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American policymakers are struggling today more than ever to come up with a big-picture idea with which to frame and justify their foreign policy. If the United States is headed for a decades-long struggle with autocratic regimes like China and Russia which requires all sorts of sacrifices from the American public, then what is fundamentally at stake in that struggle? The obvious answer - freedom, or democracy - is actually not so obvious at all, because the U.S. doesn’t alway stands on the side of democracy. Here’s what I said about it recently in an interview with an international affairs publication:
The U.S. is still struggling to find the big-picture idea which will be used to frame the challenges of the coming decades. Biden’s idea of a global struggle between democracies and autocracies doesn’t pass the test of scrutiny because the U.S. has many autocratic partners. A coalition to constrain China has to be based on something more noble than the desire to maintain a balance of power favorable to the West, but there’s remarkably little attempt to provide a superior framing. In the economic realm, the U.S. has begun co-opting many of the Chinese tactics which it previously decried. We seem to be headed for a world of more or less clearly delineated power blocs. But on what ideological basis?
The Biden administration has wrestled with this more than its predecessor because it claims, at least on paper, to organize its foreign policy on the basis of a battle between democracy and autocracy. In practice, this hasn’t been the case, as Biden’s abrupt embrace of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman showed. The Biden administration came into office talking loudly about how it was going to ostracize and punish MBS, whose crimes include ordering the murder of an American resident, then reversed course and decided to kiss the ring when it became clear that Saudi Arabia’s power in global oil markets could harm the American economy and Biden’s re-election prospects. Nothing about this should be particularly surprising, because governments make decisions like this all of the time. But it’s hard to do so while also talking with a straight face about how democracy and freedom are the cornerstone of your foreign policy.
Coups wisely
This problem is back in the news recently after a coup in Niger, a small and impoverished country in the Sahel region of Africa. Last month the country’s military seized power from its democratically-elected leader, President Mohamed Bazoum, imprisoning him and his family. Bazoum had been a staunch ally of the U.S. He allowed the American military access to a military base which it uses to combat Islamist organizations across the Sahel, and after the coup he appealed to Washington for help. Meanwhile, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a group of regional states, is threatening military intervention to restore Bazoum and the country’s democracy. France, Niger’s other main international partner, is browbeating the U.S. to oppose the coup. To top it all off, the coup leaders have been playing footsie with Russia, appealing to the Wagner group for help to stay in power.
So far, Washington’s response to this alarming chain of events has been to refuse to even recognize what happened in Niger as a coup at all. And there’s a good chance it never will.
In the 1980s, Congress started to insert provisions into the American aid budget which bans financial assistance from being given to any government which overthrew its democratically-elected predecessor in a coup. The aim of the legislation was both to discourage coups from actually occurring and to make it plain that the United States did not support them when they did. But successive presidents have seen this law as an unwelcome intrusion, something which ties their hands and forces them to adopt a punitive policy towards governments which they might rather stay on friendly terms with. This might be because the U.S. actively supported or welcomed the coup, or it might just be that some countries are so important that Washington always needs to be on good terms with whoever rules them.
So how do American officials get around this law? They simply refuse to call a coup a coup, and so avoid triggering the effects of the law.
Perhaps the most infamous example came in 2013, when the Egyptian military seized power from the democratically-elected government of Mohammed Morsi, who had come to power following the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Shortly after deposing Morsi, the military massacred nearly 1,000 peaceful protesters in cold blood, chilling the streets and making it clear that it would brook no return to civilian rule. Yet throughout all of this the Obama administration tied itself in linguistic knots to avoid using the word “coup” to describe what was happening. Jen Psaki, then a State Department spokeswoman and later Biden’s Press Secretary, explained that the Obama administration would not officially decide whether Egypt had experienced a coup because “it is not in our national interest to make such a determination”.
That decision made - or rather not made - the administration was free to continue whatever policy it wished towards Egypt, which the U.S. views as a key security partner in the Middle East and whose military it tries to keep strong in order to maintain a stable balance of power in the region. The Obama administration did temporarily suspend most military aid to the new government in Cairo in 2013, only to resume it in 2016.
It’s clear that if you’re important enough to the U.S., you can get away with a coup just fine.
What can be done?
There are numerous problems with this state of affairs. The first is that this double standard makes a mockery of American attempts to oppose coups on principled grounds when they happen elsewhere. For instance, Washington has no love for the military junta in Myanmar, so when they seized power in 2021, the American government machine went into overdrive. Most aid was suspended, U.S. aid officials wrote press releases about how they have “stood shoulder to shoulder with the people of Burma for decades in their struggle for peace, democracy, and freedom”, and they even formally grieved the anniversary of the coup two years later. But this only makes Washington look hypocritical - and a bit silly - when it ignores similar events happening elsewhere.
The situation is especially tragicomic in the Sahel. The region has now experienced four coups in the space of as many years, with Washington recognizing two of them (Mali, 2020 and Burkina Faso, 2022) and refusing to recognize two others (Chad, 2021 and Niger, 2023). Ambitious generals can be forgiven for thinking that U.S. officials are going to look the other way if they have a compelling reason - such as, for instance, an important U.S. drone base which Washington really doesn’t want to lose access to.
Making American officials look silly isn’t the only consequence. Military regimes often engage in human rights violations. They also derail transitions to democracy, which can make it harder for a country’s people to find sustainable ways to achieve political stability, economic growth, and the long-term protection of their rights. By making it clear that Washington sometimes values good relations with a country regardless of how its government treats its people, the U.S. response to coups currently does little to discourage them.
Despite all of this, it’s hard to see any real solution to this problem of naming and shaming coup leaders. There are some interesting proposals floating around from Lawfare and Just Security, but they all suffer from the problem of trying to turn what is essentially a political question into a technical one. No new bureaucratic procedure or formal definition of the word coup is going to force the American government to cut off aid to a regime which it sees as vital to American interests.
The fundamental tension in U.S. policy is that despite all of its rhetoric, America sometimes does see an interest in seeing military regimes succeed, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Washington doesn’t have the power to safeguard every democracy in the world, and American policymakers are incentivized to do what they think is best to protect the safety and prosperity of the American people over the rights and prosperity of others. American foreign policy always has been, and always will be, hypocritical. That’s standard fare for any nation-state - but more difficult for one which claims to place the protection of freedom and democracy at the core of its identity. As Washington tries to marshal the world for a long struggle with Russia and China, this problem will dog it at every step.