Who should the U.S. support?

Editor's note: Amitai Etzioni is a sociologist and professor of international relations at George Washington University and the author of several books, including "Security First" and "New Common Ground." He was a senior adviser to the Carter administration and has taught at Columbia and Harvard universities and the University of California, Berkeley.

(CNN) -- Most recently the question is being asked about Syria. Before, we wondered about the rebels in Libya. Before that, Egypt. The U.S. is winging it.

Instead, we should be articulating guidelines that answer consistently the questions: Who should we support in the Middle East? The aging autocrats or rebels we know little about and who may erect Taliban-like regimes? The Sunni or the Shia? The Kurds or the Turks? And so on.

As I see it, we should support all regimes, democratic or not, that refrain from brutalizing their people, like the government of Jordan. And we should support all uprisings that rely on nonviolence, as Egypt's did, whether or not the new regime they seek is democratic. In other words, we should stand for a nonviolent but pluralistic Middle East in which a variety of regimes might evolve.

Some will be relatively secular, but others will not separate religion and the state as the United States and France do. Some will build on collaboration among a military, a monarchy and a parliament, while others will move toward a government headed by elected leaders. We should aspire to democracy but not demand it. We should insist only on nonviolence.

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President Barack Obama best expressed this position when he stated, during his inaugural address, "To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."

One major reason to favor a less-ambitious approach is that it allows us to consistently apply the same standard to all nations, and to abandon the standard -- confusing at best, hypocritical at worst -- that leads us to urge democracy on Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, but not Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates; to tip-toe around the authoritarian regime of Syria; and to flip-flop in our position toward Yemen.

We can urge all those in power to negotiate reforms with peaceful protesters, and we can urge all those who rise against their governments to reject force.

Making nonviolence our litmus test also will help explain why we are not automatically siding with elected governments that call for a war against other people --as Hamas does. It can help explain why we insist on being sure, before allying ourselves with them, that the rebels taking on Gadhafi are not an al Qaeda offshoot or allied with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an al Qaeda-like band.

There are major, influential political parties and leaders in the Muslim world that strongly reject violence but do not favor Western democracy. This especially pertains to a number of the region's popular Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan and the Ennahda Party in Tunisia.

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Respected analysts regard the bulk of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as peaceful -- "nonviolent and conservative," according to the BBC. However, these Islamist groups simultaneously seek to impose shari'a law on their countries, which would likely limit political participation and human rights for many, such as religious minorities and women.

Beyond such pragmatic reasons, there are also principled grounds for focusing on the avoidance of violence before adding other demands. The right to life has a special standing, most obviously because all other rights are dependent upon its enforcement. (Dead people lose all rights, while those who live may fight for and see the day these other rights will be realized.)

The special normative standing of the right to life is further revealed insofar as the criminal codes of numerous nations place a higher penalty on taking a life than on violating other rights.

Finally, forced regime changes often do not lead to the desired results and tend to cause untold deaths and injuries, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Amitai Etzioni.