Freedom Betrayed: How America led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War and Walked Away

by Michael A. Ledeen

In this call to embrace the worldwide democratic revolution, this book argues that global democracy should be the centerpiece of U.S. strategy.

250 pages, Hardcover

First published October 25, 1996

About the author

Michael Arthur Ledeen was an American scholar and neoconservative foreign policy analyst. He was a consultant to the United States National Security Council, the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense. He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a scholar for 20 years, and also held the similarly named chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was very close to Italian politician Antonio Martino. Ledeen was also noted to have done work for Italian intelligence agency SISMI, having received over $100,000 in payment to offshore bank accounts for services including but not limited to training Italian intelligence operatives. Ledeen denied these allegations but admitted that he did do work for SISMI and was paid for it.

Reviews

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is insanely wrong and I disagree with almost every speck of it. Ledeen comes off as borderline mentally imbalanced, and he has no problem personally insulting those who don't agree with him. Ledeen's basic argument is that the world from the 1970's to the 1990's went through a Second Democratic Revolution starting in Spain and Portugal, moving to Latin America and South Korea, and culminating in the collapse of communism and the USSR. He claims that this is all one wave of a democratic challenge to those who believe they can centrally manage all affairs and are willing to crush individualism and spontaneity in order to bring about utopian dreams (His real enemies in the book aren't so much the Communists but elite technocrats and bureaucracies everywhere). He sees religion at the core of this revolt, pointing to the Pope, Solidarity, and other religious leaders who challenged tyranny (no matter than religion was on both sides of these struggles, especially in Latin America where the Church usually backed conservative dictators).

Ledeen maintains that the US under Reagan bolstered this movement by cutting off aid to the USSR, ratcheting up the pressure, and increasing defense spending. Of course, Ledeen's simple-minded analysis missed how Reagan shifted from hardliner to negotiator in the mid-late 1980's once the opportunities presented by Gorbachev's reforms arose. Ledeen can't seem to grasp the subtlety of Reagan's Soviet policy. He simply wants the US to back the global democratic revolution and oppose dictators completely in all circumstances. What if the US has to make common cause with a nasty regime? This thought doesn't even seem to occur to Ledeen. Should the US be invading and replacing regimes, intervening in civil wars, cutting off trade with China? Of course, says Ledeen, ignoring the practical difficulties and potential for each of these actions to actually make things worse. The restrained policies of Bush and Clinton are anathema to Ledeen (hence "Freedom Betrayed"). And of course, it won't be Ledeen and his intellectual buddies ensconced at AEI who will fight these endless imperial wars, will it?

Ledeen's book comes down to one simplistic calculus: When the size of government increases, human freedom decreases. The "people" are only starting to seize power back from the deep state. This is why he sees the 1994 midterms as part of the global Democratic revolution in terms of the people rejecting big and elitist government in favor of paring down the state and freeing up individual ingenuity. Herein lies one of the deep conceptual flaws of modern conservatism and neoconservatism. The idea that as government increases human freedom decreases makes sense looking at it from the perspective of a wealthy white male or even a white woman (which virtually all of them are), but tell this calculus to African-Americans at virtually any point in their history. Tell it to working class women, or to industrial and farm workers. For these groups, the expansion of government power as a regulator, a standard setter, and a intervenor against racist, anti-labor, or anti-women's rights laws and policies at state and local levels. For them freedom or fair treatment was not going to come from the local powers that were, and some level of federal intervention (yes, government expansion!) was needed to bring about the protection of their rights. Ledeen is just too much of an ideologue to even consider this. An this is what makes this book so utterly bad: Ledeen doesn't even see the other sides of the debate, and he is practically proud of this blindness.

This is a nice book if you want to get a sense of the difference between an intellectual and an ideologue. It's also good for those studying neoconservatism in the 1990s because this guy had a scary amount of influence in those circles. However, this may be the one book I've ever read that I would never even consider recommending to anyone with a shred of influence in foreign policy making. It is a recipe for disaster.