Mitchell thinks that the problem is inherently insoluble, and thus that the democracy promotion moment has come and gone. Another way of looking at it, though, is that the United States and other outside actors will have to decide how much they care about helping democratic forces in non-democratic states, and thus how much pressure they will impose on regimes to let those forces work. The Obama administration has gone to the mat in Egypt, where the regime was foolish enough to threaten American citizens, but not in Ethiopia. But the SCAF is still free to repress domestic groups -- a far greater threat to their continuing rule -- even though they've released the Americans. Larry Diamond argues that the United States must not let a disingenuous argument over sovereignty "trump a more basic international principle that people have a right to peacefully organize a civil society." He would like to see the Obama administration "push back very, very hard" against regimes that try to throttle democracy assistance, and do so in collaboration with other Western states and with the United Nations. International actors must be prepared at times to withhold goodies that matter to such rulers, whether in the form of aid or a diplomatic embrace.
There's no satisfying answer to this problem. Like it or not, the United States needs autocratic or semi-democratic allies like Egypt and Ethiopia, not to mention Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan. It will not, and should not, put the right of NDI and IRI to operate freely at the top of the agenda with those states. With the worst of them, it's probably a waste of breath. And it's important to remain modest about what outsiders can accomplish even in ambiguous settings like today's Egypt and Azerbaijan. But the Arab Spring has decisively proved that people who have spent their whole lives under repressive rule are prepared to take risks, sometimes very grave ones, in order to gain a measure of dignity. And the United States has to be on the right side of that struggle. The Obama administration should take the crisis in Egypt as a wake-up call on the democracy backlash.
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