Dictators in Vogue

Something called the Community of Democracies Conference opened in Warsaw on Sunday. It seems a bit anachronistic, though. These days, it is the dictators who are in vogue, not the democrats. In life and in death, the Kim Jong Ils and Hafez Assads get more respectful, even celebratory press than the world's elected leaders.


Being a tyrant used to be hazardous to your health. The fall of the Soviet empire capped 1 1/2 decades in which more than a dozen dictatorships collapsed under various forms of Western pressure f from Marcos, Pinochet, Somoza and Noriega on the right to Ortega, Jaruzelski, Honecker and Ceaucescu on the left.


In the Cold War's intermediate aftermath, it was commonly assumed that the world's remaining dictators would soon be swept away, too. But since the early 1990s, only a handful have lost their jobs. Croatia's Franjo Tudjman, Nigeria's Sani Abacha and now Assad conveniently died. Indonesia's Suharto fell victim to the impersonal forces of the international economy. Only Haiti's Raoul Cedras managed to get himself ousted by the Americans. Even the embattled and despised Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are about to survive their second U.S. president.


The democratic world has become a bit flaccid and is in a more forgiving mood than it was a decade ago. This week's conference has the worthy goal of fostering cooperation to consolidate the many democracies born in the 1970s, '80s and early '90s, in the so-called Third Wave of democratization. But promoting democracy where it doesn't exist? A Fourth Wave? That's not part of the agenda.


Indeed, the conference organizers were hesitant to make clear distinctions between real and phony democracies. Attendees include such notable democracies as Algeria, Egypt, Kenya and Yemen. Meanwhile, Jiang Zemin is the toast of the corporate world and of the governments that do its bidding. Fidel Castro is the great reuniter of broken families. Presidents-for-life Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Heidar Aliyev of Azerbaijan are accorded the respect appropriate to 21st-century sultans. And as Vladimir Putin clamps down on the Russian press, after stomping on Chechen throats, his chief punishment is to be slobbered over by Gerhard Schr?der and Tony Blair.


Even pariahs are getting a chance at redemption. Kim Jong Il's smile has the U.S. press swooning and the State Department dropping the word "rogue" from its vocabulary.


The new, softer approach to dictators is buttressed by grand theories about life in the post-Cold War world. The idea of forcing dictators to open their systems now seems so 1980s. U.S. conservatives fret about "cultural imperialism;" the left cares more about punishing the old Pinochet than about stopping a new Pinochet from emerging in Peru.


In respectable circles, the "inevitability thesis" reigns. The forces of globalization and the modern international economic system must spell doom for all dictatorships, regardless of what the United States and its allies do. So why do anything? Liberals who once demanded that the United States topple right-wing dictators, and conservatives who once toiled to undo communist governments, now worship at the same shrine of economic determinism, insisting that commerce and trade are the great solvent of international tyranny.


Republicans and Democrats alike put their faith in an imagined "iron law," according to which democracy must follow in the wake of economic development. Focus less on elections, and more on building the "institutions" of democracy f as if the institutions of democracy in, say, Peru could be of much use when the elections are rigged or stolen.


These are comfortable doctrines of passivity, well suited to these comfortable and complacent times. How nice to imagine that merely by enriching ourselves we can spread the blessings of democracy to everyone else. How much easier to provide endless democracy assistance to oppressed peoples than to confront their oppressors.


Someday we may pay a price. The community of dictators works together at least as effectively as the community of democracies. Even in this globalized age of economic and technological miracles, the international club of dictators may well get bigger, more firmly entrenched. According to the Chinese press, Jiang Zemin recently offered Kim Jong Il some advice on how to evade the West's iron law: "Snuff out all [political] challenges when they are still at the embryonic stage." The son of Kim Il Sung probably needs no lessons in snuffing. Nor does any other dictator ruthless enough to have survived the 1980s. As democracies consolidate, so do dictators.


Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes a monthly column for The Washington Post, where this comment originally appeared.