A sliding of democracy

When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union dissolved, a new era of democratic expansionism was heralded, as Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history, optimistically assuming human ideological evolution had ended and liberal democracy ultimately triumphed over the authoritarianism of communism and fascism as the final form of human government.

There was reasonable ground for such optimism, and the number of democracies in the world has significantly increased since then, reaching to more than half of the countries in the world.
This has been closely related with the impact of the third wave of democratic transition in the world, which started in the mid-1970s and continued until the early 1990s, and was related to U.S. global strategy as much as to the evolution of human understanding of good governance. 

In fact, the increasing importance of human rights after the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975 triggered a shift in U.S. foreign policy, which started to promote democracy and human rights around the world, using diverse tools ranging from military intervention to foreign aid and operating Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Various U.S. institutions, such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and others developed expertise in democracy promotion activities.

President Ronald Reagan boosted these initiatives in the 1980s against the "red menace," that is the Soviet Union. After the end of the Cold War, President Bill Clinton, in 1994, declared the global promotion of democracy as one of the strategic priorities of American foreign policy. By then, new U.S. institutions, such as National Democratic Institution, the International...