The Age of the Unthinkable Read Online Free PDF Page A

levels of
     the U.S. government of political scientists who had studied and admired The Idea. By 2002 Democratic Peace Theory, carried
     along by what seemed to be the force of history, became the central premise of the foreign policy of the most powerful nation
     in history. Speaking to an audience of West Point cadets in 2003, President George W. Bush equated American security with
     global democracy, a theory he was about to test with their blood. America would be secure when the rest of the world became
     democratic, the president said. (Or, barring that, when it was
made
to be democratic.) Condoleezza Rice, as Bush’s secretary of state, realigned the work of the State Department around the
     mission of promoting democracy, turning American diplomats from mere representatives of their governments into enthusiastic
     franchise peddlers for democratic revolution. The story of Dean Babst’s Idea rising up out of Albany played like a Disney
     movie, in which the pudgy junior-high hockey coach is pulled out of retirement and begged to suit up for the Olympics, where
     he leads his team to a gold medal.
    Disney, by the way, would have been the perfect home for such a tale, for Democratic Peace Theory was at heart as much an
     encapsulation of every triumphalist American dream as Mickey Mouse. Democratic Peace Theory held in its DNA the notion that
     what was true and sacred about America was the very thing the planet needed most, that the whispered sound of the American
     Constitution was on the lips of every suppressed soul on earth. By making the world more, well, more American, the United
     States could not only guarantee its own security but also elevate those poor masses to a world they surely dreamed of, one
     that looked very much like Phoenix — even if they lived in Peshawar or Tashkent or Beijing.
3. Glass-House Dangers
    But, elegant as Democratic Peace Theory looked on paper or on some computer screen, it often stumbled when confronted with
     reality. In 1999, American bombers struck at the democratically elected government of Serbia in Belgrade — a reminder that
     ballots were as capable of generating horror as they were of producing allies. In fact, once you got out of your political
     science department — or walked away from your hobbyist spreadsheets — you inevitably began to find ways in which The Idea
     fell apart.
    Part of the elegant logic of Democratic Peace, for instance, was something like this: if your country is open and democratic,
     then my open and democratic country can see what you are thinking. You can see what we are thinking. So we should be able
     to get along. International relations scholars Bernard Finel and Kristin Lord have called this “positive transparency,” the
     idea that more clarity should mean more stability. So a big, open, transparent, democratic world should, according to this
     reasoning, be the most stable we could hope for. (This argument is echoed in another classroom-lovely and real-world-deadly
     notion: that an interconnected global financial system should be more stable, since it allows easier movement of money and
     goods. Did more markets
really
mean more stability? Not quite. In fact, as we’ll see, more markets only made finance more confusing and dangerous.)
    Imagine for a moment that political transparency actually runs the other way. What if seeing into other nations makes you
     more nervous rather than less? What if it confuses your policy making? If your neighbor’s house was transparent and you could
     watch him polishing his gun collection, would this make you more nervous or less? What if you just watched him doing nothing
     at all, simply watched him while he watched you? In fact, when Finel and Lord studied a number of historical conflicts, they
     concluded that a “negative transparency” was often at work. Openness made countries nervous, confused their leaders, and quite
     often made crises worse rather than better.
    Once we think about