CARL GERSHMAN has the confident air of a man who knows his importance in Washington. As president of the congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), he oversees an organization of 171 employees. In 2012, his organization dispensed approximately 1,236 grants, averaging some $50,000 each—a total of close to $62 million—to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in ninety-two countries.

Thus, it isn’t surprising that Gershman would exude an unusual combination of idealism and political savvy about the ways of Washington. Well turned out in elegant suits and fashionable ties, he occupies a spacious office on the eighth floor of a fine building on Washington’s F Street. The pleasant coffee mug he carries, decorated with pictures of his children, understates the power and controversial nature of his work.

Gershman’s job is to promote democracy in foreign lands with as much force and reach as his budget and operational effectiveness will allow. The NED disperses grants not to individual dissidents or activists but directly to NGOs—civic organizations, associations and independent media. Unlike other U.S. democracy-promotion enterprises, it does not work with governments in the countries in which it promotes democracy. This pursuit sounds like a particularly honorable one to most Americans, given the widespread devotion to democratic institutions that is embedded in the U.S. national consciousness. “All people want freedom,” says Gershman, encapsulating a view widely shared throughout America, inside and out of the growing democracy-promotion movement.

But others question both this activity and the notion that U.S. federal dollars should fund efforts by Americans to determine the governmental systems of other countries, which inevitably takes on a coloration of seeking to undermine existing governments and interfere with civic systems around the world. A recent commentary on the website of Russia’s state-funded international television channel, RT (for Russia Today), expressed a view widely held outside the United States: “‘Private’ organizations like NED are nothing but funding channels for activities that used to be run by the CIA under the title of ‘subversion.’” Given that the English-language RT is essentially the Russian government’s external propaganda arm, this view of U.S. democracy-promotion activities isn’t surprising.

But that foreign perspective is echoed by a former acting president of the NED who later served as the archivist of the United States. “A lot of what we do today,” said Allen Weinstein in a 1991 interview, “was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA. The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection.”

Some two decades after Weinstein’s celebration of openness, flaps have emerged aplenty. Just months after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted from office through massive street demonstrations—a development heralded as a potential turn toward more democracy in Arab lands—the new government raided the offices of ten local civil-society organizations, including the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), two core grantees of the NED. Some forty-three NGO workers, including nineteen Americans, were arrested and charged with crimes. The matter looked harrowing until the aid workers were finally released some months later, but Egypt’s NGO crackdown is ongoing.

Russia soon acted to curtail or thwart NGO activities within its borders. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was expelled last fall, and the government later enacted a law requiring foreign-funded groups to register as “foreign agents.” The United States and other governments also require citizens working with foreign governments to register that fact. But in late December, the Russian legislature passed a law that would outlaw U.S.-funded “nonprofit organizations that engage in political activity” within Russia.

CLEARLY, SOME foreign governments are not keen about activities within their borders that many Americans view simply as idealistic efforts to support universal values. But criticism of such activities is voiced in the United States as well. Writer and thinker David Rieff suggested in this magazine that democracy promotion is the product of adherents who “will not or cannot acknowledge either the ideological or the revolutionary character of their enterprise.” He adds that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, whose 1956 boast that the Soviets would “bury” the West was “an expression of historical determinism at its most vulgar,” looks like a “philosophical pragmatist” alongside some of today’s earnest democracy-promotion cadres.

In addition, recent scholarship questions democracy promotion’s effectiveness. “Despite all of the attention that has been given to democracy promotion over the past decade, we actually know very little about which programs policy makers should fund where,” says Sarah Bush, a Temple University political scientist who is writing a book on the subject. Though many Americans instinctively assume supporting democracy in foreign countries is beneficial to all concerned, the research doesn’t match that theory. “Unfortunately, even if we accept that U.S. government-funded programs are, on average, associated with democratization, figuring out what type of programs work best is a whole different challenge,” says Bush.

She adds that American prodemocracy activities are often seen by others as meddling or duplicitous. “The United States suffers from a credibility problem when it promotes democracy overseas,” she says, continuing:

American leaders are trying to support democratic transition in countries such as Libya and Tunisia. They are also supporting the survival of friendly dictators in countries such as Bahrain and Jordan. As a consequence, the United States’ pledges to support democracy around the world often ring hollow, especially in the Middle East.

