Geostrategic Interest and Democracy Promotion: Evidence from Post-Soviet Space

Abstract

To become successful, the American policy of promoting democracy abroad needs to be scaled down and decoupled from geopolitics. In the post-Soviet world, the democracy–geopolitics doublespeak breeds cynicism and achieves mixed results at best. Particularly discouraging are the outcomes of democracy promotion in the so-called cleft countries, straddled by a cultural divide. In Ukraine, American foreign policy achieved some success at the price of intensifying inter-regional antagonisms, which subsequently compromised and offset the progress that had been achieved in democratic forms of governance. In Belarus, democracy promotion failed altogether because inter-regional antagonisms in that country are too modest and are therefore difficult to leverage.