Indeed, many of the issues that define the American domestic policy agenda, including welfare and Social Security reform, are economic rights issues. But a new administration can take two steps to signal concern for a wider spectrum of rights in U. First, the United States should help develop regional networks for human rights.
Not surprisingly, the regions weakest in human rights protection-the Middle East, Asia, and Africa-also lack regional frameworks for discussing rights although the Organization of African Unity is considering adding human rights to its agenda. Washington, however, must let regional actors take the lead. Any network on human rights in the Middle East is likely to be led by nongovernmental organizations, which have spearheaded human rights advocacy in their countries.
And any Asian human rights body likely to emerge first in Southeast rather than Northeast Asia may well emphasize economic over political rights in the early years. The task for the United States is to help build regional platforms for discussing rights, not to urge specific agendas on them. Second, in its dealings with individual countries, the United States should anchor human rights in a broader spectrum of global issues.
For example, over the past decade Washington has tried with scant success to foster a dialogue on human rights with Beijing because the U.
Episodes of gross human rights abuse during the s spurred wider recognition both of the need to bring abusers to justice and of international responsibility to promote or even provide accountability.
Such accountability can halt widespread crimes, as well as prevent future campaigns of abuse. The War Crimes Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, both sanctioned by the UN Security Council, were the hallmarks of the new attention to international justice.
In future accountability exercises, however, the world community will not be so prominent. More commonly, state sovereignty plays a larger role. Although neither government has ruled out international participation in the trials, each is adamant that its national justice system must lead, particularly in handling high-ranking officials accused of abuse. Their arguments that accountability must be pursued in tandem with social and political stability are not without merit.
A new U. The statistic usually missing in litanies of the successes of the late 20th-century wave of democracy is that 2. Encouraging these nations to move toward greater political openness and stronger protection of human rights is the single most difficult, and most important, task that a new president will face in this area.
A new administration should not automatically assume that any of these states is a candidate for an immediate transition to democracy. They thus will have few crises and wars. In illiberal or semiliberal democracies, norms play a lesser role and crises are more likely, but democratic institutions and processes may still make wars between illiberal democracies rare. Finally, state-level factors like norms and domestic structures may interact with international-systemic factors to prevent wars between democracies.
If democracies are better at information-processing, they may be better than nondemocracies at recognizing international situations where war would be foolish. Thus the logic of the democratic peace may explain why democracies sometimes behave according to realist systemic predictions. The United States will have an interest in promoting democracy because further democratization enhances the lives of citizens of other countries and contributes to a more peaceful international system.
To the extent that Americans care about citizens of other countries and international peace, they will see benefits from the continued spread of democracy. Spreading democracy also will directly advance the national interests of the United States, because democracies will not launch wars or terrorist attacks against the United States, will not produce refugees seeking asylum in the United States, and will tend to ally with the United States.
First, democracies will not go to war against the United States, provided, of course, that the United States remains a democracy. The logic of the democratic peace suggests that the United States will have fewer enemies in a world of more democracies. If democracies virtually never go to war with one another, no democracy will wage war against the United States.
Democracies are unlikely to get into crises or militarized disputes with the United States. Promoting democracy may usher in a more peaceful world; it also will enhance the national security of the United States by eliminating potential military threats. The United States would be more secure if Russia, China, and at least some countries in the Arab and Islamic worlds became stable democracies. Second, spreading democracy is likely to enhance U.
The world's principal sponsors of international terrorism are harsh, authoritarian regimes, including Syria, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, and Sudan.
Some skeptics of the democratic-peace proposition point out that democracies sometimes have sponsored covert action or "state terrorism" against other democracies. Examples include U. In each case, the target state had dubious democratic credentials. And the perpetrator of the alleged "state terrorist" acts in each case was the United States itself, which suggests that the United States has little to fear from other democracies.
Third, the spread of democracy will serve American interests by reducing the number of refugees who flee to the United States. The countries that generate the most refugees are usually the least democratic. The absence of democracy tends to lead to internal conflicts, ethnic strife, political oppression, and rapid population growth-all of which encourage the flight of refugees.
The results of the U. The number of refugees attempting to flee Haiti for the United States dropped dramatically after U. In addition to reducing the number of countries that generate refugees, the spread of democracy is likely to increase the number of countries that accept refugees, thereby reducing the number of refugees who will attempt to enter the United States.
