I was just wondering what ultimately became of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine. This is the doctrine that said the USA should support authoritarian regimes, against Communist ones (and democratic ones, apparently), because they were more stable.
I know it was famously expressed during the Reagan administration. But it really goes back much further than that. I know Democratic President Jimmy Carter supported the evil Shah of Iran, don’t forget.
It also has an interesting application today, I think. Consider Saddam Hussein. He was evil to the core, to be sure. But he did allow for a lot of religious freedom, for example. He was a dictator. But he was one of the good ones (or at least “better ones”, FWIW). I don’t support Saddam Hussein.
I don’t support the Kirkpatrick Doctrine either. I think we should support democracies everywhere, even if they are less stable. But I do often wonder what became of this doctrine. Do we still follow it at all? As I said, Democrats are just as guilty as Republicans when it comes to the implementation of this evil (and unnecessary) doctrine.
I think the reasoning was that all communist regimes were dictatorships while western regimes were a mix of democracies and dictatorships. So pro-western dictatorships, while not democracies themselves, were supporting the cause of democracy.
With the collapse of global communism and its isolation to only a handful of nations, there’s no longer a need to have dictatorial allies in the struggle against communism. So democracies can switch to supporting the spread of democracy.
Let’s make it simple: We shouldn’t support any dictatorship. If two dictatorships are duking it out, we should just stay out of it and let them settle it between themselves. We don’t need to involve ourselves in everything that happens everywhere in the globe.
World politics is so complex and moves so rapidly that anyone we support at one point might come back to bite us. Why not just not support either the dictator nor the communist regime? Let them rise or fall by their own accord, put no money or time into supporting either one, and simply wait until the day when we actually like the government that appears?
Was it shameful when we supported Stalin in WW2?
All dictators are not created equal. Hitler was worse than Stalin, and Stalin was worse than the Shah of Iran.
Sometimes it was necessary to support an anti-communist dictator because the only alternative was a communist dictator. During the Korean war there were two strongmen Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee, we supported one and opposed the other. Then when Rhee left we supported Park Chung Hee. Now South Korea is a democracy, its economy is one of the marvels of the modern world and North Korea is a prison camp full of starving people. Nothing shameful about that.
There needs to be new Kirkpatrick doctrine for Islamic terrorists. If a dictator is willing to fight the terrorists, the US should not oppose them and if they are not willing to fight terrorists then the US should oppose them, and if they support terrorism then the US should try to topple them.
Another factor was that due to our influence, our dictators could be eased out of power in favor of democratic reform when the time was right, whereas Communist dictators clung to power and were generally willing to kill everyone in the country to hold onto power. The exception ended up being Eastern Europe, but that was only because those were puppet regimes, one and all, and with no Soviet support the puppets either had to step down peacefully or die. Ceaucescu chose unwisely, the others didn’t.
But does anyone believe the Castros will ever liberalize their system? The Chinese? North Korea? Vietnam? Perhaps the economy, but communists are absolutists about political control. None of those countries will ever allow the people any freedom where it matters until they are violently overthrown.
But that’s overthinking things in the case of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine. The real reason is simply that we were in an existential conflict with world Communism, so we needed allies wherever we could find them. Not backing right-wing dictators meant the replacement of those dictators by communist governments, and even many we did back got replaced by communist governments.
Today, we have no existential ideological enemies. More to the point, the ideological enemy we do have is actually supported by powerful elements of governments we consider “friendly”. So we have three very good reasons to no longer support ANY authoritarian governments anywhere:
We just don’t HAVE to do it anymore. Our survival does not depend on what form the governments of the Middle East take.
Humanitarianism, a luxury we have in 2016 and should use whenever possible
Our “friends” have elements in their government who support our enemies. If the Pinochet government had communists in major positions in the government, we would not regard the Pinochet government as an ally. Yet the Saudi government has plenty in the royal family backing worldwide terrorism and we consider them to be essential, somehow, to the war on terror. That’s just wrong. They ARE the war on terror.
Hopefully the attack on Medina will be the wake-up call that the bored Saudi princes who like to dabble in jihad from a safe distance need in order to put a stop to that.
That wasn’t the Kirkpatrick doctrine. I’m not arguing that it can’t be a necessity but simply fighting communism doesn’t make it a necessity. The Kirkpatrick doctrine would have had us siding with Hitler against Stalin.
I don’t think there’s a bright line, but if you GIVE weapons, that’s an ally. If you sell weapons, it’s just a customer. Trade is also just a customer.
I think that material support for a regime involves free or heavily discounted weapons or access to weapons we don’t normally give countries access to. Israel and Saudi Arabia get good stuff, so I think we can say we are very supportive of those nations.
Defending a country in the UN is also significant, as it constitutes diplomatic support.
But everyone’s mileage may vary. I never considered Iraq to be a country we “supported” because at no point was Iraq ever not part of the Soviet bloc. It’s true that we preferred them in the Iran-Iraq war, but they still were primarily a Soviet ally and not a Western ally. There’s no question who Saddam would have been helping had it come down to WWIII. But some may disagree. That’s fine, because again, there’s no bright line.
Absent Germany declaring war on us, who knows? Britain for a few years cultivated Hitler as a counterweight to Stalin until it became clear that Hitler was just too much of a threat in his own right. What if Germany never declares war on the US, we stay out, and Britain makes a separate peace? We didn’t hesitate to support Franco against the Soviets, and Franco was an ideological ally of Hitler’s if not an outright ally.
For the record, Saddam wasn’t one of “our” dictators. He was one of “theirs”. In other words, he was generally an ally of the Soviet Union. We did reach out to him during the Iraq/Iran War but that was more of an “enemy of my enemy” relationship.
ETA: I didn’t see that adaher had already addressed this point.
