DEMOCRACY

Stories From the Long Road to Freedom

By Condoleezza Rice

Illustrated. 486 pp. Twelve. $35.

“I have watched,” Condoleezza Rice says in the opening pages of her important new book, “as people in Africa, Asia and Latin America have insisted on freedom. … As a child, I was a part of another great awakening: the second founding of America, as the civil rights movement unfolded in my hometown of Birmingham, Ala., and finally expanded the meaning of ‘We the people’ to encompass people like me. … There is no more thrilling moment than when people finally seize their rights and their liberty.” Such a vision, Rice argues in “Democracy: Stories From the Long Road to Freedom,” is what should shape the mission of American foreign policy in the 21st century. This view, more widely held in the Democratic than in the Republican Party, has been eclipsed in recent years by disappointments in countries ranging from Ukraine and Rwanda to Egypt and Turkey, but Rice is a keeper of the flame. Her faith in the benefits and strategic importance of democracy promotion is as strong as, or stronger than, it was when she joined the George W. Bush administration in 2001.

Rice’s continuing defense of the democracy agenda will be much noted among Republicans seeking to come to terms with the implications of President Trump’s “America First” approach to the world. She is one of the country’s most distinguished and widely respected diplomats. As hard-line advisers like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lost influence with President Bush in the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Rice as secretary of state in the second Bush term emerged as the single most influential voice shaping foreign policy. Trained as a Russia specialist, she got her first real experience in government as part of President George H. W. Bush’s team, which helped bring the Cold War to an end.

The decisions made in those years would shape American policy for the next generation. With the Soviet Union out of the picture, the United States did not withdraw from the wider world. Instead, it doubled down on a policy of global engagement, seeking to build what some in the first Bush administration called a “new world order,” based on the global extension of democracy and liberal capitalism. Despite their differences, the next three presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, worked within this overall framework; only with the inauguration of Donald Trump would the United States have a president who challenged this bipartisan perspective.

This early in the Trump administration, we cannot predict whether or how the president will convert his campaign rhetoric about “America First” into a foreign policy that challenges or reshapes America’s post-Cold War foreign policy. What we do know, however, is that the ambitious, wide-ranging goals of the world-order project have never been as popular with voters as they were with the foreign policy and journalistic elites. Since 1992, when voters rejected George H. W. Bush for Clinton, who was critical of Nafta and free trade with China on the stump, through 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, the less globalist candidate has won the key presidential elections. George W. Bush ran in favor of a “humbler” foreign policy and attacked “nation-building” against the global agenda of Vice President Al Gore. Obama was seen as promoting a less assertive and less expensive foreign policy in 2008 than John McCain, and in 2012, the Obama team mocked Mitt Romney’s warnings that Vladimir Putin was America’s leading geopolitical foe.