Democratic Control of the Military in Security Policy
As in the Carter years, the different elements of the democratic agenda are again in competition with one another--human rights versus the expansion of free trade, as one example. Whether the democratic agenda of control should be carried out by multilateral means or, in case of need, by the United States alone, has again become a source of confusion and grief, as in Bosnia. Meanwhile, the nation's enthusiasm for bearing the human and financial costs of carrying out a policy of both democratic internationalism and democratic nationalism has waned. Whereas control of the military had provided a reasonably clear rationale for policy and a lever for mobilizing public support, neo-Wilsonianism seems a guideline made of rubber and has left the American public deeply ambivalent. This ambivalence reflects the confusion implied by viewing the normative and practical issues of national policy.
This is not new. As Jack Snyder (1991) establishes in Myths of Empire, the golden ages of liberal democratic nationalism were the periods that followed the two world wars, and, to some extent, the 1980s, when the Cold War was being "won" by the West and the "third wave" of democratization occurred. This is not a coincidence; it suggests that in order to understand the current difficulties of democratic national security policy on the world stage and in the hearts of Americans, there is a need to go far beyond the all too familiar and depressing litany of what is wrong with Bill Clinton's military policy. An examination of the plight of democratic nationalism must shift to the flaws and limitations of the national security policy itself.
Security policy, in its various philosophical guises, was and is a ram against authoritarian regimes: both in and out of one's own county. It tries to free individuals from tyranny by providing them with the right to consent to their political institutions ...