"...theocracies, autocracies, and democracies are all acting primarily to advance their interests when they can, and their values when they can. "

Yes, they all act to advance their interests when they can... and their values IF they can. At the end of the day, democracies especially, more or less feign this human rights front until/unless it becomes problematic for them. i.e. Saudi Arabia and US.

When values and interests are aligned, even better. It means Superman can come out wearing his suit. So, more like an Iran or North Korea.

Anne-Marie Slaughter's metaphors are more like a mob than an army. I hope her editors at State were more assertive than the ones employed by FP.

But let's set aside the image of rampant metaphors (tsunamis! tennis! contagion! the roads of London!) surging through the streets, smashing windows and overturning cars. They must, after all, be interconnected somehow, and in terms of content they aren't what's wrong with Slaughter's article. Nor is the obeisance she pays to the contribution of international relations scholarship to the conduct of American foreign policy. That contribution is not obvious to everyone.

No, what's wrong with Slaughter's piece is where it starts. It starts with The Narrative: all-powerful, carrying everything before it. According to The Narrative, oppressive Arab governments came into being and endured through the years because of "our" choices (the first person here being used as a term of art to mean the third person -- "their" choices, other Americans, not bold and enlighted new Americans like ourselves). George W. Bush was very big on The Narrative; I think the only reason Barack Obama has never once used the expression "freedom is on the march" with respect to Egypt and Libya is because Bush used it so often when discussing Iraq.

Anyway, The Narrative describes freedom-loving young Arabs sweeping away the old American authoritarian allies and planting democracy. America beware! -- not really our America, of course, but their America, the America that "propped up" Mubarak, the Moroccan monarchy, Qadhafi, Assad. And the Saudi monarchy, which would surely have yielded to democrats long ago if their America was not propping it up. Our America, bold and enlightened, knows that in the age of the Arab Spring American meddling will be a thing of the past. No longer will America pretend it has influence to exercise on the proud culture of the Arabs, except on the margins like women's place in Arab society and perhaps how Arab children are educated.

The Narrative of the Arab Spring begins with the explicit analogy to the Prague Spring more than 40 years ago, the stirrings of freedom against oppression imposed from the outside. Like most good stories, The Narrative has elements of truth -- and yet the governments now being challenged across North Africa and the Middle East are in their own ways quintessentially Arab, and the violence directed by most of them against protest movements and rebellions alike is Arab as well. It is not aberration or a departure from Arab political traditions that we are seeing in Syria today, or in Yemen, or indeed what we have seen from the regime in Khartoum for the last ten years.

To make ourselves prisoners of The Narrative, as Slaughter does, risks blinding us both to dangers and to opportunities. We celebrate -- or at least President Obama did at the UN -- the triumph of the The Narrative in Egypt, the Arab country that really matters unless we are only talking about oil. But all Egypt has done is to get rid of Mubarak; the SCAF hasn't gone anywhere, and it may turn out that while we admire the great triumph of freedom in Tahrir Square last winter that Mubarakism hasn't gone anywhere, either. We admire the victory of The Narrative in Libya, in which American air power, deployed by the President on his own, created the conditions for a civil war that left the country's armories emptied, thousands of Libyans dead, and a rebel alliance both utterly dependent on its Western backers and committed to the idea that they defeated Qadhafi by themselves. We wring our hands over the Syrian government's brutality toward protesters, over its defiance of The Narrative. I have heard no effort on the part of the Obama administration to hang the Assad regime's despicable conduct around the neck of its patron in Tehran. While shooting unarmed protesters is to be deprecated at all times, the Syrian government's willingness to be used by the Iranians is the thing that matters to us.

The Narrative, to Obama and his admirers as to the younger Bush, is at least as much about Americans as it is about Arabs. This is what is wrong with it as a guide to policy. Americans seek a morality play, with evildoers and heroes, and we seek a happy ending -- which we assume to be attainable as long as our own boldest and most enlightened instincts are deployed on behalf of the storyline. Sometimes things work out that way, through shrewd improvisation or dumb luck. It is unsettling to me, though, to find our best or at least our most heavily credentialed foreign policy minds using a storyline they clearly want very much to believe in as the starting point for their thinking about disparate polities and how America ought to relate to them.

Yea !!! US interference in the affairs of sovereign governments has not been beneficial to the citizens of those countries nor to the United States.
Ar Condicionado Imoveis Acompanhantes Massagem

For the USA it`s alaways Circumstantial interests and circumstantial containment policy , lets try it for 20 years untill we come up with something !.
with Baba Rusia ,,always oppose untill you get the right $.

I tend to eschew theory in FP. Bush and Cheney blew it. The War in Afghanistan was the wrong kind of war with the wrong center of gravity. They then started a war that played into A Qaeda's plans. Bush and Cheney in the process enabled the expansion of AQ.

Libya is a case of trying to get it right for a change and is tarred with the horrendous blunders of Bush and Cheney. Who hates us? Iraqis and Afghanis.
Who waves American flags? Libyans.

Enough said. Mission Accomplished.