This is the kind of "pivot" I've been dreading since this conversation started. If we want to get repressive regimes to open up, Matt, is the better approach to do business with them or to cut them off? You yourself have repeatedly advocated a "Grand Bargain"-style approach to dealing with Iran, complete with increased trade, as opposed to the sanctions regime we seem to be headed towards. Increased economic ties aren't a Friedmanesque silver bullet to deflating international aggression, but there's no question that there's less political tension between trading partners than there is between countries that wall each other off behind economic sanctions. We're a couple decades into the Cuba embargo and Castro isn't doing too bad.

I can sense a coherence, but it is not a polite view.

In order to understand the disconnect between pursuing democracy and supporting monarchy lies in what Bush thinks democracy should do, and what freedom means.

His policies domesticly have made clear that he supports democracy as a platform for capitalist plutocracy, where government permanently, and across generations, protects the wealth of monied elites. Those elites take turns ruling the country (even within a family). When Bush talks of freedom, he must be speaking of a person's freedom to protect and hoard wealth.

That doesn't sound so different from a monarchy to me, or at least an aristocracy.

With this model in hand, it makes perfect sense why the United States is so friendly to monarchies and wealthy emirates, and so hostile to Communist and Socialist states (democratic or otherwise). Their wealth redistributing policies are anathema to the Bush model of what democracy should do, and what freedom means.

Thus we are fine with the house of Saud and the UAE, but hate the French. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite! Whoah there buddy, Bush was with you right up until that second and third part.

"To pivot away from the narrow security concern"

I thought you were going to pivot towards the trade deficit. With all of the foreign holdings out there, eventually they will need things to buy - port companies, technology companies, important landmarks, aerospace companies.

 And if important items are not for sale with foreign owned American dollars, those dollars become worth less.

It' s a mistake to lump the Gulf emirates with the Saudi monarchy so easily. The latter established itself by force of arms and has ruled from the beginning in alliance with reactionary Wahhabi clerics. The Gulf emirates have evolved smoothly from British protectorates to independent states, always more internationalist and commercial in their outlook even before they found oil. Dubai in particular represents a rarity in the Arab Muslim world, gung-ho capitalism - true if you ask me to early Islam, the only major religion founded by a businessman, with little of the socialist rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus. Mohammed could readily have signed up to the "Washington consensus".

The Soviet Union collapsed partly because the Marxist faith ran out of believers, but also, and not independently, because of its economic faillure. Dubai is not a model of democracy, though Al Jazeera - owned by its similar neighbour Qatar - is the nearest thing to a free media in the Arab Muslim world, and the emirates don't go in for the sharia excesses of Riyadh. But Dubai does offer a real model of economic progress and modernity, against the tired statism of say Syria and Egypt. I'd be for cutting the Emir some slack.