Notwithstanding such contrary thinking, America’s democracy-promotion enterprise is going strong. Bush has coined the phrase “Democracy Establishment” to describe the players in what has become a virtual cottage industry. Getting precise numbers on U.S.-funded democracy-promotion spending is difficult because the programs are not labeled as such. However, in 2012 the U.S. government planned to spend $2.6 billion to support democracy, good governance and human rights overseas, according to the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, a website produced by the State Department and USAID. That assistance was distributed through several institutions, including USAID, the State Department and the NED. Such funds are in addition, of course, to cash raised privately by the Democracy Establishment. Most of the money from private sources is donated by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, but the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation also are big contributors.

Bush estimates that there are “about two dozen core NGOs in the Democracy Establishment, such as Freedom House and the NED, that work in many countries and are agenda-setters in the field.” She adds, “There are, however, scores of additional American organizations that are also involved in democracy promotion that collaborate and compete with the core NGOs on democracy-assistance programs.” A lot of money is up for grabs, and the field is getting crowded. Since American democracy assistance began in the 1980s, the competition among NGOs for the U.S. government’s grants has gotten fiercer, according to Bush. More and more NGOs today are fighting to get a piece of the lucrative democracy-assistance pie. For example, she indicates that the NED gave as much as 90 percent of its grants in 1985 to large NGOs that worked in multiple countries, whereas in 2009 that amount dropped to around 50 percent, while the rest went to hundreds of organizations based abroad.

The increased competition for funds has major implications for how organizations promote democracy. Bush says:

It encourages those organizations to focus on implementing projects that will help them survive and thrive as organizations—such as projects that will yield quick, measurable results and projects that will allow them to work in many countries—even though such projects have uncertain consequences for democratization.

TO UNDERSTAND how groups in the Democracy Establishment work, it’s best to begin with the NED, which distributes half of its grant money, and serves as an umbrella organization, to what it calls its “core grantees”—the IRI and the NDI, which work for free and fair elections; the Center for International Private Enterprise, which pushes for free markets and economic reforms; and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, which assists trade unions. Each of these organizations receives an equal portion of the NED’s grant budget, and their programs are approved like those of other grantees. The other half of the NED’s funding is awarded annually to foreign-based organizations seeking support. (No American organizations receive grants under this program.)

In the digital age, getting an NED grant is easier than ever. Applications can be sent with a click of a mouse by any organization outside America that is independent of a government—public universities, for example, cannot receive funding. Four times a year, the NED’s board examines proposals to determine the credibility of applicants and to ensure the applications are consistent with the organization’s overall agenda of strengthening democratic institutions and advancing democratic goals.

Though it raises some private contributions from foundations, corporations and individuals, 99 percent of the NED’s funding comes from Congress, according to its 2011 tax return. As a result, its independence has always been suspect. “Our board gets full autonomy in the specific activities it does,” Gershman insists. Still, Congress sometimes mandates that some NED money must go to grantees in specific countries, such as Burma, Cuba or Iraq. In addition, all NED grants and activities are subject to multiple layers of oversight by the State Department and Congress, which are not in the habit of giving away money without gaining a voice in how it is spent.

But whatever the NED’s actual level of independence, it can’t escape its identity as a quasi arm of the U.S. government, devoted to supporting groups wishing to subvert autocratic governments or prevent them from gaining strength. Foreign governments in particular view the organization as merely a screen for U.S. foreign-policy interests, as reflected in an RT commentary suggesting that the “NED is so clearly part of the US government that legislators had to pass a specific law stating that it was not.”

The NED was born in the Reagan administration, when democracy promotion came into its own. As the late political scientist Samuel Huntington put it in 1984, “The Reagan administration moved far beyond the Carter administration’s more limited concern with human rights.” Though Reagan initially scorned the Carter administration’s emphasis on human rights, once in office he called for a “democratic revolution.” In a famous speech at London’s Westminster in 1982, Reagan said, “It is time that we committed ourselves as a nation—in both the public and private sectors—to assisting democratic development.” To that end, Reagan announced an initiative to study democracy promotion, which led to the establishment of the NED in 1983.

