Preface: The Friendly Tyrants Project
On reflection, it is clear that the United States has over the years regularly confronted problems in its relationships with Friendly Tyrants - pro-U.S and/or anticommunist authoritarian regimes. But despite a long, varied, and crisis-ridden American experience with such regimes, each new episode tends to be treated as something unprecedented. For all the years that Washington had dealt with the likes of Fulgensio Batista and Rafael Trujillo, the shah of Iran and Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Greek colonels and Argentine generals, when it came to a Ferdinand Marcos or a François Duvalier in the throes of crises in 1986, who could knowledgeably cite the lessons of those earlier experiences, or even remember them in any detail?
Were there no lessons that could be learned from earlier experiences; indeed, could it be that there were no patterns at all in forty years of assorted but suggestively similar cases?
We thought it worthwhile to find out, and thus was born the Foreign Policy Research Institute's three-year study on Friendly Tyrants. We hoped to learn if American policy toward anticommunist authoritarian states exhibited patterns when past cases were compared; and if they did, then to find out whether knowledge of such patterns could be put to practical use in managing current troubles and preventing future ones. To our knowledge, such an effort had never before been undertaken.
In choosing to call our project Friendly Tyrants, we deliberately sought provocation. We knew that not all authoritarian regimes were tyrannical, or even very unpopular among their people. We knew that some Americans thought of certain countries as being authoritarian when they were instead merely autocratic in tone. It was our hunch that the ideological clash over many Friendly Tyrants cases in the past, some of which have been among the most bitter and contentious episodes of the last four decades of U.S. foreign policy, was at the emotional heart of the matter. So, we hoped that such a provocation would help us to ·define positions, to spur debate, and thus, in time, to reach the necessary analytical distinctions required for sober scholarship to proceed.
To be more precise, by Friendly Tyrants we merely mean those regimes or governments that have generally good working relations with the United States, and in whose stability the United States takes an interest, but whose internal practices are repugnant to many Americans. We have not, however, and do not prejudge any of the countries studied in this volume and we agree that not all of our cases involve tyrannies by any reasonable definition. But because images diverge from reality, and because policy often flows from the former and not the latter, the label stands, not as a verdict, but as a guidepost.
In the first year of study, we looked at selected historical cases, from Fulgensio Batista in Cuba in 1958 to the Philippines and Haiti in 1986. We could not study every case, so for comparative purposes we chose countries that varied geographically and politically, and which had dissimilar bilateral relations with the United States.[1] Of the cases that are explored below, some involve countries that are far away, like Turkey, and others that are close by, like Nicaragua. Some were fairly new, like Haiti and the Philippines from the mid-l980s; others were old, like South Vietnam and Greece under the colonels from the 1950s and 1960s. In some, the crisis in relations was protracted over many years, as in Vietnam; in others, the core crisis period lasted only a few weeks, as in Haiti. In some, a communist insurgency gave special urgency to the dilemma from the American point of view, again, in Vietnam and to a lesser extent in the Philippines; in others, there was no serious military dimension to the crisis at all, either internal or external, as in Haiti or Iran. Some of the governments studied were overtly friendly, like the Philippines and Iran; others were more reserved, like the Argentine junta. Some have been strategically important, like Greece, and others marginal, like the Dominican Republic. Some were very dependent on the United States, like Cuba under Batista; others were more independent, like the Argentine junta. They include countries from nearly every continent and widely diverse rulers. Many were dominated by a single personality; others exhibited more a form of corporate authoritarianism; and some were not effectively dominated at all. Some were traditional authoritarian dictatorships resting on sometimes broad bases of social support; some, like Trujillo's, verged toward totalitarian temptations. And, as alluded to just above, some, like Turkey, fit the category of Friendly Tyrants only by mistake; that is, through misperception and misunderstanding.
