“…what we’re seeing is an old alternative ideology re-emerging – an ideology that targets not only the tools of democracy but also its very norms. It suggests democratic values lead to violence and disorder, and people are better off and societies are more stable with the strong-arm of centralized power and the safety blanket of control.

“The people who profess this idea would have us believe that encouraging political competition, supporting changes in leadership, allowing people to write and say anything they want destabilizes fragile societies. …

“They would have us believe that the separatism in eastern Ukraine was a real phenomenon, rather than an invention – a reverse Maidan engineered by President [Vladimir] Putin to justify the brazen occupation and violent rule of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine and undermine the right of Ukraine’s citizens – and no one else – to determine their country’s future.

“We don’t hear these arguments just from bullies standing on the dais of the U.N. General Assembly, but from proxy regimes and local leaders across the world who sow distrust, fear and hate masked as legitimate skepticism and debate. And this is not just an academic dispute. Those who are acting on these ideas are actually upending the international order. …

“When students, business owners, veterans and grandmothers endured the freezing cold on the Maidan to demand an end to corruption and insist that their leaders make good on promises, President Putin invaded their country to make their democratic experiment fail because it was a threat to his own experiment.

“And now in Syria, we see that Russia has gone to war to bolster an authoritarian regime that is brutalizing its own citizens and attracting the world’s worst terrorists – ensuring more suffering, more refugee flight and more space for Daesh [ISIS]. …

– Deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, speaking on the topic “U.S. Democracy Support: 2016 and Beyond” at Freedom House in Washington on October 14.