Archive for the ‘Essays of Interest’ Category

Jack Miller Center Returning Fellow, William Anthony Hay, reviews a recent volume by Norman Stone in the Wall Street Journal.

How the West Won

Revisiting the days of the Berlin Wall, Cuban missiles and Reaganite resolve

By WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY

The outcome of the Cold War may seem inevitable in retrospect, but it hardly appeared that way during the four decades of high-stakes conflict. In the West and in the developing world of former European colonies, many perfectly intelligent people, without any great ideological investment in either side of the debate, concluded that the Soviet Union offered a successful path to modernity while the U.S. and its allies faced crisis or decline. The Soviets had seemed to master the basic delivery system of a vast welfare-state apparatus—health care, literacy, housing and even, it was said, basic consumer goods—while the West was subject to the vagaries of free-market boom and bust, with widening inequalities in the private realm and evidence everywhere of public squalor. Only during the mid-1980s did reality shatter the illusion. Communism and then the Soviet Union itself collapsed from within. The totality of the Western victory prompts an interesting question: How could so many have gotten so much so wrong?

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