Francis Fukuyama best captured the mood following the disintegration of the Soviet Union when he forecast the coming realization of Hegel's dream of the end of history: the final victory of liberalism and the impending advent of a global liberal order.¹ This mood was one of optimism² that the new moment would "ensure in one go political forms of justice and economic forms of production of wealth, as well as setting up interests and optimizing gains for all."³ It was also believed that liberal democracies would "deliver" peace and good governance everywhere, including where they had not taken roots. This basic idea was given a boost by President George H. W. Bush who, upon waging a war to reverse the 1990 Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, proclaimed the advent of a new world order based on multi-lateral and peaceful resolutions of international conflicts; prohibition of territorial occupations; preventive interventions in destabilizing nationalist disputes. Caught up in the exuberance, Michael W. Doyle envisaged the emerging union of the great classical doctrines of democracy and liberal forms as legitimating devices of both internal and foreign policies.⁴ The democratic peace theory was intended to not only supplant realist commonsense about the nature and telos of international relations, it was to dispense with the tenets of state Marxism and so-called third world structuralism—embodied inter alia by the theories of neocolonialism, dependency, and imperialism.