Robert Kagan’s argument that “free elections come first” (Washington Post, Oct 28) is based on an elementary logical fallacy: that two negatives make one positive. Kagan shows that sheer economic development does not pave the way to democratization (see China). Furthermore, he demonstrates that the rule of law—by which he means a fair, even handed law, not the one that protects people from violence, terror, and anarchy (see China)—cannot be established in non-democratic nations. However, it does not follow, as he suggests, that free elections per se can produce a liberal democracy.

Democratic history shows that political development must include freeing of the press, the introduction of competitive political parties, a growing middle class, and increasing respect for a fair law, in addition to free elections—all of these measures have to be introduced more or less simultaneously, albeit gradually (See the US, Western Europe, and India). When free elections do come first, as Kagan wishes, we see the election of the representatives of terrorist organizations (e.g., Hamas), unstable governments and failing states (in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan), increasingly authoritarian governments (e.g., Russia ), and the rise of populist movements but not liberal democracy (e.g., Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan).

Most importantly, political development can thrive only after basic security is established first. When people cannot go to work, children to school, or citizens to the streets, without an ever-present fear that they may be killed, then the rights to vote, speak, and assemble are going to be far from their minds. Indeed, even if they gain freedom, they will rush to sacrifice it when they do not feel safe in their homes and communities, as we have seen in Russia in the early 1990s. People do not look for a risk-free or crime-free world, but one in which most people most of the time can live without a sense that they and their loved ones are under constant attack. To seek free elections before elementary safety is provided, will leave a people neither safe nor free.

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Amitai Etzioni is Professor of International Relations at the George Washington University and the author of Security First: For A Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2007) www.securityfirstbook.com