http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikegonzalez3/2015/08/05/obamas-true-legacy-propping-up-dictators/
________________________________
Mike Gonzalez Contributor
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
I am a senior fellow at the Center for International Studies at The
Heritage Foundation. Formerly, I spent 15 years overseas as a foreign
correspondent, 10 of those with The Wall Street Journal, and two and a
half years as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush Administration,
first at the SEC and then at the State Department. I have a BA from
Emerson College in Boston and an MBA from Columbia Business School. My
book, A Race for the Future, How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal
Monopoly on Hispanic Americans, was published by Crown Forum in
September, 2014. My wife Siobhan and I live in Maryland with our three
children.
Contact Mike Gonzalez
The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those
of the writer.
Obama's True Legacy: Propping Up Dictators
8/05/2015 _at_ 11:36AM
By praising Ethiopia’s repressive regime for being “democratically
elected” last week, President Obama was driving home once again
something that should be abundantly clear by now: His administration
marks a radical departure from previous ones when it comes to
democracy promotion.
U.S. President Barack Obama converses with Ethiopian Prime Minister
Hailemariam Desalegn while walking to board Air Force One for his
departure from Ethiopia late last month. (ZACHARIAS ABUBEKER/AFP/Getty
Images)
On the contrary, the Obama legacy will be one of propping up
dictatorial regimes around the world. His praise for the government of
Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn merely took to Africa what Obama
and his foreign policy team have already done on a grander scale in
Iran, Cuba and Burma.
To be sure, President Obama was standing next to Desalegn at a joint
press conference in Addis Ababa when he spoke. Maybe he didn’t want to
be a bad guest. And the President did add that the Ethipiopian
government has “more work to do.” After a slew of criticism at home,
he later also questioned why African leaders clung on to office rather
than leave after their terms were completed.
But Mr. Obama didn’t have to go out of his way to call Desalegn
“democratically elected,” let alone do it twice. Nor did he have to
make excuses for his government’s horrendous human rights record by
recalling the country’s past hardship and the relative infancy of its
constitution.
Before leaving for Africa, human rights activists and think tanks had
called on Mr. Obama to use his trip to promote economic and political
freedom—something the president did only in the mildest of ways.
The Ethiopian government, for the record, has been roundly criticized
by all major human rights organizations for holding sham elections in
May in which Desalegn’s Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic
Front (EPRDF) claimed to have won 100 percent of the vote. Immediately
upon Mr. Obama’s comments, the President of Freedom House Mark P.
Lagon released this reaction:
President Obama unfortunately was fundamentally wrong in his comments
about the parliamentary elections Ethiopia held in May, in which the
ruling Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) won
every seat. Calling Ethiopia’s government democratically elected
lowers the standards for democracy and undermines the courageous work
of so many Ethiopians who fight to realize a just and democratic
society.
And that’s just it. President Obama seems to have very little time for
dissidents who fight brutal regimes in troubled lands. The reasons for
that are many. My Heritage Foundation colleague Joshua Meservey, an
Africa expert, brings up two when he tells me:
President Obama seems uncomfortable with democracy promotion for two
reasons. First, he wants to distance himself from President George W.
Bush’s agenda, a significant plank of which was democracy promotion.
Second, I think he is a product of a certain liberal worldview that
believes the U.S.’s and West’s past sins, such as slavery and the
Crusades, disqualify them from pushing their values abroad, as doing
so implies that the U.S.-led West’s model is superior.
Meservey is right, except what liberals don’t seem to get is that they
are turning on its head one of the huge achievements of classical
liberalism: the Enlightenment promotion of the idea that some rights
are natural, and thus universal.
The 18th century Enlightenment was all about the universal
applicability of such natural rights as life, liberty and the pursuit
of property. Except that to modern liberals, the Enlightenment was all
about dead white men, so promoting their ideas is culturally
insensitive. Ironically, they resemble in this sense the conservatives
of the 18th century, who shared Edmund Burke’s belief in each nation’s
particularism.
Only up to a point, of course. Liberals still want to push their pet
causes on others. Unfortunately these don’t include democracy or
traditional human rights.
David Kramer, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy and Human
Rights under President Bush, sees the hand of National Security
Adviser Susan Rice in the Ethiopia faux pas, saying Rice has “had a
long-standing interest in Ethiopia and… was a huge fan of the late
President Meles Zenawi, who was no democrat, to say the least.” Ms.
Rice’s sympathy for African despots is well known.
For the most part, though, Kramer’s analysis is the same as
Meservey’s: Obama’s problems with democracy are larger.
“For the first year I put it down to ABB, Anything But Bush—Bush did
it, so it was bad,” Kramer told me. “But seven years on that doesn’t
explain it anymore. He’s the president who’s shown the least interest
in democracy and human rights since Richard Nixon. It’s sad. For
someone who constantly extols his past as a community organizer, this
is pretty unexplainable.”
Received on Sun Aug 09 2015 - 12:02:52 EDT