the democracy battleground.

Painting was a particularly important battleground, and throughout the 1950s the CIA sponsored exhibitions of American abstract expressionist painters, the most important of whom were Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. The young Nelson Rockefeller, who helped organize many of these exhibitions through the Museum of Modern Art in New York, all but gave the game away when he called abstract expressionism “free enterprise painting.” And Tom Braden, head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division at the time, later recalled:

We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had.

Most American policy makers and human-rights activists may believe that history is on their side, but for the first time since the Soviet collapse their efforts are encountering serious resistance not only from resurgent states such as Russia and emergent powers such as China but also from many nations in the Global South. For these countries, the democracy promoters’ claims sound more like moral flags of convenience to further U.S. interests than disinterested efforts in the name of the global public good.

After all, the George W. Bush administration used the democracy agenda to justify its Iraq invasion and the global prosecution of its long war against jihadis. 

The U.S. State Department’s outraged reaction to the news was a case study in the hypocrisy and confusion that have attended post–Cold War democracy promotion from the start. Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland declared that the United States remained “committed to supporting democracy, human rights, and the development of a more robust civil society in Russia.” She added defiantly that Washington looked forward to “continuing our close cooperation with Russian non-governmental organizations.”

It is perfectly legitimate for the Obama administration to oppose the Putin government and to favor dissident groups like Memorial, the election-monitoring NGO Golos and other organizations that oppose the Putin regime. But it is absurd to pretend that, in doing so, Washington is not meddling in Russia’s internal affairs. Vladimir Putin may be everything his adversaries in the democratic Russian opposition say he is, but the fact that he is bad does not mean he is wrong. USAID has been funding groups that would like to see a different and more democratic government in the Kremlin. For Washington to express indignation that this dictatorship is not prepared to let America continue underwriting its enemies really tells you all you need to know about the self-delusional sense of arrogant entitlement that pervades the democracy-building project.

During the Cold War, the utility of democracy promotion was clear: it was a weapon in that conflict. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, it was possible to believe a new world order curated by the United States might actually come into being. Then, pursuing democracy promotion was an entirely rational decision for policy makers, for it would have strengthened that world order. But now, when the new world order has turned out to be a chimera, why continue to pursue a policy configured for other times and other conditions? 

http://nationalinterest.org/article/evangelists-democracy-7625?page=show