The NED’s initial budget was $31.3 million. “At first, we were very small,” says Gershman. But the organization’s small size didn’t shield it from controversy. Its original board included Democrats and Republicans, representatives from the U.S. labor, business and education fields, foreign-policy specialists and members of Congress. Its first permanent chairman was John Richardson, a former assistant secretary of state. Gershman, a former aide to the U.S. representative to the United Nations, became president at age forty on April 30, 1984.

Almost immediately, some outsiders viewed the organization as a kind of handmaiden of the American establishment. Suspicions and allegations that it was merely an extension of the U.S. government were not long in emerging. Prominent board members, including former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former vice president Walter Mondale, underscored its government alignment, in the minds of many. The only difference between the NED’s activities and previous U.S. interventions in foreign countries, critics alleged, was that the NED operated under a spotlight, heralded by defenders as proof that the NED was a valuable and pristine institution.

The NED enjoyed undeniable successes in the 1980s. Soon after its founding, NED leaders had to decide whether to support Poland’s Solidarity trade union, which had emerged as a major force against that country’s Communist rulers—and, as a result, was banned by the Polish government. “We had a discussion with board members, to determine whether we could violate the laws of another country,” Gershman recalls. “Ultimately we concluded that we had to observe the laws only of the United States.”

Whatever the merits of this decision, it was to have major implications in later decades when nations with significant NGO activities within their borders complained that their customs and electoral systems were being trampled by outside agitators. But the immediate result in Poland was excellent. The NED worked closely with then CIA chief William Casey to provide vital supplies to Solidarity, which soon played an essential role in liberating Eastern Europe from Soviet rule. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national-security adviser to President Carter, credits these efforts with preserving Solidarity during its most harrowing times so it could play its subsequent liberating role. “To sustain an underground effort takes a lot in terms of supplies, networks, etc.,” he told Time in 1992, “and this is why Solidarity wasn’t crushed.”

Other efforts proved less salutary. In 1985, the New York Times reported that the NED had funneled $1.4 million to French center-right groups opposed to the policies of then president Francois Mitterrand’s Socialist Party. The cash was distributed secretly, in violation of the NED’s charter. Worse, one of the anti-Communist groups funded by the NED had ties to an illegal, extreme-right paramilitary group. Gershman lamely insisted that none of the money was “intended for activities that in any way could be construed as criticism of the Mitterrand government.” This interference in one of the world’s oldest democracies contradicted the NED’s stated mission, spirit and ethics. Upon finding out about the program, one persistent NED critic, Representative Hank Brown of Colorado (later a senator), argued that what he called “the French connection . . . requires Americans to ask how they would feel if they learned that the French Government was giving millions of dollars to the AFL-CIO to oppose the policies of Ronald Reagan.”

More generally, the NED’s prominent advocacy has served as a kind of inspiration for others bent on creating their own nonprofit organizations devoted to democracy promotion. Thus did the Democracy Establishment emerge as an important player in Washington. But the roots of the prodemocracy movement stretch back more than a century in U.S. history.

THE MOVEMENT can be said to have begun in the fateful year of 1898 with America’s war with Spain, which resulted from many factors, practical as well as idealistic. But the central trigger was America’s agitation about Spain’s colonial treatment of the Cuban people, some of whom had been in revolt against their Spanish overlords for years. Once the victory over Spain was complete, which took a mere three months, the United States decided it must build democracies in Cuba and the Philippines, which it now dominated, and a tradition of overseas nation building was born. President Woodrow Wilson’s interventions in Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as his participation in World War I, were all rhetorically defended at least in part by an American duty to support democracy in beleaguered nations. The failures of those adventures cooled America’s nation-building ardor, leading to the “isolationist” policies of the 1920s and 1930s.

Then World War II transformed the world and altered U.S. attitudes. “The first phase of the project of building an international network to promote democracy began in the early years of the cold war,” writes Nicolas Guilhot in The Democracy Makers. President Franklin Roosevelt, along with British prime minister Winston Churchill, pushed Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta Conference (unsuccessfully) to allow free elections in Poland. Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, determined that the destroyed nations of Japan and Germany must be rebuilt in America’s democratic image. The Marshall Plan, John Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in Latin America, the interventions in Southeast Asia—all were at least in part attempts to export democracy to countries with weak or nonexistent consensual governments. The Cold War became defined by America not as a competition between two countries, the Soviet Union and the United States, but as one between two systems, democracy and totalitarianism.

