>doesn't touch upon... it's a lot harder to have a unified "strong" and "assertive" democracy when we buy oil from Russia and cheap electronics from China. The

>doesn't touch upon... it's a lot harder to have a unified "strong" and "assertive" democracy when we buy oil from Russia and cheap electronics from China. The article's sentence "Trading with autocrats promotes autocracy, not democracy." heads a relevant discussion. I was once shocked to learn how cozy was the relationship between the US and Nazi Germany before WW2. It ran deep. True 'Autocracy' ... 'Government by a single person having unlimited power' seldom exists without the willing support of other powerful people. From there is fairly substancial evidence that some US powers helped to enable the Nazis... materially and philosophically. That support suggests that our popular 'democracy' had already been under siege, from some powers within, for a long time. An ideal needing faith to be fully born, our well-devised 'framework of democracy' had always been and continues to be compromised by special interests. Today, all the surveillance is certainly evidence.