Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Kagan

The year does almost all the talking here. “1993” isn’t just a timestamp; it’s a mood, the brief post-Soviet window when Western visitors could mistake turbulence for transition and slogans for institutions. Kagan’s “optimistic” lands as a self-aware tell: a confession of having believed in the frictionless story that democracy, once “taken hold,” is basically a plant that just needs time and sunlight. The phrase is carefully chosen. Democracies don’t “take hold” by accident; the metaphor implies roots, inevitability, a natural process that can survive bad weather.

Then he adds the hedge: “despite the obstacles.” That’s doing reputational work. It anticipates the reader’s hindsight - oligarchs, corruption, state capture, the coming consolidation of power - and preemptively frames those forces as external impediments rather than signals that the supposed democratic “hold” might have been shallow. The sentence tries to salvage the earlier belief without fully repudiating it: I wasn’t naive, I saw problems, but I still thought the arc bent the right way.

As a writer closely associated with American foreign-policy debates, Kagan is also staging a mini-autobiography of a broader Western posture in the 1990s: faith in liberalization, markets, and elections as mutually reinforcing defaults. The subtext is elegiac and corrective. It’s not only about Russia; it’s about how easily observers confuse the appearance of democratic motion with the hard, unglamorous engineering of courts, parties, media independence, and legitimacy. Optimism becomes both the emotion and the cautionary tale.