An Appraisal of United States' Foreign Policy of Democracy Promotion

Abstract

The article was an effort to assess the extent of United States benevolence, consistency, and objectivity in the execution of her professed policy of promoting democracy abroad. We adopted the theory of political realism, secondary sources of information gathering, as well as content analysis. Using Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain as cases. The paper revealed that contrary to many peoples' views of the U.S. as a benevolent exporter of democracy, the U.S. has actually been using her foreign policy of democracy promotion as a stratagem for achieving her politico-economic cum geo-strategic interests. The paper also ascertained that in a bid to achieve the said national interests, the U.S. has greatly been selective and, hence, inconsistent in promoting democracy abroad. Given the prevailing power politics where might makes right, the paper recommends (a) That non-democratic cum authoritarian states, should immediately embark on a selfless home-grown transition to representative government (with its inherent human rights) so as to eliminate the 'excuse' for U.S. (and her allies) national interest-oriented political engineering in other countries, and (b) That leaders of non-democratic states (especially in the Third World) should, as a matter of urgency, endeavour to acquire high techno-economic cum military power capabilities with which to ward off selfish foreign intervention, especially by the global Leviathan (the U.S.) in their domestic affairs. These shall no doubt help to realise genuine global democratisation as well as Article 2(4) and Article 2(7) of the U.N. Charter bordering on sovereignty, equality of states, and non-interventionism.