wanderlust

“We invested so much money and effort over so many decades to get behind the Iron Curtain, to talk about what democracy was, to keep the flag of freedom unfurled in people’s hearts […] just to give people a sense that they weren’t alone, and that maybe their ideas about the human spirit were not subversive.”

“It is true that bin Laden’s name was not chanted during any of the uprisings. However, neither was the United States’, nor were there any statues of liberty constructed, as was famously the case in Tiananmen Square in 1989. In fact, a case could be made that the Arab Spring demonstrated the irrelevance of the United States more than it did al Qaeda’s.”