Democracy Promotion and the Monarchies
from Middle East Program, Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy, Democracy, Human Rights, and American Foreign Policy, and United States Policy in the Middle East and North Africa
from Middle East Program, Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy, Democracy, Human Rights, and American Foreign Policy, and United States Policy in the Middle East and North Africa

Democracy Promotion and the Monarchies

Should the United States be promoting democracy and human rights in friendly monarchies? Yes — human rights improvements, not regime change, should be the goal, working especially in areas where progress is pragmatically possible.

November 15, 2021 4:03 pm (EST)

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Current political and economic issues succinctly explained.

Promotion of democracy and human rights are often linked or even viewed as identical aims. In the U.S. State Department, the office dealing with this subject area is called the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL). That office, plus several others, is overseen by the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights. Similarly, the National Security Council officer handling these matters is Senior Director for Democracy and Human Rights.

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Yet democracy and human rights are two different concepts: “democracy” describes how decisions are made through popular voting, while “human rights” describes certain inviolable rights adhering to the individual regardless of the form of government or the wishes of the majority. Promotion of democracy is often defended as the best way to assure respect for human rights, though in some countries majority rule can endanger the rights of minorities.

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For the United States and other countries that wish to promote both human rights and democracy, monarchies can present a problem. Constitutional monarchies in Europe and Japan present no contradiction, but in monarchies where the head of state retains governing powers the problem is evident. The largest group of such countries lies in the Arab world, where Bahrain, Qatar, Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, and the UAE remain “genuine” monarchies where the sovereign holds considerable (or even all) political power. How should the United States, a nation that rebelled against a king in the name of popular sovereignty, deal with the promotion of democracy and human rights in those cases?

The United States has long maintained good diplomatic relations with these Arab monarchies and has not sought to undermine their system of government. Today, American diplomats do not urge the end of these Arab monarchies, though other Arab states have overthrown theirs: in the twentieth century there were kings in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. American calls for respect for human rights in Arab monarchies do not include a demand for democratic voting or a change to a constitutional system with the king or sultan as a mere figurehead. A typical example is the message then-Secretary of State Clinton   issued in 2009 on Saudi Arabia’s “National Day.”[1] She congratulated the king for “extend[ing] the hand of friendship to people of other faiths…strengthening the Kingdom’s institutions, working to diversify the economy, support knowledge-based education, and expand opportunity for women” and for “promoting the principles of moderation, tolerance, and mutual respect – core values that we all share.” Not a word about democracy.

Why Not Promote Democracy?

Why not? First and most obviously, this would amount to a call for regime change and be understood by the rulers of these states as a deeply hostile act. It would destroy or undermine important relationships between these monarchies and the United States. As Prof. Gregory Gause has written, “in each of these countries, Washington has an agenda that goes beyond domestic political reform; real interests related to oil, Arab- Israeli peace, military cooperation, and intelligence-sharing are all at stake.”[2]

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Second, change does not always mean improvement. As Gause wrote, “A real American push for democratization in dynastic monarchies could undermine the stability that extended family rule has given those countries.” In the Middle Eastern countries where monarchy was replaced by a republican form of government, such as Nasser’s or Saddam Hussein’s, those “republics” were in fact dictatorships.

Third, there is no evident demand in those countries that the monarchies be eliminated. Because such demands are criminal acts and would be punished, the desire for democracy is impossible to measure—but as they watch instability in Lebanon and Tunisia, or repression in Egypt and Syria, it’s reasonable to assume that the relative stability of the Arab monarchies holds some appeal to their citizens. While it is debatable, it can also be argued that the monarchies, some of them with centuries-old roots, have acquired considerable legitimacy. Finally, in Jordan, Morocco, and Kuwait, there are elected parliaments with limited powers. While these can be used as pressure valves to eliminate demands for more democracy, they have some role in governance and may be seen by citizens in those countries as holding the promise of a future constitutional monarchy.

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U.S. Democracy and Human Rights Policy in Monarchies

With this background, what should be U.S. democracy promotion and human rights policy toward the Arab monarchies?

First, the United States should not promote regime change from monarchy to republican forms of government. Such a policy would offend friendly governments, likely neither advance the cause of human rights or of democracy, nor represent the desires of the citizenry in the affected states. Moreover, otherwise acceptable pressure for improvements in respect for human rights may be seen as subversive and hostile when linked to a demand for democracy.

Second, the United States should promote respect for human rights using the commitments the monarchies have themselves made. Sometimes this will be through a country’s adherence to international instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, or Arab Charter on Human Rights. This would help avoid the accusation that foreign principles and values are being imposed. It is always wise to use the historic and cultural assets at hand: to take one example, the concept of electoral democracy may not have deep roots in traditional Islam but the concept of justice certainly does. Thus, pressure for an independent and non-corrupt system of justice that treats all citizens equally will have wide support, and religious roots, in Arab lands.

Third, the United States should push on doors that are at least partly open rather than banging on stone walls. The George W. Bush administration, for example, did not urge democracy on Saudi Arabia’s government but it did urge greater respect for all religions and greater room for non-Muslims to practice their religion in the kingdom. Those pressures met with at least modest success. Where there are elected parliaments, pressing for fully free elections and press freedom to cover them is an obvious choice. Where advisory bodies such as “Shura Councils” have both elected and appointed members, discussing an increase in the percentage elected should not be unduly disruptive. Where there is no parliament, demands for one may be rejected out of hand but pressing for some form of elected or representative bodies at the local or provincial level may work.

