It's a message that seems obvious only in the abstract, and is frequently forgotten in the particular. During the Cold War, the U.S. responded to the threat of World War Three in part by aiding democratic, anti-Soviet movements like Havel's -- but only in Eastern Europe. In the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, the U.S. suppressed democratic movements that it feared might align with communism and it supported or imposed pro-American dictatorships. Europe has been blessed with a period of remarkable peace, but those less democratic regions endured decades of conflict. In the Middle East, the U.S. still today supports dictatorships in the name of stability, and still today the region is among the world's most violent.

"Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens, there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and their state, there can be no guarantee of external peace," Havel wrote in 1985, when Soviet oppression of his country was at its height and often targeted him personally, in an essay titled Anatomy of a Reticence. "A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit. A manipulated population can be misused in serving any military adventure whatever."

On February 21, 1990, only weeks after becoming president of the newly independent Czechoslovakia, Havel addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress, which was eager to help him, his country, and all of Eastern Europe that had just freed itself from Soviet control. But he warned that the U.S. should "see a little further"; it should not consider the weakening of the Soviet Union (which would not fall for nearly two years) as a victory against evil, as Ronald Reagan had portrayed the Cold War, so much as an incremental step toward a more important goal of freedom for all people. More important than a massive Soviet defeat, in other words, was a smaller victory for something Havel named many times in this address and in so many of his speeches: democracy.

"Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness," Havel told Congress, referring to a movement toward democracy, "nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe for which the world is headed -- be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization -- will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war, or by the danger that the absurd mountains of nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitely won. This is actually far from being a final victory."