OPINION:
The Biden administration’s suggestion that it might be wise to entice China into helping broker a cease-fire or settlement to end the Russo-Ukrainian war smacks of the pre-Reagan establishment dealings with the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, foreign policy geeks thought the U.S. and the Soviet Union could work together to maintain world peace. It didn’t work then, and it’s even less likely to work now.
Detente, as implemented by President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, was based on the unstated assumption that U.S. influence and power was waning while the Soviet Union’s was growing. Stated more bluntly, we were losing and they were winning, and all that was left was to manage our decline wisely. This would finesse our otherwise absolute humiliation and avoid open warfare with our sworn enemies in Moscow.
The “experts” who bought into this scoffed at conservatives, who believed Moscow’s rulers, while intent upon defending their own homeland, were just as motivated by an ideological mission to create a Communist world. They believed the U.S. could treat the USSR like any large nation, respect her interests and all would be well.
As candidate and then president, Ronald Reagan never accepted what much of the Washington establishment saw as reality. He believed, first, that communism is evil, and its adherents would never voluntarily give up their dream of world conquest; second, that a Communist Soviet Union could never beat the United States economically or militarily if we stood up for our interests and values. He believed that America could bankrupt the USSR and in so doing force Moscow to abandon her messianic goals to survive.
Reagan famously told informed Richard Allen, his chief foreign policy expert, that he believed in a straightforward outcome to the Cold War: “We win, they lose.”
The very idea that we could win or that there could be a “winner” was anathema to the devotees of detente who dismissed Reagan as a simple-minded cowboy who just didn’t get it. A longtime and respected adviser to Democratic presidents put it more bluntly. Clark Clifford described the new president as “an amiable dunce.” Their panic may have been real as they believed openly competing with Moscow risked nuclear war.
Reagan believed the opposite. He believed that a strong and determined West could defeat what he later called the “Evil Empire” in Moscow but could do so peacefully. The result was “peace through strength,” ramping up defense spending, plans to build a missile defense system called “Star Wars” by detractors, and a determination to take on Moscow and her surrogates whenever and wherever.
The results startled Reagan’s critics. The Soviet Union, on the brink of economic collapse, installed its eighth and final leader in Mikhail Gorbachev and essentially sued for peace. The Berlin Wall came down, Moscow’s colonies in Eastern Europe and the Baltics slipped the noose, and the Soviet Empire became the Russian Federation — without bloodshed.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin later called this turn of events a disaster and has been striving unsuccessfully since to put the Empire back together.
As Yogi Berra might have observed, it seems like deja vu all over again. A new empire in Beijing run by men who see themselves as Marxist-Leninists is on the rise as they openly seek to overthrow the world economic, military and political order. They’ve tweaked and improved the old Soviet economic model and adapted it to today’s world, but underneath it all, they are not that different from Stalin and Mao. They want it all, freedom and the aspirations of those over whom they rule be damned.
What’s more, their belief that while the Soviets in an earlier era may have thought the United States and its Western allies were in decline, they know it. They are convinced that tomorrow is theirs in part because feckless Western leaders, rhetoric aside, are acting as if they know they are losing. Like the architects of detente decades ago, President Biden and other leaders seem to be simply trying to manage our decline risking armed conflict.
Mr. Biden’s policies are remarkably like those of Nixon and Kissinger; policies that led the Soviet leadership to believe they were on the verge of establishing the Communist hegemony of their dreams. It took Reagan with the backing of steadfast allies like Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and a solidly anti-communist Polish pope to change all that.
The question facing the world and those nations and peoples Beijing wants to swallow up today is simple enough; is there another Ronald Reagan out there? And if there is, will he or she come forward?
• David Keene is editor-at-large at The Washington Times.
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