U.S. foreign policy should neither abandon the goal of respect for human rights in monarchies, nor risk human rights progress by linking it to pressure for popular sovereignty. Such pressure will be seen as subversive and unfriendly. But the religious traditions, and their promises to their own populations, provide wide opportunities for the promotion of human rights by friendly and supportive allies.

This publication is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy. 

 

 

[2] Gregory Gause, Kings for All Seasons:
How The Middle East’s Monarchies Survived the Arab Spring
, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Resilience-Arab-Mo…

 

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Sign up to receive CFR President Mike Froman’s analysis on the most important foreign policy story of the week, delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon. Subscribe to The World This Week. In the Middle East, Israel and Iran are engaged in what could be the most consequential conflict in the region since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. CFR’s experts continue to cover all aspects of the evolving conflict on CFR.org. While the situation evolves, including the potential for direct U.S. involvement, it is worth touching on another recent development in the region which could have far-reaching consequences: the diffusion of cutting-edge U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) technology to leading Gulf powers. The defining feature of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is his willingness to question and, in many cases, reject the prevailing consensus on matters ranging from European security to trade. His approach to AI policy is no exception. Less than six months into his second term, Trump is set to fundamentally rewrite the United States’ international AI strategy in ways that could influence the balance of global power for decades to come. In February, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Vice President JD Vance delivered a rousing speech at the Grand Palais, and made it clear that the Trump administration planned to abandon the Biden administration’s safety-centric approach to AI governance in favor of a laissez-faire regulatory regime. “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vance said. “It will be won by building—from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future.” And as Trump’s AI czar David Sacks put it, “Washington wants to control things, the bureaucracy wants to control things. That’s not a winning formula for technology development. We’ve got to let the private sector cook.” The accelerationist thrust of Vance and Sacks’s remarks is manifesting on a global scale. Last month, during Trump’s tour of the Middle East, the United States announced a series of deals to permit the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia to import huge quantities (potentially over one million units) of advanced AI chips to be housed in massive new data centers that will serve U.S. and Gulf AI firms that are training and operating cutting-edge models. These imports were made possible by the Trump administration’s decision to scrap a Biden administration executive order that capped chip exports to geopolitical swing states in the Gulf and beyond, and which represents the most significant proliferation of AI capabilities outside the United States and China to date. The recipe for building and operating cutting-edge AI models has a few key raw ingredients: training data, algorithms (the governing logic of AI models like ChatGPT), advanced chips like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) or Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)—and massive, power-hungry data centers filled with advanced chips.  Today, the United States maintains a monopoly of only one of these inputs: advanced semiconductors, and more specifically, the design of advanced semiconductors—a field in which U.S. tech giants like Nvidia and AMD, remain far ahead of their global competitors. To weaponize this chokepoint, the first Trump administration and the Biden administration placed a series of ever-stricter export controls on the sale of advanced U.S.-designed AI chips to countries of concern, including China.  The semiconductor export control regime culminated in the final days of the Biden administration with the rollout of the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, more commonly known as the AI diffusion rule—a comprehensive global framework for limiting the proliferation of advanced semiconductors. The rule sorted the world into three camps. Tier 1 countries, including core U.S. allies such as Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, were exempt from restrictions, whereas tier 3 countries, such as Russia, China, and Iran, were subject to the extremely stringent controls. The core controversy of the diffusion rule stemmed from the tier 2 bucket, which included some 150 countries including India, Mexico, Israel, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Many tier 2 states, particularly Gulf powers with deep economic and military ties to the United States, were furious.  The rule wasn’t just a matter of how many chips could be imported and by whom. It refashioned how the United States could steer the distribution of computing resources, including the regulation and real-time monitoring of their deployment abroad and the terms by which the technologies can be shared with third parties. Proponents of the restrictions pointed to the need to limit geopolitical swing states’ access to leading AI capabilities and to prevent Chinese, Russian, and other adversarial actors from accessing powerful AI chips by contracting cloud service providers in these swing states.  However, critics of the rule, including leading AI model developers and cloud service providers, claimed that the constraints would stifle U.S. innovation and incentivize tier 2 countries to adopt Chinese AI infrastructure. Moreover, critics argued that with domestic capital expenditures on AI development and infrastructure running into the hundreds of billions of dollars in 2025 alone, fresh capital and scale-up opportunities in the Gulf and beyond represented the most viable option for expanding the U.S. AI ecosystem. This hypothesis is about to be tested in real time. 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Perhaps maintaining and expanding the United States’ global market share in key AI chokepoint technologies will deny China the scale it needs to outcompete the United States—but it also introduces the risk of U.S. chips falling into the wrong hands via transhipment, smuggling, and other means, or being co-opted by authoritarian regimes for malign purposes.  Such risks are not illusory: there is already ample evidence of Chinese firms using shell entities to access leading-edge U.S. chips through cloud service providers in Southeast Asia. And Chinese firms, including Huawei, were important vendors for leading Gulf AI firms, including the UAE’s G-42, until the U.S. government forced the firm to divest its Chinese hardware as a condition for receiving a strategic investment from Microsoft in 2024. In the United States, the ability to build new data centers is severely constrained by complex permitting processes and limited capacity to bring new power to the grid. What the Gulf countries lack in terms of semiconductor prowess and AI talent, they make up for with abundant capital, energy, and accommodating regulations. The Gulf countries are well-positioned for massive AI infrastructure buildouts. The question is simply, using whose technology—American or Chinese—and on what terms? In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it will be American technology for now. The question remains whether the diffusion of the most powerful dual-use technologies of our day will bind foreign users to the United States and what impact it will have on the global balance of power.  We welcome your feedback on this column. Let me know what foreign policy issues you’d like me to address next by replying to [email protected].

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