Thursday, March 24, 2011

Making the world safe for democracy

Stephen Walt summarizes recent studies of attempts - recent and not so recent - to make the world safe for democracy by foreign powers throwing out leaders of other countries, such as Libya, Iraq, Germany. Some of these studies consider overthrows going back 200 hundred years.

The results are not good, especially in those cases where a new leader or group is brought in. For example, our interventions since WWII have led to democracies only 3% of the time. Another study found that the interventions by the U.s. and Russia during the Cold War resulted in less democracy in the world.

What will be the result of our 21st century interventions?

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