Wind of Change

Where were you when the Wall fell?

People a generation older than I am will tell you where they were when Kennedy was shot.  Me?  The first major “where were you?” event was probably the assassination attempt on President Reagan, and, after that, the Space Shuttle Challenger’s explosion.

But the one that left the greatest emotional impact was certainly the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 25th anniversary of which is coming up soon.

Why was I thinking about this?  A college friend posted the video on facebook, and it fits in with recent articles by Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson, the gist of which is that Obama seems to think that “history” is a magical cosmic force which will see to the fall of dictators and murderous regimes, without the apparent need of anyone to take any action.  (I blogged about this earlier here.)

And if you think back, those brief years, when one communist regime after another fell near-bloodlessly, did feel almost magical.  I blogged about this, too, back on the 24th anniversary, last fall.  And remember the last days of the Soviet Union, when we all watched in suspense as the hardliners tried to retake control but failed, and the country dismantled itself into its republics, some of which had never before been independent countries?

It seemed as if it was only a matter of time before the remaining communist regimes would fall.  Clinton set about declaring a “peace dividend” and cutting military spending, and, in this magical time, we truly believed that all the nations of the world were on a steady path towards freedom and democracy.

I visited Germany not long after the fall of the Wall, in 1992, when parts of the wall still stood, when Russians sold military trinkets and other vendors sold “pieces of the wall” by the Brandenburg Gate, and I toured the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. And, having grown up reading about desperate attempts by East Germans and others behind the Iron Curtain to flee to the West (we always had a Readers’ Digest subscription, and I remember in particular one story about a family that fled in a homemade hot-air balloon), this was deeply moving.  One might say that, for this brief time, we all believed that, in fact, the arc of history was indeed bending toward justice.

But that time is gone.  We learned that there are other enemies to peace and freedom besides the communist world — with a rude awakening when Saddam invaded Kuwait, then again when Al Qaeda first bombed the World Trade Center and then, after we had convinced ourselves they were no great threat, destroyed it, and our view of the world, entirely, and again when any illusions of Russia being brought into the fold of democratic, peaceful, and free nations, have been shattered  (for all but the willfully-blind) by Putin’s actions in Georgia and Ukraine.  And we’re continuing to have to unlearn the lesson that history will now take the form of one peaceful revolution after another — the Velvet Revolution was one thing, but Iran’s Green Revolution failed, suppressed by the government, and the Arab Spring was, well, a bust, with Libya in chaos and the military taking the reins in Egypt.

In short, we grew up.

Which leads to the question:  has Obama learned this lesson?

Perhaps he full well understands that there are serious problems in the world today, and they’re not going to fix themselves, but is simply conceding that he hasn’t a clue about what to do.  Perhaps he’s intentionally abdicating America’s historic leading role and gambling that other Western nations will step up sooner or later without too much lasting harm from the leadership void in the meantime.  And perhaps his “arc of history” fluff is just there to avoid too baldly stating that, as far as all the world’s trouble spots go, his message to the Ukrainians, and the Afghans, and the Yazidis and the Iraqi and Syrian Christians is simply, “you’re on your own.”