The Audacity of Hope

who are rich.” Forty-five years later, that mass misery still exists. If we are to fulfill
Kennedy’s promise—and serve our long-term security interests—then we will have to
go beyond a more prudent use of military force. We will have to align our policies to
help reduce the spheres of insecurity, poverty, and violence around the world, and give
more people a stake in the global order that has served us so well.
Of course, there are those who would argue with my starting premise—that any global
system built in America’s image can alleviate misery in poorer countries. For these
critics, America’s notion of what the international system should be—free trade, open
markets, the unfettered flow of information, the rule of law, democratic elections, and
the like—is simply an expression of American imperialism, designed to exploit the
cheap labor and natural resources of other countries and infect non-Western cultures
with decadent beliefs. Rather than conform to America’s rules, the argument goes, other
countries should resist America’s efforts to expand its hegemony; instead, they should
follow their own path to development, taking their lead from left-leaning populists like
Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, or turning to more traditional principles of social
organization, like Islamic law.
I don’t dismiss these critics out of hand. America and its Western partners did design
the current international system, after all; it is our way of doing things—our accounting
standards, our language, our dollar, our copyright laws, our technology, and our popular
culture—to which the world has had to adapt over the past fifty years. If overall the
international system has produced great prosperity in the world’s most developed
countries, it has also left many people behind—a fact that Western policy makers have
often ignored and occasionally made worse.
Ultimately, though, I believe critics are wrong to think that the world’s poor will benefit
by rejecting the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy. When human rights
activists from various countries come to my office and talk about being jailed or
tortured for their beliefs, they are not acting as agents of American power. When my
cousin in Kenya complains that it’s impossible to find work unless he’s paid a bribe to
some official in the ruling party, he hasn’t been brainwashed by Western ideas. Who
doubts that, if given the choice, most of the people in North Korea would prefer living
in South Korea, or that many in Cuba wouldn’t mind giving Miami a try?
No person, in any culture, likes to be bullied. No person likes living in fear because his
or her ideas are different. Nobody likes being poor or hungry, and nobody likes to live
under an economic system in which the fruits of his or her labor go perpetually
unrewarded. The system of free markets and liberal democracy that now characterizes
most of the developed world may be flawed; it may all too often reflect the interests of
the powerful over the powerless. But that system is constantly subject to change and
improvement—and it is precisely in this openness to change that market-based liberal
democracies offer people around the world their best chance at a better life.
Our challenge, then, is to make sure that U.S. policies move the international system in
the direction of greater equity, justice, and prosperity—that the rules we promote serve
both our interests and the interests of a struggling world. In doing so, we might keep a
few basic principles in mind. First, we should be skeptical of those who believe we can
single-handedly liberate other people from tyranny. I agree with George W. Bush when
in his second inaugural address he proclaimed a universal desire to be free. But there are