#16 - JRL 8241 - JRL Home
From: Ira Straus (IRASTRAUS@aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2004
Subject: Remembering about Reagan and Russia

The passing of President Reagan seems to me a moment for reflection. Practically the entire universe of Russian and Soviet studies knew that Ronald Reagan was wrong when he said Communism would come to an end in the Soviet Union. The universe of international relations studies and the rest of the intellectual world for that matter was also sure he was wrong. Yet he proved right. Almost to a man (and woman), Soviet studies and the rest of academia proved wrong against him.

His death is a moment when perhaps one ought to reflect on why this was so.

At minimum, it seems that Reagan had good instincts, and the academic world did not. Perhaps he somehow knew better where to look for relevant information and how to process it. This ought to be a matter of concern for academia, whose main purpose is to understand how to find relevant information and how to process it.

Problems of bad instincts and poor information processing also permeated the mainstream of the political world. Most people thought Reagan was crazy and dangerous for speaking of an end of Communism. This was the line of conservatives and realists alike. Most conservatives also thought he was dangerously off-base; they welcomed his hard line but as a matter of containment, and were worried by his optimism and his belief in positive change. One inhabitant of the conservative milieu in Washington, the late Bernard Yoh, spoke of a long and difficult fight within his institute in the early 1980s to get it to hold a conference on the prospect of a world without Communism. A few years later, that prospect came into public view.

Reagan was one of the first to embrace Gorbachev, with encouragement from Margaret Thatcher. Here too he showed rare judgment. The center-right realists of the Kissinger-Scowcroft school objected to this embrace, seeing it as a form of succumbing to a clever scheme to divide and deceive the West, and as a diversion from the predictable centrist path that is needed to hold the alliance together. Conservatives similarly objected. Liberals welcomed the changes under Gorbachev, but mostly as a development that would remain within the Communist system and ought to be met with detente on the same assumption. These views remained predominant as late as the election campaign of 1988: most of the Republican candidates, including Bush Sr., ran on a platform of not being naive about Gorbachev, a failing of which implicitly they accused their President alongside the Democrats; while most of the Democrats were cautious if only for fear of such criticism. The Kissinger-Scowcroft views came back to power in 1989, with damaging consequences; U.S.-Soviet interaction was placed on hold for half a year, and the subsequent revolutions were met for the most part belatedly and passively.

Reagan was subjected in his time to enormous contempt for breaking with consensus about the future of the Soviet system. He also suffered demonization as a warmonger. He was said to be careless about nuclear weapons and war. He was frequently accused of provoking World War III, and sometimes of preparing to launch a nuclear war himself against the Soviet Union. When he dismissed the personal attacks with a joke about how he was going to launch the war in a few minutes, the major media deplored this with a straight face as a further proof that he didn't understand how serious a matter nuclear war was. In the Soviet Union itself, such depictions of Reagan fed into a war scare; although they were also made for the sake of the state propaganda campaign in the name of peace. In America the dark depictions of Reagan had an element of collective hysteria and whipped up fear, with the obvious partisan and ideological motivations in most cases. There was also a factor of social snobbery on the part of those who considered Reagan an idiot, and a level of animosity that seems hard to fathom in retrospect and is forgotten in the comments in the last day about how everyone in Washington found him lovable. There have been other hate campaigns -- against Clinton, against the current President Bush (and the result, not surprisingly, is that an extraordinary number of people tell pollsters that they "hate" Bush); there was one against Reagan too. Certainly it was not love that motivated the many in the intellectual world who, in the days after the attempt on President Reagan's life, remarked that it was a pity the bullet had not killed him.

When Reagan called the Soviet Union "an evil empire", it was in the course of arguing that it was a form of snobbery to stand above the battle in the name of peace. He later explained that he wanted the people in the hinterland to see every now and then that their government was aware of the elementary realities. On this matter, it was his critics who tended to be in denial of reality. There was campaign of denunciation of the attitude of "moral superiority"; this was answered with a campaign of denunciation of the attitude of "moral equivalency". Two fears were, however, at work on the part of his critics: first, that his attitude was arrogant and belligerent and would lead to war; second, that he was not merely describing the empirical reality a bit colorfully but was referring to "the evil empire", which sounds like something from the Book of Revelation (or, in a re-translation from the typical Russian translation, "the empire of evil"). And in fact he did sometimes express interest in the Apocalypse. Yet it did not seem to affect his judgment or his conception of the purpose of human action on earth.

It would perhaps not be out of place to hope for some reconsideration at this time from those who called Reagan a fool and a warmonger for his views on the Soviet Union. By now they surely have had enough time to see that they were wrong.

For those of us, on the other hand, who hoped he would prove right about an end to Communism but most of the time didn't really expect it, his death is an occasion to remember a man of unusual insight into the trend of global affairs. His views were to a large extent self-made, without much of an intellectual support milieu to help him avoid ideological fantasies, nor much of a moral support milieu; yet in matters of foreign policy he maintained his balance and realism. He believed in a need for a renewal of courage, a view that always raises a risk of recklessness; yet he seemed in practice fully aware of the countervailing virtue of prudence. The mix of courage and independence with sobriety and good judgment was a rare one. It was a tribute to his character. The world is a better place for it.