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In August 1968, as my family took a summerlong camping trip through Europe, 500,000 troops from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries rolled into Czechoslovakia to put down what Moscow perceived as the country’s intolerable deviation from its leadership of the Warsaw Pact nations.

It was tempting at the time to view this as a successful demonstration of Soviet force. After all, Moscow not only halted the rapid liberalization of Czechoslovakia—which had been driven by popular demands for expanded political freedoms and economic reforms—but had gotten other Warsaw Pact allies, such as Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, to help it do so.

In August 1968, as my family took a summerlong camping trip through Europe, 500,000 troops from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries rolled into Czechoslovakia to put down what Moscow perceived as the country’s intolerable deviation from its leadership of the Warsaw Pact nations.

It was tempting at the time to view this as a successful demonstration of Soviet force. After all, Moscow not only halted the rapid liberalization of Czechoslovakia—which had been driven by popular demands for expanded political freedoms and economic reforms—but had gotten other Warsaw Pact allies, such as Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, to help it do so.

In the fullness of time, though, history has come to see the events of that fateful summer very differently. And how could it fail to do so? Two decades later, an even greater wave of popular protests on behalf of political freedoms, known as the Velvet Revolution, arose in Czechoslovakia and quickly spread throughout Moscow’s client states in Eastern Europe, bringing about an end to four decades of communism in the region.

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Amid the dramatic back-and-forth about whether U.S. President Donald Trump will force Denmark to sell........

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