[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
One reason why leftist establishment apparatchiks hate Donald Trump so much is because he brushes aside the conventional wisdom and tries approaches that they have dismissed as foolish, impossible, or worse. Remember John Kerry confidently declaring that there could be no peace between Israel and Muslim Arab countries until the Palestinian issue were resolved; then Trump concluded the Abraham Accords. Before Trump, another president upended the conventional wisdom, and also turned out to be right where the “experts” were wrong: Ronald Reagan.
As Rating America’s Presidents explains, Reagan became president in the era of détente, when it was generally agreed that the best way to deal with the Soviet Union and global Communism in general was to play down differences, turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses endemic to socialist states, seek accords that would ease tensions, prevent the use of nuclear weapons, and allow the two sides to continue in much the same way indefinitely.
The détente era reached its apex on June 18, 1979, when Jimmy Carter and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT II Treaty, and then, as the world watched agog, Carter embraced and kissed the Communist despot.
President Reagan set a different tone. He was a public critic of détente as disadvantageous to American interests. On June 8, 1982, in a speech before the British House of Commons, he contradicted the conventional wisdom that the Soviet Union was here to stay and boldly predicted its demise. Reagan said, “The march of freedom and democracy…will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
He went even further on March 8, 1983, in a speech to Christian leaders, when he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” He warned them against the temptation to “simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
The international media, as well as many foreign policy “experts” within the Reagan administration, were aghast, charging that Reagan’s rhetoric was reckless, destroyed the possibility for further détente accords with the Soviets, and greatly increased the possibility of nuclear war.
In calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” however, Reagan rejected the moral equivalency that had become fashionable during the era of détente and restored the idea of the Cold War as not just a jockeying for interests between two superpowers but a just and necessary moral crusade against a monstrous regime that victimized its own people. This heartened and emboldened Soviet dissidents and residents of Soviet satellites who had been dismayed to see the leading nation in the free world begin to treat the Soviet Union as if it were anything but a cruel totalitarian state.
At the same time, Reagan began a massive military buildup, again to the consternation of the foreign policy establishment, which again warned that he was risking a nuclear war. But Reagan’s remark that Marxism-Leninism would be relegated to the “ash-heap of history” was not just a rhetorical flourish. Reagan discerned what the establishment analysts missed: détente was allowing the Soviet economy breathing room, and the Soviets would not be able to keep up with the new arms race. Reagan calculated that the strain of trying to do so would weaken the Soviet economy, and that would lead to the end of the Soviet Union as a Communist superpower.
Reagan also directly challenged Soviet propaganda, which often found echoes in the Western media, claiming that the Soviet bloc was working for peace against a warmongering, imperialist United States. On June 12, 1987, at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, Reagan addressed Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev: “There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Two years later, the Communists could contain their peoples’ desire for freedom no longer. On November 9, 1989, East German authorities, under immense pressure, announced that their borders were open; hundreds of thousands of East Germans massed at the Wall, vastly outnumbering the guards, who ultimately let them through. The Berlin Wall, where so many people had been gunned down making a desperate rush for freedom, soon afterward began to be torn down. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.
The “experts” never saw it all coming. Only Ronald Reagan did.
