Europe, Canada, and the democracies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America now bear the burden of keeping the old American ideal of the free world alive. While the ideal was always a noble lie, it enabled hundreds of millions of people to imagine a better world during the Cold War, and it could do so again.

VIENNA—Anyone old enough to remember the Cold War will also remember an imagined place called the “free world.” It was where Westerners believed they lived, while Eastern Europeans, Russians, and Chinese lived behind barbed wire.