Authoritarianism doesn’t make your country smart or strong.
Liberal democracies are not perfect, and military debacles obviously happen here, too. But our openness at least permits us to identify and correct errors...
Liberalism does not make people perfect, nor does it create heaven on Earth.
But its great genius is that it invented a way out of this kind of trap. Liberalism gives us a method of blundering our way through trial and error toward better answers.
Those Westerners who wish to throw away this inheritance should look at the grim fate of Russian conscripts being marched off to their deaths not as a model but a cautionary tale.
