In our exultation, we forgot to finish the job. Communism lived on in mainland China, and THE FEDERALIST
When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved, the Western world thought, with considerable justification, that the generational struggle with communism had ended. But in our exultation, we forgot to finish the job. Communism lived on in mainland China and is once again challenging the free world for dominance. This time, they’re doing it with our money. As we have begun to realize these past few years, and as the coronavirus outbreak has made even clearer, China has used our free markets and open-mindedness against us, running an economy based on the bizarre fusion of communism and mercantilism while cracking down ever more on its people’s natural rights and freedoms. It is time for the free world to rejoin the fight. Harsh in War, Generous in Peace Historically, the United States has been generous in victory. As the Civil War drew to a close, President Abraham Lincoln resisted calls for vengeance against the conquered South, famously saying after the fall of Richmond that he would prefer to “let ’em up easy.” After the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson declined the territorial concessions America’s allies were demanding, focusing instead on an ultimately misguided plan for permanent peace. Likewise, after the Second World War, presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman did not look to conquer territory, as Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union did, but to rebuild the shattered lands of Europe and Japan, making former fascist enemies into democratic friends.
