Daydream Believers

Wired's Danger Room blog looks at Fred Kaplan's new book, Daydream Believers, which explains "how a few grand ideas wrecked American power":

DR: You also take the Bush administration to task for its belief that free societies — democracies — would naturally be friendlier to us, and hostile to terrorists. How come? I think a lot of us find the idea of squaring America's interests with its ideals pretty appealing. And we don't much like the notion of supporting dictatorships, like Saudi Arabia.

Kaplan: It is an appealing notion. And there is some evidence that highly developed democracies tend not to go to war with one another. But there’s also a lot of evidence that emerging democracies are more war-prone than any other kind of regime. Bush and Condi Rice put their faith in the proposition that toppling dictators and holding free elections yield friendly, pro-Western democracies. But look at the results of the Palestinian elections, which put Hamas in power. The elections in Iraq were little more than an ethnic census; they politicized, and thus hardened, sectarian divisions. Without democratic institutions, democratic processes are in many societies likely to produce governments hostile to us and to freedom as we understand the concept.