Throughout his academic career, Howard J. Wiarda maintained a near-permanent association with prominent institutions of policy analysis, during which he generated several skeptical assessments of U.S. democracy policy. These constitute an underestimated contribution to the literature. He was comfortable with the idea that the United States stood for democracy but came to worry about the dangers of U.S.-branded democracy promotion. He erred in his characterization of democracy policy, but his critique previewed the dangers of an increasingly expansive definition of U.S. democracy policy. Despite his ties to think tanks, Wiarda remained essentially an outsider to policy circles, an academic whose writing about democratization was informed by closeness to policy makers but who was never a practitioner of democracy assistance.