During this time, prominent scholars such as Seymour Martin Lipset, David Apter and Samuel Huntington launched an academic subfield by studying the factors that led to democratic transitions. Variously called “modernization theory” or “development theory,” this field implicitly offered the U.S. government advice on how to foster democratic governments overseas. But the military failures of the Vietnam War revealed weaknesses in the democracy-promotion ethos and led to a new wave of liberal isolationism that captured the Democratic Party in the 1970s, while the Nixon and Ford administrations developed a narrower conception of the U.S. national interest. The result was a retreat from expansive efforts at democracy promotion.

NGOs such as Amnesty International began to fill the void. So, too, did the European Commission and the Catholic Church. The Helsinki accords, signed in 1975, led to the establishment of the Moscow Helsinki Group and Helsinki Watch (later changed to Human Rights Watch), which monitored the Soviet Union’s declared commitment to human rights. Freedom House began publishing its annual reports on the state of democratic rights in countries around the world.

Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War’s end, foreseen by almost nobody of note in the realm of international relations. This development had a profound impact on the American consciousness. To many, it demonstrated the widespread, if not universal, appeal of democracy. Eastern European peoples destroyed Communist dictatorships in order to make their countries more responsive to popular sentiment through the construction of market-based democracies. The Russian people responded, overrunning efforts by leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev to reform Communism in order to save it.

All this spawned in the American mind and heart a strong faith in the superiority of the American system. This was powerfully reflected in Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” essay in this magazine, which posited that liberal democracy was the political-ideological end point of mankind’s civic development.

There followed even more striking odes to the magic of democracy. The great diplomat and geopolitical thinker George Kennan abandoned his former dismissal of Wilsonism and now praised Woodrow Wilson’s “broad vision and acute sensitivities.” Samuel Huntington, who in 1984 had described the possibility of democratic development in Eastern Europe as “virtually nil,” now hailed the democratic wave there and wrote that “the dialectic of history upended the theories of social science . . . the movement toward democracy was a global one.”

The Washington nonprofit community soon joined in. As the NED’s Gershman puts it, democracy-promotion forces go “where the action is.” The result was a wave of new democracy-promotion enterprises and the emergence of today’s Democracy Establishment. Even before the 1989 collapse of the Soviet empire, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems was established “to support electoral and other democratic institutions in emerging, evolving, and experienced democracies.” Founded by Republican Party consultant F. Clifton White and now headed by businessman and former Democratic consultant Bill Sweeney, the organization gets some 95 percent of its $103 million operating budget from the State Department and USAID, according to its 2011 tax filings.

IF THE West’s Cold War victory spawned new democracy-promotion entities, the 9/11 attacks on the American homeland by Islamist terrorists generated an even greater wave as many democracy champions concluded that such attacks and the angers behind them resulted from the Middle East’s closed societies. Some new organizations were born, while others expanded their Middle East activities.

One new organization involved in that effort was the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), which was founded in 2006 as an organization devoted to “examining how genuine democracies can develop in the Middle East and how the U.S. can best support that process.” POMED hosts seminars and conferences and publishes policy briefs on the state of democracy in the Middle East. It brings Middle Eastern activists, dissidents and civil-society workers to the United States for training sessions and to meet with officials at the White House, State Department and USAID, as well as with members of Congress. Former congressmen Jim Kolbe, an Arizona Republican, and Jim Moody, a Wisconsin Democrat, sit on its board of advisers.

Stephen McInerney, executive director of POMED, disavows any intent to foster the protest movements of the Arab Spring, which erupted in December 2010 and brought down governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya the following year. But he claims credit for enhancing their effectiveness. “We didn’t fund them to start protests,” he told the New York Times, “but we did help support their development of skills and networking. That training did play a role in what ultimately happened, but it was their revolution.”

An older organization that expanded its role after 9/11 is Freedom House, established in 1941. It became more widely used by the U.S. government following 9/11. In 1997, Freedom House merged with the National Forum Foundation, enhancing its capacity to conduct on-the-ground projects in fledgling democracies in target areas such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. Although Freedom House gets at least 75 percent of its $41.5 million annual funding from the U.S. government, it describes itself as independent. But it isn’t merely the group’s financial independence that can be questioned. R. James Woolsey, a former head of the CIA, was Freedom House’s chairman for many years, a connection that inevitably raised questions abroad about the independence of Freedom House from U.S. foreign-policy aims.

