PERSPECTIVE ON FOREIGN POLICY : We Didn’t Win the Cold War : This boast insults the masses of people who risked everything to turn their countries toward democracy.

If there is one thing Americans agree on, it is that “we won the Cold War.” Unexamined and unchallenged, this simplistic notion is a reminder that we have not come so far in international relations and foreign policy. While it sounds reasonable at first--because democracy seems to be the preferred system for most of our ex-adversaries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union--the claim is presumptuous, ethnocentric and insulting to the people and places it describes.

In visits across several countries of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Commonwealth of Independent States, I have not yet found a local person who thinks that America or the West generally won the Cold War. Knowledgeable people do credit the ideals of American democracy as one factor contributing to the end of the Cold War, as well as the arms race’s hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union. But they think that they themselves had more to do with the several revolutions and reforms that have swept the region since 1989.

The expressions of gratitude to the West by Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa and other leaders were more in anticipation of help than repayment for our vigorous and steadfast support. In fact, it could be argued that we did very little, very late. From the Hungarian revolution of 1956 to the Prague Spring of 1968 and the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the West was quite cautious--anything but a mighty contributor to the end of totalitarian rule. Indeed, our intelligence organizations were caught off guard when the Berlin Wall collapsed and country after country rejected Marxist-Leninist ideology for their own idea of democracy and a market economy.

In more than 100 interviews over a two-year period with chiefs of state (among them Havel and Walesa), journalists, intellectuals and ordinary citizens, I came to appreciate and respect the degree of suffering endured--from hard time in prison to psychological intimidation. These risk-takers, who put their own lives and their families’ futures on the line, deserve more than our self-congratulatory political rhetoric. We should not confuse their admiration for our democratic ideals and our concepts of freedom of expression with their own self-determination.

No mistake about it, we are held in esteem. I heard leaders quote Jefferson and Lincoln and was touched by taxi drivers who wanted to be sure I noticed the American flag on their dashboard. There is widespread support for press freedom and a penchant for capitalism and popular democracy. But in the end, the people who rejected communism want to claim credit for their own victory rather than attribute their success to others.

The idea that we won the Cold War--even when we include its beneficiaries in the “we”--is paternalistic and self-serving. In time, it will do damage to our present good relations, especially if American and other Western support for still-floundering countries isn’t more significant than it has been to date.

Allowing this slogan to permeate our national discourse is delusional. We once saw these countries as a grim, gray bloc; now they are happy and industrious democracies dedicated to market economies--both views are vast over-simplifications and just plain wrong.

Seeing the several, quite different, countries of the old Eastern bloc as one entity distorts reality in another way. Few of the governments in the region are truly stable, and not all are led by people we’d regard as fully democratized. The former communists may be out of sight at the moment, but they are very much on the scene and hoping that the new governments will fail, reviving support for their own greater involvement, if not their return to power. By the same token, the so-called new market economies are not necessarily new, but actually the vestiges of the old command system of government control and enterprise, lumbering slowly toward change. The emerging free press of the region is similarly unstable, with many publications being established, then dying because of financial malnutrition or lack of support.

Beyond Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, the notion that communism is dead and that the Cold War is over ignores China, North Korea and other countries where our ideas are certainly not universally admired or emulated--at least not yet.

Leaders eager to claim the spoils of victory in the post-Cold War period may have short-term satisfaction as they make long-term enemies who will rightly resent such ethnocentric arrogance. We need more sensitive language that appropriately gives credit to the long-suffering, highly intelligent and courageous people of Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, who were and are stewards of their own destiny. We need to end our self-congratulatory orgy and assist more vigorously in their transition.