Congratulations are due to the 8 million Iraqis who turned out to vote today. Regardless of your sentiments on the war, you should applaud and be heartened by a major milestone on Iraq's path toward becoming a free society. With Afghanistan and Iraq holding meaningful elections (although with years of hard work ahead to become truly free), hope begins to return to a fetid, tyranical region.

It is also a repudiation of decades of American "realpolitik" foreign policy; perhaps even its deathknell. Realpolitik relied on stability above all else. But stability among nations is a chimera. As Mark Steyn puts it today in the Chicago Sun-Times, "The geopolitical scene is never stable...'Stability' is a fancy term to dignify laziness and complacency as sophistication."

One way to think of realpolitik is as the foreign policy equivalent of communist economic policy. The economics of communism was based on central planning: the state/party controlled the economic sector, setting output levels, pricing, and distribution. Realpolitik attempted to control the international political environment via an analogous sort of "central planning": international bodies such as the UN were used to regulate foreign policy through their arcane bureaucracies. The rules of this bodies evolved over time to punish and constrain the most successful countries, and to give succor to the oppressive and genocidal, while providing a cosmopolitan lifestyle for those "public servants" lucky enough to be seconded to New York or Geneva by their masters. Think of the Soviet Union, where everyone lived in equal squalor, except for the apparatchiks, and you get the general idea. Central planning always has the short term appearance of stability, but is ultimately unsustainable and therefore unstable in the long run.

Like communism, realpolitik has fallen quickly, the result of decades of internal corruption, moral degradation, and an unsustainable ethical model. In the coming decades, we may well look back and see that the election today is to realpolitik what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to communism.

The global march from feudalism to freedom continues...