There was a time not too long ago – as late as the American invasion of Iraq in 2002 – that democracy was regarded, at least in Washington, DC as an inexorable force across the world as one country after another forsook the coils of dictatorship for democratic systems of government. Then-Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze proclaimed the Sinatra Doctrine, allowing the nations formerly under Soviet control to "do it their way." The political historian Francis Fukayama in 1992, in his seminal