Freedom House has been prominently on the side of major U.S. interventions, including the Iraq War. On the eve of that war, the organization called for a long-term occupation of Iraq and waxed eloquent on the importance of the mission: “We fervently hope that the war effort American forces are now engaged in goes well and that Saddam Hussein’s tyranny falls with minimal loss of life,” the organization said.

Freedom House’s activities sometimes reflect a tendency to allow the wish for democracy to become a perception of emerging democracy. In 2003, the organization assured its members that the “Gulf monarchies of Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar are moving toward constitutional rule in which significant power resides with democratically elected representatives.” A year later, events demolished that optimism. And, in the wake of the Arab Spring, we know that Bahrain’s monarchy is prepared, with the help of Saudi Arabia, to do whatever is necessary to suppress democracy movements there—with U.S. acquiescence. Stability in Bahrain, home to a crucial U.S. naval base, is more important to Washington than democracy.

Freedom House retreated similarly in subsequent assessments of democratic trends in Qatar and Kuwait. These retreats from initial positive assessments reflect a disturbing trend for the Democracy Establishment: often its members are so focused on their desire to see democracies sprouting in foreign lands that they find themselves viewing the world through rose-colored glasses. Good examples are Egypt and Libya, whose Arab Spring revolutions didn’t lead to the smooth transition to democracy that many had anticipated.

BUT IN the heady days of that Middle East protest movement, some observers credited U.S. democracy-promotion organizations with providing vital training and support to the protest groups. In April 2011, the New York Times ran an article headlined “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings.” The article reported that American officials and others

are seeing that the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans in campaigning, organizing through new media tools and monitoring elections.

The NED also played a role, both before and during the protests. From 2005 to 2011, it gave more than $234,200 to the Libya Human and Political Development Forum, a group that opposed Muammar el-Qaddafi’s rule. According to the NED website, one $105,000 grant was “to foster constructive dialogue and cooperation among Libyan democrats and civic groups inside and outside the country and establish a presence for the Forum inside Libya.” Along with other NED-sponsored groups, this organization helped bring attention to the effort to depose Libya’s longtime strongman leader. That contributed to a dizzying cycle of events that ultimately entangled America in the conflict and posed a need for weapons and other supplies from U.S. companies. In 2011, NATO, with heavy U.S. involvement, established a no-fly zone and launched air strikes in the North African country. By the close of the year, the United States had spent more than $1.2 billion on the Libyan effort.

What that interventionist effort will yield for Libya’s future remains an open question. On the second anniversary of the outbreak of the revolt against Qaddafi, the Economist wrote that “political, economic and security reforms are proceeding at a snail’s pace at best.” Violence is endemic, the national army is weak and civil society is moribund. None of this is to say that Libya was better off under a dictator—but interventions spurred in part by the Democracy Establishment often have unintended consequences.

Those unintended consequences also can affect the United States adversely. When the country helped Qatar and the United Arab Emirates funnel arms to Libya’s anti-Qaddafi groups, some of them ended up in the hands of anti-American Islamists. In October 2012, it was revealed that the United States dispensed $8 million to help the beleaguered Libyan government create a commando force that would establish “Libya’s ability to combat and defend against threats from Al Qaeda and its affiliates,” which were a relatively minor problem in Libya during Qaddafi’s rule.

It’s worth noting, moreover, that Qaddafi, while a brutal leader and once a sponsor of anti-American terrorism, had abandoned his effort to accumulate weapons of mass destruction and his anti-Western posture in exchange for more normalized relations with the West. Hence, he didn’t pose a direct threat to American interests, whereas the subsequent situation in Libya ultimately did. One result was the killing of four American diplomats, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, at the Benghazi consulate. Moreover, questions have been raised about the impact of America’s Libya action on Iran, which is under substantial pressure from the United States and other nations to abandon any nuclear-weapons program it may be pursuing. America’s turnabout in its dealings with Libya, following the two countries’ previous understanding, isn’t seen as strong encouragement to Iranian leaders. Such unintended consequences raise the question of whether the quest for democracy, in any and all circumstances, is the best approach in terms of American interests. A case can be made that American interests should sometimes take a backseat to humanitarian concerns, but the detriment to those interests should at least be acknowledged.

