"Freedom Is On The March"

Don't like the way things are going? Wait for the inevitable plot twist.

In today’s post, I want to note an irony of our time that is as important as it is little-known. It is also bitter, I’m afraid. But hang in there. I’ll end with something appropriately hopeful for the new year.

“America rejects the false comfort of isolationism,” declared President George W. Bush in his 2006 State of the Union address. “We are the nation that saved liberty in Europe, and liberated death camps, and helped raise up democracies, and faced down an evil empire. Once again, we accept the call of history to deliver the oppressed and move this world toward peace.”

That delivery was happening in Iraq, of course. By 2006, the 2003 invasion of Iraq had turned into a fiasco that dwarfed even the Vietnam War. Rather than hailing the American soldiers who toppled Saddam Hussein as liberators, and embracing democracy like a West German Mesopotamia, Iraqis had turned toward their sects and tribes and all hell had broken loose.

Bush appealed to American optimism and idealism and called on Americans to stay the course. “Democracies in the Middle East will not look like our own, because they will reflect the traditions of their own citizens. Yet liberty is the future of every nation in the Middle East, because liberty is the right and hope of all humanity,” Bush insisted.

In doing this noble work, “we need the support of our friends and allies. To draw that support, we must always be clear in our principles and willing to act. The only alternative to American leadership is a dramatically more dangerous and anxious world. Yet we also choose to lead because it is a privilege to serve the values that gave us birth. American leaders -- from Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Reagan -- rejected isolation and retreat, because they knew that America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.”

The Iraqi mess aside, Bush had a point.

Shortly after the State of the Union address, Bush gave a speech at “Freedom House,” a venerable Washington D.C. NGO that promotes political rights and civil liberties around the world. “In our world, and due in part to our efforts, freedom is taking root in places where liberty was unimaginable a couple of years ago. Just 25 years ago, at the start of the 1980s, there were only 45 democracies on the face of the Earth. Today, Freedom House reports there are 122 democracies, and more people now live in liberty than ever before.”

I was there that day. Bush was never a great speaker but I remember how sincere his words felt to me. “Freedom is on the march” wasn’t merely a clever catchphrase his speechwriters dreamed up when he invaded Iraq. He didn’t repeat it constantly as a poll-tested way to score points. He believed it utterly. Bush really did see himself as leading the next phase of a great crusade of liberation that began in the Second World War.

That makes Bush’s triumphalism in 2006 the stuff of tragedy. Because at the very moment that Bush was boasting about the long, glorious march of freedom, that march was stalling.

Now, here we are in 2025. And it is indisputable that freedom is in full retreat.

I can say that thanks to the very same Freedom House reports that Bush cited. Released early last year, the latest iteration of that annual report contained a grim sentence: “Global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year.”

There’s little reason to think that dismal trend will change anytime soon. In fact, it seems likely to accelerate given that in a few weeks the office once held by George W. Bush will come under the control of a man who attempted to subvert an election and who repeatedly promised to turn the executive branch into an instrument of personal vengeance. That same incoming president has also made it clear in word and deed that his vision of American foreign policy is a wholesale repudiation of the approach taken by every American president from Roosevelt to Eisenhower to Reagan and Biden. Internationalism is over. This is the age of “America first,” which could more accurately be called “American alone.” America will make demands. It will shake its mighty fist. Others will cower and give America what it wants. Friends and allies will be bullied while dictators are praised. And freedom be damned.

How did it come to this?

That’s a subject for a book, not a Substack post, but I think we can find a strong clue simply by chasing the origins of the phrase George W. Bush loved to repeat.

Bush was not the first president to say “freedom is on the march.” He wasn’t even the first president to say it in a State of the Union address.

Ronald Reagan was.

“History is no captive of some inevitable force,” Reagan said in his 1986 State of the Union. “History is made by men and women of vision and courage. Tonight, freedom is on the march. The United States is the economic miracle, the model to which the world once again turns. We stand for an idea whose time is now: Only by lifting the weights from the shoulders of all can people truly prosper and can peace among all nations be secure.”

Apparently, the Gipper liked that line because he repeated it in the 1987 State of the Union address.

“We can also be heartened by our progress across the world,” Reagan declared. “Most important, America is at peace tonight and freedom is on the march. And we've done much these past years to restore our defenses, our alliances and our leadership in the world. Our sons and daughters in the services once again wear their uniforms with pride.”

