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the country always on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon or acquiring the “breakout capacity” to make one

directionless apparatus of the Islamic Republic. Iran is weak now

in which he noted shared Iranian and Arab aims: “Democracy and dignity

the Arab Spring is just another complication of this global task — a sudden thunderstorm with flashes of lightening

the problems of American foreign policy become more complex still. We are trying to carry out a vast reordering of global society even as we preserve the stability of the international political order: we are trying to walk blindfolded on a...

and that it would be immoral as well as impractical to stand in the way of the changes that need to come.

democratic voting procedures may not produce liberal governments. We know that demagogues and aspiring despots can use the language and even the mechanisms of democracy to build personal dictatorships (Napoleon III and Hugo Chavez

idealists close their eyes to the problems of revolutionary upheavals in societies that have difficult histories

most seem closer to Yugoslavia and Belarus or

those countries were the exception and not the rule. Think Ukraine

not the rule. The peaceful revolutions in the Central European countries as Soviet power melted in 1989-1990 are a unique exception to the rule that most revolutions either turn nasty or fail. When many American idealists think about revolu...

with the old despots crushing dissent or making only cosmetic changes to the old system. (This happened in Austria in 1848 and something very like it may be happening in Egypt today.) Others move into radicalism

and that a large majority of revolutions either fail or go bad. Americans almost instinctively look at revolutions in terms of our own past: the 1688 Glorious Revolution that made Parliament more powerful than the King in England

the idealism of our enthusiasts that every new foreign revolution will bring a millennium of democratic peace is absurd.

the United States is a revolutionary power. Whether our government is trying to overthrow foreign dictators is almost irrelevant; American society is the most revolutionary force on the planet. The Internet is more subversive than the CIA i...

those revolutions failed to establish anything like liberal democratic rule.

dedication and vision of the democrats rising in the Arab world today

not weeks” is what they promised the President when he began to bomb for democracy in Libya. The democratic revolution in Egypt is looking less democratic by the day; it looks more and more as if the Army used public unrest to block the Mub...

the Iranian mullahs and the younger Assad have been sent back to the benches in disgrace. Their counsel is now seen as both morally dubious and pragmatically unwise; the ‘realists’ would have put the US on the wrong side of history in the s...

there are very few takers for yet another military venture – this time in Syria.