ABSTRACT
The view of democracy as producing peace-loving and stable regimes has become a settled opinion of our time. Almost every day, editorialists and commentators in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and in other respected national newspapers stress the correlation between democratic values and perpetual peace. Any hostile actions taken by self-described democracies, moreover, are now routinely described as advancing peace by containing or punishing non-democrats. Of course, demanding that the entire world be made to conform to their values is by no means a pacifist stance. Indeed, the success of value-imposition comes down to a question of power, who is in a position to make others bow to his notion of a highest value or of a human right. One suspects that high-placed policymakers may find the impulse to be belligerently "democratic" hard to resist, and a Republican return to executive control could provide the occasion to vent this impulse as an expression of morality.
