Riding the democratic wave

I tried to find this article by Lawrence F. Kaplan (THE EFFECTS OF AMERICAN POWER.
Pressure Points in The New Republic) on a non-subscription site, but wasn't successful. So I'll just have to content myself with quoting some of the most pertinent sections.

Neither version of events [internal vs. external democratic change] fares well under scrutiny. When democracy blossoms in several different places at once in a region whose political culture hasn't budged in 60 years, it's illogical to credit internal forces alone. At the same time, crediting the inspirational effect of Iraq's elections with events in places as far-flung as Ukraine and Egypt goes too far.

Each camp approaches the events of this spring from a different direction, but both end up in the same place: repeating the claim that "people power," triggered either by unique circumstances or the example of Iraq, accounts for the democratic wave sweeping over the Middle East and Central Asia, and that it alone can accomplish the ends of U.S. foreign policy in the region. But absent direct U.S. intervention, not one of these movements would have succeeded. This holds true in Egypt, Ukraine, Georgia, the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan and wherever else democracy has gained a foothold since the invasion of Iraq. Has that invasion changed the world directly? Maybe. Maybe not. What we do know is that it changed the orientation of U.S. foreign policy by making democratic interventions in other parts of the world more frequent and muscular. And that is changing the world.

...

There is a lesson here, and a reminder, for a nation chastened by the war in Iraq: When it comes to democratization, either the decisive push will come from Washington or it may not come at all.

Democracy, of course, is a political choice, an act of will. Someone, not something, must create it. Often that someone is a single leader -- a Juan Carlos or a Vaclav Havel. Other times, pressure for democracy comes from a political opposition -- Solidarity in Poland or demonstrators in the streets of Kiev and Beirut. Without these forces, external pressure can only accomplish so much -- a fact evident in Syria, which lacks a cohesive democratic opposition. But it is also true that, absent U.S. pressure, people power rarely suffices -- a fact vividly on display today in Uzbekistan. While the United States seldom convinces a government to topple itself, in many situations -- particularly moments of crisis -- U.S. intervention can tip the scales in favour of democracy. During the 1980s, Washington successfully applied diplomatic and economic pressure to repressive regimes from Poland to South Korea and Taiwan. Today, U.S. "crisis diplomacy" is playing the same role in Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon and Egypt.

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Even more so, because, while the tactic for democracy promotion varied by circumstance in all of these cases, in none of them did it involve Washington exporting democracy by force of arms -- a means that critics of the Bush administration, both at home and abroad, routinely conflate with an end. Alas, in the telling of American opinion-makers who take an organic view of democratization -- arguing that it must be grown, nurtured and never transplanted -- interference is still interference.... Abroad, however, the voices in full cry today against "outside interference" belong mostly to the dictators and their allies. As for the democrats, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kyrgyzstan's Tariel Bektemirov neatly summarized their priorities. Echoing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous plea from the Soviet Union to "interfere as much as you can. We beg you to come and interfere," Bektemirov said, "I want the U.S. to interfere. I want the world at large to interfere." And so we should.