Emma Ashford on Democracy Here and There

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

“America Can’t Promote Democracy Abroad. It Can’t Even Protect It at Home.” (Emma Ashford, Foreign Policy, 1/7/21)
“The U.S. Must Now Repair Democracy at Home and Abroad” (Thomas Wright, The Atlantic, 1/10/21)
“Rogue Superpower: Why This Could Be an Illiberal American Century” (Michael Beckley, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2020)

Archival audio:

Video shows moment woman was shot in U.S. Capitol riot (CGTN America, 1/6/21)
4 dead after riots at US Capitol (USA Today, 1/6/21)
Protestors pound on U.S. Capitol door, break window amid massive protests in Washington D.C. (10 Tampa Bay, 1/6/21)
Van Jones: US Capitol riot is treason and rebellion. Period. (CNN, 1/6/21)
See Biden's speech as rioters invade Capitol (CNN, 1/6/21)
Chaos in Washington as Trump supporters storm Capitol and force lockdown of Congress (BBC, 1/6/21)
Four dead after Trump supporters storm Congress (Sky News, 1/7/21)
Counterinsurgency expert says Trump riots will lead to future violence in the US (ABC News Australia, 1/7/21)

Transcript:

January 13, 2021

EMMA ASHFORD: The events of the last week have shown that things are at the stage where they are so broken that we really have to start thinking about fixing things here at home, shoring up our own domestic democratic institutions, before we can even start to think about what we should be doing on the world stage.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. Today, we had planned to bring you an episode all about war powers. We had great interviewees and a great conversation. But last Wednesday, something happened.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: We're joined now by a foreign policy expert, Emma Ashford of the Atlantic Council, who's going to help us make sense of the violent riots on Capitol Hill Wednesday and the response to the events in the national security and foreign policy communities.

Emma, thank you so much for taking time to be with us today.

ASHFORD: It's great to be here. I just wish the circumstances were better.

HANNAH: Right. Yeah, it's a dark day for American democracy, no doubt, and you've grappled with that. I think we've spoken before, and you mentioned how this is a piece you sort of just punched out Wednesday night in response to the events of last Wednesday, a date that will go down in infamy, as some people have said. What are your initial reactions to that news?

ASHFORD: Yes. So, obviously what happened on Wednesday was just absolutely horrifying. You know, put aside the question of foreign policy entirely for right now. An armed mob broke into the Capitol. We probably came close to them kidnapping or even killing some lawmakers. We’re incredibly lucky that didn't happen. The images, I suspect, will be etched into our minds for a really long time.

But as for the article you're talking about, I ended up typing it out late at night after all of that happened on Wednesday and after my kids went to sleep. The thing I ended up focusing on as far as foreign policy implications was my frustration about the reaction I was seeing in the foreign policy community. This reaction was not, “Oh, my God. This is horrifying. We should rethink what we're doing.” The reaction was, “Well, this will damage America's moral standing, and it will make it harder for us to lead the world.” And to some extent, this reflected a frustration I've obviously had about U.S. foreign policy for a very long time, but there was sort of a willingness on the part of a lot of people in the foreign policy community to just look past problems here at home in America and just say, “Well, the only thing that really matters is whether American leadership in the world is secure.” And you see this everywhere from individual foreign policy pundits to the Biden campaign's documents, which say we should be restoring leadership in the world. I just find it incredibly frustrating that when faced with this, something we will find in the history books—that might end up having its own chapter in history books—the response was a panic about moral authority.

HANNAH: One of the things you write about so persuasively is that these people—these commentators and policy makers—are essentially exploiting a national tragedy to promote American exceptionalism and saying we should continue reshaping the world in America's image to continue promoting democracy. These people have become so blasé about what that image is. So, talk about who those people are and about why you think they're so blasé.

ASHFORD: Yeah. So, in the piece I follow a few specific people, particularly Michael McFaul, who used to be who used to be America's ambassador to Russia under President Obama and who's quite a noted liberal internationalist interventionist hawk, particularly on democracy promotion questions. But there were some organizations as well, four major democracy promotion think tanks, including the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, and a couple of others. They got together and put out a statement that basically says, “This changes nothing. America continues to stand with people seeking democracy overseas. We will continue to push for that with everything we have.” And so, again, it's not everybody. It's certainly not everybody in Washington. It's not even everybody in the foreign policy community. It's not even everyone that might identify as a liberal internationalist. But there was a fairly coherent subset of people basically making an argument that it's all about moral authority, that the thing we need to focus on is shoring up America's moral authority, making sure we can build a community of democracies to push back against China. And not so much about the domestic political implications of what happened on Wednesday.