As far as we are aware, this effort was the first to analyze Friendly Tyrants and their crisis as a distinct class of events, with characteristic causes and consequences for U.S. foreign policy. This effort is represented below in Part I of this volume. It also resulted in, among other publications, Mark Falcoff's study, A Tale of Two Policies: U.S. Relations with the Argentine Junta, 1976-1982.[2] Among the conclusions reached from surveying the historical record were that traditional, personalistic dictatorships are becoming uncommon; that dictatorial regimes are notoriously unstable; and that a number of modernizing autocracies, especially in Asia, are becoming more pluralistic. We note these three conclusions among many because, as work began for the second year of the study, each was exemplified on the front pages of the newspaper.
In the second year, we turned to contemporary cases, which compose Part II of this volume. Cases were again selected with an eye to providing a range of examples. Thus, Pakistan under Mohammed Zia ul-Haq is a nearly pure case of the Friendly Tyrants syndrome; Jordan is of interest precisely because it does not raise the usual tensions. Mexico has great importance to the United States, Paraguay very little. The Chilean regime had been notable for its brutality, the Taiwanese is in rapid transition toward democracy. South Korea has a myriad of friendly ties to the United States, Indonesia has rather few. Zaire has a personalistic dictatorship, South Africa's authoritarianism is corporatist in nature.
History never rests. Over the months during which this section of the book moved from imagination to pagination, five of the cases took significant steps to leave the ranks of tyrannies. Two of them - South Korea and Taiwan - evolved rapidly away from formal authoritarianism and toward democracy. Their journeys are still far from over, but it is becoming ever more difficult to typify either as a tyranny. More dramatic yet, the ground shifted in Pakistan with the death of President Zia and the election of Benazir Bhutto, temporarily taking Pakistan out of the ranks of the undemocratic. The most picturesque dictator of our panoply, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte of Chile, lost a plebiscite of his own making in October 1988, putting a limit on his term in power. If that were not enough, the senior dictator of our group, General Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, was overthrown in the thirty-sixth year of his reign by an internal army-party coup on February 3, 1989. General Stroessner's departure opened a prospect that the essential dictatorial political structure of Paraguay would change permanently, and even that political pluralism would have a chance to develop in what most observers counted as a most unlikely place. Despite these changes, the original division of cases between Part I and II remains intact for none of these developments can yet be said to represent historical closure on their respective cases. Even in Asunción, where General Andres Rodriguez has clearly aired out the Paraguayan political system, it is too soon to remove that country from the ranks of Friendly Tyrants.
There have been important developments in most of the other five cases, too. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional - PRI) began to loosen up its hegemonic control over Mexican political life; for the first time in sixty years, in 1989, another party was allowed to win a regional election. In South Africa political discontent and President Botha's poor health combined to create a dramatic new flexibility in the administration of F. W. de Klerk. In Jordan economic crisis precipitated a cabinet shakeup, an election, and a royal willingness to pay more attention to public opinion. In Indonesia an elite shakeup occurred below the top levels of government, but Jakarta has remained quiet. The relaxation of regional tensions in southern Africa led to a slight improvement in the public life of Zaire, but not enough to make President Mobutu's visit to Washington in May 1989 or his pretensions to pluralistic politics thereafter any Jess occasions for argument between his American critics and supporters.
For all this, editing the second part of this book was like shooting at a moving target. Not only were there changes in the ten countries under study, but a new U.S. administration began as well. Nevertheless, the value of these essays, as with the historical cases, lies not so much in their timeliness as in the skill with which they weave together the political sociology of the Friendly Tyranny in question with the interests and decision processes of U.S. foreign policy. To write these two dozen essays, we sought out specialists with thorough knowledge and with practical experience who could address both sides of the bilateral relationships under study. This led us to commission an exceptional group of writers who combined academic depth and government experience. Our authors have written on the history, politics, and economies of the states in question. Most of them have worked in parts of the executive branch (including the Department of State, Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, and National Security Council), for senators and congressmen, for lobbying groups, and for the president in a personal capacity. They do not all agree on every general policy issue - some incline more toward realpolitik than others - but on questions as complex and open-ended as those under study, it is not necessary, possible, or even desirable that they should.
