After the freedom agenda

The promotion of democracy has fallen on hard times. The fiasco of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq gave democracy promotion, the invasion's last and most desperate justification, a bad name. Fueling the retreat from such projects is pessimism about the worldwide prospects for democratization. Democracy itself seems to be in retreat after the "third wave" that brought a tide of democracies to Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America in the 1990s. Pointing to the failure of the new democracies to deliver material welfare and to the rise of autocratic China, the deepening authoritarianism in Russia, and the successful defiance of theocratic Iran, pundits now proclaim an age of authoritarian advantage. But recent studies suggest that the pessimism is overdone, and democracy is still worthy of prudent and principled promotion.