HANNAH: One smart and thoughtful critic of your piece is Tom Wright of the Brookings Institution. He's written a rebuttal over at the Atlantic defending this kind of the foreign policy community and their zealous promotion of democracy in the wake of this tragedy. Help us understand where you and Tom differ and how you respond to his piece.

ASHFORD: Yeah, sure. Tom basically responds, and there's a couple pieces out there that do this. The argument is effectively that America shouldn't stop trying to promote democracy, shouldn't stop saying things about other countries where there are injustices just because we aren't perfect at home. And I am very sympathetic to that argument. That's an entirely true argument, but it's also a bit of a straw man because that's not what I'm arguing. And I don't think that's what a lot of people who were criticizing this school of thought were actually saying last week. There's a difference, I think, between American leaders saying, “Hey, we're not perfect either, but we are going to say something when we see China conducting injustices against the Uighurs and when we see them conducting injustices in Hong Kong.” That's absolutely fine. There's a question, I think, of how useful it is if you look at the completely tone deaf nature of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Twitter feed over the last week, where he has pretended Wednesday didn't happen and continued to call out other states as authoritarian. So, it's not very effective, but I agree that we should still sort of “see something, say something.” But I think that's not the argument I'm making or the argument most of us are making. Instead, what we're talking about is the actual capacity of America to do these things, to engage in the world, to be seen as a leader, as somebody that can lead the charge on China. I don't think that's possible given the level of domestic political dysfunction we have seen over the last four years, but particularly in the last week.

I think there was a really interesting article by Michael Beckley in Foreign Affairs a few months back that I would encourage people to go back and read. Beckley is over at the American Enterprise Institute and typically has policy implications in his work that suggest a more robust American posture abroad, but the piece in Foreign Affairs basically argues that we should worry about America as an illiberal actor in world affairs. That is something I've only begun to grapple with after the events of last week, but I think is a good response to Tom and those who are saying, “It doesn't impact what America says abroad.” Well, I think it does. Other states are going to look at America after this. They've already been looking at us for years under Trump and saying not just, “Does America have the moral authority to engage in the world, to promote human rights, to speak out against injustice?” But also, “Is what America is saying internationally actually illiberal?” And I think that's an increasing problem.

HANNAH: Yeah, and there are a lot of people who think, “Oh, Trump's only got another week left, and we have Joe Biden coming back in. Therefore we are going to restore American moral leadership in the world necessarily.” President Trump might be going away, and Twitter and Facebook have seen to that on another dimension. But those people who stormed the Capitol are not, and the insurrectionists and the people who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories are not. And so, when I heard Joe Biden's speech about, “This is not who we are,”—and frequently on the stump throughout the campaign, he's talked about “the power of our example rather than the example of our power.” And so, if you want to reckon with that and if you want to take that seriously—and I do—one wonders, to your point, about the power of our example at this moment.

A Washington Post columnist sort of responded to President-elect Biden's speech in the aftermath of this tragedy, saying it was kind of an appeal to American exceptionalism.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: And it was kind of not what we needed at the moment—this kind of exhortation that this is not who we are. I mean, this is who we are to some extent, right? And do we need to come to terms with that? What do you think the transition of power in this country from President Trump to President Biden portends for our ability to promote democracy abroad and the ways in which we promote democracy?

ASHFORD: Well, Biden saying, “This is not who we are.”—a lot of people who are smarter and more educated on this have pointed out this is who America is, and America has never been perfect. And so, again, I have some sympathy with these arguments that America can sometimes be a force for good in the world even as it has problems at home. Look at what America did during the early phases of the Cold War, even as Jim Crow persisted in the American South. These things are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I'd argue that the problems we have today are so much bigger.

We're transitioning next week—hopefully with no more violence—over to the Biden Administration, and Joe Biden is going to make all the right noises for four years. You know, he's going to talk about American leadership. He's going to talk about allies and partners. He's going to engage with other countries. He's going to talk about climate change, global problems, and human rights. And other countries have absolutely no idea if that will continue four years down the road. Will Joe Biden fix this and bring it back into balance, or are we just four years away from another Trump Administration? If it's not him, perhaps it's Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton or someone like that. Is America going to seesaw back and forth between these somewhat more autocratic and more democratic forms of government?

I heard a comment a couple of weeks back that stuck with me, and it was, “The thing that is most disquieting to policymakers in European capitals is that seventy-four million people voted for Donald Trump.” Now, again, we know because we live here. We watch the news. We talk to our friends and family. We know most of those seventy-four million people didn't vote for Trump because they agree with what happened on Wednesday. They may have voted for him because they agree with other policy stances on abortion or various other things, but the fact is that Trump was not repudiated at the ballot box.

