The Cold War is about as real to many millennials as the Neolithic era. The millions of deaths resulting from communism are not part of their consciousness, and the willingness of their parents and grandparents to wage a cold war for 40 years in the face of a totalitarian regime seems irrelevant to them.

We have to go back a century to find as little understanding of socialism and communism as exists now among chunks of the American electorate. Socialists from 1906 to 1916 won some big city mayoral races and had a national presence. The Russian Revolution in 1917 showed where socialism led, and Americans generally found Soviet communism under Lenin, Stalin, Khruschev, and Brezhnev unattractive. But now, most millennials prefer socialism to capitalism, according to one recent poll, and are voting for self-proclaimed democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders, according to exit polls from many primaries and caucuses.

A Brief History of the Cold War (Regnery Publishing, 2016), by Lee Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, won’t do much to stem that socialist tide, but at least people in their 20s and 30s who read it will understand why Americans persevered in a long twilight struggle that ended in victory, and older readers will recall the tension. The authors succinctly report essential people, places, events, and ideas that culminated in Ronald Reagan’s even more succinct summary: “We win, they lose.” Here’s the conclusion from the book. —Marvin Olasky

Conclusion

All great historical periods and events are instructive. The Cold War is no exception. It offers lasting lessons that can help us deal with the challenges of the present and the future.

What then are the major lessons of the birth and the death of the Cold War that can be applied to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy today? The world has changed since 1945, when the Cold War began, and 1991, when it ended, but certain things remain true.

Ideas matter

Contrary to Machiavelli and his modern-day Realpolitik disciples, power is not everything, even in totalitarian regimes. The philosophical ideas undergirding the regime matter as well, because they guide governments and help us to understand their conduct.

The United States has been shaped by ideas drawn from its founding principles. Likewise, the Soviet regime, from beginning to end, was shaped by the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Gorbachev initiated glasnost and then perestroika in order to save Soviet communism, not to initiate Western democracy. When communists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe admitted they no longer believed in communism, they undermined the ideological foundations of their power and authority.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Gorbachev acknowledged that it had been built on sand, socialist sand. He admitted reluctantly, “The Achilles heel of socialism was the inability to link the socialist goal with the provision of incentives for efficient labor and the encouragement of initiative on the part of individuals. It became clear in practice that a market provides such incentives best of all.” Boris Yeltsin was more to the point: “The world can breathe a sigh of relief. The idol of communism, which spread everywhere social strife, animosity, and unparalleled brutality, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed.”

Similarly, the mullahs who govern Iran—like the radicals behind ISIS—are guided by their commitment to a militant Islam, a commitment that shapes their worldview and influences their conduct on the world stage. In China, the communist government struggles to rationalize the contrary demands of economic liberalization and political control. As China’s economy inevitably declines, there will be increased pressure for political liberalization.

Friends and allies, real and potential, matter

Early and late in the Cold War, the United States called upon and led a grand alliance against the Soviet Union through diplomatic, economic, and strategic instruments such as the Marshall Plan, NATO, the “police action” in Korea, the deployment of Euromissiles to counter the Soviet SS-20s, the “special relationship” with Great Britain, and the multifaceted Reagan Doctrine. When it acted more unilaterally, as in Vietnam, it was not successful.

In contrast, the Soviet Union was never able to command true allegiance from the members of the Warsaw Pact or the various nationalities and peoples within the Soviet empire. The Soviet Union was not a true nation but a conglomeration of captive peoples and nationalities united by the Kremlin and its Red Army. Marxism-Leninism was an alien doctrine imposed on the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by a totalitarian imperial power. Once Western governments began encouraging the people within the “evil empire” to stand up, they did so with increasing confidence and success. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was crushed by Soviet tanks, but in 1980, the communist government of Poland could only “ban” the Solidarity union for fear of alienating the West.

Leadership matters

The history of the Cold War is the biographies of leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It began with Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin and ended with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Václav Havel, Lech Wałęsa, and even Mikhail Gorbachev, who helped end the Cold War by reluctantly abandoning the Brezhnev Doctrine that had propped up the communist regimes of Eastern Europe for decades. Containment might have continued to be the policy of the United States for years if Reagan had not laid down a new way to wage the Cold War—“We win, and they lose.”