THERE ALSO can be a diplomatic price to pay in U.S. relations with foreign governments bent on protecting themselves from internal dissent and rebel movements. Their hostility toward the American democracy-promotion movement is on the rise. Egypt now has some of the world’s strictest laws governing NGOs. When the Egyptian government raided the offices of ten local civil-society organizations in late 2011, it made clear its aversion to outside forces meddling in the country’s internal affairs. The country’s justice minister said the organizations were “betraying Egypt by deliberately promoting political strife.” After the NGO workers’ release, the country sought to promulgate a law that would require local organizations to obtain permits to receive foreign funding. And foreign NGOs would be required to receive permits in order to operate in the country.

The Russian government quickly embraced the Egyptian crackdown amid suggestions that the U.S. government was fostering antigovernment activities by the American groups. “As the continuing violent crackdown by security forces against the protests has left 17 dead and more than 700 injured this month alone, Egypt’s military is becoming increasingly fearful of foreign interference in the country’s internal affairs,” Russia’s RT website declared immediately after the government raids on NGO offices. The article suggested the United States was behind the fall of the Mubarak government. That assertion was not idle. As the New York Times reported in April 2011:

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House.

Through these organizations, the U.S. government was able to deny responsibility for fomenting the revolutions. But, wrote the Times, “The work of these groups often provoked tensions between the United States and many Middle Eastern leaders, who frequently complained that their leadership was being undermined.”

Russia soon took action against similar organizations in its country. In November 2011, Vladimir Putin accepted his party’s nomination for president with these words: “The representatives of certain foreign governments gather people to whom they give money—so-called ‘grantees’—whom they instruct, find them ‘suitable work’ in order to influence the result of the election campaign in our country.” After his election the following year, Putin’s government expelled USAID in September, two weeks before local elections, saying the agency was making “attempts to influence political processes—including elections at different levels—through its distribution of grants.”

The government compounded the move weeks later with a law requiring foreign-funded groups to register as “foreign agents.” The State Department opposed this, with department spokesperson Victoria Nuland promising, “We will continue to be vigilant in supporting democracy, human rights, civil society in Russia. We’ll just do it another way.”That prompted the Russian government to complain about America’s “gross interference.” Said Russian prime minister Dmitri Medvedev: “Imagine if an NGO in the U.S. dealing with politics received money from the Russian federal budget. There would be an outcry.”

On October 1, RT put the NED on notice. An editorial declared:

Russia needs to enforce its decision and shut operations of NED and its all [sic] four mandated grantees, namely the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS).

It continued, “The fact that Washington is planning to redirect USAID funding through ‘private’ organizations reflects an outrageous level of disrespect for the decision of the Russian government.” This agitation quickly got results.

In October, the NDI pulled most of its staff out of Russia, transferring employees to nearby Lithuania. In December, the IRI followed suit. “They have to pull out, given the conditions,” Senator John McCain told Foreign Policy magazine. McCain, a leading proponent of democracy promotion, is chairman of the IRI. On December 28, things got worse, with Putin signing the notorious law prohibiting U.S. citizens from adopting Russian children. The bill also suspended activities of nonprofit organizations that receive money from the United States. In response, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution condemning the ban. Senator Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri who adopted a son from Russia several years ago, called the adoption ban “outrageous.”

Nonetheless, in February of this year, at a meeting with top officials of the main successor agency to the KGB, the Federal Security Service, Putin put all foreign NGOs on notice, warning them against “meddling in our internal affairs.” He told officials at the agency that they must be prepared to thwart foreign attempts to derail plans for Russia to integrate with its neighbors. “They may use various instruments of pressure, including mechanisms of the so-called ‘soft power,’” he said. “The sovereign right of Russia and its partners to build and develop its integration project must be safely protected.” Democracy promotion thus directly undermines relations between the United States and a regional power that the Obama administration had hoped to woo back into constructive relations.

