Issue: 12 February 2005

To help us through the many longueurs of the recent Iraqi election process, some members of the Baghdad press corps devised an exciting new competition: seeing who could spot the cheesiest advertisement or trailer on any international rolling news channel. CNN, predictably, coasted to the palm. ‘Arab-American comedians: healing cultural wounds ...one smile at a time,’ ran a trailer for some show on the Middle East. Businessmen in suits, their heads held aloft at 45-degree angles, half-smiles playing on their lips, gazed in a visionary, uplifted sort of way at the new wide seats being introduced on Qatar Airways’s club class. Overjoyed mobile-phone customers grooved to upbeat music under sunny skies. ‘Deep down, we are all the same,’ said the voice-over.

Then the pictures changed to a slightly older man in a slightly more formal setting, delivering a speech that could quite easily have been written by exactly the same mobile-phone ad-persons. ‘We live in the country where the biggest dreams are born,’ said George W. Bush (for it was he). ‘The only force powerful enough to replace hatred with hope is the force of freedom.... The road of Providence is uneven and unpredictable, yet we know where it leads. It leads to freedom.’

Taken with his inaugural address, couched in very similar terms, Mr Bush is clearly positioning himself as the freedom President. The two speeches rested on a number of unspoken assumptions: that America was advancing the cause of freedom; that oppressed people across the world wanted to be like America; and that America could be the arbiter of freedom for all other countries. All of these beliefs were once true; but, thanks in part to Mr Bush’s calamitous Presidency, none is true any longer.

The cause of freedom did advance, dramatically, under recent American presidents: under Reagan and Bush Senior, as the Cold War ended, as Eastern Europe was liberated and as the end of superpower rivalry unlocked reform in parts of the Third World. There are many more democracies now than there were 20 years ago. But under the current President, the position is much more complicated.

Modest advances in freedom have taken place: in Afghanistan, though life for Afghans outside Kabul has changed very little; and in Iraq, though there it is a freedom of the ruins. But these are balanced by the shaming reductions in freedom that have occurred in those traditional standard-bearers, America and Britain. What we have seen at Guantanamo and to a lesser extent Belmarsh amounts to an embryonic, and hopefully temporary, Israelification of the state, where functioning democratic institutions such as the courts and the law are bypassed in the name of security. These may be appropriate for Israel, which faces a genuinely substantial threat, but Britain and America face nothing of the sort. Further compromises with freedom seem inevitable here as New Labour pushes ahead with identity cards, non-jury courts and other medicines far worse than the disease.

In many places, President Bush’s war on terror has made the cause of freedom more hopeless than ever. Uzbekistan, a far worse human rights abuser than, say, Iran, has traded on its strategic value to the US to win absolution — indeed funding — for its savage repression of dissidents. (Democratic activists in Uzbekistan are sometimes boiled to death; the pathologists can tell by the fact that the bodies are left with a recognisable tide-mark.) President Vladimir Putin, who has presided over the most significant recent reversal of democracy anywhere on earth, is praised by Bush. Putin — in Chechnya — and other demi-tyrants across the planet have been allowed to get away with murder by claiming that it is all part of the war on al-Qa’eda.

The administration’s chosen enemies of freedom, Iran and North Korea, meanwhile, rest fairly easy, openly defiant of Washington, American travails in Iraq having satisfactorily demonstrated to them the limits of US power.

Over much of the world, the battle of ideas has been won by democracy; absolute despotism is now rare; even the likes of Russia, though slipping back, are still freer than they were two decades ago, and unlikely to return to tyranny. The real battle, as Bush failed to acknowledge, is to build effective states that can sustain democratic ideals. Iraq has now joined the long list of states with vaguely democratic principles and regular elections, but which cannot sustain the order necessary to make it meaningful.

The idea of the US as a model for the rest of the world has also faded. Partly this is due to President Bush’s deliberate rejection of treaties, ideals and norms of international law to which all other democractic nations subscribe; Bruce Ackerman, of Yale University’s law school, says that American law, once the world standard, has become ‘provincial’. Mostly, however, it is due to the rise of alternative models. The larger democracies of the ‘New Europe’ all rejected US-style constitutions in favour of a Germanic federal parliamentary system, as did the new South Africa. It is an article of American faith that political and economic freedom go hand-in-hand; that prosperity is inseparable from democracy. China, for now and for some of its people at least, has proved otherwise, and is a powerful new non-democratic role model.

China’s (and even Europe’s) ascent should remind Americans of something that President Bush appears to have forgotten: that it is economic, not military, might which really counts. The destruction of communism under Reagan and Bush Senior was accomplished almost entirely by the unstoppable strength of the US economy.

President Bush now attempts to secure freedom principally by force of arms, but since the second world war, all major attempts by the United States to advance American values by military means have failed. This is hardly surprising. The 82nd Airborne is jolly good at breaking things and killing people but, as one might have foreseen, this has proved an entirely hopeless way of getting anyone to love America or what it stands for. Iraqis are far more anti-American than they ever were under Saddam Hussein.

The West’s, and especially America’s, real strength, something no other nation including China can match, is its soft power — the absolutely killer combination of economic, marketing and cultural strength. East Germany’s biggest enemy was its citizens’ ability to receive West German TV. Much as we may mock them, those mobile phone ads on CNN and all the other products of Hollywood, are far more seductive in spreading a vision of prosperity, capitalism and progress than any Bush speech. And in the age of satellites, they don’t — unlike the 82nd Airborne — need to kick down the door or point guns at the kids to get into the house. Britain’s subtlest and most important instrument for distributing its values around the world is no longer the Royal Navy or the East India Company; it is the BBC. That is another reason why our dear government’s recent jihad against the Corporation was so ill advised.

Double standards are inevitable, even necessary, in foreign policy. Take the case of Egypt. ‘The great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East,’ said the President at one point during his speech. Unfortunately, the main opposition in Egypt — which would probably do rather well if free elections were ever allowed — is deeply Islamist and committed to the erasure of Israel. It is Egypt’s very lack of democracy which allows it to promote ‘peace in the Middle East’. Thanks in part to the crassness of US policy in the region, democracy there tomorrow would almost certainly produce a string of governments violently hostile to the United States.

All major nations must suffer conflicts between their rhetorically expressed ideals and their interests; but only the United States insists on widening them to the point at which it starts to suffer a serious loss of credibility. Perhaps the motto for the second Bush term ought to be: speak loudly, and carry a great deal of shtick.

Andrew Gilligan is defence and diplomatic editor of The Spectator, and is on the staff of the Evening Standard.