Economic and Political Reform

We're covering a lot here, but the overall design is to lay out our interests. We've talked about oil. We've talked about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Is there anything else that we should put on the table as a U.S. interest?

At the strategic level, those are obviously the interests. Now, every nation has a right to define moral interests of its own, including issues of human rights and democracy, and those issue resonate when there is a coincidence of strategic interest. They don't when there is no coincidence of strategic interest. In this particular case, you can make the further argument that it is no longer possible globally, because of what we have seen on 9/11, to separate what happens domestically in the region and what happens internationally. It is much more difficult to separate between the domestic and the international than it used to be. As a consequence, there is an American interest in bringing about political and economic reform in the region. It is an American interest, a global interest; it's certainly a regional interest. But this cannot be achieved coercively.

In a way, you have two fundamentally competing notions. One notion is that the region needs more liberalization in the economic arena and in the political arena. The other notion is that because of the fear of global terrorist threats, and because terrorism is fundamentally a non-state phenomenon that thrives in instability, you also don't want to create too much instability and too much motivation for groups that would come after American interest. So how do you mediate those two problems? That's going to be the trick for American policy in the next decade.

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