I can only speak to the history that I know but int he case of Napoleon, nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Iraq, the people did not get their freedom back. Never. The people were liberated by an external military force from a moral nation that believed in liberation over conquest.
In 3 of those cases, the liberating force was America. When America falls by the wayside as a free nation, who is going to be the world’s liberating force? Do you suppose China will come and be our liberators? I highly doubt it.
Even in the case of the Iron Curtain, America was still the liberating force. We liberated Eastern Europe with economic pressure rather than military warfare.
I was making the point that we are heading toward socialist tyranny and there has never been the free democratic nation that could vote itself back from tyranny. The cycle, as you pointed odut in some of your examples, is that the nation has to go through a period of opression and tyranny before it again musters the spiritual courage to fight with arms against its oppressors and win back its freedom.
Never has their been a nation that voted itself into opression and then voted itself back out. The oppressors prevent it.
I get your point, and I agree that many of the nations I listed were freed by external forces, not their own efforts. And we certainly can't count on anybody liberating us.
However, it is a historical fact that oppressors are not always, in fact never are, a monolithic force that stands unchanging thru eternity.
The Argentine military dictators picked a fight with Maggie Thatcher and got clobbered. They soon lost power. Military dictators have to win their wars to keep power.
Allende and then Pinochet destroyed democracy in Chile. Pinochet and his crew then either got tired or decided democracy should be allowed to come back. Much the same thing happened in Spain after Franco and Portugal after Salazar. All three countries are now firmly democratic, although at least the European ones have major problems economically and demographically.
Same thing happened in USSR and all of Eastern Europe. Communism collapsed from its own internal contradictions, ironically enough. It is actually a good argument whether our ecomomic and military confrontation with USSR accelerated or slowed this collapse. While we stressed the system, we also provided a convenient outside enemy that encouraged internal solidarity.
While I would never claim China is free, it is certainly much less unfree than it used to be.
My point is merely that looking at the road from freedom to tyranny as inevitably a one-way street leading to a pit of eternal despotism from which there is no escape is just not historically accurate.