How 'Dallas' Won the Cold War

Great column. I knew as soon as I read the headline what the column was going to be about:

Joseph Stalin is said to have screened the 1940 movie "The Grapes of Wrath" in the Soviet Union to showcase the depredations of life under capitalism. Russian audiences watched the final scenes of the Okies' westward trek aboard overladen, broken-down jalopies -- and marveled that in the United States, even poor people had cars. "Dallas" functioned similarly.

"I think we were directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the [Soviet] empire," Hagman told the Associated Press a decade ago. "They would see the wealthy Ewings and say, 'Hey, we don't have all this stuff.' I think it was good old-fashioned greed that got them to question their authority."

This is dead on. The best thing we could do to undermine the regime of Kim Jong Il in North Korea is broadcast an endless stream of U.S. television -- and is another great example of how trade embargoes are counter-productive. Whether it be the struggle against communism or radical Islam, both are fundamentally battles of ideas, and policymakers would be do well to remember that U.S. culture and related soft power are a key part of the U.S. arsenal in this fight.

Anecdotally I knew a guy that lived in Hungary a few years after the end of communism and he said that the streets were absolutely vacant when Dallas aired. Another effect of the show is that plenty of Hungarians were anxious to introduce him to their daughters, figuring that Dallas was representative of the way in which many Americans lived.