ABSTRACT
Woodrow Wilson had a dual vision: he sought to promote democratic regimes across the world and to create a form of world governance based on democratic principles. Moreover, neoconservatives held that if the authoritarian barriers to democratization did not collapse under their own growing weight, the US and its allies should help history by overthrowing the old regimes. Hence their support for coercive regime changes most recently in Libya and Syria. The extensive scholarship on democratization shows that its success requires both constituting factors and facilitating conditions. Strong data provided by Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper support the thesis of the limits of the democratization that can be brought about by foreign powers, at least by the US. The necessary sociological conditions for democratization were available in Iraq, Afghanistan, or most of the rest of the Middle East and of Africa.
