A review of Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025, by Mark Palmer.
About the Author
Thomas O. Melia is deputy director of Freedom House and consulting editor for the World Encyclopedia of Parliaments and Legislatures. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
Democracies rarely begin with a blank slate. Relics of authoritarian rule typically persist after democratic transitions, and these vestiges are not always harmful to people’s newfound freedom.
The global democratic decline of the last two decades is rarely discussed in the same breath with the 2003 decision by the United States and Britain to invade Iraq. But…
