It would be difficult to overstate how loud the 2024 warnings sounded by Lech Wałęsa rang in my imagination when, weeks before the U.S. presidential election, he said that a Trump/Vance victory would be “a misfortune for the world.” Who could argue with him today? Then again, why would anybody have argued with him then? Wałęsa knew authoritarianism up close. Today, he is the last living author of the Cold War’s end. I’d sooner take his word than a thousand journalists or political scientists. Yet, his warning made barely a ripple eighteen months ago. I’ll wager today it’s all but forgotten.
I am thinking about it today, though, in the wake of Viktor Orbán’s crushing electoral defeat yesterday in Hungary. Orbán has been the “mouse” aiding Vladimir Putin’s “lion” for two decades while the world has teetered precariously back into an authoritarianism we thought was defeated as the eighties gave way to the nineties. Now the mouse is gone. The lion remains. It is a moment to take stock.
For a long time it has seemed right to say that the U.S. or the West’s having ‘won’ the Cold War has proved illusory. Those early days of the 1990’s were encouraging. History had ended. All the arguments were settled. Liberalism, democracy, and capitalism were the answer to every question. We would win the world to Western values one Big Mac at a time. The truth of how things would unfold proved to be somewhat different.
The long dream of the 1990’s ended with sharp suddenness on the morning of September 11, 2001. Our American confidence was shaken. Our character would follow quickly. But the more important harbinger of a different and darker future came a few months earlier in Ljubljana, Slovenia when newly-installed President George W. Bush felt that he “got a sense of [Vladimir Putin’s] soul.” In retrospect, we can feel sure Bush saw only what he wanted to see—or perhaps better, what a former-KGB officer wanted Bush to see.
Putin became the president of Russia just a year before Bush became president of the United States. Putin’s election followed the strange and transitional presidency of Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin did not cut a strong international figure, and Putin’s own first presidential candidacy was based on making Russia into a “strong state.” He consolidated power quickly, and has not been without power for more than a quarter-century. Across that time, U.S. presidents have hoped to find a way to work with Putin on the basis we have hoped the U.S. might partner with Russia since the Berlin Wall fell. The reality has been somewhat different.
We can see now that Putin has been restoring the tsarist system. The meaning of “strong state” has been ‘authoritarian state,’ a centralized state organized around one man. And, having consolidated that power at home in Russia, Putin has projected his desires internationally into Chechnya and Ukraine. To accomplish those actions in his expanding sphere of interest, Putin’s most important strategic goal has been the disruption of NATO. Orbán has been an important piece of that strategy for over a decade. At one time or another, so have been leaders in Slovakia and Serbia, as well as Meloni in Italy, AfD in Germany, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK…and, of course, Donald Trump.
The authoritarian momentum of the last twenty-five years all projects forward from Putin’s election in 1999. That momentum has waned and flagged from time to time. Putin has suffered setbacks—though he has won more than he has lost, and he never suffered a major defeat until April 12, 2026.
And so now, in a world perched precariously on the precipice of war, the question comes alive again—Can we win the Cold War again? The war that Putin has been fighting against constitutional government and the rules-based international order since 2000? Will we summon the resources to do that? Is it even possible?
Those questions hang in the air today. We all need to be thinking about them.
Reproduced with permission by Steven P. Millies with thanks.
