From Prague 1989 to Washington 2026: What Trump's America Can Learn From the Velvet Revolution

The regime fell in six weeks. The structural conditions that had made it possible did not. The difference matters for America.

In December 1990, I attended a Christmas service in Prague.

The revolution had happened fourteen months earlier. The last Soviet-backed government had fallen in November 1989, Václav Havel had gone from prison to president in six weeks, and this was the city’s second free Christmas. I knew, standing in that church, that I was witnessing something. The em…