I certainly hope that historians and others become just as wary at the use of phrases like "the end of history", "normal" and the "triumph of hope" when they're used by those enjoying the current political formation as they rightly were when predecessors used such language to describe colonialism, fascism, and Communism.

Lech Walesa was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. He said the Pope deserved most of the credit for liberating Poland. If you want to trace the sequences, the turmoil in Poland is important. A lot of people argue that the US Intelligence agencies missed the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. Their system didn't work, as an economic system. If you had taken the view that their economic system was doomed, it would have been reasonable to say there was no reason to apply 'too much' pressure. If we didn't know it was collapsing, why not? Do our intelligence agencies ever get it right?

Of course, we tend to point to Poland and Central Europe. What 'we' did there worked out. The 'proxy' wars in Africa led to endless civil wars, long after the basic Cold War structure was finished. We supported the Shah so the Soviets couldn't project power into the Middle East. That didn't work out very well, given the Soviets were collapsing and so, alas, was the Shah. Should we sort through Allende and Pinochet? Why are South Americans embracing Castro, a figure of vestigial quality, in a Post Cold War era?

It's not like Europe had nothing to do with the liberation of enslaved Europe. Was their approach completely wrong? Did they really accept what was happening in Russia?

What were we to believe the thrust of history was? Pat Buchanan used to say that Right Wing dictators were often supplanted, but the Communist World was a permanent monolith. Well, not quite.

Did anyone say that the Soviet economy would collapse under it's own inefficiency, and liberalization of the economic sector would force other liberalization? In Russia, or China?

A lot depends on how 'super' US power remains, over the next 20 years. If American ideas dominate the world, as the enlightened 'victor' historians may say the US won. What if Asia rises, and the US is one among 4 or 5 co-equals? What if the US is over-extended and nibbled to death economically and politically, militarily? Then they may say that bi-polar world contained a lot of pretense on both side of the icy divide, or that it, some vaguely defined Cold War, simply fed on itself until the force was spent.

Ultimately, if Capitalism won, every country has a better idea where the true answer lies. Economic development will be universal, and other political and cultural ideas will be the points of contention. The US is not the embodiment of capitalism, once you remove it from the Cold War context.

It's like the arguments over Vietnam. If Vietnam is Capitalist now, what we were fighting for ultimately prevailed in Vietnam, and it's somewhat silly to say we should have won 'more' in Vietnam. Was Ho Chi Minh the same as Stalin? Communism was not monolithic, and it was crumbling during most of the Cold War.

What should we really fight for now? For Hamas in the Palestinian elections? For the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's elections? Should we take the long view that enlightenment will spread through, say, the Middle East, or cast that part of the world in black and white, in terms of 'evil' as Reagan did with Russia?

Did we get the best result in Russia? Putin?

It irks me just as much when I hear that Reagan won the Cold War as when I hear that America created Bin Laden. This is politically convenient magical thinking that ignores the ability of non-Americans to make decisions about their own lives.

The problem of Soviet Communism cured itself. The Communists succeeded at mass literacy. And once the masses were literate enough, they stopped tolerating being told how to think by a pack of single party politicians.

Now in America I'm afraid we could be reversing that process by becoming worse at mass literacy to produce a population that wants to be told how to think by a pack of single party politicians.

Who won the Cold War? I see that little question as being more complicated than it looks.

This is the same myth these guys always trot out about Reagan. Reagan won the Cold War by driving the Soviet Union into the ground, etc etc etc.

Bullshit. Reagan was a dolt. A friendly Grandpa kinda guy who was hard to dislike, unless you actually looked at his politics, in which case it became clear you were seeing a drunken man at the wheel, and if we weren't careful we could end up with the CIA running the country through Daddy Bush. Which if you look at Iran-Contra, pretty much happened.

Gorbachev ended the Cold War, singlehandedly and permanently. Reagan just happened to be in power when Russia finally had a great leader arise who knew it was time for Russia to come out of it's totalitarian train-wreck of misdirection of Socialist priciples. America had little to do with it. Perestroika was intalled to open things up and the rest was inevitable after that. End of story.

Reagan was a puppet for the folks who began the dismantling of the middle class by creating Trickle Down Economics, or the It's Raining Piss Theory, which thankfully got side-tracked by 8 years of sound fiscal management during which Clinton did what supposedly couldn't be done, namely, paying off the national debt and getting he economy booming again. Once George Junior got in they decided to take us where we would have been had they not been driven from power in the 90s, so they cut taxes to the tune of trillions and proceeded to break the country. It puts us on the road to Orwell's Nightmare just a few years later than he predicted, but right on time for Corporate Amerika to turn us into a slave labor colony for the 21st century.