Fourth, the global spread of democracy will advance American interests by creating more potential allies for the United States. Historically, most of America's allies have been democracies. In general, democracies are much more likely to ally with one another than with nondemocracies. Fifth, the spread of democracy internationally is likely to increase Americans' psychological sense of well-being about their own democratic institutions.
Part of the impetus behind American attempts to spread democracy has always come from the belief that American democracy will be healthier when other countries adopt similar political systems. To some extent, this belief reflects the conviction that democracies will be friendly toward the United States.
But it also reflects the fact that democratic principles are an integral part of America's national identity. The United States thus has a special interest in seeing its ideals spread.
Finally, the United States will benefit from the spread of democracy because democracies will make better economic partners. Democracies are more likely to adopt market economies, so democracies will tend to have more prosperous and open economies.
The United States generally will be able to establish mutually beneficial trading relationships with democracies. And democracies provide better climates for American overseas investment, by virtue of their political stability and market economies. Although many political scientists accept the proposition that democracies rarely, if ever, go to war with one another, several critics have challenged claims of a democratic peace.
By the late s, proponents and critics of the democratic peace were engaged in a vigorous and sometimes heated debate. Critics have presented several important challenges to the deductive logic and empirical bases of the democratic peace proposition. They have argued that there is not a convincing theoretical explanation of the apparent absence of war between democracies, that democracies actually have fought one another, that the absence of wars between democracies is not statistically significant, and that factors other than shared democratic institutions or values have caused the democratic peace.
The critics of the democratic peace have presented vigorous arguments that have forced the proposition's proponents to refine and qualify the case for the democratic peace. These criticisms do not, however, refute the principal arguments for the democratic peace. As I argue below, there is still a compelling deductive and empirical case that democracies are extremely unlikely to fight one another.
Moreover, the case for spreading democracy does not rest entirely on the democratic-peace proposition. Although those who favor promoting democracy often invoke the democratic peace, the debate over whether the United States should spread democracy is not the same as the debate over the democratic peace.
Even if the critics were able to undermine the democratic-peace proposition, their arguments would not negate the case for spreading democracy, because there are other reasons for promoting democracy. More important, the case for promoting democracy as a means of building peace remains sound if the spread of democracy merely reduces the probability of war between democracies, whereas "proving" the democratic peace proposition requires showing that the probability of such wars is at or close to zero.
Several criticisms of the democratic peace proposition fault the logic that has been advanced to explain the apparent absence of war between democracies. These arguments do not rest on an assessment of the empirical evidence, but instead rely on analyses and critiques of the internal consistency and persuasiveness of the theoretical explanations of the democratic peace.
Critics have offered four major challenges to the logic of the democratic peace: a there is no consensus on the causal mechanisms that keep democracies at peace: b the possibility that democracies may turn into nondemocracies means that even democracies operate according to realist principles; c the structural-institutional explanation of the democratic peace is flawed, not least because its logic also would predict that democracies are less likely to be involved in any wars, not just wars with other democracies; and d the normative explanation of the democratic peace is unpersuasive.
The Argument: The first, and most general criticism of the deductive logic of the democratic peace proposition holds that the lack of agreement on what causes democracies to avoid war with one another calls the proposition into question. Response: The fact that several theories have been advanced to explain the democratic peace does not mean that we cannot be confident that democracies are unlikely to fight one another.
There is no reason to assume that a single theory explains all the cases in which democracies have avoided war with one another. It is possible to be confident in an empirical finding even when many different explanations account for it.
For example, it is empirically true that all human beings eventually die. The discovery of evidence to refute this proposition would have profound biological, philosophical, and theological implications, not to mention its effects on retirement planning and the future of the Social Security system. But there are many causes of death, each of which rests on a different logic of explanation.
People die in wars, accidents, and violent crimes, as well as from AIDS, heart disease, numerous types of cancer, and Alzheimer's Disease, among many other factors. In some cases, the causal logic of the explanation of death is very clear. It is well understood how a bullet through the heart leads to death. In other cases, including many infectious and chronic diseases, the precise biological and physiological processes that cause death are not fully understood.
