Yea, and most young democracies are very vulnerable. You can look at the Arab Spring for examples of failed democracies, and the early United States (it took us 20 years to get off the Articles of Confederation and work on the Constitution we use today).

Myanmar's another one. India's been restricting its people's rights lately.

Democracy takes a while to establish as a stable system and often fails.

Alexander the Great was granting (non-representative) democracies to cities in Asia Minor 2400 years ago, I wonder what he'd think of Erdogan.

The Thirteen Colonies had a long history of democratic self governance. The revolution was mostly an independence movement. The revolutionary part was the Republican federation.

This long history of democratic rule was not present in many modern attempts to establish democracies.

I'm not sure the average Russian would have seen the situation much differently.

Look at the people today who decry chinese investment in the US economy? I'm not even saying those people are wrong.

All it takes is for one person or group in the country to poke us enough to the point where we feel the need to strengthen our security posture there (read: add more troops) and then some terrible situation like Abu Ghraib completely destroys any credibility we have with the local population and it just spirals into disaster.

I simply have no faith left in our government's ability to execute even a completely peaceful operation like the marshall plan (and similarly what we did in Japan).

What's your proposition then? How it's best to go forward from where we are, if you don't trust the current organization abilities?

I used to find that drinking a lot helped but then my insides started to hurt. I'm thinking about maybe growing psilocybin mushrooms now.