A USIP Study Group Report
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
PART I: GENERAL FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This report offers a set of general and country-specific findings and recommendations to assist the Obama administration in its efforts to tackle escalating security challenges while sustaining diplomatic, institutional and economic support for democracy and human rights in the Greater Middle East.
The working group recognizes that addressing threats from terrorist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda, as well as stemming conflicts arising from the persistence of regional conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia, must be a top priority. But, as the case studies of Yemen, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon amply demonstrate, long-term political stability, economic development and security also requires a continued and even enhanced U.S. commitment, in both words and deeds, to fostering democratic transformation, human rights and effective governance. The architecture of security and peacemaking must be accompanied by a revived focus on democratic reforms.
Absent such an effort, this study group believes that the already wide political, social and ideological gap between states and societies will further expand, thus making regimes, and even entire states vulnerable to internal and external shocks. It is the task and challenge of genuine reformers in both the regimes and oppositions of the Arab World and South Asia to chart an exit from the cul-de-sac of arbitrary rule and state-managed political reform by defining a common vision of substantive “democratic transformation.”
We believe that the Obama administration can and should assist in this effort. “Articulated in a respectful, matter-of-fact language that abjures preaching or triumphalism,” (Recommendation 4) support for democracy by our highest officials will not only buttress U.S. security interests: it will also advance President Obama’s vision of a new relationship between the U.S. and Muslim majority states, a vision whose parameters he boldly set out during his June 4, 2009 Cairo speech.
In encouraging the administration to forge a strategy that links security to democratic change, we offer what we believe to be a politically feasible long-term strategy, one that is far preferable to either relying on the status quo, on the one hand, or trying to rapidly undermine it by promoting regime change, on the other. (click full PDF report)
