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If the desire of our realists to conduct foreign policy with foreign
despots as if unprincipled cooperation with the bad guys could build
a stable world is unrealistic, the idealism of our enthusiasts that every
new foreign revolution will bring a millennium of democratic peace
is absurd.
American foreign policy cannot expect that revolutions in foreign
countries will rescue us from the painful dilemmas our foreign policy
often confronts. Revolution is not the deus ex machina that will make
the world peaceful; it is a tsunami that sweeps everything before it,
and often leaves the world messier and more dangerous.
Modern history teaches two great lessons about revolution: that
revolutions are inevitable, and that a large majority of revolutions
either fail or go bad. Americans almost instinctively look at
revolutions in terms of our own past: the 1688 Glorious Revolution
that made Parliament more powerful than the King in England, and
the American Revolution that led in relatively short order to the
establishment of a stable and constitutional government.
Most revolutions don’t work like this at all. Many of them fail, with
the old despots crushing dissent or making only cosmetic changes to
the old system. (This happened in Austria in 1848 and something
very like it may be happening in Egypt today.) Others move into
radicalism, terror and mob rule before a new despot comes along to
bring order — at least until the next futile and bloody revolutionary
spasm. That was France’s history for almost 100 years after the
storming of the Bastille. China, Russia and Iran all saw revolutions
like this in the 20th century.
The revolutions that ‘work’ are the exceptions, not the rule. The
peaceful revolutions in the Central European countries as Soviet
power melted in 1989-1990 are a unique exception to the rule that
most revolutions either turn nasty or fail. When many American

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