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By Root 1874 0

work, the impact of such posturing on Azeri authorities is zero. The greater danger here is that the supposed presence of a new pillar of American foreign policy—and this is how Internet freedom is often presented by senior American diplomats—will detract the public from asking the tough questions about the older, far more influential pillars, some of which are clearly beginning to crumble. As such, it would become much harder to evaluate the continuity of American policies, to view and criticize them in their totality. Since the plight of bloggers makes for far better copy than the plight of human rights campaigners, some observers might mistakenly believe that the U.S. government is, in fact, extremely critical of its allies.

As Rami Khouri, of Lebanon’s Daily Star, so poignantly remarked on the gap between America’s highly idealistic rhetoric on Internet freedom and its rather cynical actions in the rest of its foreign policy: “One cannot take seriously the United States or any other Western government that funds [online] political activism by young Arabs while it simultaneously provides funds and guns that help cement the power of the very same Arab governments the young social and political activists target for change.” But Khouri may have underestimated American diplomats’ own capacity for self-delusion. They take themselves seriously, and it’s quite possible that they would be the first to believe that a fight for a free Internet—fought, for some reasons, only abroad—could somehow compensate for the lack of any serious changes elsewhere in American foreign policy. Unfortunately, virtually nothing about the current situation suggests that American foreign policy can muster enough decency and idealism to erect this new shiny pillar of Internet freedom; in its current incorporation, the Internet freedom agenda looks more like a marketing ploy.

Recent developments indicate that Washington’s newly declared commitment to Internet freedom will be shaped by pre-Internet policies and alliances. Thus, even though a week before Clinton’s seminal speech Jordan, America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East, announced a new harsh Internet censorship law, she never referred to it (Clinton mentioned many other countries, like Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Tunisia nevertheless).

The biggest tragedy of the Obama administration’s Internet freedom agenda, even in its weakest form, is the unleashing of a conceptual monster so ambiguous as to greatly impede the administration’s ability to accomplish other objectives. China and Iran, for example, want to keep tight control over the Internet, not only because they fear that their citizens may discover the real state of affairs in their countries, but also because they believe that the Internet is America’s favorite tool of starting antigovernment rebellions. And the stronger such beliefs, the more challenging it would be for liberals to keep the Internet unregulated and hope that gradually it will help foster a strong demand for democracy. Marc Lynch hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “When the U.S. says to Iran or to other adversarial regimes that it should respect ‘freedom of internet expression’ or ‘freedom of internet connectivity,’ those regimes will assume that it is really trying to use those as a rhetorical cover for hostile actions.” Translated into policies, the very concept of Internet freedom, much like “the war on terror” before it, leads to intellectual mush in the heads of its promoters and breeds excessive paranoia in the heads of their adversaries. This is hardly the kind of change that American foreign policy needs in the age of Obama.

The End of the American Internet

The interpretation of Internet freedom as a cover-up for regime change might seem ridiculous if it weren’t so widely shared by some of America’s most powerful movers and shakers. Such cyber-jingoism is poised to backfire, however, on American companies, which have been exporting Internet freedom, perhaps in its weakest form, for years.

Before all this talk about Internet freedom began in earnest,