There are no black holes in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity.
Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.
As has been pointed out with Libya, the debate over Libya, sometimes we allow diplomatic relations with imperfect regimes because progress can best be made through engagement instead of isolation.
The U.S. is friends with dictatorial regimes, then invades places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and what happens afterwards is a catastrophe. In the place of their leaders, fundamentalist movements that use the name of Islam spring up, and all that’s left is terror and bloodshed.
But, if you believe we should go around the world overturning regimes to make little United States, I don’t agree with that, because I don’t think we’re capable of doing that.
Sometimes overturning brutal regimes takes time and costs lives. I wish it weren’t so. I really, really do.
Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.
During my many years in international business and public life, I have had the good fortune of sitting down for lunch with people with whom I completely disagreed, in practice and principle: Soviet communists, heads of state from various unsavory regimes, benighted religious figures, corrupt business leaders.
The real point is that totalitarian regimes have claimed jurisdiction over the whole person, and the whole society, and they don’t at all believe that we should give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.
We think about democracy, and that’s the word that Americans love to use, ‘democracy,’ and that’s how we characterize our system. But if democracy just means going to vote, it’s pretty meaningless. Russia has democracy in that sense. Most authoritarian regimes have democracy in that sense.
Non-democratic regimes always need to mobilize their people against external enemies in order to maintain internal stability.
When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation – namely, life, liberty and justice for all.
International regimes, international treaties, international norms are observed not because of the goodness of anybody but because they bring benefits. If they don’t, then the longevity of those agreements come into jeopardy.
