When President Bush said that America hopes to spread democracy to all of the world, he was echoing a sentiment many people support. Though Americans do not put "extending democracy" near the top of their list of foreign policy objectives (preventing terrorism is their chief goal), few would deny that if popular rule is extended it would improve lives around the world.

Hailed as the key to the solution of poverty, corruption, bad governance and, last but not least, terrorism, spreading democracy around the globe has become the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11. However, this enterprise is at risk because most of our policymakers have a poor understanding of the economic and institutional landscape that is most favorable to the extension of political liberties and free elections.

When it is asked whether Western countries can "impose" democracy on the non-Western world, even the language reflects a confusion centering on the idea of "imposition," since it implies a proprietary belief that democracy "belongs" to the West, taking it to be a quintessentially "Western" idea which has originated and flourished exclusively in the West. This is a thoroughly misleading way of understanding the history and the contemporary prospects of democracy.

Several strategic thinkers, including the brilliant Martin van Creveld, have suggested the nation-state is kaput. At least two books published in the 1990s sported titles trumpeting "the end of the nation-state" -extreme versions of the reasoned van Creveld critique.