Reagan’s themes were clear. First, a free and prosperous America is good for freedom elsewhere because a free and prosperous America offers the world an example to aspire to. It is also good for America because when other nations attempt to emulate America’s freedom and prosperity, they become friends and allies, making the United States stronger and more secure. In short, freedom and democracy being “on the march” is good for both America and the world.

But notice something else: While Reagan emphasizes the importance of having a strong, proud military for defence, and holding the line against the Soviet Union, he does not see that military as the means of spreading freedom. For Reagan, “freedom is on the march” is a metaphor only, which he made abundantly clear by pairing “freedom is on the march” with “America is at peace tonight.”

When Bush said “freedom is on the march,” he spoke literally. His soldiers were exporting freedom.

That highlights a critical difference between the two presidents. Both were internationalists. Both wanted America to have abundant hard power in the form of military and economic might. But Reagan did not see American soldiers as a crusader force spreading the faith of freedom with fixed bayonets. Instead, he treasured the soft power of “the shining city upon a hill,” a phrase he routinely used: Make America free and prosperous, make it open and generous with the world, and other nations would seek to emulate America and become America’s friend and ally. That will spread freedom. And make America stronger.

Now consider the following chart of popular opinion in countries around the world, as measured by Pew since 2000.

Two facts leap out.

One, Donald Trump was an albatross around America’s neck during his first term (2017-2020). I have little doubt that when this chart is updated to account for the second Trump term, the damage he will have done to American popularity in the world will be even deeper.

Two, the 2003 invasion of Iraq caused American popularity around the word to plummet.

There are no equivalent data going back to the Vietnam era, as far as I know, but there is abundant reason to think the Vietnam War’s effect on American standing in the world was similar to that of the invasion of Iraq.

So what can we make of this?

First, most people around the world do not like American presidents who are swaggering bullies. American popularity suffers — which means American soft power wanes.

Second, most of the people of the world do not thank the United States when it unilaterally exercises its hard power, even if the stated goal is the export of freedom and democracy. Quite the opposite. The worse the conflict, the worse the damage to American popularity, and therefore American soft power.

Ronald Reagan’s approach was right. George W. Bush’s was catastrophically wrong.

But this distinction is lost on the Trumpian right. In their eyes, Bush’s foolhardy wars didn’t disgrace the unilateral application of American military might or the even more foolhardy notion that freedom and democracy can be spread by crusader armies. No, they disgraced the internationalism that underlay the thinking of both Bush and Reagan. In a word, they disgraced “globalism.”

“Globalism” is a contentious term, of course. In many contexts, it is nakedly anti-Semitic. In others, it betrays a paranoid vision of unseen dark forces manipulating events. At its most benign, it means the whole system of multilateralism — working with friends, allied, and international institutions — that the United States developed and maintained after the Second World War. If we use that last meaning, the conclusion that Bush’s war disgraced “globalism” is downright bizarre. It was precisely because the United States invaded Iraq without a United Nations mandate, in violation of the international order the United States created, that American standing in the world cratered. But Trumpians have somehow twisted this history — and the fiasco that Bush’s invasion created — into a justification for the president to act with wild unilateralism not seen since the late 19th-century. Or worse. Just listen to Trump as he staggers about like a mean drunk, threatening to slap Canada with tariffs in violation of his own trade agreement, threatening to send the US military into Mexico to fight drug traffickers, threatening to seize the Panama Canal, and even threatening Denmark (!) if it dares, again, to refuse to sell Greenland.

It’s impossible to imagine Donald Trump ever speaking sincerely about freedom being “on the march.” But threatening other countries with invasion? Or actually invading? Oh, yes. That’s easily imagined. He’s already done a little of that. So not only will Trump’s return to the White House mean freedom will lose its global champion and exemplar, the United States may actually switch sides. It will be fascinating to see how the venerable Freedom House scores freedom in the United States after a man who led a failed coup attempt becomes head of state.

So, yes, it seems that global freedom, so long in retreat, is in for even worse years ahead.

That’s enough grim tidings for New Years Day.

Let’s get to the part where I cheer you up.

It’s mostly forgotten now but in the early 1970s, when Freedom House started producing reports on global freedom, pessimism reigned. Not only was much of the world locked behind the Iron Curtain, decolonization had resulted in a bevy of new nations launched with hope and excitement only to see one after another succumb to dictatorship.

