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experience revolutions are usually the countries that lack the preconditions for Anglo-American style relatively peaceful revolutions that end with the establishment of stable constitutional order. If things were going well in those countries, they would not be having revolutions.
Historically, revolutions in foreign countries are both necessary for their political development and inevitable. They often tend to make American foreign policy more difficult — and the world more dangerous. On the evidence so far, this is the pattern we are seeing in the Middle East today.
Revolutionary Realism?
The difficulty American policymakers have in coming to grips with the recurring phenomenon of foreign revolutions is rooted in America’s paradoxical world role. We are not just the world’s leading revolutionary nation; we are also the chief custodian of the international status quo. We are upholding the existing balance of power and the international system of finance and trade with one hand, but the American agenda in the world ultimately aims to transform rather than to defend.
It is harder to be an effective revolutionary power than to be a conservative one — and it is harder still to combine the two roles.
A traditional conservative power knows what it wants. Revolutionary powers have a tougher job; building the future is harder work than holding on to the past. This is particularly true in the American case; the global transformation we seek is unparalleled for depth, complexity and scale.
We are not sure how this revolutionary transformation works. We know that it involves liberal political change: governments of law rather than of men and legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed as measured in regular and free elections. We also know that involves intellectual and social change: traditional religious ideas
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