Nevertheless, the variety of causal mechanisms and our incomplete understanding of many of them do not lead us to the conclusion that some human beings will not die. Accounting for the absence of wars between democracies is somewhat similar to explaining why people die. Several causal mechanisms explain the absence of wars between democracies.
In some cases, democracies avoid war because the distribution of power in the international system gives them strong incentives to remain at peace. In at least some of these cases, democratic decision-making processes may make democracies "smarter" and better able to recognize systemic incentives. When states share liberal values, they are unlikely to go to war because fighting one another would undermine liberal values such as respect for individual freedom.
As John Owen has argued, democratic institutions may reinforce the incentives for peace provided by shared liberal principles. Proponents of the democratic peace need to refine the logic of each explanation and identify the conditions under which they apply, but the multiplicity of explanations does not mean that the democratic peace is invalid. The Argument: A second criticism of the logic of the democratic peace argues that democracies cannot enjoy a perpetual peace among themselves because there is always a possibility that a democratic state will become nondemocratic.
This possibility means that even democracies must be concerned about the potential threat posed by other democracies. John Mearsheimer argues that: "Liberal democracies must therefore worry about relative power among themselves, which is tantamount to saying that each has an incentive to consider aggression against the other to forestall future trouble.
Response: There are four reasons for rejecting claims that fears of democratic backsliding compel democracies to treat other democracies as they would treat any nondemocratic state. First, the historical record shows that mature, stable democracies rarely become autocracies. Second, democracies are able to recognize and respond to states that are making a transition from democracy to authoritarianism.
Democratic states thus can pursue a policy of accommodation toward other democracies, hedge their bets with more cautious policies toward unstable or uncertain democracies, and abandon accommodation when democracies turn into nondemocracies.
There is no reason to assume that democracies will become autocracies overnight and then immediately launch attacks on democracies. Third, like some other realist arguments, the claim that states must give priority to preparing for an unlikely dangerous future development rests on flawed logic. It assumes that states must base their foreign policies almost entirely on worst-case scenarios. Similar logic would imply that, for example, citizens in any country should act on the basis of the assumption that domestic law and order might collapse into anarchy and violence.
Fourth, the claim that democracies must worry about the relative power of other democracies which may become autocracies relies on the same shaky logic that predicts that states cannot cooperate because they need to worry about the relative gains achieved by other states. The relative-gains argument holds that in international politics, cooperation is rare because it often gives greater gains to one state, and these relative disparities in gains can be turned into advantages in power than can be used to threaten the state that gains less.
In practice, however, relative-gains concerns vary and are often almost nonexistent. The Argument: Critics of the structural-institutional explanation of the democratic peace make the following arguments.
First, the structural-institutional model fails to explain why democracies go to war with nondemocracies, even though they do not fight other democracies. If leaders of democracies are constrained from going to war by the public, this constraint would also prevent democracies from fighting nondemocracies.
Second, critics argue that the public is often just as warlike as the leaders that they are supposed to constrain. Public jingoism and enthusiasm for war accompanied the outbreak of World War One and helped cause the Spanish-American War. The structural-institutional model thus erroneously assumes that the people are usually more pacific than their leaders.
The end of conscription in many countries and the tendency for wars to be fought by volunteer professional armies may further erode public opposition to the use of force. Response: The criticisms of the structural-institutional explanation of the democratic peace are not persuasive, for four reasons. First, this explanation can account for why democracies only avoid wars with other democracies, because democracies may behave differently toward states i.
Democracies may distinguish between states on the basis of their political institutions, and pursue different policies toward those that are constrained by democratic institutions.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman argue that "some political institutions help foster beliefs Democratic institutions are visible signs that the state in question is likely to face high political costs for using force in its diplomacy. Thus the institutional argument does not actually predict that democracies will pursue peaceful policies toward all types of states.
Second, the institutional-structural explanation, properly formulated, need not rest on the assumption that the public is peace-loving while leaders are eager to go to war. Some proponents of the democratic peace proposition, including Immanuel Kant, have assumed that the people are less eager to favor war, because they will ultimately be forced to pay its costs.
In a democracy, the executive branch, legislative branch, and the public all constrain each other's ability to make rash and hasty decisions for war. Third, the critics overlook how the existence of domestic constraints in a pair of democratic states can enable a democratic dyad to spend more time seeking a peaceful settlement of a conflict than a dyad with one or no democracies. If both states in a crisis are unable to mobilize quickly, they will have more time to resolve the crisis without war.