Having assembled this fine group of authors, we wanted to make the most of the comparative endeavor. This is not easy, for no one knows well enough in detail the political culture and history of nearly two dozen countries scattered around the globe. Yet to make comparative assessments and policy judgments, each participant had to gain familiarity with these and other cases. From the beginning, therefore, we doggedly insisted that the essays address the same questions and share a common structure.
In addition, we hoped to use conferences of authors to bring out new thoughts. With this in mind, we insisted on a small but highly disciplined series of meetings. Authors were prevailed upon to read all the papers before they met, and this allowed us to use the time in conference not to summarize papers, but to pursue discussions that led in unanticipated and suggestive directions. The moderator of both conferences, Michael Mandelbaum, successfully kept the discussions from becoming too abstract to be useful, and authors agreed that these preparations did permit the sessions to break new ground.
After the conferences, the authors revised their papers on the basis of our discussions. We then edited the revised essays rigorously to give as much stylistic harmony to the book as possible, and what follows is the product of this collective effort.
We do not claim to have broken new theoretical ground here; social scientists will find no new models or analytical concepts. Instead, we have designed the study for those interested in the more practical arts of policy making and evaluation. For that reason, we have tried to banish all arcane jargon from the narrative, and to limit footnotes to specific quotations, economic data, and key historical or, in some cases, archival and interview sources.
We are happy to thank the staff of St. Martin's Press for sharing our enthusiasm for this study, and for bringing it into print in a handsome and expeditious manner. And, finally, the Foreign Policy Research Institute appreciates the support of the Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation, without which this book may never have come to exist.
Here, then, are a diverse group of Friendly Tyrants, some from America's postwar foreign policy past, some from its present. Each historical case, in its day, was debated and discussed at length. Current dilemmas feed much argument now, and we have no doubt that there are more Friendly Tyrants crises in our future. We bring them all together here - the old, the new, and the potential - as varied manifestations of a single phenomenon. We and the authors who joined us in this enterprise earnestly hope the excitement attending our work has been captured in this volume. If so, our time has been well spent in the preparation, and we are confident that yours will be in the reading.
Daniel Pipes
Adam Garfinkle
Introduction
Adam Garfinkle and Daniel Pipes
How to deal with pro-American authoritarian regimes presents one of the most difficult issues facing American foreign policy. The problem lies in the painful incongruities that Friendly Tyrants, as we have chosen to call them, pose between deeply cherished American political values on the one hand, and well-understood security requisites for a dangerous world on the other.
Most Friendly Tyrants are politically regressive, avoiding public accountability and denying the majority of their citizens any real political participation. Many, if not most, are military governments and have long records of human rights abuses. They rig elections, censor the press, corrupt the rule of law, discriminate against the disenfranchised, and imprison dissidents. In many, corruption is rampant, cynicism limitless.
Yet their usefulness to the United States can be as great as their global disrepute. All the Friendly Tyrants have viewed the Soviet Union and its proxies and allies as a threat and often have acted in ways that enhance American security, whether in coordination with us or on their own. South Korea - although ever less a tyranny - holds the line against North Korea, South Africa controls critical sea-lanes and has essential minerals, Pakistan kept the war effort alive inside Afghanistan and deserves partial credit for the Soviet troop withdrawal. Zaire has resources and has allowed the resupply of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) forces in Angola. Taiwan is an economic powerhouse, and Mexico is next door.
Friendly Tyrants raise conundra like no other governments. Democracies present no problems of conflicting values. Internally, they stress freedom and the rule of law; externally, they usually join American efforts to contain the Soviet Union. Wherever they are located - Western Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America - true democracies share a range of common interests with the United States. We approve of them, engage in extensive economic and cultural dealings with them, and form military alliances with them. Tactics may differ, and relations are not always unperturbed, but there is no fundamental conflict of foreign policy goals or political philosophy.
Totalitarian states are equally unproblematic, in precisely the opposite way. They threaten the United States and its allies militarily, repress their own people, and practice barbarous anti-humanitarian policies on a systematic basis. We have bad relations with them, little trade and exchange, and substantial military hostility. Until very recently, the Soviet Union, its former East European satellites, and such states as Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and Ethiopia fit this category.
