The popular uprisings of the sort now spreading across North Africa to the Persian Gulf were hard to anticipate---but the American response wasn't. U.S. history is filled with moments like the present one when upheavals abroad generated great hopes for the advance of freedom. Those moments have also evoked deep anxieties rooted in a suspicion that most peoples reaching for freedom, especially those outside the North Atlantic world, lacked the "maturity" to manage it. Reactions to revolutions in France in 1789 and Russia in 1917 set the pattern (as I suggested some time ago in...