Hibernating Bear

Interviewed by "Christian Century," Walter Russell Mead reminds idealistic U.S. policy makers that some nations are better equipped for political modernization than others -- and he's not talking about Iraq:

[O]ne can't be deterministic about who is and who isn't able to change. Look at Russia: In some ways it is still struggling with the basic issues about liberal democratic capitalism that it was struggling with 100 years ago, before the Soviet takeover.