This afternoon, we're joined by Elliot Abrams.

Mr. Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C.

He served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor in the administration of George W. Bush,

and he served as Assistant Secretary of State in the Reagan administration.

Mr. Abrams has written many books, is enormously, and to the shame of the rest of us, extremely productive.

The most recent book is tested by Zion,

the Bush administration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,

published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in

welcoming Elliot Abrams. So, Elliot, our topic today is reconsidering the democracy agenda.

So I thought I'd just begin with a simple question.

What is democracy promotion as a policy, as a strategy?

It means, first of all, welcome to everybody.

Thank you all for being here. It means that we're not indifferent. We're not indifferent to the internal arrangements in other countries. That's a new idea. The old idea was you have states. They are what they are. You concern yourself with their foreign policy.

You don't concern yourself with their internal arrangements, none of your business. Whether they

have democracy, no democracy, king, a president, it's not your business, doesn't affect you,

stay out of it. So the first thing is to come to the conclusion that it does matter to us. And if it matters

to us, then why don't we try to do something about it? People have a trade policy we don't

like. We try to get them to change their trade policy. So why would we not get them to try

to change something more important? And I, the, I brought along one line from

Andre Sakharov, a country that does not respect the rights of its own people, will not

respect the rights of its neighbors, something we're seeing right now with Putin and Ukraine.

So the idea is let's try to see if we can make them do better at respecting the rights of their own people.

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