Challenges for Building Stable Democracies Essay -- Essays Papers

Challenges for Building Stable Democracies It has been stated that the Bush administration’s goal is to have America spread democracy around the world. This may sound radical, but it is really just what our foreign policy has been for the past 60 or so years. The only difference is that now there is no evil communist empire, the USSR has fallen. America has a new ideological enemy the theocracies and oppressive regimes around the world especially Africa and the Middle East, the places that breed terrorists. The Bush administration and most people feel that the best way to stop Terrorism is to wipe out its source. However, in building democracies in the Middle East and other parts in the world there are some extreme difficulties in the process. The first step to building any strong democracy in a country with an autocratic regime is to topple that old regime. This can often be very difficult, because these autocratic regimes usually have quite a strong military and police force to oppose your attempted regime change. America really has little problems with this, because our army is the most powerful in the world. Despite our ease at defeating most armies it we cannot overlook this step in the process of building democracies. The next step is occupying the country; this can often take even more troops then the invasion. This is because often after a state is defeated there are still rebel guerilla groups that can cause a bit of a problem. There is also the fact that it takes a long time to rebuild a country. The two countries we have successfully rebuilt as democracies, Japan and Germany, had no guerillas and it took us five years of occupation to get them where they needed to be. Any invasion force has to have ... ...aucratic gridlock that results in extreme inefficiency. Despite these challenges the United States and others have a good chance to spread Democracy, but it will not be easy. To make America’s current plan work we need to be dedicated to this goal, be willing to deal with hardships, have the compassion to get these people out from under oppressive regimes, and to not pull out of the states at the first sign of trouble. Works Cited 1. David Ingersoll, Richard Matthews, and Andrew Davison, â€Å"Theopolitics and Islamism,† in The Philosophic Roots of Modern Ideology, third edition (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2001) 2. Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, found on http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm, Ch. 19 3. Sheri Berman, â€Å"Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic,† World Politic 49 (April 1997)