critique of the neocons is mostly about Iraq. Perhaps, but I would argue that this tidy distinction–"we only mean Iraq, we're all for Burma"–has been lost on the popular imagination. The anti-Bush, anti-neocon obsession has been so constant, so often pegged to the broader Bush "dream" for democracy and freedom, that its critics have tossed out the world's democratic babies with the Iraqi and Afghan bathwater.

An overstatement? In a July 2006 Foreign Affairs article, "The End of the Bush Revolution," Philip Gordon of Brookings, now an advisor to Barack Obama, tries to deflate what he describes as a "revolutionary" Bush foreign policy, which argues that "the spread of democracy and freedom is the key to a safer and more peaceful world." He finds "such thinking" still afloat in the president's 2006 State of the Union message. Mr. Gordon places this as "on the idealistic end of the U.S. foreign policy spectrum" and a departure from "the realist view that the United States should avoid meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations."

This March, in the Washington Post, Tony Smith of Tufts, writing from the Democratic left, derides both neocons and neolibs for promoting "market democracy" and urges the Democratic presidential candidates to articulate "a more modest U.S. role in the world."

Short version: You're on your own, Burma. Slightly longer version: You're on your own, Burma and the European Union will be pleased to hold trade seminars with the military junta while it is busy smashing monk's heads in.

It is ironic that the left that used to decry the Cold War "realism" that led to the, "He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard," approach to diplomacy is now embracing that same concept.