The United States today is in a new Cold War with China, and our current administration gives every indication that it is not up to this challenge. China’s geopolitical threat cannot be wished away. At stake in this struggle is the future world order, which will either be a U.S.-led order or one led by the Chinese Communist Party. It is a time for strong, resilient, prudent, and perceptive American leadership. We need another Ronald Reagan.
Forty years ago, beginning with his Westminster speech in London, President Reagan envisioned the collapse of the Soviet Union. The man who Democratic elder statesman Clark Clifford once called an “amiable dunce,” and who the mainstream press repeatedly ridiculed throughout his career as an unthinking extremist, had a better grasp of geopolitics than all of his Ivy League-educated critics. It is worth remembering this as we face-off against China in a new Cold War.
On June 8, 1982, Reagan addressed members of Britain’s Parliament in the Royal Gallery in the Palace of Westminster as part of a European journey that included visits to Rome, Paris, the economic summit at Versailles, and would later take him to Germany. He spoke about the challenge posed to the West by “a terrible political invention, totalitarianism.” He noted that we were “approaching the end of a bloody century” and referenced the crackdown of Solidarity in Poland, but said that he was optimistic about the future. Why was he optimistic?
'Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root'
Echoing Winston Churchill, Reagan observed that “From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none -- not one regime -- has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.”
Then, Reagan said he believed that we were at a “turning point” in the Cold War. The Soviet Union, he said, was undergoing a “great revolutionary crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. The Soviet Union,” Reagan said, “is in deep economic difficulty.” He further explained that the cause of this economic difficulty was the “constant shrinkage of economic growth combined with the growth of military production.” And the Soviet Union’s “political structure” no longer “corresponds to its economic base.” We were witnessing the “decay of the Soviet experiment,” Reagan concluded.
Reagan recounted the instances where “man’s instinctive desire for freedom and self-determination” surfaced in the communist world: 1953 in East Germany, 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and 1981 in Poland. And then he declared that the United States will cautiously force “the pace of change” in the Soviet empire. “What I am describing,” Reagan said, “is a plan and a hope for the long term -- 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.”
Reagan's strategy for winning the Cold War
What Reagan publicly revealed in broad terms at Westminster was a strategy for winning the Cold War; a strategy for bringing about the collapse of the Soviet empire. Unknown to most of the world, six months later on January 17, 1983, Reagan authorized National Security Decision Directive 75 (NSDD-75), a classified document every bit as important and consequential as NSC-68, the April 1950 classified document that instituted the policy of containment that had up to that point guided U.S. foreign policy towards the Soviet Union.
NSDD-75 effectively set a course for U.S. foreign policy to break with passive containment and foster the process of change within the Soviet empire. It identified as U.S. tasks: “To contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism by competing effectively on a sustained basis with the Soviet Union in all international arenas,” and to “promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced.”
NSDD-75 called for a broad modernization of U.S. military forces -- nuclear and conventional -- and a reinvigorated NATO. Equally important, NSDD-75 directed the use of economic policy to exploit Soviet economic vulnerabilities and called for political offensive warfare to be waged in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Soviet empire.
Communism a 'sad, bizarre chapter in human history'
Two months after signing NSDD-75, Reagan delivered his famous “evil empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals. There, he added his views that the Cold War also had a spiritual dimension that should not be ignored. He invoked C.S. Lewis (about the never-ending struggle between good and evil) and Whittaker Chambers (who described the Soviet communism as the “focus of concentrated evil in our time”), and told his audience that the “real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.” And then, consistent with his Westminster speech and NSDD-75, Reagan said, “I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.”
Four years later, Reagan’s policies had reached a point where he could confidently stand at the Brandenburg Gate at the Berlin Wall and call upon the Soviet leader to “tear down this wall.” By that time, Reagan had reinvigorated U.S. military power, forcibly overthrown a pro-Soviet, pro-Cuban regime in Grenada, installed intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe to offset Soviet deployments of the SS-20 missiles, provided military assistance to Afghan rebels and other rebel forces who were resisting Soviet or Soviet-backed regimes, provided aid and political backing to Poland’s freedom fighters, and used economic power (including reaching a deal with the Saudis to keep oil prices low which sapped the source of hard currency for the Soviets) to put further strain on a Soviet economy already in crisis (as Reagan had pointed out in his Westminster address). Two years later, the Berlin Wall fell and by 1991, the Soviet empire was gone.
In the 21st century’s Cold War, China is a more formidable adversary than the Soviet Union was in the first Cold War. But it, too, has vulnerabilities that can be exploited -- economic and political. It, too, has restless and long-repressed national groups who pine for freedom and independence. Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn recalled that in the mid-to-late 1970s, it was clear to him “that Communism could not last forever. It was decaying from within, chronically ill, but on the outside seemed immensely powerful, marching forward with great strides.” What the West needed, he said, was to abandon timidity and face the Kremlin with “unrelenting toughness.” In a speech in the U.S. Senate chamber in 1975 (later published in Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West), he told his audience, “Very soon . . . your country will stand in need of not just exceptional men but of great men. Find them in your souls. Find them in your hearts. Find them in the depths of your country.” Many years later in the National Review, Solzhenitsyn recalled those words and added, “Five years later, I was overjoyed when just such a man came to the White House” -- Ronald Reagan.
China’s challenge in the 21st century demands the wisdom, foresight, and prudent but strong leadership of another Ronald Reagan. Hopefully we can find one.
Read Full Article »
