Word: communisms
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...ended, we found no reason to celebrate. Instead we heated up the "war on drugs." What should have been a public-health campaign, focused on the persistent shame of poverty, became a new occasion for martial rhetoric and muscle flexing. Months later, when the Berlin Wall fell and communism collapsed throughout Europe, we Americans did not dance in the streets. What we did, according to the networks, was change the channel to avoid the news. Nonviolent revolutions do not uplift us, and the loss of mortal enemies only seems to leave us empty and bereft...
...Communism might have collapsed of its own fatal flaws anyway. We will obviously never know for sure. But the process was vitally influenced by the U.S.-led revival of Europe and Japan after World War II, by U.S. containment efforts that made the cost of Soviet adventurism prohibitive, by the solidity of NATO, by the drive for human rights and by the example of U.S. -- and Western -- economic success. Even Soviet officials acknowledge the effect of American pressure, including the arms buildup...
...influence the rest of the world was by the power of its example. That "light unto the nations" view was later ridiculed, but it has regained the force of simple truth. The example of a tremendously successful American economy and free institutions contributed strongly to the downfall of communism and to the movement toward market economies and democracy all over the world...
...this is accompanied by a new isolationism, the notion that with the collapse of communism, there is not much left for America to do in the world, that the U.S. should circle the wagons. There is also economic isolationism, otherwise known as protectionism. And there is the isolationism of despair: the conviction that in winning the cold war, we spent so much of our treasure that we no longer have the means to exert much influence abroad -- that the U.S. is increasingly "irrelevant...
...need a "vital international economy" with open trade. Democracy, once regarded by many as hopelessly inefficient compared with the planned and regimented dictatorships, has proved itself indispensable to productive economies. We have learned much more about the connection between the abundant life and freedom. We have also learned that communism is really a new form of feudalism, a fixed society. Such a society cannot create abundance...