I’ve been following with great interest the discussion about the President’s belief in the innate yearning for liberty, which is one major premise of our ongoing democratizing project – a project on which I am, I suppose, a sympathetic skeptic. If I could broaden the subject, though, I want to take issue with another of the premises: the notion that a democratic world necessarily makes the United States safer from terrorism.

It may be true that democracies do not historically make war on one another. But if you accept that international terrorism – rather than the outbreak of a conventional war between sovereigns – is our biggest security challenge today, I’m not sure where democratizing gets you.

Terror networks are not only stateless, they are exceedingly good at converting the liberties available in democratic societies to their advantage. (It is in many ways easier to plan a terror attack in a free country than a police state – and there is nothing like the ACLU in, say, China.) The 9/11 hijackers plotted for two years in both Germany and here. London, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, etc. –they are all hotspots.

Also, as we know from experience past and present, democratizing is both expensive and exhausting. If, for example, the investment in Iraq sapped our resolve to deal earlier and more aggressively with, say, Iran and Syria, that is a cost that has to be weighed against whatever degree we are safer than we would be if we had toppled Saddam but not dug in to democratize the place.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a paean to realism. I do believe spreading American values is something we should, even must, do. And if democracies don’t make war against each other, that is a huge upside – maybe even a dispositive one – even if democracies don’t necessarily reduce the amount of terrorism. I have just never found very persuasive the claim that more democracy necessarily means less terrorism.