The renowned economist Robert Heilbroner looked at the state of the world and where it was headed. And drew conclusions that were both grim and typical of that grim time.

As I wrote in Future Babble:

Heilbroner wrote An Inquiry into the Human Prospect in 1972 and 1973. The mood was one of “puzzlement and despair,” he noted. “There is a question in the air, more sensed than seen, like the invisible approach of a distant storm, a question I would hesitate to ask aloud did I not believe it existed unvoiced in the minds of many: ‘Is there hope for man?’” Like a god standing at the crest of Olympus, Heilbroner gazed across history and the globe and rendered his verdict: Not really.

“The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seems to be very slim indeed. Thus, to anticipate the conclusions of our inquiry, the answer as to whether we can conceive of the future other than as a continuation of the darkness, cruelty, and disorder of the past seems to me to be no; and to the question of whether worse impends, yes.”

Heilbroner’s future was one of environmental breakdown, resource scarcity, and the replacement of liberal democracy by “iron” governments “probably of a military-socialist cast.”

And let me underscore: Heilbroner’s vision was hardly unusual.

In 1968, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index hovered in the 130 range: By the end of 1974, it was a miserable 43. Pessimism like that wouldn’t be seen again until the crash of 2008. In the New York Review of Books, the historian Geoffrey Barraclough cited a long list of authors who foresaw either depression or the rise of fascism before delivering his own verdict: “The odds, it seems to me, are that we shall get both.

Are you cheered up yet?

No?

Then let me make this very explicit: Although we remember the 1970s today as little more than the decade of disco, that era was, in fact, one of crushing pessimism. Informed observers the world over debated how nasty the future would get, but that it would be nasty was something that serious people scarcely discussed.

Imagine you published a book in 1974, or 1976, or 1980. In that book, you argued that stagflation would be beaten by the early 1980s and the US would once again be the undisputed economic leader of the world by the mid-1990s. You argued that by the year 2000 none of the old liberal democracies would have succumbed to fascism or communism, that fascist regimes in Spain and elsewhere would be swept away, and, most incredibly, the Soviet Union and the communist bloc would peacefully dissolve. And freedom? Liberal democracy would see such spectacular growth around the world that by the end of the century those Freedom House reports would include glorious numbers and the big debate would be whether liberal democracy’s undisputed triumph, and lack of serious rivals, could reasonably be called “the end of history.” Oh, and there would be massive improvements on a long list of environmental concerns. In short, you argued in your book that by the end of the century, the world would be far freer and more prosperous than ever before in human history.

How would your book sell? It wouldn’t. No publisher would have touched that in the 1970s. It would have been too ludicrous.

And yet, that ludicrous future came to be.

I personally don’t understand people who are fixedly optimistic or pessimistic about the world. (I describe myself as a “possibilist.”) How can anyone be optimistic or pessimistic when History loves nothing more than a good surprise?

Things are wonderful? Bang! An archduke is shot and German soldiers are marching through Belgium.

Things are horrific? Suddenly you are revelling in les trente glorieuses, as the French call the thirty glorious years following the end of the Second World War.

I don’t believe there is a God, much less a God directing events on Earth, but the one argument for a meddling God that gives me pause is how well-scripted history is: Every time we get used to some trend, and we assume it must continue, or even accelerate, and the whole show of life is starting to look a little tiresomely predictable — BAM! — we get one hell of a plot twist. Who could have come up with the career of Donald Trump if not some cosmic George R. R. Martin whose raison d’être is not love or consciousness but keeping the audience on the edge of its seat?

The phrase “this too shall pass” is most often used today as a form of consolation, but it originates in Jewish tradition or a Persian fable — I don’t think it’s clear which — and it means more than that. In one version of the story, the wise King Solomon asked a servant for a ring which, if a sad man wore it, he would be glad, but a happy man who wore it would be saddened. The servant could find nothing to match that description. So Solomon had a ring inscribed with “this too shall pass.” That phrase underscores the impermanence of all things. It counsels the prosperous and the powerful to be humble, and those who suffer to hang on.

More prosaically, we can adapt the oft-used expression of those who live in volatile climes: If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes.

In any event, the best advice, as usual, comes from Winston Churchill: In 2025, “keep buggering on,” everyone.

KBO.