Bruce Russett argues: "If another nation's leaders regard a state as democratic, they will anticipate a difficult and lengthy process before the democracy is likely to use significant military force against them.
They will expect an opportunity to reach a negotiated settlement. Finally, critics of the institutional-structural explanation have not addressed the claim that democratic institutions endow democracies with better information-processing capabilities that enable democracies to limit the myths that cause war and to avoid wars when international circumstances render war unwise.
The Argument: Scholars skeptical of the democratic peace proposition have not criticized the normative explanation for the democratic peace as much as they have argued against the structural-institutional explanation. Several skeptics have not attacked the logic of the normative explanation, preferring to argue against the democratic peace on empirical grounds.
Some critics claim that democratic norms should preclude the use of threats or covert action by democracies against other democracies. Norms of trust and respect for the autonomy of liberal regimes would rule out such behavior, just as they proscribe war. But democracies often have threatened war or engaged in covert actions against other democracies.
Response: Proponents of the democratic peace counter that the involvement of the United States in Chile in is usually the only example of covert intervention by a democracy in another democracy and that democracies as a group are actually less likely to engage in covert or overt interventions. If democracies or liberal states fail to recognize one another or temporarily adopt illiberal policies, they may find themselves at odds with other democracies or liberal states.
But as crises develop between liberal democracies, they tend to act on the basis of their shared norms and draw back from the brink of war. The Argument: Critics of the democratic peace point to apparent wars between democracies as evidence that there is no democratic peace.
At least 17 conflicts have been cited as potential wars between democracies. Responses: There are three reasons to reject the claim that the democratic peace proposition is invalid because democracies may have fought some wars. First, the democratic peace propositionCcorrectly formulated-holds that democracies rarely fight, not that they never fight.
Thus the correct formulation of the democratic peace proposition is the statement that democracies almost never go to war with one another. Second, many of the cases cited do not qualify as "wars" between "democracies. In some cases, one of the participants was not a democracy. In , Britain was not a democracy. Spain's democratic credentials in were dubious. Germany in was not governed by liberal principles and its foreign policy was directed by the Kaiser, not the elected Reichstag.
The American Civil War was not an international war. Finland engaged in virtually no direct hostilities with the Western allies during World War Two; it fought almost entirely against communist Russia.
Third, the criticism that democracies have fought one another is irrelevant to deciding whether the United States should export democracy. The spread of democracy makes sense as long as democracies are significantly less likely to go to war with one another.
A policy of spreading democracy would be justified if democracies have, for example, avoided war The Argument: Statistical critiques of the evidence for the democratic peace proposition generally argue that there is not enough evidence to conclude that the absence of wars between democracies is statistically significant. There are two underlying logics behind most of these quantitative arguments. The first suggests that wars between a given pair of states are relatively rare in international politics, so the absence of wars between democracies might be a coincidence.
Responses: Many quantitative analyses conclude that challenges to the statistical significance of the democratic peace do not withstand close scrutiny. Maoz also argues that it is misleading to count all parties in large, multi-state wars as being at war with one another. He notes that Spiro changes the counting rule for the Korean War. Maoz and Russett focused on the "politically-relevant" dyads, which account for most wars.
Maoz also claims that slicing the data into one-year segments makes finding any war statistically insignificant. Such slicing is like testing whether a bowl of sugar will attract ants by assessing the statistical significance of finding an ant on an individual grain of sugar. The odds that ants will be in the sugar bowl are high; the chances of an ant being on a given grain of sugar, however, are so low that finding one on a grain would not be statistically significant.
When Maoz looks at politically-relevant dyads, he finds that one would expect And when Maoz adopts Spiro's suggestion to look at dyads over their entire history, he finds that conflict actually fell when both countries in a dyad became democratic.
The second argument also is unpersuasive, because Farber and Gowa make an arbitrary decision to slice up the data into different periods and categories. Moreover, Maoz is unable to replicate their results. Farber and Gowa appear to have miscounted the total number of dyads. An additional set of arguments suggests other factors besides shared democracy have caused democracies to remain at peace with one another.
