Politics & Power Quote by Warren Christopher

Christopher’s line is diplomacy doing what it does best: sounding reassuring while quietly lowering the boom. “Only two countries… are not democratic” is the comforting headline, the kind of hemispheric scorecard that lets Washington claim the post-Cold War project is basically working. Then comes the pivot word that matters: “but.” In a single breath, he converts “democratic” from a badge into a spectrum, and he makes clear that elections alone don’t equal stability, legitimacy, or rule of law.

The phrase “really fragile democracies” carries strategic subtext. “Fragile” softens what could be read as accusation (corrupt, coercive, captured), while still framing these governments as vulnerable to relapse: coups, authoritarian backsliding, narco-state pressure, IMF-era social unrest, hollowed-out institutions. It’s also a way of redefining U.S. interest. If democracy is fragile, it demands stewardship, monitoring, aid packages, and, at times, intervention dressed up as support. The hemisphere becomes a ward as much as a partner.

Contextually, this is Warren Christopher as Clinton’s foreign-policy voice in the 1990s, when the Organization of American States and “democracy promotion” were ascendant and Cuba remained the obvious exception. The other “not democratic” state is a tell: depending on the exact moment, it could signal Haiti under military rule or another outright authoritarian outlier. Either way, Christopher is sketching a map where the problem isn’t dictatorship as a regime type so much as democracy as an unfinished infrastructure project. That framing is tidy, actionable, and unmistakably American.