Jonathan Tobin agrees with Rubin on the importance of Mongolia, but worries about the Mongolian enthusiasm for Genghis Khan:

While we can sympathize with Mongolia’s troubles in the last century, any country that accords Genghis Khan–one of history’s great mass-murdering conquerors–the status of founding father, undermines its stance as a lonely democracy fighting for independence against authoritarian bullies.

Seriously? Yes, Genghis Khan was a brutal conqueror and empire-builder, and contemporary Mongolian attitudes towards him rely on greatly minimizing all of the destruction that went into building the beginning of the Mongol world empire, but it is really quite silly to hold this against them. Nations that have regained real political independence only in very recent times are understandably going to look back to moments in the past when their nation was independent, influential and powerful, and they are going to celebrate the famous leaders in their national history. Genghis Khan was undeniably the founder of the most organized political structure in Mongolian history up to that point, and it was because of his wars and the wars of his successors that the Mongols briefly dominated much of Eurasia. Good luck cultivating friendship with Mongolia by disparaging their most famous leader. By the same token, the enduring popular admiration for Stalin in the “fledgling democracy” of Georgia ought to discredit its stance as well.

One important difference between Georgia and Mongolia is that Mongolia has done a reasonably good job of building a functioning democratic state, and Georgia has stagnated as a semi-authoritarian or “hybrid” state. Freedom House rates Mongolia as free with civil liberties and political rights scores that are better than Georgia’s. According to Freedom House, Georgia is “not an electoral democracy” by their standards, and rates as only partly free. The Economist Intelligent Unit’s Democracy Index ranks Mongolia 64th in the world and considers it a “flawed democracy.” By comparison, the EIU report counts Georgia as a “hybrid” regime and ranks it 103rd between Bhutan and Pakistan. Mongolia matched or outperformed Georgia in every category that the EIU uses. That doesn’t mean that the U.S. should repeat its Georgian mistake in Mongolia, but it should tell us that the admiration Mongols have for Genghis Khan has no relevance for how Mongolia governs itself today.