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    The dislocations of the global economy, perhaps more than any other development, intervened. A long-held equation in the West, and especially in America, between freedom and prosperity broke down. Free markets in Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Russia brought wildly divergent results and made substantial numbers of people worse off than they had been before—or at least convinced that they were. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 set the United States on an incredibly ambitious global mission to stamp out terrorism—a mission that brought us into conflict after conflict around the world and convinced many that the U.S. was not an unambiguous force for liberty or even human rights. The last two decades, in short, have weakened American andWestern arguments that our form of government and political economy, wherever it is tried, is a sure bet to peace, freedom, and prosperity. Millions are now telling us: Thanks, but no thanks. We’ll take the pieces we like and leave the rest. It isn’t doing so well for you, anyway .
    We need to recognize that the democratic revolutions of the last generation have also sparked a conservative backlash—one that sees America’s devotion to democracy as irresponsible, even reckless. We in America believe in the integrity of the process without guaranteeing the outcome. We are apparently willing to see hundreds of thousands of our own jobs go abroad because it’s only fair that harder-working populations elsewhere benefit from free-market forces. And we are willing to import millions of immigrants because they wish to work hard, pay taxes, and generate economic wealth. We believe that the free flow of capital is a crucial kind of freedom that generally benefits the most industrious and virtuous. Believing in the integrity of this process—or ideology, some would say—we are willing to sacrifice social traditions, demographic and ethnic balance, and perhaps the nation-state itself. At least, that’s how it looks to many watching from afar.
    These anti-Western arguments are, of course, caricatures—but they result from a massive, decades-long communications failure. Perhaps as important as our failure to take our message to Russia and China is our failure to provide arguments to those countries that would resist the influence of Moscow and Beijing if they could. Eastern Europe and Central Asia remain within Russia’s power orbit. Some of Eastern Europe is now free from Moscow’s shadow, via European influence (and Ukraine was on the verge of making its break until Putin lured the Ukrainians back in with his $15 billion sweetener). But many parts are not—indeed, huge swaths from Belarus through Moldavia, Ukraine, and Georgia. We must give them the intellectual ammunition to resist Moscow’s overtures. People in those societies have beenthrough a historical cycle in which they saw the collapse of totalitarian systems and the horrors that followed. They identify these horrors as the consequence of too much freedom—which, as the Axis nations continually remind them, is an American evil.
    We have not allayed these fears. Thus freedom appears in a problematic light around the world. We need to acknowledge these dislocations—which, after all, we are experiencing ourselves—while also renewing our defense of individual liberty, free markets, rule of law, and human dignity. These virtues may seem self-evident to most Americans, but around the world, as we have seen, many question them.
    Our task is complex and nuanced, since what we defend is somewhat amorphous—freedom, liberty, and other abstract goods are not as immediate as blood and soil—and also because the system we espouse has had, in many respects, a rough 20 years. Compared with the eloquent, if simplistic, appeals of Russia and China, ours seems a harder sell. This is especially true because we believe in a kind of progress that derives directly from our Constitution—ever and greater freedoms and liberty to