About three-quarters of the world's dictatorships currently receive military assistance from the United States. This is a strange record for a nation that consistently justifies its sweeping foreign interventions as aimed at "promoting democracy" and "thwarting evil dictatorships."

In the Cold War it was "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." Current analysis shows the U.S. militarily assisting dictators the world over, calling it "promoting democracy," and disingenuously wondering why it's all going so badly.

For much of its history, the United States government has explained or defended its intervention in the affairs of other nations by framing such behavior as necessary to "promote democracy" abroad and to thwart the advance of "evil dictators." While the use of those phrases has hardly dwindled over the years, establishment figures have been forced to admit in recent years that the U.S.' democracy promotion efforts haven't gone quite as planned.