Help Ukraine and Israel Prevail, Says Carl Gershman
To aid democracy at a time of peril, make the American idea great again
[“America has a positive role to play in advancing freedom and democracy in the rest of the world,” is one of the themes here at The Editors. I’ve been reporting that out by soliciting, from a variety of thoughtful voices, answers to this prompt:
What are the most promising, concrete, specific steps America can take over the next few years to promote freedom, democracy, and rule of law in other countries? What places and people would you focus on, what’s the case for making the efforts, and how, practically, do you get it done given the constraints imposed by the American political and fiscal landscape?
Today’s response comes from Carl Gershman. Gershman was president of the National Endowment for Democracy from its founding in 1983 until he stepped down in 2021. He moderated the 1981 debate between Tom Kahn and Norman Podhoretz on “Poland, the Future of Communism, and U.S. Policy,” which Eric Chenowith calls “one of the most fascinating intellectual exchanges of the Cold War.” Midge Decter introduced him at that event by saying, “I will turn the meeting over now to Carl Gershman, whom I think needs no introduction to this audience,” and that may apply here, too, though we have a larger, more physically dispersed, crowd. I first met him in the mid-1990s when I was Washington correspondent of the Forward. His son Jacob Gershman was one of our best hires, among a lot of really excellent hires, at the New York Sun in the 2002 to 2008 period. — Ira Stoll]
A report released in July by the bipartisan Commission on National Defense Strategy, which was established by senior Democrats and Republicans on both the House and Senate Armed Services committees, opens with the foreboding declaration that “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.” The report notes that the “no limits” strategic partnership signed by Russia and China in 2022 has been broadened to include Iran and North Korea, and that this new alignment “creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multitheater or global war.” It warns that while the U.S. was prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, it is not prepared today.
There is no more powerful evidence that the United States is neither ready for such a war or in a position to deter it than the fact that two of the four members of the new Axis of Tyranny have launched unprovoked aggression against democratic countries — Russia against Ukraine, and Iran (through its proxy Hamas) against Israel — while China, a third member, repeatedly threatens to attack democratic Taiwan, all without the danger of a larger war even entering the national political debate during a presidential election year.
We are at a moment comparable to the 1930s, when the complacent and unprepared democracies failed to respond to the rise and deepening collaboration of the three Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and fascist Italy, leading to history’s bloodiest war. Just as the future and survival of democracy was at stake in that last existential battle, democracy is the central and defining issue in today’s global struggle.
As Anne Applebaum notes in Autocracy, Inc., democracy and the liberal ideas that inspire it are the common enemy of the alliance of autocrats, who are aiding each other in all the current arenas of confrontation. Undermining democracy is also their common interest since the liberal values that the autocrats oppose threaten their hold on power. Not least, their common objective is destruction of the rules-based international order that the U.S. and other democracies have built since World War II to protect democracy, preserve peace, and promote global prosperity.
The first and most immediate step that the U.S. needs to take to counter the Axis of Tyranny is to help Ukraine and Israel prevail in their struggles, respectively, against Russia and Iran. The defeat of these two authoritarian aggressors would be a major victory for democracy. It would also be seen as a damaging defeat for both the Russian and Iranian regimes, which could be destabilized as a result, and for the Axis coalition as well. It would promote the model of courageous resistance to tyranny and terror, as demonstrated by Ukraine and Israel, in contrast to the shameless cowardice of Hungary, among other countries. Not least, it would give hope and encouragement to democrats around the world.
But that’s far from sufficient. To contain the coalition of autocracies and halt the drift toward a larger war, the U.S. will need to reverse the erosion of its military power — the defense budget as a share of GDP is today less than half what it averaged during the Cold War. As recommended by the Commission, the U.S., in close cooperation with its allies, needs to develop and implement a comprehensive security plan that integrates credible military deterrence with other elements of national power, among them diplomacy, economic investment, cybersecurity, and technical innovation.
A strengthened political and information program should also be part of this integrated plan, both to counter the global disinformation campaigns of China, Russia and other autocracies and to promote the defense and advance of democracy in other countries. Toward this end, Voice of America and the other “freedom radios” need to be strengthened along with the National Endowment for Democracy and its four party, labor and business institutes. It will also be necessary to restore in some appropriate form the United States Information Agency, whose abolition by Congress during the vacation from history in the 1990s was a serious unforced error.
Finally, the U.S. must overcome the cynicism and polarization that have made us what Robert Gates has called a “dysfunctional superpower.” We can’t meet the crisis we face without healing ourselves first, and that will require remembering the moral principles on which the U.S. was founded. What’s needed is to make the American idea great again — the idea, as Lincoln said in 1861 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, that the Declaration of Independence “gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but to the world.” The idea of universal freedom still inspires people across the world, and dictators fear it for good reason. If we can recover it as the common denominator of American national identity, we will then have the capacity to meet the grave dangers we now face.
Other, earlier answers: “Don’t Lose Any Countries” Is Elliott Abrams’s Advice, by Elliott Abrams
Counter Communist China in the U.S. and at the U.N., Ellen Bork Recommends, by Ellen Bork
 | A guest post by
|
I wouldn't give a full endorsement of the "rules-based international order that the U.S. and other democracies have built since World War II". These rules have empowered terrorists to act with impunity, and threaten to restrict the ability of countries like Israel to respond. This international order has led to international courts threatening to punish Israel and imprison its leaders.
It is hard to fully endorse this international order until these bugs are fixed.