"Relations with authoritarian regimes have long posed a deep dilemma for American policy, between US strategic interests and the exigencies of realpolitik—the need to deal with the world as it is, not as we want it to be—and America's democratic ideals. In the pursuit of the former, the US has long supported numerous heinous regimes, none more so than the Saudi oil theocracy, or South Korea and South Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s."