LONDON -- U.S. President George W. Bush claims his policy is to promote democracy because democratic countries do not wage aggressive wars.
The principle of promoting democratic regimes is one that the vast majority of people living in countries where the government can claim to have been democratically elected are likely to support. But there may well not be full agreement on the meaning of democracy or on which countries can rightly claim to be democracies. It is also questionable whether U.S. foreign policy lives up to the president's claim.
Most observers would probably accept that the United States, Britain, Japan and countries in Western Europe are democracies, but it would be unwise to be complacent about the nature of democracy in our countries.