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The Spectacle Blog
As we conservatives celebrate the centennial of Reagan’s birth, we should be careful to explain and defend his decisive role in bringing about the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
I say this because there’s been a lot of revisionist history to the effect that Reagan was just one of many presidents, beginning with Democrat Harry Truman, who worked to defeat the Soviets.
This is misleading; and it ignores a fundamental difference between Reagan and his predecessors: Whereas they were intent on accommodating and containing the Soviets, Reagan was determined to defeat and destroy them.
Indeed, “we win; they lose,” is how he summed up his strategy. That sounds uncontroversial today, in the light of historical hindsight. But at the time, Reagan’s winning strategy was extremely contentious and controversial.
In fact, most of the leading liberal intellectuals — and even many Republican foreign policy “realists” — thought Reagan was dangerous and delusional
Dinesh D’Souza captured the thinking of these “wise men,” and the contempt they had for Reagan, in his fine study, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
For example,
Strobe Talbott, a senior correspondent at Time and later an official in the Clinton State Department, faulted officials in the Reagan administration for espousing “the early fifties goal of rolling back Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” an objective he considered misguided and unrealistic.
“Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end,” Talbott scoffed, adding that if the Soviet economy was in a crisis of any kind, “it is a permanent, institutionalized crisis with which the U.S.S.R. has learned to live.”
Equally scornful was Sovietologist Stephen Cohen of Princeton University, who wrote in 1983: “All evidence indicates that the Reagan administration has abandoned both containment and détente for a very different objective: destroying the Soviet Union as a world power and possibly even its Communist system.”
Cohen was absolutely right: The Reagan presidency did effect a fundamental departure from past American foreign policy, and thank goodness for that.
Reagan’s offensive-minded strategy to beat the Soviets is something we conservatives should remember today as we grapple with a new, and in some ways more dangerous, foreign policy challenge in the threat of radical Islam.
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More Blog Posts by John R. Guardiano
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/02/07/reagans-foreign-policy-was-tha
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Ken (Old Texican)| 2.7.11 @ 12:52PM
Mr. Guardiano,
The problem is that you and I cannot set foreign policy, and Obama and Hillary are going to screw it up across the board.
I have never called for impeachment of Obama or Biden...until today... (my goodness, whack-job Pelosi was next in line).
Boehner is smart enough to get the right advisors to keep us out of a major nuclear war...or win it if necessary.
I hope impeachment articles are quietly being written as I write.
Please keep in mind that Pakistan has some 100 deliverable nukes.......... today...one demonstration away from changing hands to the terrorists.
Devasahayam| 2.7.11 @ 2:11PM
On your claim that Pornistan's (name given to Pakistan by ActForAmerica founder Brigitte Gabriel (1)) weapons are "one demonstration away from changing hands to terrorists", you are mistaken. They are already in the hands of the master-terrorists, the ones in uniform (of Pornistan military (2))
(1) aptly, given that the country outranks India, US, UK and Canada (EACH of the first three has an online community which outnumbers that of Pornistan) combined in searches for online pornography--and also its active harbouring of Haqqani Network of Taliban, the largest producer of the hardest-core pornography at which even Larry Flynt would cringe
(2) see the nation's history since 1970--it grotesquely murdered 3.5 million of its citizens (of which 2.3 million were Muslims, 1 million Hindus, and 200,000 mostly Buddhists) in 1971, and another 700,000 between 1977 and 1988 during the Robespierrean reign of Zia ul-Haq (who was among the Naziesque war-criminals responsible for the 1971 murders).
Occam's Tool| 2.7.11 @ 1:32PM
Strobe Talbott is a lefty swine on foreign policy, like Ron Paul.
Devasahayam| 2.7.11 @ 2:21PM
Unfortunately, Reagan made one dangerous error of foreign policy which adversely affected US down-road, as well as two other errors which are not exactly detached:
(1) the worst error: he asked Israel not to bump-off Yasir Arafat in 1982 Lebanon, and airlifted the POS to Tunis--from where he helped plot (along with Hizballah) the blow-ups of American Embassy and Marine Barracks in Beirut, and also ordered the murder of Leon Klinghoffer.
(2) He also amnestied 3 million illegals, causing delays (some grievous) for potential legal immigrants (the mess we have today with malfeasants is a consequence of this)
(3) Finally, he pushed Canada-US Free Trade Agreement to Congress without considering the immigration-related ramifications and as consequence failed to train US Immigration and State Department (especially Consular Officers) officials on these.
On #2 and #3, I suffered greatly; in 1997, I (then on TN-1) received news of approval of I-140 for EB-3 labour-certification (admittedly, I failed to ensure in 1996 that it was EB-2, for which I qualified in spades, rather than EB-3)--along with the disastrous (for any long-range plans such as marriage) news that I could NOT proceed further (and at a time when H1-b cap had been reached for FY-1998, so I would have had to wait till FY-1999 to even get that type of visa, had I wished it--which I didn't)!
And if you attempt to claim that US Immigration/Consular officials understood the ramifications--then explain to me why when I returned in March 1999 to Atlanta from Gatwick I was asked "where's the visa?"!