There are examples of fraternal dictatorships, or one, anyway: the passing of power from Fidel to Raul Castro.

While Argentina, Brazil, and Chile - what in textbooks used to be called the ABC countries - seem settled into democratic politics and free market economics, the Andean countries are in disarray.

Libya as a country is a relatively new concept. The period of Libya as a modern nation really starts after World War II.

It’s unlikely to change – there’s nothing in King Salman’s past as governor of Riyadh for about forty years that suggests that he was particularly a reformer, not on the role of women, not on democratic development. There’s been a rumor in the last couple of days that he said to someone in an e-mail that he’s in favor of a constitutional monarchy, but I would be surprised if the level of repression started to go down … I think the kind of thing that we would view as significant reforms is unlikely.

A great nation like the United States has many and varied interests, and we need both to do business with tyrants and to engage constantly in multilateral diplomacy.

For the entire first term, Obama and his people blamed Bush for everything - which is another way of saying they felt Bush and the Bush years were the inescapable reference point for everything they were themselves doing.

It seems clear to me that the Obama Administration has no human rights policy. That is, while in some inchoate sense they would like respect for human rights to grow around the world, as all Americans would, they have no actual policy to achieve that goal - and they subordinate it to all their other policy goals.