Although the occasional anomaly does arise - better U.S. relations with totalitarian China than with democratic India - it is rare and due to special circumstances. Genuinely neutral countries, like Algeria, or noncommunist countries within the Soviet foreign policy camp, like Syria, do not raise serious problems in this regard either.
Only with respect to friendly authoritarian states does the conflict between values and interests announce itself with alacrity. Dictatorial regimes are often unpredictable; we dislike consorting with them on principle; widespread revulsion makes it hard to sustain constant relations; we have suffered from the tumults of their displacements, and we fear new problems. All things being equal, Americans want to spread their values and domestic moral standards around the globe, and helping tyrants hardly advances that cause.
But the United States is a global power that has been locked in a drawn-out struggle with a tenacious adversary and could not always choose its allies. However much the conscience calls, such matters as access to minerals, the protection of sea-lanes, foreign bases, and other aspects of geopolitics also matter.
When two sets of cherished values clash, the result is disagreement. Some Americans have seen friendly authoritarian states primarily as allies against the Soviet Union, others as repressors of their own people. Some would reward them for their helpfulness, others would punish them for their abuses. Some Americans accept not-wholly savory allies with much less anguish than others, but almost all feel a nagging dissonance.
This mix creates debate in the body politics and has often produced irresolution in American policies. Concern with security drives hard-headed efforts to maintain cooperative ties, but repugnance (both popular and official) toward repressive regimes eventually erodes relations. And everything changes when a crisis breaks out in the Friendly Tyrants state. Here a clear pattern is discernable. Whereas security is largely the preserve of experts, everyone cares about human rights. When a country under authoritarian rule is quiet, humanitarian trespasses are usually ignored by the public and tolerated or dealt with privately by Washington. But when a crisis develops - strikes, riots, economic collapse, guerrilla warfare, secession instability, killings, and terrorism - then intense media interest results, and it shifts the focus of attention from security concerns to humanitarian ones.
When that happens, relations with Friendly Tyrants are transformed. Press exposure increases faster than understanding, popular revulsion explodes, and politicians can no longer conduct business as usual. Previously quiet constituencies - ideological, ethnic, racial, or religious - weigh in and bend U.S. policy, making the development of a coherent approach even more difficult. In the last two decades, South Vietnam and Greece paid a heavy price for public scrutiny, the former unjustly so, the latter probably not. Turkey and El Salvador suffered such scrutiny in the early 1980s, South Africa and Panama towards the decade's end. Indonesia and Zaire seem likely candidates sometime in the future.
THE CHAPTERS: PART I
Howard Wiarda sets forth basic themes of the Friendly Tyrants conundrum, noting the philosophical divide in American politics that drives the argument on dealing with authoritarians. He offers an analytical schema that helps distinguish between cases that are more or less dangerous, and also shows how the decline of a bipartisan spirit within the United States has eroded the rational formulation of policy toward Friendly Tyrants.
Adam Garfinkle and Alan Luxenberg then apply this material to discuss the origins of the Friendly Tyrants problem in the postwar world, and then in tum the Cuban and Dominican Republic cases of the 1959-1961 period, thus beginning a chronological treatment of cases that takes the reader from South Vietnam to the Philippines. These brief summaries of two early cases set the stage for what follows in more ways than one. First, most of the dilemmas, and the penchant to fail in managing them, that mark later Friendly Tyrants crises also marked these. And second, many of the policy makers who dealt with these two cases also dealt hands-on with Vietnam in the early stages of the U.S. involvement there.
Douglas Pike makes two compelling arguments with regard to the tragic case of South Vietnam. First, the South Vietnamese government never wielded enough political power to be the authoritarian monster portrayed by the American Left. It thus was not really a Friendly Tyrant so much as a struggling, modernizing regime beset by subversion and war. Second, crises in Saigon were rarely seen as crises in Washington, and vice versa, making the issue of Vietnam a fundamentally disjointed one for the formulation of U.S. policy. The war as seen from Washington's point of view was broadly political, enmeshed with domestic programs and problems and, later, the rise of broad dissent over the war. In Vietnam, American policy makers and the military tried to win an unconventional war against an unconventional enemy, and rarely did the views of those in Washington and those in Vietnam match each other. Ultimately, Lyndon Johnson lost his battles at home; then and only then, argues Pike, was the war lost in Vietnam.