Such claims are implicit in some critiques of the logic and evidence, but not all such critiques identify the factors that are alleged to count for the absence of wars between democracies. The Argument: Several critics of the democratic peace proposition claim that the absence of war among democracies can be explained by the fact that democracies often have allied against common threats.
Democracies have avoided wars with one another not because they share democratic forms of government, but because they have had a common interest in defeating a common enemy. Thus the realist logic of balancing against threats explains the democratic peace.
Responses: There are three responses to the claim that allying against common threats is a more important cause of peace among democracies. First, those who make this argument overlook the fact that threat perceptions and alliance choice often reflect shared values and political principles.
These critics assume that alliance formation proceeds in strict accordance with realist logic and that regime type plays no role. Democracies, however, may have found themselves allied to one another against nondemocracies because they share a commitment to democratic values and want to defend them against threats from nondemocracies.
Indeed, if the democratic peace proposition is only partially valid and if it is at least dimly understood by decisionmakers, democracies will find other democracies less threatening than nondemocracies and therefore will tend to align with them against nondemocracies.
This argument is consistent with Stephen Walt's balance-of-threat theory, which identifies offensive intentions as element of threat. Second, the tendency of democracies to ally with one another is further evidence of the special characteristics of democratic foreign policy.
Instead of being a refutation of the democratic peace, the tendency of democracies to ally with one another is actually an additional piece of confirming evidence. Third, Maoz does an interesting test, examining whether states were allied before they became democracies or allied only after they became democracies.
He finds that "Non-aligned democracies are considerably less likely to fight each other than aligned non-democracies. The Argument: Some critics of the democratic peace proposition claim that democracies have not fought one another because they have not had the opportunity. Until recently, there were relatively few democracies in the international system. Many were geographically remote from each other. Response: The most sophisticated statistical analyses of the evidence for the democratic peace take these variables into account and still conclude that there is a strong relationship between democracy and peace.
The Argument: Skeptics suggest that, if the democratic peace proposition is valid, we should find that pairs of democracies behave in crises in way that reveals that shared democracy, not considerations of power and interest, caused them to avoid war.
For example, tracing the process of how events unfolded should reveal that the publics in democracies did not want war with other democracies, that leaders did not make military threats against other democracies, and that democracies adopted accommodating behavior toward other democracies. Response: Proponents of the democratic-peace proposition do not deny that considerations of power and interest often motivate states.
For instance, authoritarians commonly reject facts and spread lies to manipulate the public. The refusal by Republican political leaders to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, a unique characteristic of American democracy and one respected by countries and international leaders around the world, [20] culminated in the coup attempt on the United States Capitol on January 6, , when a mob of Trump supporters descended upon the Capitol with the intention of stopping the certification of the election results by Congress and harming Democrat political leaders.
Historically, the United States has generally rejected authoritarianism and totalitarianism and has acted as an enforcer of democracy and freedom around the globe. Those values and that influence waned under the Trump Administration. Following the coup attempt, the world has been left to wonder, what will be the role of the United States in monitoring, encouraging, and enforcing democratic freedoms and liberties abroad? With authoritarianism on the rise worldwide and democratic rule declining, the loss of American leadership could prove detrimental for global freedom and liberty.
The election of Joe Biden signals the return of an America that, at least publicly, embraces democracy and rebukes tyrannical leaders and authoritarian regimes. In order to reestablish its democratic credibility, the United States will have to repair, first and foremost, the significant fractures to its own democracy that were exposed and worsened during the Trump Administration. It could accomplish this by ending the Trump Administration practice of making false or misleading comments about administration policy or general facts, filling the many vacancies left open at independent agencies, ceasing presidential or other political interference in the operation of those agencies, and by directing agencies to cooperate with Freedom of Information Act requests and independent oversight organizations.
An overhaul of the policing, housing, education, and medical systems is key in improving the unequal treatment faced by many minority groups. Additionally, policies and practices that work to address the gender pay gap and the wealth gap in America are instrumental to improving American democracy.
The report argues that the U. The survey also finds that allowing foreign-born people to study and live in the U. People who report having had family members or close friends who have lived in America in the past five years are significantly more likely to have positive views. America should accept that each country will need to find its own path to adopt democracy. Contact us at letters time. The U. Capitol dome is reflected on the plaza of the East Front of the U.
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