HANNAH: I want to stick with this for a minute. Perceptions of other countries—we talk about the power of our example, but then we usually fail to measure or appreciate how our example is perceived in the world. We at the Eurasia Group Foundation try to mitigate that by conducting an international survey of foreign publics’ perceptions of American democracy. One of the things I've seen that's interesting is an assessment of how this news is getting reported in the foreign press as though it were the American news castigating or condemning such news in another country.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: What's happening here at home is precisely the thing American policymakers are so used to condemning abroad. Let's talk a little bit about foreign perception. How is this playing out abroad, and in a concrete way, how does it influence our ability to set an example?

ASHFORD: I'll start by giving you a personal anecdote. I am British born. I was born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland. On Wednesday afternoon, I received a lot of phone calls and texts from friends and family still in the UK, some of them saying, “Hey, are you guys OK? I don't know how close you live to this.” A lot of them were saying, “Oh, my God. We're sitting up to watch this. It's 11:00 at night. I can't go to bed. I can't stop watching the news. This is horrifying.” And I wonder if people in America are perhaps underestimating the extent to which this was viewed abroad with horror. I mean, obviously, that is anecdotal. That is personal. But what I'm also seeing out of a lot of those countries—particularly the European capitals—that are allies, that are democracies which have had a long-running relationship with America, is very firm statements condemning this and condemning President Trump. Not the kind of wishy washy statements we've seen before. Not things like, “We hope this gets resolved to everyone's satisfaction.” But statements condemning this in very harsh terms. And I really do think that's going to have a long term impact, that countries like Germany or France—particularly in France, we've already seen a lot of talk about European strategic autonomy. The French are actually quite clear that this is in part a hedge against America moving in a direction the European states don't like. And they're more circumspect in Germany and elsewhere, but again, I think we have to question the extent to which Joe Biden is going to be able to even think about mending those fences in a world where European allies fear what could come from the American political system.

HANNAH: It strikes me as really problematic that countries we're concerned about are now concerned about us and, essentially, our devolution to authoritarianism.

ASHFORD: If you think about it, a really interesting point, I guess, is particularly Germany. We helped Germany rebuild itself into a democratic state, and to some extent, we almost seem to have done better there than we have at home. Again, this comes back to the duality of: can America help abroad if it's not perfect at home? I think that's a real straw man argument because we have proven time and time again that we can and that even when America is not perfect, we can lead by example. But I think the events of the last week have shown that things are at the stage where they are so broken that we really have to start thinking about fixing things here at home, shoring up our own domestic democratic institutions, before we can even start to think about what we should be doing on the world stage.

HANNAH: One of the things I take away from this is, for all the arrogance of claiming to promote universal values overseas—a yearning for freedom and a distaste for oppression—I do think those things are universal to some extent. But what we fail to appreciate is there are other things that are universal as well—the ability for a public or a large portion of the public to be susceptible to conspiratorial thinking, the ability to get really angry and be charmed and misguided by a charismatic strongman—we're not immune to those simply because our founding fathers were enlightened and because we're an exceptional nation. Those things happen here at home as well. Is this a problem that is pervasive everywhere, and it's just the case that America is having its moment?

ASHFORD: The concept we've been dancing around this whole time is American exceptionalism. And for myself—just my personal opinion—I think America is exceptional, but it's only exceptional in its ideals. It's exceptional in that it was a country founded on ideas rather than on a nation or ethnic identity. That is pretty exceptional in world history and gives America a fairly special place. But I do think there is a very pernicious inclination—not just among individuals in America, but even among institutions—to think that America is truly exceptional and that the political trends or problems we see elsewhere can't impact us here. Some of the ones you mention are susceptibility to conspiracy theories and extremism in politics.

Some of the best guides to what's been happening in the American political system over the last four years have been the scholars who study comparative politics and look at these trends in other countries. They have turned around and applied their knowledge to America, and, speaking as a political scientist and as somewhat of an academic, I have found those people to be a far better guide to what's happening than the people who actually study American politics for a living. And again, perhaps that's just a manifestation of the myth of American exceptionalism—the idea that we think American politics is so unique, we've spun it out into its own discipline, away from comparing it to other countries. And so, I kind of agree with you. I think these are trends we have seen in other countries at various points in history. This may just be America's time, and history tells us that's probably not a good thing.

