adam wrote:

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.
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"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism
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By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.

aha incrementalism
the United States and the West as a midwife to the increasing hegemony of liberal democracy rather than imperialist powers trying to impose a way of life
"we hold these truths to be self evident" and inevitable because they have Satyagraha or truth force

Very interesting argument. However, I think it is important to take (buzzword alert) "the decline of the nation-state" into account as well when looking at the rise of democracy abroad. The framework of that argument is that unless democracy is promoted internally, it will fail. This is interesting when considering how national borders continue to slowly whither and "domestic" as well as "internally" may become terms that means little in the near future- EU or FTAA anyone?
And hey, isn't that what free-trade democratic capitalism wants?

RE: After Neoconservatism - New York Times