Adam Garfinkle evaluates the still puzzling American policy toward Greece during the period of the colonels' junta; 1967 to 1974. It baffles because the United States seemed to accept the erosion of Greek democracy despite the many levers of influence - never used - at its disposal both when the coup occurred and later, during the Nixon administration, when the colonels more fully institutionalized their rule. Rejecting conspiracy theories that have postulated that the United States plotted to make Cyprus a part of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), Garfinkle suggests that initial bureaucratic incoherence and inattention owing to the pressing problem of Vietnam, clientism between the United States and Greek intelligence services, and the unpredictability of intelligence planning played major roles in determining American policy at the outset. Later on, new forms of inattention and the extreme realpolitik proclivities of the Nixon administration resulted in the institutionalization of a policy insensitive to developments within Greece for which the United States is still paying today.
The Turkish case is (like the Greek one) best defined as an authoritarian interruption within a generally democratic national experience. Paul Henze presents the paradox that episodic interventions by the Turkish military, understood by both U.S. and Turkish sides as being aimed at preserving democracy and not undermining it, have not caused much trouble for relations with the United States; instead, tensions mostly have occurred when the Turkish government has been democratic, and that has been by far most of the time since the days of the Truman Doctrine. The Turkish case shows that a Friendly Tyranny, defined here in the special sense of Turkey under military rule, need not generate a crisis for Washington, while democracies can. Problems in the two states' relations have had less to do with the character of the Turkish political system than with specific issues. Turkey is thus a complex case in the sense that it is not really a Friendly Tyrant, yet U.S.-Turkish tensions at times when Turkey has been a full and thriving democracy have often been interpreted in the United States as though it were.
The late Ambassador James Theberge dissected the case of Anastasio Somoza Debayle and the Carter administration's human rights policy. He suggested that only a rare confluence of decay in Nicaragua and maladroitness in Washington could have produced a Sandinista victory. Ambassador Theberge 's depiction of the manner in which leading Carter administration officials behaved - denial, illusion, the selecting out of pertinent but discrepant information - provides classic examples of what the human cognitive apparatus is capable of when the stresses of mutually exclusive beliefs take their toll.
It must be added, however, that Ambassador Theberge's essay differs in kind at least in a limited way from the others. As a former ambassador to Nicaragua, his discussion of a still hotly debated case cannot be characterized as detached. Still, while many would take strong exception to his interpretations, they are plausible and represent, as well, something of a document on the case, for this chapter is Ambassador Theberge's only extended writing on this topic. In addition, it should be noted that Ambassador Theberge wrote his draft before two important books on the Nicaraguan case from other participants appeared,[3] and that he passed away before he could fully apply these works to his own understanding and writing. As a result, we, the editors, undertook a delicate task: to refashion the essay in light of new evidence and analysis without doing damage to the author's basic themes. We hope we have succeeded in this.
Recalling many years of U.S. policy toward the shah, Barry Rubin rejects the argument that the Carter administration undermined the monarchy, and that a different American policy could have saved it for long. He also doubts whether the United States could have decisively influenced Iran's successor regime. This said, he concedes that American efforts were too little, too late. What direct influence the United States could have brought to bear required the right actions at precisely the right moment. Perhaps more than any other, the Iranian case points up the inescapable challenge of Friendly Tyrants: pressing the shah to reform years before would have only alienated him at a time of strength, but once his weakness showed, it was too late for Americans to guide the shah. There was only the briefest moment when American policy could have made a difference.
Mark Falcoff directs his attention to the Argentine junta that led their country into the disastrous Falklands War. He reaches a surprising conclusion: the Carter and Reagan administrations started from diametrically opposed points, acted in pursuit of very different goals, yet ended up with roughly the same result - a basic irrelevance to unfolding events in Argentina. Falcoff bases his analysis in both Argentine political culture and the predilections of the Reagan administration, while also taking into account the influence of personal idiosyncrasies and happenstance.
