Rebuilding, Reaching Out, and Other Lessons from Ronald Reagan
Simon Miles
December 14, 2020
Ronald Reagan never shied away from criticizing the Soviet Union, especially early in his presidency. At his first press conference, he called its leaders fundamentally immoral liars. Before the British parliament, he lumped its ideology in with other vanquished forms of totalitarianism, an allusion to Nazism that cannot have escaped his audience. And, most famously, the fortieth president dubbed the Soviet Union an “evil empire.†Then something changed. In May 1988, in the heart of Moscow, Reagan described that earlier war of words as something long since abandoned — “another time, another era.†Confrontation, it appeared, had given way to cooperation between the superpowers. What can policymakers today learn from Reagan’s seeming ability to transform the Cold War as they confront the challenges of great-power competition?
On the one hand, there are those who answer: nothing. Reagan was no grand strategist, they maintain, but rather an improviser. His ostensible reversal in 1984 further proves the “ad-hocery†of U.S. foreign policy during the 1980s. And then there is the fact that, to some, the fortieth president simply was not intellectually up to anything akin to strategic thinking. On the other hand are those who maintain that Reagan had one big, key idea: Go on the offensive, and never relent. This doctrine of “maximum pressure†is credited with having brought down the Soviet Union and enjoyed traction in the White House of Donald Trump for a spell, albeit with little success. Whether critiquing him from the left or lauding him from the right, Reagan has become synonymous with inflexible, ideological foreign policy.
https://warontherocks.com/2020/12/rebuilding-reaching-out-and-other-lessons-from-ronald-reagan/
