On March 12, 1947, U.S. President Harry Truman delivered an address before a joint session of Congress in which he asked for $400,000,000 in aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey. He also sought congressional support for his decision to send American civilian and military personnel and equipment to the two countries. Until then, Greece and Turkey had both depended on British aid. In the case of the Greek government, that British assistance was critical for its civil war with the Greek Communist Party. President Truman’s address to Congress came in the wake of the British government’s announcement that it would no longer give economic and military support to the Greeks and the Turks.

President Truman feared that a Greek Communist Party victory in the civil war would let the Soviets gain a foothold in Greece, risking political instability there, in Turkey, and the wider region. Active Soviet engagement in various parts of the world during that time also worried Truman. He argued that the U.S. could not stand aloof and allow the introduction of Soviet totalitarianism into free, independent nations because America’s national security did not just depend on the physical security of American territory. Truman’s broader vision was that the U.S. would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces, and support free peoples who were resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures. This worldview, which entailed possible American involvement in conflicts in far-flung places, became known as the Truman Doctrine.

Quite clearly, what President Truman had in mind was American support for countries that were already democratic but had come under threat from external forces. In the last few decades, some U.S. administrations, notably that of President George W. Bush, have extended the notion to include spreading of democracy. The U.S. decided to help nations like Iraq and Afghanistan become democratic states from scratch.

As we now know, those projects failed spectacularly. The hope was that democracy would bring stability to those societies; instead, what resulted was utter chaos. Simply put, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places where these attempts were made, there were no foundations, structurally and culturally, on which democratic institutions could be built and sustained. But due to a combination of naiveté and arrogance, none of these factors were taken into consideration when America plunged itself into those missions.

In Ghana, a military dictatorship had been in power for two decades when, in the early 1990s, the Clinton administration persuaded the junta to hold democratic elections. The Cold War had just ended and the U.S. was the only game in town. Around the world, America’s voice carried considerable weight so the regime in Ghana did return the country to civilian rule. This became a trend across Africa and much of the developing world.

The results in Ghana and elsewhere were not as disastrous as they were in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they have been quite disappointing. The main problem is that most of the people who have come to power through elections are not really democrats who have interest in governing. They are rather like bank robbers who use politics as a means to loot without going through the trouble of brandishing weapons at tellers. The bandits in suits wipe national coffers clean, leaving millions impoverished in their countries. They proceed to capture state machinery to entrench themselves in power. In many ways, they end up worse than the military dictators they replaced. Those who bother to run elections periodically rig them, winning in landslides.

Monitoring of elections by impartial foreign observers was supposed to be the solution to this problem. The thinking was that making the electoral process free and fair would provide effective mechanisms for electorates to toss out corrupt and incompetent governors. That entire oversight regime has become ineffective, for two primary reasons. First, because the U.S. seems unable to keep its own democratic house in order lately, no one listens to it anymore. The kleptocrats can simply tell America to mind its own business, and then return to looting.

Second, election monitoring resembles the action of a soccer referee who whistles for the start of a match and then promptly leaves the field to run errands. The referee assumes that all of the players on the two teams know the rules of the game so they will manage in his absence. He returns to the field in the eighty-fifth minute to find that the contest has degenerated into chaos. It is too late to reassert control. He throws his hands up in the air, whistles to end the game soon thereafter, whatever the score is, and waits a few days to be called to referee another game. If referees behaved like that in a national league, the fanbase would quickly sour on the sport and stop patronizing it.

That, in essence, is what democracy has become in much of the developing world. Entire populations have become disillusioned because inadvertently, America and its Western allies have created a false sense that it is easy to have democracy as a governing model. To the contrary, it is not enough to show up once every four or five years to vote in national elections, sit back in the intervening years, and expect the good life to be delivered from national capitals. A strong culture of accountability, citizen engagement and vigilance are prerequisites for a properly functioning democracy. Because these ingredients are lacking in places like Ghana, there is often a lot of complaining about corruption and poor services, with little in terms of response from the governors. Democracy is extremely difficult business. That point has to be made clearly to ordinary people in these countries.

Given the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the chaotic politics in many supposedly democratic countries today, it is unlikely that any American administration will repeat any of those previous mistakes anytime soon. That is a good thing. Democracy is not something that can be easily exported. It is my preferred form of government, but it has to develop organically in any society that wants to be governed under it.