Georges Fauriol's analysis of the fall of the Haiti's house of Duvalier depicts a classic example of the interplay of domestic and foreign factors in U.S. policy. The deterioration of the Duvalier regime coincided with Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative and destabilization in Central America, embuing Haiti with a broader regional significance than usual. Yet Haiti first re-entered American political consciousness in the early 1980s, spurred by the congressional Black Caucus, largely on account of humanitarian, medical, and emigration issues. Even as the crisis in Haiti took on explicit political dimensions, the United States was locked for a time into a policy grid defined by these initial, apolitical issues. In the end, U.S. actions facilitated Jean-Claude Duvalier's quick and peaceful exit but, as in other Caribbean cases of an earlier era, the United States either could not or did not try hard enough to manage the transition in such a way as to advance prospects for democracy in Haiti. From the U.S. point of view, therefore, the names have changed in Haiti, but not the basic problem. What has remained the same is Haiti 's marginal significance for U.S. foreign policy, and U.S. pessimism that Haitian political culture can sustain democratic reform in the near term.
Finally, Theodore Friend analyzes the Philippines, another case (like Haiti) still locked in an extended postcrisis transition. Did the United States wait too long with Marcos, leaving Corazon Aquino with a mess beyond her capacity to manage? Friend points out (as does Rubin in the case of the shah) that Marcos's weaknesses became fully evident only at the end, when his power quickly unraveled. He emphasizes the Filipino role in Marcos 's overthrow, while recognizing increasing American pressure for democracy in Marcos's last three years.
In the end, Friend warns that the Philippine case is probably unique: in no other state is the United States so central - nowhere else could it avail itself of a relatively positive colonial legacy. While giving high marks to American policy makers, with one notable exception, Friend suggests their success has only limited utility as a source of lessons.[4]
The concluding chapter to Part I puts the Friendly Tyrants problem in the context of American history and the American political character. It suggests that, owing to the large (and growing) porosity in the making of American foreign policy, the Friendly Tyrants problem is endemic to the engagement of American political culture with world affairs. It can never be solved, only managed. More specifically, the conclusion examines four aspects of the policy-making process that stand forth from the historical case studies: the conflict between the executive and legislative branches of government; the role of bureaucratic incoherence; the role of intelligence and covert operations; and the paramount importance of diplomatic skill and judgment.
THE CHAPTERS: PART II
The final chapter to Part I plays the role of the Janus to Part II, pointing the way to contemporary cases. Michael Mandelbaum picks up the parable, aiming to distinguish the larger context of the Friendly Tyrants dilemma as it appears in 1990 from how it appeared in earlier decades. Changes in the Soviet Union, the waning if not the ending of the cold war, the absence of Marxist-Leninist insurgencies in all but a few Friendly Tyrannies, and the rise of economic nationalism have made the dilemma less acute, more diffuse, but not less significant. Mandelbaum points out that despite the shift in the underlying context of superpower rivalry, both realists and idealists urge a more active U.S. role in dealing with Friendly Tyrants - either to bolster them or to force their reform or demise - than ever before.
In the first country case study, Mark Falcoff emphasizes the limits of U.S. influence on the Pinochet regime. He demonstrates the feeble impact of economic sanctions and the counterproductive consequences of trying to tum Chile into a pariah state without the wherewithal to do so effectively. His essay also analyzes the reasons for the limited but important convergence of liberal and conservative opinion in the United States as Pinochet approached the fateful plebiscite of October 1988. This convergence allowed a consensus on U.S. policy toward Chile unlike any since the rise of Salvador Allende in 1972 and facilitated a temperate and effective U.S. policy toward Chile in heady times.
Riordan Roett provides the necessary background for understanding how Paraguay under General Alfredo Stroessner managed to avoid most of the accoutrement of the twentieth century for so long also shows how the general's system worked, supported usefully at the height of the cold war by a U.S. generosity born of (largely unfounded) fears of a leftist rebellion, and more recently by political shadows cast by Brazil and Argentina. Roett's analysis illustrates the improbability that General Andres Rodriguez meant most of what he said early in his rule about Paraguayan democracy; the bright words were aimed more at consolidating power and fobbing off external pressures from the United States and elsewhere. He also illustrates, however, the sources of discontent and change in Paraguay that will make it impossible for Rodriguez to control the country as did Stroessner for so many years even if that is what he intends.
