The proliferation of undemocratic regimes is by no means inevitable, and American efforts to spread democracy can be both ethical and effective, writes Gregory A. Fossedal in "The Democratic Imperative," a witty, carefully reasoned, consistently fair, optimistic look at the state of democracy in the world and what the United States can do about it.

According to Mr. Fossedal, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, the United States can and should do a lot. Though he has no qualms about military aid or even outright force when called for, he also has great respect for other methods of persuasion, such as the Voice of America and  economic sanctions. "The rule," he writes, "is to locate and then build forces for democracy - a free press, political parties, unions, business groups, churches, and other private institu- tions - with words at first, and with other levers if necessary." The question is, of course, that of our right to use them: if we applaud Mikhail S. Gorbachev for no longer exporting his revolution, what gives us the right to export ours?

Mr. Fossedal's answer is that the United States was founded on a base of human rights that applies not just to Americans but to everyone. "To argue against a foreign policy to promote the rights of man ... is to argue against the rights themselves, and thus against our own institutions." Mr. Fossedal pays too little attention to some of the nastier possible consequences of such international activism, and one can certainly quarrel with his portrait of American democracy as a moral imperative, but his argument is a formidable one, based solidly in scholarship and logic and presented brilliantly.

Hal Goodman