In the face of such governmental hostility, some dissidents in foreign countries have demonstrated a certain level of wariness toward America’s Democracy Establishment. In 2006, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice asked Congress to transfer $85 million into the Iran Democracy Fund to, as she put it, “promote political change inside Iran.” Most controversially, $20 million of that was to support the efforts of civil-society groups—media, legal and human-rights NGOs—both outside and inside Iran. An internal State Department memo obtained by the Center for American Progress confided that the money was meant in part to “reach out to the Iranian people to support their desire for freedom and democracy.”

It soon became apparent that the money wasn’t wanted, for it undermined other human-rights work under way inside Iran. “The [democracy] money is a blade,” an Iranian journalist named Emadeddin Baghi told the New York Times. “Our government accuses us of receiving money from the Americans. All of a sudden, my normal human rights work becomes political.” In 2009, the Obama administration killed the fund. Individuals in the Democracy Establishment were apoplectic, but Iranians weren’t. Akbar Ganji, Iran’s most famous political dissident, told the BBC:

The US democracy fund was severely counterproductive. None of the human right activists and members of opposition in Iran had any interest in using such funds, but we were all accused by Iran’s government of being American spies because a few groups in America used these funds.

The Iran Democracy Fund also soured already-fractious relations between the United States and the Iranian government. Iran deplored such activities as efforts to upend its government. “Is there even a perception that the American government has democracy in mind?” Iran’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Javad Zarif, asked a reporter. “Except among a few dreamers in Eastern Europe?”

A POIGNANT example of when NGO activity intersects with U.S. covert action involves the case of Alan Gross, who worked for a private contractor—Development Alternatives Inc., an employee-owned development corporation—that was granted $6 million in USAID funds to promote democracy in Cuba. During several trips to the island nation, he provided communications equipment to the Havana Jewish community as a way of breaking the Cuban government’s “information blockade,” as the Washington Post put it. After his trips, he or other Development Alternatives officials filed reports to USAID.

He was arrested in December 2009 by Cuban officials who accused him of being “contracted to work for American intelligence services,” an allegation heatedly denied by U.S. officials. In March 2011, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. His sentence unleashed a torrent of protests from U.S. lawmakers and Jewish groups, and in early December 2012 the U.S. Senate passed a resolution calling for Gross’s release, based in part on reports of serious health problems. Yet he carried out his Cuban activities in what clearly appeared to be a clandestine fashion and was aware of the risks involved, according to USAID reports that were later published. And the USAID funds that fueled his activity were appropriated by Congress as part of a law that called specifically for regime change in Cuba. When U.S. citizens engage in foreign activity born of idealism but predictably seen as threatening by targeted governments, the potential fallout can be highly significant.

The sad Gross episode also underscores two fundamental yet rarely acknowledged realities about America’s democracy-promotion movement. The first is that ultimately it is about regime change. That’s because any regime adjudged by that movement to be insufficiently democratic will, sooner or later, come under pressure from the vast democracy-promotion machinery.

The second is that these democratic evangelists are not independent operators. The prodemocracy activists may insist they are independent from Washington as they go about their missionary work in nations run by leaders who don’t want democracy and may even harbor well-honed philosophical objections to it. But to a very real extent they are doing the work of a U.S. government that often seems fixated on democracy promotion.

Yet the question emerges whether this is smart diplomacy for the United States at a time of upheaval around the world and powerful new developments in the global balance of power. Can Russia realistically be expected to cooperate with the West’s efforts to deal with Iran when its government is being openly undermined by the United States? How do Egyptians see it when Washington openly sides with certain factions in the midst of a low-level civil war? And in regions such as the Middle East that have experienced centuries of Western interference, how is American intervention perceived?

These questions don’t seem to get asked at the comfortable NED headquarters on F Street or the other major NGO offices throughout Washington—or their far-flung outposts around the world. But they are questions that yearn for answers as the world faces a future that many believe holds in store the reality of American decline. Whatever the merits of the prediction of American decline, it is certain that the country’s standing in the world will be challenged more severely in the future than it has been over the past seven decades. And the sprawling prodemocracy project of America’s NGOs could actually hamper its efforts to address those challenges.

Jordan Michael Smith, a contributing writer at Salon and the Christian Science Monitor, is a contributing editor at the American Conservative.

Image: Pullquote: All NED grants and activities are subject to oversight by the State Department and Congress, which are not in the habit of giving away money without gaining a voice in how it is spent.Essay Types: Essay