Howard Wiarda stresses the strengths and flexibility of Mexico's corporatist authoritarianism in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional - PRI). On the other hand, he shows how the PRI's failure to manage the Mexican economy has generated an enormous array of problems that have spilled over the Rio Grande and become U.S.-Mexican problems as well: immigration, the debt, drugs, and more. Wiarda demonstrates the U.S. dilemma: if the United States does not press the PRI to reform and liberalize, there is no way to ever solve current problems; but if the United States presses too hard or too quickly, it may help catalyze a political and economic crisis for both Mexico and the United States that no one could control.
A key dimension of the Friendly Tyrants dilemma is the loss of control over policy that occurs when a Friendly Tyrant becomes a media sensation for one reason or another. Guy Pauker's analysis of Suharto's reign in Indonesia explains why a regime that is undemocratic and even brutal, and that rules a country of considerable strategic significance to the United States, is nevertheless not a subject of much partisan conflict. One of the many factors that Pauker names is the consummate skill of the U.S. ambassadors that have been posted to Jakarta in recent years, a reminder that sheer skill and the power of individual personalities can make a difference. Another is the fact that there is no large U.S. presence in Indonesia, and no large Indonesian ethnic minority in the United States, two factors that historically have raised the profile of a bilateral relationship to sometimes dangerous levels either in the United States or abroad, or both.
Edward A. Olsen's analysis of South Korea highlights the tensions that South Korea's evolution toward economic power and political pluralism is causing for U.S. foreign policy. Washington has been slow to recognize that South Korea can no longer be thought of or dealt with as the diplomatic waif it was forty years ago. Korean democracy can never be like American democracy because Korean culture is not like American culture. But the United States, argues Olsen, ought to be proud to adjust to considerable positive change. In contrast to stagnation and repression in the North, South Korea stands forth as one of the most spectacular examples in the postwar period of how a fragile polity, if dedicated to free market economics and secure within the mantle of U.S. military protection, can achieve economic development and political maturity. Finally, Olsen notes that economic problems are clouding and even overtaking security issues as the focus of bilateral relations. When they do, the classic formulation of the Friendly Tyrants dilemma becomes less prominent.
Martin Lasater echoes many of the same conclusions for Taiwan. He emphasizes the crucial importance of institutional coherence in a transition to democracy. While the Kuomintang Party holds within it the seeds of political pluralism and democracy, it took special conditions - including the easing of immediate security concerns and general material affluence - to allow those to flourish. U.S. policy toward Taiwan is much complicated by its relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC) and thus, in the Taiwanese case, it is not only economic issues that dilute the strength of the Friendly Tyrants issue, but also the complexity of America's China policy. (That complexity, in tum, makes the PRC a kind of Friendly Tyrant, albeit a highly unorthodox one.)
Richard N. Haass unravels the exceedingly complex case of South African corporatist authoritarianism. He concludes that while the metaphors Americans use to understand the apartheid regime are enmeshed with America's own experiences with racial questions, they do not even come close to the reality of South African politics. Further, it is not clear how much leverage the United States can muster to compel change in Pretoria. The United States, it seems, is doomed to temporize: it cannot maintain remotely normal relations with a racist regime, but it could never support civil or international violence directed against whites in South Africa whose lives are in so many ways like those of the majority of Americans. In the end, an anti-apartheid South African policy, even if not a particularly active one, functions for all U.S. administrations, and especially Republican ones, as an entry ticket for dealing with Congress on a whole range of contentious foreign policy issues.
