Leonid Bershidsky’s Observation — that Leaders of the Developing World Emulate President Putin’s Authoritarian Ways — Is Insightful — as Is His Comment that American Hypocrisy Has Itself to Blame

06 August 2014

The reverse of President George W. Bush’s hopes

The leaders of some of the biggest developing nations -- China, India, Turkey, South Africa -- are increasingly acting like Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The crucial similarities are not really among the leaders themselves but among all authoritarian regimes regardless of the continents on which they operate.

The Western version of democracy had a chance to spread after communism fell in the 1990s, but it has failed to take root where the world's untapped economic potential is concentrated.

The West squandered its opportunity by cynical and self-serving interference in the emerging world's affairs. It botched democracy's marketing campaign:

While democratic values themselves are hard to tarnish, the politicians who put themselves forward as their champions did not live up to the task.

Bershidsky quotes Ambassador McFaul

The former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said in March this year that, “The United States does not have the same moral authority as it did in the last century.”

And people my age will recall how unhelpfully the US took advantage of Russian misery, as the former Soviets fell into disorder and despair after the fall of the communist regime.

American leaders then compounded this strategic stupidity by dismantling representative democracy at home and sending our Military Industrial Complex out to do (usually bloodily) anti-democratic things to significant swaths of humanity.

Therefore, Ambassador McFaul had good reason to add that:

As ambassador, I found it difficult to defend our commitment to sovereignty and international law when asked by Russians, “What about Iraq?”

Some current practices of American democracy also do not inspire observers abroad.

To win this new conflict, we must restore the United States as a model.

Fat chance

It does not take acuity to recognize that American leadership of the last few decades is not in the same farsighted class as the one that generated the well-intended Marshall Plan for Europe and essentially parallel assistance to Japan after World War II.

The point is not necessarily that we did help with these economic programs, but that we generously tried to. Most of the world noticed.

I am not optimistic that today’s less ethically admirable United States will be able to turn itself around to become the light that Ambassador McFaul and Mr. Bershidsky hope for. Our will, and who we once were, seem to be gone.

Historical cycles of this kind tend to end with the noticeable decline of the civilization that generated them.

The moral? — Heightened authoritarianism is probably the wave of the future

Humanity’s baser impulses are riding high — here and abroad. Getting a herd of individually selfish cats headed in the same direction takes repressive clout under circumstances where resources are limited.

It is difficult for American culture to model a freer alternative to despotism, when our current practices so visibly deny our illusory democratic paradigm.

“Do as I say, not as I do” is not persuasive leadership. Nor is trumpeting the benefit of representative democracy, when it is so obviously absent at home.

In truth, robber barons run the developed world, and dictators rule most of the rest. American democracy was a comparatively short running attempt to upset that historically proven baseline. The experiment appears to have failed.

Unless, of course, a significant portion of the American public wakes up enough to care about losing the Liberty ideal that we once thought valuable — in essence, Ambassador McFaul’s point.

PeteFree.com

Leonid Bershidsky’s Observation — that Leaders of the Developing World Emulate President Putin’s Authoritarian Ways — Is Insightful — as Is His Comment that American Hypocrisy Has Itself to Blame