Moving from supporting democracy to accepting semidemocracy would be a significant shift in our post-cold-war policy. Changing from a real commitment to trying to help countries achieve genuine freedom and democracy, and settling for tall Topekan buildings, would be walking away from a policy which has contributed to the expansion of democracy to places ranging from Eastern Europe to South America and southern Africa. Our support for these nascent democracies has contributed to improving the lives of millions and winning friends and allies for the United States.

In contrast, when there is a gap between U.S. rhetoric on democracy and actual policy, support for the United States wanes. This is the case even in Georgia. At one time, pro-American feeling was nearly universal in Georgia. This has begun to somewhat change-as manifested by protests in front of the U.S. Embassy and increasing charges levied by the opposition that the United States has chosen to support Saakashvili rather than democracy.

And if "semidemocracy" is the best the United States is prepared to offer, perhaps, in other countries now "in the middle" between authoritarianism and "full democracy," the Chinese or Russian state-corporatist models might begin to seem more appealing.

The Rose Revolution was at one time a source of hope that we might be seeing the beginning of a new wave of democratization. Less than five years later, those hopes seem somewhat quaint. The question we now face in Georgia and elsewhere, whether we choose to admit it or not, is whether or not the efforts of the last quarter century to help spread democracy to previously unimaginable corners of the world have finally run their course.

Lincoln A. Mitchell is the Arnold A. Saltzman Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. His book Uncertain Democracy: U.S. Foreign Policy and Georgia's Rose Revolution will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in Fall 2008. The author would like to thank Tiko Ninua in Tbilisi for her assistance on this article.

¹Lincoln A. Mitchell, "Beyond Bombs and Ballots," The National Interest, No. 88 (Mar./Apr. 2007).