America was founded as a radical experiment in (small l) liberal (small r) republican governance in a world then governed by emperors. Thomas Jefferson envisioned America becoming the fountainhead of an “Empire of Liberty.”
In 1910, the year my father was born, over 80% of the world was still ruled by emperors. Within 13 years, four of the five great empires fell: the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian and Chinese. The least autocratic, the British, went into terminal decline.
Creating the Empire of Liberty was hard. It was bloody. It was bitter.
And … heroic. We celebrated and well commemorated the first two great victories, WWI and WWII. The third great victory, victory in the Cold War? Nyet, comrade.
After the Allied victory in World War I banner headlines declared the Armistice. We celebrated with street celebrations. It became a national holiday (now, in America, Veterans Day.)
Ultimate victory in World War II, VJ-Day, was celebrated by throngs in the streets. An Alfred Eisenstaedt photo of a sailor planting a kiss on a (clearly unenthusiastic) nurse was featured in Life Magazine. It became iconic.
The collapse of empires, unexpectedly, was not followed immediately by the rise of liberal republicanism. Instead, brutal dictatorships followed.
America waded back into the fight, into WWII. Together with our Allies, including the USSR, we replaced Nazism and Fascism, in much of western Europe, and Japanese Imperialism in the Pacific, with liberal republicanism.
Communism remained an aggressive, quasi-religious force. Per the USSR’s most insightful and delightful contemporary exponent, former Soviet propaganda executive Dima Vorobiev, at Quora: “Marxism is a secular grandkid of Christianity. … Marxism as an ideology is infallible, just like Jesus. It’s totally impossible to ever get disillusioned about the idea of a society where everyone is equal, no one is exploited, and the economy is an endless cornucopia in the service of human self-improvement.”
The Soviet Union and China, post-WWII, remained totalitarian. So began the Cold War, properly seen as WWIII. Later, much later, China, under Deng Xiaoping, embraced supply-side economics and liberalized from totalitarian to authoritarian. That was a step toward extending the Empire of Liberty.
Meanwhile, the Soviet satellites broke free. Then, our dominant neo-imperial adversary, the Soviet Union, dissolved 30 years ago on December 25-26, 1991.
The USSR did not end with a bang. Nor with a whimper.
It ended silently. Unlike the attendant stupendous celebrations that followed victories in World War I and World War II, our victory in the Cold War went virtually uncelebrated. To celebrate our adversary’s self-dissolution would have been unseemly.
There was no dramatic precursor military action, no Hundred Days Offensive, no D-Day, no atomic bombings. There is no WWIII Memorial akin to the WWII Memorial on the national mall or the WWI Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue.
America, a mercantilist nation (“Make money, not war!”), never sought world hegemony. We inherited it as if by accident. The neo-conservatives, of course, embraced American world hegemony.
Without the benefit of a vivid Declaration of Peace America remained on a war footing. Thus, we mistook the rogue guerrilla actions of 9/11 for Pearl Harbor 2.0, plunging into a feckless, doomed, series of wars in the Middle East.
The fall of the USSR caused the discombobulation of America. We were victimized by our own success.
As Communist Party whiz kid Georgi Arbatov, director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute for U.S and Canada Studies, told a gathering of American scientists during the USSR’s late twilight, “Our major secret weapon is to deprive you of an enemy ….”
Depriving us of an enemy proved frighteningly effective.
Now what?
Honor, even glory, comes from serving a cause greater than ourselves. Losing the sense of purpose we derived from having, and vanquishing, a great enemy America lost its way. Politically, we became actors without a script.
Both major parties used to be fierce yet friendly rivals in working to generate a worldwide Empire of Liberty. Now, aspiring Caesars struggle to dominate both parties.
The lamp of liberty gutters.
Without America’s commitment to establishing an Empire of Liberty, strongmen now are gaining traction around the world. As Anne Applebaum put it plainly in The Atlantic, “The Bad Guys Are Winning.”
What comes next?
My Magic Eight Ball says, “Reply hazy, try again.”
A dragon rises in the East. China may be an adversary worthy of the better angels of our nature.
Perhaps the rising People’s Republic of China will shock America back into its historic mission. Let America return to fomenting liberty and justice for all.
The Greatest Generation won WWII.
We Boomers won the Cold War.
Bismarck once reportedly said, “We must leave some problems for our grandchildren to solve.” May the Millennials and Zoomers rise to the occasion.
Meanwhile, happy 30th anniversary of liberty’s victory in the Cold War. And God bless America.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $88T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.