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Excerpt:
It seems a very long time ago that President George W. Bush gave his second inaugural address. In January 2005, he proclaimed that "the best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." With this soaring idea, deeply rooted in America's Wilsonian political tradition, Bush defined the organizing foreign policy principle for his second term in office. However, exactly a year after uttering those words, Bush's Middle East democracy initiative came to a halt when Hamas won a parliamentary victory in the West Bank and Gaza in January 2006. Suddenly, it became clear that the United States had erred by equating democracy with one election and by not forming policy around the establishment of liberal institutions, which would ensure that liberal means would not lead to an illiberal end.
