Is the freedom agenda in US foreign policy dead? By dead, presumably, we mean one of two things: discredited out of practice or rendered moot by events. Events change, and doctrines come in and out of fashion; but many on the left and the right feel well-served in pronouncing the freedom agenda a relic of the Bush administration — something to have gotten past. As a matter of political reality, the freedom agenda as we know it from the Bush years has clearly been humbled, frustrated, and even reversed. As a matter of political rhetoric, the whole concept of a freedom agenda seems too freighted and loaded to do the sort of work policymakers and public intellectuals wish to put their reputations and efforts behind. ‘The Israel lobby’; ‘The color revolutions’; ‘An end to evil’; ‘We are all Georgians now’: the catchphrases associated with what we recognize as the freedom agenda are themselves code words, shorthand for debates and postures that have inspired and reinforced an exaggerated, but not baseless, sense of cabalism. Partisans for and against the freedom agenda have become, like their subject itself, dangerously susceptible to caricature — fair and otherwise.

Assessing the future of the freedom agenda, then, requires an appraisal of the freedom agenda itself. Fortunately or unfortunately, this is no simple task. For the freedom agenda at its most ambitious and utopian — the agenda expressed with soaring bluntness in President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address — never correlated in any serious way with the actual grand-strategic policy of the Bush administration. Indeed, the freedom agenda of the Second Inaugural proved, over the course of Bush’s conciliatory and conventional second-term consolidation, much more a backward-looking affair than the prophetic, future-oriented commandment that it purported to be at the time. We can argue over why this is so — pinning the responsibility on specific administration personnel, on the nature of America’s view of itself in the world, and/or on the systemic resilience or rigidity of the international system — but there should be little argument, nowadays, over the actually narrow and limited application of the freedom agenda in deed, as opposed to in speech.

To be sure, for a fair share of responsible commentators and analysts, even closely focused aims of the sort connected with the freedom agenda were rash, irresponsible, and counterproductive. Their criticisms separated out effectively into four arguments: (1) the freedom agenda drove a damaging wedge between America and Europe, or between America, plus some European countries, and others; (2) the freedom agenda badly mishandled the US-Russia relationship, at a time when constructive relations with a weak and wary Kremlin were paramount; (3) the freedom agenda misleadingly inspired a passionately and poorly-executed commitment to transformational geopolitical change in a complex, dangerous part of the world; and (4) the freedom agenda functioned primarily as a rhetorical lever designed to activate sufficient political support (that could never otherwise be secured) for powerful but minor, and ultimately inimical, foreign interests. (A separate line of criticism held that the freedom agenda derived from a fundamentally mistaken view of the truth about the human soul. But had the other four arguments against the freedom agenda carried little or no weight, few — alas — would have been able to raise this point effectively in a purely political context.)

In light of the critiques arrayed against the freedom agenda, even a strict limitation of agenda-inspired doctrines to America’s foreign relations with Israel, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Georgia, and Ukraine — a whopping six nations, only half of which could claim even regional-power status — appears wrongheaded and objectionable. Syria and Ukraine, moreover, amounted to little more than sideshows in terms of the freedom agenda’s actual practice, though its most vociferous partisans certainly hoped otherwise. Most incredibly, the Bush administration talked a great deal about Georgia and Iran in terms of the freedom agenda, but managed crisis relations with those states in a manner only broadly consonant, at best, with the agenda’s most platitudinous and widely-accepted principles. When push came to shove, the rhetoric of the freedom agenda yielded to its far more modest and contingent practice.

Again, the particulars of how and why utopian speech translated into pedestrian deed can be litigated and relitigated, but to questionable effect. What matters, for purposes of appraising the freedom agenda, is establishing how relatively modest its practical goals proved to be. Few, if any, have seriously challenged its application in Afghanistan. Most are willing to see it followed through in Kosovo as our obligations there are wound up. And even the agenda’s sincerest and most opportunist supporters have proven quite unwilling to rescue Mikhail Saakashvili in its name. Much of the controversy over the freedom agenda boils down to a basket of specific questions concerning the wisdom of certain policy commitments in the Middle East: the defense of Israel, the establishment of a more friendly and democratic regime in Iraq, and the management of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. A significant remainder, however, concerns the future of Ukraine — a country that can hardly be ushered into NATO in the name of freedom while half or more of its population (plus its leadership, on any given month) firmly opposes closer integration with the West. Early differences with Europe in the wake of the Iraq invasion have been papered over and then healed. The critiques of the freedom agenda that remain are those which take it as an affirmative harm to proper US-Russia relations and those which, combining arguments (3) and (4), take it as a disingenuous means for redescribing an ‘Israel agenda’ in sufficiently abstract terms to captivate and exploit American public opinion.

In essence, both those critiques rest upon a shared premise: that not all human beings are as freedom-loving, or indeed deserving of freedom, as are Americans and Israelis — or that if they are one or the other, it nonetheless does more harm than good for the US to tie its foreign policy too decisively to advancing the freedom of other people and nations. The trouble, of course, is that establishing what policies are tied ‘too decisively’ to that end requires a judgment call, or, more specifically, a sustained series of judgment calls fielded within a fluid geopolitical landscape that no policymakers can fully, or perhaps even mostly, control. Without that caveat, the ‘more harm than good’ proviso reduces to a truism: American foreign policy should not be too idealistic. As a guide to foreign policymaking, this is true advice, but not very useful. The main question facing enthusiasts of a freedom agenda today is whether the opportunities for the prudent, responsible pursuit of increased freedom abroad are plentiful enough to permit anything more than an ad hoc approach. If not, the freedom agenda may already have died, replaced by a ‘freedom doctrine’, a ‘freedom interest’, or a ‘freedom preference’; if so, some sort of freedom agenda, at least, survives.

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