A firm commitment to freedom is something the presidents who served at the beginning and the end of the Cold War had in common. As important as Ronald Reagan was to the end of the war, there is much to be learned from the American president who was there at its beginning. Harry Truman’s Cold War was a conflict between good and evil, between freedom and tyranny, between liberal democracy and totalitarianism, between capitalism and communism. His strategy was to articulate America’s basic principles of freedom and democracy, to assist those who lived under such principles to maintain them, and to help those under totalitarianism to realize them in the future.

The United States enjoyed successes in the Cold War when led by clear-eyed visionaries like Truman and Reagan. American leaders like Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush, who sought to deal with the communist threat through a so-called “realistic” approach, were less successful. Truman and Reagan crafted principled strategies suited to the circumstances each faced. Truman approved the historic Berlin Airlift, which many experts said was at the same time unrealistic and provocative. Reagan, challenging Gorbachev (over the protests of the State Department) to tear down the Berlin Wall, kept up the political pressure on the Soviet leader while negotiating the INF Treaty. Nixon negotiated with the Soviets and went to China thinking he could get Moscow and Beijing to help end the Vietnam War. He assumed they would be pragmatic rather than remain committed to their end goals, but they wanted their ideological enemy to remain bogged down in that quagmire. Bush kept propping up Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall despite the convincing evidence that the people throughout the Soviet empire had had enough of communism and wanted a new non-communist beginning.

On the other side, the Soviet Union and its satellites were led by aging tyrants like East German communist boss Erich Honecker, who in early 1989 declared that the Berlin Wall would stand for another hundred years. Gorbachev’s three immediate predecessors had believed that the Soviet Union could indefinitely spend an estimated 40 percent of its budget on military weapons. Early Soviet rulers like Lenin and Stalin were ruthlessly totalitarian. As they aged they still believed in their ideological right to rule and that socialism would ultimately triumph. Khrushchev and Brezhnev never renounced the Leninist goal of a socialist world.

Statecraft matters

Victory over a determined adversary requires not only strength and resolve but a strategy suited to the times and the nation-states involved. Containment was an appropriate strategy in the beginning of the Cold War when the United States was sorting out its domestic and foreign responsibilities and the Soviet Union was in place and in power in Eastern Europe. Forty years later, the United States could take the offensive against an economically weakened Soviet Union and its communist satellites, which had failed to deliver the goods to their peoples and whose Marxist ideology was disintegrating.

A successful U.S. foreign policy depends on the exercise of prudence. It is impossible to predetermine the extent, priority, and immediacy of the nation’s security requirements—they constantly shifted throughout the Cold War as the balance of world forces changed. Likewise, it is impossible to predetermine the challenges and opportunities for furthering American principles and interests in the world today. It is impossible therefore to know beforehand what specific policy prudence will dictate at any particular time and place. The statesman— that is, the wise president guided by his top advisors— must choose the prudent course at that moment.

Cold War policies such as the Marshall Plan and the Reagan Doctrine were prudent. Our economic aid helped World War II allies to get back on their feet and at the same time created markets for our goods. U.S. military support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan turned that conflict into the Soviet Union’s Vietnam and helped end the Cold War. Less prudent policies, like Jimmy Carter’s human rights fixation, which resulted in a Marxist Nicaragua and an Islamist Iran, and the Nixon-Kissinger détente, which allowed the Soviets to surpass us in strategic weapons, were failures.

A grand strategy for U.S. foreign policy begins with the thesis that the United States should always clearly express its general principles of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, be politically, economically, and diplomatically active around the world, and engage militarily when it is necessary to defend its vital interests. Those interests include protecting American territory, sea lanes, and airspace; preventing a major hostile power from controlling Europe, East Asia, or the Persian Gulf; ensuring U.S. access to world resources; defending free trade throughout the world; and protecting Americans against threats to their lives and well-being.

Whether it is clashes with Islamic terrorists or long-term challenges from autocratic Russia or Communist China’s economic and military attempts to expand its sphere of influence, a prudent foreign policy guided by our founding principles and backed up by our capabilities offers the best path for the United States. That is a strategy for today and tomorrow and for the ages.

From the book A Brief History of the Cold War by Lee Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding. Copyright ©2016. Published by Regnery Publishing. All rights reserved. Reprinted by special permission of Regnery Publishing, Washington, D.C.