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| A Reagan Doctrine for the Twenty-First Century |
| 2015-10-12 |
| [FreeBeacon] What to do? The time has come for a revised strategy towards Russia, the greatest military and ideological threat to the United States and to the world order it has built over decades as guarantor of international security. We've faced a similar problem before. To create a freer and richer world, not the United States but Russia must be knocked back on its heels. That is exactly what Ronald Reagan did in the final years of the Cold War. What is required today is a Reagan Doctrine for the twenty-first century--a comprehensive military, diplomatic, and cultural approach that elevates America's stature and diminishes Russia's. I can hear liberals already: Reagan, they'll say, was not a warrior but a peacemaker. Didn't he negotiate with Gorbachev, didn't he offer at Reykjavik to eliminate all ICBMs in exchange for the right of strategic defense? And so he did. But to focus only on Reagan's diplomacy is to suffer from historical myopia. It is to ignore Reagan's first term in favor of his second. The hawkish policies Reagan enacted between 1981 and 1985 gave him the economic, political, and military leverage to become friends with Gorbachev later. And only with Gorbachev: During Reagan's first term, three Soviet leaders preceded the author of glasnost and perestroika. The president didn't meet with any of them. "They keep dying on me," he liked to say. In their moral disapproval of force, in their fallacious belief that human beings of every nation and every government share the same values and interests, liberals forget that every diplomatic solution is based on the balance or preponderance of military power. It is the weaker party that seeks negotiations--just as Europe and the United States, consumed by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, did after Russia's invasion of Georgia. Just as President Obama, preoccupied with ending the Middle Eastern wars and resolving the financial crisis, attempted his reset with Russia. Just as Europe and the United States, in the grip of anomie and malaise, have sought to freeze the conflict in Ukraine and "de-conflict" the escalating war in Syria. ... |
| Posted by:Blossom Unains5562 |
| #4 Do not fail to credit Carter who was so horrible that it encouraged the Soviets to overextend themselves in time for Reagan. Hopefully Obama's horribleness may someday serve in the way. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2015-10-12 13:46 |
| #3 The EUSSR politburo wants Europe to be a superpower but noone else wants them to be. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2015-10-12 06:04 |
| #2 The USSR was moribund by 1980 but the Reagan era defense buildup pushed the end of the regime much faster than it would have happened in the absence of the buildup. The Reagan defense buildup is also something which got amoral guys who cared about a guaranteed paycheck more than anything else in the universe to vote for Republicans for the first time since the New Deal (Reagan Democrats) by replacing the union jobs they lost under Carter with de facto government jobs in the defense industry. Unfortunately, they weren't voting on principle and weren't authentic conservatives and as soon as the Cold War was over and their defense jobs went away they went back to voting for Democrats. I liked Reagan and voted for him. But I sometimes wonder. He got elected promising to a) put the Soviets out of business and b) shrink government. He hastened the former for sure, but failed utterly at the second. History shows the Soviets were gone anyways. In retrospect, he should have spent more political capital getting rid of the Dept. of Education and other agencies, and trimmed those agencies he couldn't eliminate. In 1982 it may not have looked that way but in 2015 it looks like he concentrated on the wrong monster to kill. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2015-10-12 05:53 |
| #1 Personally, I think that USA's era as "sole superpower" was a disaster---both foreign & domestic. The sooner we're back to bi-polar world (and these arrogant degenerates of EU are taught their place) the better. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2015-10-12 02:58 |