Twenty years ago yesterday, the world witnessed the impossible; the peaceful disintegration of one of the major empires in world history - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the previous 75 years, if you had asked any foreign policy expert what the chances were that the Soviet Union would go out with a whimper, it is doubtful that few, if any, would have predicted such. As late as the 1980's when Ronald Reagan launched his initiative not to "contain" Communism but to destroy it, most observers were calling his policies "provocative," "dangerous," and worse. While many of these so-called experts called Reagan a "war monger," the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain who were being oppressed and imprisoned blessed his name for calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Ilya Somin sums up the benefits of a world without the Soviet Union: With the demise of the USSR, we were spared a regime that slaughtered millions both within and outside its borders, inflicted numerous other...(Read Full Post)