After the Cold War ended, much promise was held out that the world would rapidly democratize -- particularly states with notoriously poor human rights records such as China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba.
Alas, these were utopian dreams. We were told that transferring large amounts of wealth and technology to authoritarian regimes would make them richer and free -- only the former took place. We educated their leaders, often at our taxpayers' expense, with the promise that these Western educated leaders would usher in a new era of freedom in their home countries. This, too, failed to come to pass. What we often saw was our transferred knowledge being used against us, and to repress other peoples.
