When we defeated the USSR in the Cold War, they lost their Eastern Europe colonies, but their Russian homeland stood strongly in the grasp of the same forces of darkness that have controlled them since 1917. To this day, the KGB and some Russian Mafioso still run the place.
We cut off their right arm, but we didn't cut off their head.
They remain a dangerous enemy. We did not defeat the forces of tyranny within Russia (note - I didn't say that we didn't defeat the forces of tyranny for all time in all places - that I agree is not possible - I said we didn't defeat the forces of tyranny in Russia at that time.)
Similarly, we did not defeat the forces of darkness in Germany after World War I. We forced them to collapse, reform and regroup. That's why we got to fight World War II.
Reagan was one of the great leaders of our time or any time. He understood freedom better than most of us, and was willing to devote his life and great talents to fighting tyranny. Collapsing and morphing the Soviet empire was a great victory. But the Russian snake is not dead, its head is not decapitated and crushed. Rather it is just morphed. And it is resurgent.
I fear for my country. With the Leftist control of much of the media, education and government, we may not be able to mount a full scale war again. This great light of liberty that has shown on this nation for the last two centuries will grow dim for many centuries when that day comes.
Yeltsin?
To this day, the KGB and some Russian Mafioso still run the place.
Right. It's a corrupt, leeching mafia state. But it is no longer an expansionist empire that spreads a freedom-destroying ideology, controls a large fraction of the world, and threatens to engulf more on any serious level.
Since when does the definition of "victory" require "making the enemy's government a nice one"? This is precisely what I'm talking about. People have been taught by, perhaps, Hollywood movies to culviate a ridiculously utopian notion of what it means to win/lose over a foe.
Transport a random American and a Russian from the 1950s to today and show them the two countries: what lives are like, what the respective economies are like. Show them the modern map of Russia - tell them about all the "former Soviet states". (Are there "former American states"?)
Heck, just focus on women: where do "mail-order brides" come from, in the popular imagination - America, or Russia? If you hear a story like: "desperate woman signed up for what she thought would be a housekeeping job, flew to Turkey, handed over her passport, and was kidnapped into prostitution", is that woman more likely to be from Russia or from America?
X is in the business of creating, marketing, and selling software in stores. Y is in the business of pirating software and selling it out of a street kiosk. Is X from Russia and Y from America - or vice versa?
Or focus on migration - did millions of Americans start coming to Russia in 1991, or vice versa? Do brilliant American college kids go to Russia to get their PhDs, or vice versa? Are there more children born in America to Russian-born parents, or vice versa?
How many Stalin, Lenin, Beria, Dzerzhinksky statues have been brought down vs. how many Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Roosevelt statues?
Believe me, neither the 1950s American nor the 1950s Russian transported to today's time would be in any doubt whatsoever as to who won the Cold War.
No, we did not make Russia's government into a nice, beautiful, human-rights-respecting democracy. I never said we did. (Although it's worth pointing out that its government today is "more democratic" than it used to be.) I just said we won the Cold War. It's a bizarre modern western standard that, bizarrely, have decided that winning wars entails remaking the enemy's society into Sweden and anything less is not only failure but somehow defeat, or even "part of their plan".
The impossible-standard-of-victory problem has plagued us when it comes to evaluating Iraq, and it'd be ridiculous and sad to let it demoralize us needlessly in our thinking about the Cold War.