Over at Democracy Arsenal, Michael Cohen reads a quote from a prospective adviser to President Obama about “achiev[ing] small, concrete outcomes that advance political freedoms in very tangible ways and do[ing] so, without talking about doing so” and observes:

There is simply no better way to undermine US credibility and weaken the country’s moral standing then fail to back up your words with actions: even when it may be occasionally appropriate to weigh American interests over American values. People around the world listen when US presidents speak and they can smell hypocrisy a mile away.

I’d add that it’s more than just a credibility issue. What the Bush administration failed to adequately take into account — and here I’m presuming good faith on its part when it comes to democracy promotion, just for the sake of argument — were the structural reasons why autocracies remain in place, and if the Obama administration doesn’t take those into account, it will likely fail, too.

Take a few examples: Over the last eight years, there was never an effort to, say, encourage the United States’ Persian Gulf-state clients to move away from a rentier-state model of governance reliant on oil revenue for their wealth, even though the political science literature on rentier states underscores oil wealth’s contribution to dysfunction, corruption and autocracy. Sticking with the Middle East for a moment, you can’t tell Egypt and Syria to liberalize on one hand and then rely on their security services for outsourcing your torture. A belated and then meager effort to actively mitigate and then resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, perhaps the single greatest source of multifaceted instability in the region and the cynical pretext for much Arab autocracy, doesn’t help either.

This isn’t to say that Michael’s wrong, because he’s not. It’s just to say that the issue is a lot deeper than rhetoric.