HANNAH: You write in the Foreign Policy piece that it's hard to see why the United States policymakers are prioritizing rallying an ambitious and “poorly defined,” quote unquote, alliance of democracies to push back against China rather than trying to stop the bleeding at home. And I know that is a priority of the Biden Administration. There's been talk about a summit of democracies. So, talk about the idea of an alliance of democracies and why you think it's tone deaf for the moment. But the second part of that is fixing it at home. Let's talk again about concrete things the United States can do to shore up its democracy to beat back this conspiracy. Is that a civics education? What are the safeguards? How do you strengthen institutions and the public investment in democracy here at home?

ASHFORD: Yes. Let me, I guess, take those in reverse order. I wish I knew the answer to your last question. I don't have a good answer, in part because this is not my area of expertise. I would probably start looking at reforms, things like reforming the Electoral College and reforming the Senate, but again, I'm not an expert in these things. And I would hope the people who are experts in them could perhaps make some more concrete suggestions.

On the question of the alliance of democracies. It's a fairly nebulous idea. I have seen everything from suggestions that a grouping of democracies should actually be about focusing on structural reforms at home and about fixing trade and some of these transnational issues like populism which have come up in the last few years. That's the minority view, but I've seen that. And I'm not even convinced that's a bad idea necessarily. But then a lot of these are about pushing back on China or pushing back on Russia. I think the general theory is basically that we have NATO, which is a fairly concrete alliance, but we have nothing similar in the Asia Pacific. If China is viewed by most in Washington to be the major threat, then we need to build something analogous, and this grouping of democracies is basically supposed to be a way to rope Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and those Asian democracies into a grouping that also includes Europe. The idea being to sort of tie countries like Germany and France to you in pushing back on China. This is incredibly ambitious, perhaps even more ambitious than forming NATO at the start of the Cold War, because it's not geographically bound to just one area. And as I say, it is a little nebulous, but for the vast majority of people it is very much about inward-looking policy, about pushing back on China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. And again, the argument I make in this Foreign Policy piece is just that is incredibly ambitious. I do not believe we have the capacity or the scope to engage in that kind of institution building right now, even if it were a good idea, which is a totally different discussion we can have some other time.

HANNAH: One piece of news is a lot of people are critical that the Capitol Police didn't sufficiently protect the Capitol from the insurgents—from the insurrectionists. There was obviously no lack of intelligence that this was going to happen. A lot of academics were tracking loosely coordinated plans on social media. The president had a rally right down the street. What went wrong from a national security standpoint, and what can we do to prevent this from happening again?

ASHFORD: I mean, clearly, a lot of things went wrong. A policeman got beaten to death by a mob inside the U.S. Capitol. A lot of things went wrong. For my part, I guess I look at what happened on Wednesday, and I see an unruly mob breaking into the Capitol and getting through insufficient defenses. That's one problem. Maybe if they had beefed up the defenses a little more and been more aware, this wouldn't have happened. I doubt it would have happened without incitement from President Trump, either. But what I find a lot more concerning were the reports and pictures of smaller, clearly professionalized, often ex-military groups of men going into the Capitol en masse, looking like they had a plan to kidnap, kill, and capture people. That is the definition of domestic extremism or terrorism. What I worry this shows about our national security apparatus is that we have been focused far too long on the idea of external terrorism, the idea that a terrorist is an Arab jihadi, somebody from Yemen or Syria or Lebanon, while ignoring the threat of quite extremist white nationalist or supremacist rhetoric at home. If you look over the scope of recent U.S. history, those groups have often been more threatening.

Prior to 9/11, the biggest terrorist attack on U.S. soil was conducted by Timothy McVeigh, a white nationalist in Oklahoma City. In the last twenty years, as we have focused more and more on foreign jihadi terrorism—everything from al-Qaida through to ISIS—we have largely ignored these domestic threats. Now, I don't necessarily think the response is to set up a domestic terrorism law and start doing all of those war on terror things at home, as some people have said, but it does suggest that some rebalancing of our priorities over threat perceptions is in order. We have a massive military apparatus overseas dedicated to fighting extremism in Mali and places like that, and we allowed different groups at home—that were born here and live here—we led them to overrun the Capitol and almost kill lawmakers. Something is really out of balance in how we approach these national security threats. And again, this is kind of my argument—same as the argument about moral authority—it's not that we shouldn't have a debate about what we're doing abroad. But right now, we need to think about where we have gone wrong at home before we engage in that debate abroad.

HANNAH: Emma, thank you so much for joining us today.

ASHFORD: Thanks for having me.

HANNAH: I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special thanks to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Thank you to our producer Caroline Gray, our editor Luke Taylor, sound engineer Zubin Hensler, and EGF’s graduate research assistant Adam Pontius. If you liked what you heard, do subscribe to us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and anywhere else you find podcasts. Rate and review us, and if there is a topic you want us to cover, shoot us an email at info@egfound.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and see you next time.

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