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The Market Shall Set You Free
By ROBERT WRIGHT

Princeton, N.J.

LAST week President Bush again laid out a faith-based view of the world and
again took heat for it. Human history, the president said in his inaugural
address,
"has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of liberty."
Accordingly, America will pursue "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our
world"
- and Mr. Bush has "complete confidence" of success. Critics on the left and
right warned against grounding foreign policy in such naïve optimism (a
world
without tyrants?) and such unbounded faith.

But the problem with the speech is actually the opposite. Mr. Bush has too
little hope, and too little faith. He underestimates the impetus behind
freedom
and so doesn't see how powerfully it imparts a "visible direction" to
history. This lack of faith helps explain some of his biggest foreign policy
failures
and suggests that there are more to come.

Oddly, the underlying problem is that this Republican president doesn't
appreciate free markets. Mr. Bush doesn't see how capitalism helps drive
history
toward freedom via an algorithm that for all we know is divinely designed
and is in any event awesomely elegant. Namely: Capitalism's pre-eminence as
a
wealth generator means that every tyrant has to either embrace free markets
or fall slowly into economic oblivion; but for markets to work, citizens
need
access to information technology and the freedom to use it - and that means
having political power.

This link between economic and political liberty has been extolled by
conservative thinkers for centuries, but the microelectronic age has
strengthened
it. Even China's deftly capitalist-yet-authoritarian government - which
embraces technology while blocking Web sites and censoring chat groups - is
doomed
to fail in the long run. China is increasingly porous to news and ideas, and
its high-tech political ferment goes beyond online debates. Last year a
government
official treated a blue-collar worker high-handedly in a sidewalk encounter
and set off a riot - after news of the incident spread by cell phones and
text
messaging.

You won't hear much about such progress from neoconservatives, who prefer to
stress how desperately the global fight for freedom needs American power
behind
it (and who last week raved about an inaugural speech that vowed to furnish
this power). And, to be sure, neoconservatives can rightly point to lots of
oppression and brutality in China and elsewhere - as can liberal
human-rights activists. But anyone who talks as if Chinese freedom hasn't
grown since
China went capitalist is evincing a hazy historical memory and, however
obliquely, is abetting war. Right-wing hawks thrive on depicting tyranny as
a force
of nature, when in fact nature is working toward its demise.

The president said last week that military force isn't the principal lever
he would use to punish tyrants. But that mainly leaves economic levers, like
sanctions and exclusion from the World Trade Organization. Given that
involvement in the larger capitalist world is time-release poison for
tyranny, impeding
this involvement is an odd way to aid history's march toward freedom. Four
decades of economic isolation have transformed Fidel Castro from a young,
fiery
dictator into an old, fiery dictator.

Economic exclusion is especially perverse in cases where inclusion could
work as a carrot. Suppose, for example, that a malignant authoritarian
regime was
developing nuclear weapons and you might stop it by offering membership in
the W.T.O. It's a twofer - you draw tyrants into a web of commerce that will
ultimately spell their doom, and they pay for the privilege by disarming.
What president could resist that?

Correct! President Bush is sitting on the sidelines scowling as the European
Union tries to strike that very bargain with Iran.

It's possible that skepticism about the European initiative is justified -
that Iran, in the end, would rather have the bomb than a seat in the W.T.O.
But
there's one way for the Bush administration to find out: Outline a highly
intrusive arms inspection regime and say that the United States will support
W.T.O. membership if the inspectors find no weapons program (or if Iran
fesses up) and are allowed to set up long-term monitoring.

There are various explanations for Mr. Bush's position. Maybe some in the
administration fear losing a rationale for invading Iran. Maybe the
administration
is ideologically opposed to arms control agreements (a strange position,
post-9/11). But part of the problem seems to be that Mr. Bush doesn't grasp
the
liberating power of capitalism, the lethal effect of luring authoritarian
regimes into the modern world of free markets and free minds.

That would help explain the amazing four-year paralysis of America's North
Korea policy. Reluctant to invade, yet allergic to "rewarding" tyrants with
economic
incentives and international engagement, the president sat by while North
Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, apparently built up a nuclear arsenal. Now,
with
Iran no more than a few years from having the bomb, we're watching this
movie again. And it may be a double feature: the inertia we saw in North
Korea
followed by the war we've seen in Iraq. With Iraq and Iran in flames (live,
on Al Jazeera!) and Mr. Kim coolly stockpiling nukes, President Bush will
have
hit the axis-of-evil trifecta.

Pundits have mined Mr. Bush's inaugural address for literary antecedents -
Kennedy here, Lincoln there, a trace of Truman. But some of it was pure Bill
Clinton. Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton said that history was on freedom's side
and stressed that freedom abroad serves America's interests. But he also saw
- and explicitly articulated - something absent from Mr. Bush's inaugural
vision: the tight link between economic and political liberty in the
information
age, the essentially redeeming effect of globalization. That's one reason
Mr. Clinton defied intraparty opposition to keep commerce with China and
other
nations strong.

In the wake of John Kerry's defeat, Democrats have been searching for a new
foreign policy vision. But Mr. Clinton laid down as solid a template for
post-9/11
policy as you could expect from a pre-9/11 president.

First, fight the spread of weapons of mass destruction, which means, among
other things, making arms inspections innovatively intrusive, as in the
landmark
Chemical Weapons Convention that President Clinton signed (and that Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, et. al., opposed). Second, pursue terrorist
networks
overtly and covertly (something Mr. Clinton did more aggressively than the
pre-9/11 Bush administration). Third, make America liked and respected
abroad
(as opposed to, say, loathed and reviled). Fourth, seek lasting peace in the
Middle East (something Mr. Bush keeps putting off until after the next war).

And finally, help the world mature into a comprehensive community of
nations - bound by economic interdependence and a commitment to liberty, and
cooperating
in the global struggle against terrorism and in law enforcement generally.

But in pursuing that last goal, respect and harness the forces in your
favor. Give history some guidance, but resist the flattering delusion that
you're
its pilot. Don't take military and economic weapons off the table, but
appreciate how sparingly you can use them when the architect of history is
on your
side. Have a little faith.

Robert Wright, a fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values
and at the New America Foundation, is the author of "Nonzero: The Logic of
Human
Destiny."