Michael Schatzberg sheds light on the intriguing case of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, arguing that the United States was largely responsible for bringing him to formal power in 1970 and has been partly responsible for keeping him there since. He points out that U.S. support for Mobutu, however repugnant, has not been at the expense of democracy; the opposition - democratic or Marxist - has never shown much promise. In return, Mobutu has on occasion served as a useful agent for U.S. policy. In particular, his willingness to serve as a funnel of assistance to Jonas Savimbi 's UNITA helped, marginally at least, to sustain the Reagan Doctrine in southern Africa. Too, Zairean willingness to help the United States helped persuade the Soviet leadership that aiding the Marxist regime in Angola cost more than it could afford. In this way, Mobutu may have contributed to the independence of Namibia, a long sought African nationalist goal. Still, Schatzberg argues that the United States probably assists Mobutu more than his importance warrants, especially in light of the probability that his likely successors would pose no danger of installing an anti-Western regime.
Sometimes the authoritarian quality of a regime friendly to the United States is the most important factor in the bilateral relations. In other cases, it is only one factor among others. In the case of Jordan, as Robert Satloff shows, it is hardly even noticed. Why? Because, for better or worse, few Americans expect anything but authoritarianism of one sort or another from the Arab states, and because in the Jordanian case, its significance in the American prism has been overwhelmingly related to its assumed connection to solving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Satloff predicts that only when the Arab-Israeli conflict subsides will the Hashemite form of autocratic rule become an issue in U.S.-Jordanian relations.
Finally, Pakistan provides a classic case of the Friendly Tyrants dilemma. As Craig Baxter explains, the United States needed Pakistan desperately after 1979 for new and old reasons. The newest and most important reason was to channel aid to the rebels, the mujahidin, in Afghanistan. Others, made more urgent by the Soviet war in Afghanistan, included bolstering a flank of the Sino-American entente; maintaining a pro-American presence in the vicinity of the Iranian cauldron; and deflecting the utility of Soviet support for India in the subcontinent.
But maintaining a good relationship was not easy. President Zia-ul-Haq was a military dictator and human rights abuses were plentiful. Anti-American demonstrations by fundamentalist Muslims were troublesome. Reports of Pakistani involvement in drug trafficking added yet another neuralgic element. Islamabad's nuclear weapons ambitions constantly irritated relations. Even in the context of U.S.-Pakistani efforts to help the mujahidin, interests diverged. Washington sought to frustrate the Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan, but the Pakistanis had other concerns, such as containing Pathan nationalism, getting the refugees to return to Afghanistan, and influencing the post-Soviet government.
Had the mujahidin cause not been so popular in the United States, and had Pakistani motives been more broadly recognized, the U.S.-Pakistani relationship would not have been as smooth as it was before General Zia's death. As luck would have it, just as the U.S. need for Pakistani cooperation ebbed because of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Benazir Bhutto's election greatly improved Pakistan's image in the United States. What would have been a very difficult time in U.S.-Pakistani relations became instead merely difficult.
The volume ends with a summary essay to Part II by Richard Haass, in which the generic qualities of the Friendly Tyrants dilemma as it exists today are reviewed and interpreted proscriptively for specific use in thinking through policy dilemmas. Haass pleads not for passivity but for humility, arguing both that Friendly Tyrants represent an enduring dilemma and that the U.S. ability to control the outcomes of foreign political crises is ever likely to be less than we would wish. In other words, we can neither avoid nor control Friendly Tyrants and their crises. But with skill and a little bit of luck, we can survive them.
[1] Among the cases left out are Spain under Francisco Franco, Portugal under Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Ethiopia under Haile Selassie Tunisia under Habib Bourguiba, and others besides.
[2] Mark Falcoff, A Tale of Two Policies: U.S. Relations with the Argentine Junta, 1976-1982 (Philadelphia, Penna.: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1989).
[3] We refer to Robert A. Pastor, Condemned to Repetition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), and Anthony Lake, Somoza Falling (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). Pastor was at the National Security Council and Lake at Policy Planning in the Department of State during the Nicaraguan crisis.
[4] Both the essays on Haiti and the Philippines appeared in slightly different form in Orbis, Fall 1988. The latter essay created its own history, for Ferdinand Marcos himself subsequently replied to Friend's analysis. That reply was published in Orbis, Winter 1989, along with Friend's rejoinder.
