RUTHFULLY YOURS

Every ruling party in a democracy eventually wears out its welcome, and on Monday Canadians tossed out the Conservative Party after nine years in power under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. They’re now taking a gamble that the winning Liberals, led by 43-year-old Justin Trudeau, won’t return to the anticompetitive economic policies of the past.

Mr. Harper resigned as Conservative leader and said in a gracious concession speech that “the people are never wrong.” They’d clearly had enough of Mr. Harper, who governed sensibly but in his later years had grown increasingly insular and autocratic in stifling party debate. The Conservatives also suffered from the global commodity bust, which has sent Canada into a mild recession after years of outperforming most of the developed world.

The popular desire for change vaulted the Liberals to a surprisingly large victory with 184 seats in Parliament. They were also helped by the collapse of the hard-left New Democratic Party, which won only 44 seats compared to 103 in the 2011 election. The Conservatives will settle for 99.

Putin says Syrian government has ‘achieved significantly positive results’ against opposition forces.

MOSCOW—Syrian President Bashar al-Assad arrived in Moscow on an unannounced visit Tuesday, the Russian government said Wednesday, in the leader’s first known trip outside his country since the start of conflict there in March 2011.

In a statement issued by the Kremlin, Russian President said the Syrian government had “achieved significantly positive results” in its fight against an array of opposition forces.

Russia began an aerial-bombardment campaign in support of Mr. Assad’s forces in late September. Mr. Putin said Russia was willing “not only to take the path of military action in the fight against terrorism, but to take the path of a political solution” to end the conflict in Syria.

“It worries us as well—Russia, I mean—that unfortunately a minimum of around 4,000 people from the republics of the former Soviet Union have taken up arms against the government forces and are fighting on the territory of Syria,” Mr. Putin added.

According to the Kremlin statement, Mr. Assad expressed gratitude for Russia’s support.

“Surely no statesman in modern times … has been as revered and then as reviled as Henry Kissinger.” So begins Niall Ferguson’s commissioned biography. But reverence and revulsion for Kissinger have never been sequential. Instead, for sixty years, Henry Kissinger has been a paragon of of America’s bipartisan ruling class, whose evolving identity he has reflected.

Ordinary people, however, sensed that he cared less for them than for his own career and ideas, and that he has served America badly. In 1976, as Democratic and Republican Party elites were celebrating Secretary of State Kissinger’s 1972 deals with the Soviet Union, his 1973 “Paris Peace Accords” after which America’s naval bases in Vietnam became Soviet bases, and were looking none too closely at the substance of the newly established relationship with China, the insurgent faction of the Democratic Party that nominated Jimmy Carter made rejection of Kissinger the winning issue of that year’s presidential campaign. Meanwhile Ronald Reagan was doing the same thing on behalf of the Republican rank and file, and continued to do it through his landslide victory in 1980.

Henry Kissinger’s luminous career was punctuated by one great disappointment, namely his failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet system and the downfall of the foreign-policy system to which he devoted his life. That’s on par with the old joke: “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” Kissinger was more hedgehog than fox: The fox knows many things, said Archilochus, but the hedgehog knows one important thing. Kissinger knew one important thing, which had the sole defect of being wrong. Like the Bourbons, Dr. Kissinger has learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as he showed in an Oct. 16 essay for the Wall Street Journal entitled, “A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse.” Kissinger bewails “disintegration of the American role in stabilizing the Middle East order” and wishes to restore it.

As Angelo Codevilla argued on this site in his review of a new Kissinger biography, the great man took as dogmatic truth that the Cold War was unwinnable, and thus “’the goal of war can no longer be military victory,’ but rather to achieve ‘certain political conditions that are fully understood by the other side,’ and that to this end, the U.S would ‘present (the enemy) at every point with an opportunity for a settlement.’”

Ronald Reagan, by contrast, told the first meeting of his national security team, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.” He and his advisors–Richard Allen, William Clark, William J. Casey, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and then-younger men like Angelo Codevilla, Herbert Meyer and Norman Bailey–saw a sea-change when it stared them in the face.