“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” – Mark Twain

David Satter, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and visiting scholar at SAIS, has done an amazing thing to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has taken a topic which normally takes about 1,000 words just to introduce, and distilled one of its principal lessons for today’s geopolitical arena into just about 1,000 words.

In particular, and very significantly, he closes in on what continues to be one of the defining struggles of our time: the challenge of engaging with an ideology that leaves no room for alternative discourse. Twenty years ago, that ideology was Communism. Today it is Islamic radicalism. In short:

Our response to the claims of totalitarian ideology is traditionally to defend freedom. By answering an ideology that claims infallibility and promises to create heaven on earth by defending “freedom,” however, we immediately raise the question of “freedom for what?” We also leave the contents of the ideology completely unchallenged. The failure of the West during the Cold War to challenge the claims of communist ideology was always taken by the communists to mean that the West did not believe in anything.