“Alexander Cooley”:http://polisci.barnard.edu/profiles/alexander-cooley and my colleague “Dan Nexon”:http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/dhn2/?PageTemplateID=156 have an interesting “new piece”:http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67700/alexander-cooley-and-daniel-h-nexon/bahrains-base-politics in _Foreign Affairs_ on the way the presence of U.S. military bases in authoritarian states complicates U.S. responses to democratic revolutions. The core of the piece is on Bahrain but there are interesting general lessons.
bq. Further complicating base politics are transnational political movements, which can overwhelm the traditional U.S. policy of promoting incremental political reform in authoritarian partners. A few years ago, the so-called color revolutions diffused across Eurasia. Although the revolutions resulted in pro-U.S. regimes in Ukraine and Georgia, by throwing a light on the authoritarian practices of Washington’s allies in Central Asia, they also politicized U.S. basing arrangements in the region. Following Western criticism of the Uzbek government’s crackdown on demonstrators in May 2005, Uzbek President Islam Karimov became concerned that the United States was plotting another regional regime change. In July 2005, the government of Uzbekistan evicted the U.S. military from its facility at Karshi-Khanabad, a disturbance that continues to complicate U.S. basing arrangements in Central Asia. When political movements like these arise, as they now have in the Arab world, the United States cannot count on being able to distance its bases simultaneously from unpopular host government policies and elite fears across host countries that Washington is ready to throw its autocratic friends under the bus.
Cooley and Nexon’s key piece of policy advice is that:
bq. [..] Washington needs to avoid thinking about its basing arrangements in terms of a simple trade-off between pragmatism and idealism. As recent events suggest, traditional strategies of binding the United States to loyal strongman regimes can undermine both U.S. interests and values. Defense officials and U.S. diplomats can best preserve security contracts and commitments by broadening their engagement with a wide variety of political, social, and economic actors, even over the initial objections of authoritarian elites.
This is sound advice that is (as always) easier said than done. It requires that the U.S. foresees that seemingly stable authoritarian regimes might break down and that the U.S. builds ex ante alliances with the actors that may become more influential when such a breakdown occurs. In negotiations over base agreements, the U.S. should ensure that the economic benefits of basing arrangements go to groups that are not necessarily included in the authoritarian coalition. It is not obvious why autocrats would agree to this. On the one hand, it may seem that recent events may just have made the argument that it is in the self-interest of authocrats to participate in such arrangements more persuasive. On the other hand, autocrats could credibly conclude that Bahrain’s government has been able to survive so far because of the nature of its basing agreement with the U.S. Surely, the stakes for the U.S. would be lower if the U.S. expected that its basing agreement would survive in a democratic Bahrain. I fear that at this point the latter lesson seems more likely than the first.