“Not only do we have to realise the limits of what we can actually accomplish in someone else’s country, we should also recognise that for any given outcome, it’s better that it happens through the actions of [people] themselves.” – Paul Wolfowitz
in Washington saw something else at work. Secretary of State George Shultz pressed the hardest, but behind him stood a chorus of neoconservative voices an ideological commitment to democracy and disdain for the Realpolitik of the previous generation. Their leader then was the 42-year-old Assistant Secretary of State for Asian Affairs, Paul Wolfowitz. Persuaded that Manila’s crowds represented widespread popular opposition rather than the provocations of a radical fringe, Wolfowitz impressed on Shultz the need to convince Reagan to stop supporting his friend and ally. Marcos’s obvious attempts to steal the 7 February 1986 election from leading opposition candidate Corazon Aquino, the widow of the slain Benigno Aquino, prompted the People Power uprisings and the key military defections that fatally undermined the regime. On 25 February, Marcos fled to exile in Hawaii. Reagan was bitter that Marcos had been “treated as shabbily as our country had treated another former ally, the Shah of Iran,” and probably felt Shultz and Wolfowitz were on the wrong side of history. But in the next few years, as a wave of democratisation swept over East Asia, Latin America, southern Africa, and Eastern Europe, it was clear that a new global politics — one that had formed in part on the streets of Manila — would rule the day. Reagan and his aides were not wrong to look to the past; policymakers should consider history as they respond to global events. But even as leaders sift through history for lessons, they should not expect the past to repeat itself. In 1986, critics complained that Reagan had an outdated sense of Cold War loyalty. But in 2003, few policy analysts asked whether Paul Wolfowitz — back in public service as Undersecretary of Defense
and one of the primary proponents of the War on Iraq — had relied too heavily or too readily on his memories of the Philippines’ popular uprising. By all accounts, including his own, Wolfowitz was mesmerized by People Power: by the sight of crowds on the streets; by Filipinos’ passionate commitment to electoral democracy; and by their peaceful overthrow of a hated dictator. The events of 1986 shaped his statecraft, with repercussions two decades later. People Power may have made Wolfowitz think that regime change would be easy, and that crowds would fill Firdos Square in Baghdad in the same way as they had gathered on Manila’s main superhighway. Saddam Hussein was at least as unpopular as Ferdinand Marcos, but this was a poor analogy. In Iraq, the institutions of civil society that might have laid the groundwork for U.S. intervention were not there: there was little in the way of critical press institutions, religious organisations, or civil society groups. Perhaps most importantly, Iraq lacked the long tradition of vigorously contested elections that are such a crucial part of Philippine political culture. Policy-makers bring a great deal of personal experience — and often a depth of historical knowledge — with them to their meeting rooms, but they rarely have time to analyse it critically. The second key lesson of People Power can be gleaned not in 1986, but in 2003. Global leaders who turn to historical comparisons in moments of crisis should pause to consider whether the analogies they make are truly applicable to the situation at hand. In 2011, mass movements for democratisation and regime change are
sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. Once again, events are moving faster than any policy-maker can understand, and again, the impulse is towards making historical analogies. But in all the comparisons made by the global press since January — the Arab Spring has been likened to the falling of the second Berlin Wall, the second Iran of 1978, another Tiananmen of 1989 — there has been no extended comparison to People Power in 1986. It is unfortunate these analyses have neglected the many linkages between People Power in 1986 and the events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011. As in the Philippines, spontaneous mass movements in places as diverse as Syria, Egypt, and Libya are unified less by a shared vision of the future than by a unanimous antagonism towards an existing regime. In nations such as Egypt that maintained close ties with the United States, much of that opposition has been expressed in the language of anti-Americanism, a rhetoric that can just as easily be misread by jittery U.S. State Department officials who fear Islamic radicalism in 2011 in the same manner their predecessors had feared communism in 1986. Perhaps the most important message for global leaders is one that Paul Wolfowitz himself conveyed in a speech in late 1986, as the Philippines shifted from revolution to the slow and painful rebuilding of democratic institutions — a place where nations such as Libya and Egypt find themselves now. “One problem here is for Americans to exaggerate their role and to look for the biggest possible role they can play in … internal affairs,” he told an audience of public policy students at Tufts University. “Not only do we have to realise the limits of what we can actually accomplish in someone else’s country, we should also recognise that for any given outcome, it’s better that it happens through the actions of [people] themselves…” Humility, it seems, is the most crucial lesson for global leaders – and the hardest to learn. Christopher Capozzola is Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently writing a history of Filipino soldiers in the U.S. armed forces in the 20th century.
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