A good friend of mine used to have a clever quote on his Facebook profile. It read: “Democracy is like sex. When it’s good, it’s really good. When it’s bad, it’s still better than anything else.”

I believe this statement, however juvenile, to be an accurate indictment of American foreign policy in the Third World. For years, administrators did their best to convince Americans and the world that democracy was the cure-all to the violence, corruption, mistrust and delinquent behavior that has plagued developing regions for so long. President Bush started a war five years ago after successfully convincing the world that removing Saddam Hussein and installing Democracy 2.0 in Iraq would stabilize the country and the region. I think we can all agree that this was a mistake.

Many Third World conflicts are tribal or political disputes rooted in a history of mistrust and competition over resources that began long before anyone reading this article stepped foot onto this earth. After the era of European Imperialism, many parts of Africa and Asia were divided up into colonial territories with little or no regard for tribal demographics that predated any sort of Western contact. If you look closely at a map, it actually seems like an inebriated British man in London drew a whole bunch of lines on a globe before he set out for afternoon tea.

American democracy is such a wonderful phenomenon because from our melting pot mixture of cultures, customs and traditions that separate the various “tribes” in the United States, we’ve all decided to come together and trust each other enough to allow, for example, a Catholic to represent a Protestant in the Senate, or for a Jew to represent a Muslim in the House of Representatives. It is this trust in each other and in the stability and fairness of our system of checks and balances on power that keeps America from descending into the kind of electoral violence that has plagued Iraq, Lebanon, Kenya, Pakistan and many other countries in recent months.

Without the ability to trust political rivals to govern fairly, democracy as adapted in America is unobtainable. This kind of trust simply does not exist in many parts of the Third World. We’re talking about tribes that have massacred one another, raped, plundered and pillaged each other’s villages at various points in history. It is supremely arrogant of us to believe that when we in the West finally show up with our monetary benevolence and choose sides that this animosity will simply be put aside. It’s going to take much more than that.

In the Third World, there is no hope for peace right now. There are only questions of how people are going to continue to feed their families in regions of failed economies and oppressive regimes. Until the rest of the world comes up with a way to help build trust between these various political factions and, more important, a stable system that peacefully transfers power after the results of fair elections, all the money we’ve spent exporting our brand of democracy will continue to be wasted.