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Fifth, what is reasonable to expect to achieve by pushing harder on democracy? Too often, policymakers set the bar unrealistically high and conclude action is not worthwhile.

Fourth, how can the United States raise democracy and rights issues with a politically problematic security partner in a way that maximizes the potential to advance democratic progress? Engagement on democracy and rights should emphasize the countryвЂ™s self-interest and target not just individual rights cases but structural elements of democratic decline, while also clearly articulating U.S.

security interests be threatened if the United States pushes a particular security partner harder on democracy? Answering this question goes to the heart of weighing potential democracy-security trade-offs and requires close analysis that avoids the reflexive answer that pushing on democracy will immediately trigger a reduction in security collaboration.

Candidly assessing the relationship will give policymakers a sense of what, if any, tensions exist between democracy and security objectives. security interests may benefit, suffer, or remain unaffected if the democratic situation of the country improves.

Second, what is the relationship between the security interests that the United States hopes the partnership will serve and the problematic democratic situation of the partner? No simple relationship can be assumed.

To mitigate this, policymakers must identify and agree on the interests at stake in a given partnership to ensure they are operating from a clear shared understanding, at least within the U.S. government operate from different conceptions of the security interests at stake and rely on long-standing assumptions that persist on bureaucratic autopilot.

First, what are the specific security interests that the partnership with the foreign government in question will help advance? Often, different parts of the U.S.

Such assessments should address five key questions: policymakers avoid ad hoc approaches and diminish the long-standing tendency to back down reflexively on democracy and rights when clashing interests arise. But careful assessments of the security and political issues at stake can help U.S. There are no magic solutions to the democracy-security dilemma. By contrast, democratic decline in Turkey has coincided with-and contributed to-a major deterioration in AnkaraвЂ™s relations with Washington, including significant divergence on a range of foreign policy issues. Indian security partnership has unfolded alongside a distinctly illiberal turn in Indian politics. push, warmly welcomed by Prime Minister Narendra ModiвЂ™s government, to further strengthen the U.S. concerns with the countryвЂ™s authoritarian politics have surfaced periodically over the years yet struggled to find a meaningful place in a relationship dominated by deeply rooted security cooperation, including extensive U.S. policy toward Egypt, India, and Turkey over the past twenty years highlight the complexity of the democracy-security dilemma. policymakers deal with it more systematically and effectively. This paper looks in depth at the democracy-security dilemma with a view to helping U.S. While the Biden administration has publicly and privately raised democracy and rights issues with various security partners, its cautious approach toward some of them has started to attract criticism from those who feel that near-term security interests have been too strongly prioritized compared to democracy and human rights concerns. appeals to values, bolstering the damaging perception that America only pushes for democracy against its adversaries or in strategically irrelevant countries.ДЄlready in the first year of BidenвЂ™s presidency, such tensions have emerged in relations with countries as diverse as Egypt, Hungary, India, the Philippines, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

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Yet giving them a free pass on democracy and rights issues undercuts the credibility of U.S. Such situations frequently give rise to a policy dilemma: confronting partner governments over their political shortcomings risks triggering hostility that would jeopardize the security benefits that such governments provide to Washington. Powerful security interests, especially countering terrorist threats, maintaining stability in the Middle East, and managing competition with a rising China, underlie many of these partnerships.

foreign policy, they confront the stubborn fact that the United States maintains cooperative security relations with a wide range of undemocratic or democratically backsliding governments. As President Joe Biden and his team seek to put the defense of democracy and protection of human rights at the center of U.S.

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