Is Democracy the Answer?

The immediate aftermath of the heinous attacks on the French capital by the Islamic State Group has, perhaps, opened the possibility for a rapprochement between the United States and Russia. On the ‘sidelines’ of the G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin had what both sides described as a productive meeting, presumably over how to best help France fashion an effective response to the atrocious acts which racked Paris on November 13th. And yet, despite the perhaps promising tete-a-tete, just below the surface, relations between the two New Cold War rivals will likely remain antagonistic.

Why so? Part of the answer lies in the question: Is democracy the answer? American efforts at democracy promotion in and around Russia since the end of the Cold War have helped to midwife the present dilemma in which we find ourselves. This is an old story, and it is worth re-telling. When the Clinton administration took over the reigns of power in early 1993, the careful efforts by the prior administration not to alienate Russia in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution were summarily discarded in favor of a policy of triumphalism, which took the form of, among other things, so-called zdravstvidaniya or “hello-goodbye” trips by senior Clinton administration officials to the former republics of the Soviet Union. These trips began what became a 25 year (and counting!) effort by the U.S. to wrest the the former republics of the Soviet Union out of the Russian sphere of influence.