Winter is Coming (41 page)

How did we come to such a sad state? When did we go from Soviet dissidents as celebrities and the belief that it was the duty of the free to help the unfree to a world where dictators pose for selfies with snowboarders and the victims of oppression are told to take care of themselves? Believe me when I say I am not harkening back to some never-was golden age of my imagination. I am neither too young to remember those times nor too old to have forgotten them.

November 9, 1989, was one of the most glorious days in the known history of the world. Hundreds of millions of people were released from totalitarian Communism after generations of darkness.

There is no shortage of scholarship and opinions about why the Wall came down when it did. I am happy to engage in those endless discussions, but we must recognize that looking for a specific cause at a specific moment misses the point. We do know that without the unity of the free world against a common enemy, without a strong stand based on refusing to negotiate over the value of individual freedom, that the Wall would still be standing today and I might still be playing chess for the Soviet Union.

There were alliances and rivalries and stretches of realpolitik for decades. Individuals played a part on both sides, from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II, to Mikhail Gorbachev unleashing forces he could not control. The critical theme was as simple as it was true: the Cold War was about good versus evil, and, just as importantly, this was not just a matter of philosophy, but a real battle worth fighting. Society supported the efforts of those great leaders, and society supported the fight and the principles behind it.

The Wall fell and the world exhaled. The long war of generations was over. The threat of nuclear annihilation that hung over all our heads was ending. Victories, however, even great victories, come at a cost, even if that cost is just letting down one’s guard. There were no truth commissions for Communism, no trials or punishments for the epic crimes of these regimes. The KGB changed its name but it did not change its stripes.

And, of course, Western complacency has enabled all its enemies, not just Putin. Today’s dictatorships have what the Soviets could scarcely dream of: easy access to global markets to fund repression at home. Not just the petro-states like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, but the manufacturing states as well. The idea that the free world would use engagement for leverage against dictators on human rights has been countered by the authoritarian states because they are willing to exploit it without hesitation, while there is no similar will in the free world.

Engagement has provided dictatorships with much more than consumers of the oil they extract and the iPhones they assemble. They use Interpol to persecute dissidents abroad; they sponsor or create political parties and NGOs to lobby for their cause; they write op-eds in the
New York Times
full of hypocritical calls for peace and harmony. And all of this while cracking down harder than ever at home. This is engagement as a one-way street. This is engagement as appeasement. This is a failure of leadership on a tragic scale.

Even the greatest ideals and traditions can lose focus after a radical change in the landscape. Symbols help us find that focus, leaving us vulnerable when those symbols disappear. America going to the moon was not so remarkable because there was anything of value there. John F. Kennedy understood that it would become a symbol of American progress, of challenge, of difficulty, and, of course, of superiority over the USSR.

A generation of new technology was developed thanks to the space race, technology that would power American industrial might into the computer age. But not long after this incredible feat was achieved, the space race fizzled significantly. The symbol was gone and no man has walked on the moon since Eugene Cernan in December 1972. The symbol of challenge, the symbol of progress, was confused with the challenge itself. When the moon was reached, the great quest it represented was quickly forgotten. As with Hitler and Stalin, a man traveling to the moon is mostly remembered today as mythology.

The Berlin Wall was more than a symbol, of course. It literally divided a city and represented the divide between the free and unfree worlds. When it fell, it was easy to forget that those two worlds, the free and the unfree, still existed even though the Wall did not. The symbol was gone and so what it represented was forgotten. Suddenly, evil no longer had a familiar form. As 9/11 taught us, the dangers are real even though the battle lines are unclear. Allies of convenience have replaced alliances based on history and values. This is the natural result of over twenty years of treating everyone like a potential friend, a practice that emboldens enemies and confuses true allies.

But enemies do exist, whether we admit it or not. They are the enemies of what America and the rest of the free world stand for. Whether it is Putin or ISIS, these forces cannot be defeated with engagement. No, to defeat them will require the unity and the resolve and the principles that won the Cold War. In chess terms, our great predecessors left us with a winning position twenty-five years ago. They gave us the tools to bring down dictators and showed us how to use them. But we have abandoned these tools and forgotten the lessons. It is past time to relearn them.

