Comment

Why the World Needs America: Some Argue That Democracy and Free Markets Could Thrive Without U.S. Predominance. Not Likely.

2
Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus2/12/2012 4:20:17 am PST

Kagan also writes, with an apparently straight face:

Take the issue of democracy. For several decades, the balance of power in the world has favored democratic governments. In a genuinely post-American world, the balance would shift toward the great-power autocracies. Both Beijing and Moscow already protect dictators like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. If they gain greater relative influence in the future, we will see fewer democratic transitions and more autocrats hanging on to power. The balance in a new, multipolar world might be more favorable to democracy if some of the rising democracies—Brazil, India, Turkey, South Africa—picked up the slack from a declining U.S. Yet not all of them have the desire or the capacity to do it.

He totally ignores that the US too, for almost a century, supported dictators from Central America to South America to Africa to South and Southwest Asia.

Kagan is beginning to sound a bit like like that faux-historian Dave Barton.