In the last twenty years of his life, Alexander Solzhenitsyn increasingly challenged both American foreign policy and American conceptions of democracy. Sometimes he missed the mark but just as often he was right. No wonder his former conservative allies had largely abandoned him by the 1990s.

In 2005, for example, he declared that:

It [democracy] must not be forced [upon people] like a cap. Democracy can only grow upwards, like a plant. Democracy must begin at the local level, within the local self-government. Only then can it develop further."

.....Solzhenitsyn slammed the US policy, saying that over ten years ago, the US"launched an absurd project to impose democracy all over the world.""The US has a strange idea of democracy - they first interfered with the Bosnian situation, bombed Yugoslavia, then Afghanistan, and then Iraq.""Who is next, perhaps, Iran?" the writer wonders."The US must understand that democracy cannot be introduced by force, by the army," he said.