There is a global war under way that most people, even many of its casualties, are unaware is even taking place. I don’t have to look back beyond a few months’ headlines to count this war’s many casualties. A hundred forty-seven murdered at a university in Garissa, Kenya. Sixteen killed in terror attacks in Paris at the magazine
Charlie Hebdo
and at a kosher supermarket. The thousands killed in Eastern Ukraine. The opposition leader gunned down on a bridge on his way home in Moscow. Then there are the countless wounded and imprisoned victims of this global struggle.

Globalization has effectively compressed the world in size, increasing the mobility of goods, capital, and labor. Yet this compression takes place across not only space but time as well, as the twenty-first century’s borderless technologies and ideas collide with once sheltered cultures and regimes intent on existing as in centuries past. This is less the famous clash of civilizations than an attempt by these “time travelers” to hold on to their waning authority by stopping the advance of the ideas of an open society.

Radical Islamists set the time machine to the Dark Ages and encourage the murder of all who oppose them. Vladimir Putin wants Russia to exist in the great power era of tsars and monarchs, dominating its neighbors by force and undisturbed by elections and rights complaints. The post-Communist autocracies, led by Putin’s closest dictator allies in Belarus and Kazakhstan, exploit ideology only as a means of hanging on to power at any cost. In the East, Kim Jong-un’s North Korea attempts to freeze time in a Stalinist prison camp bubble. In the West, Maduro in Venezuela and the Castros in Cuba use socialist propaganda to resist increasing pressure for human rights. Boko Haram warlords employ religion as an excuse to slaughter their rivals. Others, such as the religious monarchies in the Middle East, are guilty by association for creating favorable conditions for violence with their archaic restrictions on free society.

What unites the time travelers is their rejection of modernity, their fear and hatred of what we should simply call “modern values” to replace the obsolete and condescending term “Western values.”

Globalization has brought these relics into contact and competition with the modern world that threatens to destroy their environments and authority. This contact also provides them with markets for their natural resources and with the technology they use for murder and repression, so they cannot disengage entirely. The time travelers cannot fight head to head with the ideas and prosperity of the free world, so they use the only weapons they have: ideology, violence, and disregard for the value of human life. They combat the lure of free speech and free markets with irrationality: radical religion and nationalism, cults of personality and dogma, hatred and fear.

Despite the denials of many politicians and pundits it is quite possible to lose a fight you refuse to acknowledge you are in. Even worse, ignoring the reality of the conflict puts more innocent victims on the front lines instead of trained soldiers and law enforcement. There are no easy solutions for homegrown terrorists or nuclear-armed dictators, but we must begin by ending this culture of denial.

I’ve argued elsewhere that history is cyclical; it turned out that the great victory for democracy was not eternal but seasonal. It just took time for the backlash to manifest against our excessive optimism. The mullahs, monarchs, and dictators are pushing back against the threat to their medieval ecosystems. This is the common thread connecting Putin’s attack on Ukraine and the murderous Islam-derived ideology that drives al-Qaeda and ISIS, and that drove the Kouachi brothers in Paris and so many others like them. They are pushing back against the modern world, brutally demonstrating the fallacy of “the end of history.” Our goal must be to help those stuck in the past to join the present, and it cannot be done only by force. We must be sincere and make an overwhelmingly attractive case. But this does not mean coddling or tolerating violent extremists or those who create them, at home or abroad. An open society that cannot defend its citizens will not be open for very long. A society that won’t fight for freedom will lose it, a truth immortalized by Reagan’s statement that freedom “is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Symbols matter in this fight, symbols like
Charlie Hebdo
and the “Bring Back Our Girls” campaigns, and photographs of world leaders marching together for free speech. It is not enough to tell our immigrants, our citizens, and the billions of souls still living in the unfree world that these ideals matter; we must show them. The terrorists and their teachers and the dictators and their enablers are quick to point out every hypocrisy, every double standard. We cannot compromise for, as Victor Hugo wrote in
Les Travailleurs de la Mer,
“Men grow accustomed to poison by degrees.”