For, in fact, it was not just predictable that Georgia would somehow go wrong, it was a certainty: That’s because just about all revolutions, even peaceful ones, somehow go wrong. In the decade following 1989, for example, Communists were re-elected to power in pretty much every Central European country.

…

Ironically, all this has disturbing echoes of another mistake made by another American president not that long ago in the same part of the world. Over and over again, throughout the 1990s, Bill Clinton told Boris Yeltsin he was a democrat. In one summit after another, the American president praised the Russian president as an example for others to follow. Even as Yeltsin shot up his parliament, revived the KGB, and started the repressive processes that culminated in the selection of Vladimir Putin as his successor, the U.S. government kept using the words “democracy” and “free markets” about Russia, hoping it would all come out right.

It didn’t. Picking democratic “friends,” it seems, is no easier than picking winning horses. We’d be better off building institutions, not egos. I hope next time we will.