She was a realist in the sense that she knew that throughout most of history autocracy has been the default option while democracy is problematic. To wit, in Great Britain, the journey from the Magna Carta to the great reform bills took seven centuries to traverse. The United States cannot generally be the “midwife” to democracy far away, she believed. She was a neoconservative during the Cold War because she felt, like President Ronald Reagan did, that the United States had to defeat Communism, not simply coexist with it.
