This article is far too kind to the Clinton-era State Department.

Merry’s was dealt with by Jim Steinberg, director of the policy planning staff, who wrote that he found the memo “stimulating” but disputed its critique that the U.S. should emphasize democracy-building over free markets. “There have been free markets without democracy,” Steinberg wrote, “but there have never been democracies without free markets.”

This wasn’t a sincere expression of any dogma. This was all an Orwellesque code, which Merry and the author of the article failed to decode, for “We don’t really give a shit about democracy. We plan to liberalize the Russian economy so our friends can start milking it like a swollen udder, and what happens to the people or any future geopolitics isn’t our problem.”

There have been people involved in US foreign policy who sincerely cared about democracy, but if any of them had been calling the shots during the 80s and 90s, we wouldn’t have been overturning so many democracies so we could milk them, too, using international structures which are surviving and thriving into the present day.