Big Democracies at the Crossroads

• In a balloting year filled with surprises from India and Venezuela, and with Americans battered by the Bush-Kerry race, what do Russia and Indonesia tell us about the future character of democracy as a globally expanding project?

Too Much Global?

• By pairing the global and the local with the national and the personal, we introduce a more perfect union of inquiry into a world caught in the throes of globalization and confronting a loss of communal meaning and values

His eyes on the Kremlin,
President pushed USSR downfall

Special Feature: Won for the Gipper?

By Harvey Sicherman
Commenting from Philadelphia, US

Ronald Reagan lived a uniquely American life. It was also, as he himself often remarked, a highly improbable one. A small towner from the Midwest parlays a sporting talent into radio broadcasting, broadcasting into movie-acting, thence to union leadership, thence to corporate communications, finally to politics, vaulting from the governorship of California to his party’s presidential nomination on his second try. Two landslides and eight presidential years later, Reagan bequeaths an economic revival and victory in the Cold War to an admiring America. “All in all, not bad, not bad at all,” as he declaimed in his farewell address….

As for the Soviet Union, Reagan was a “container” in the vigorous way of the early Cold War. He believed that the communists justified their tyranny through conflict and expansion but this “evil empire,” to use Reagan’s famous later phrase, operated on such absurd economic and social principles that if its aggressive march could be arrested by superior Western strength, then its collapse could be foretold. This had to be done while avoiding the disaster of a nuclear war. He summarized his views in his autobiography: “You had to wonder how long the Soviets could keep their empire intact. If they didn’t make some changes, it seemed clear to me that in time communism would collapse of its own weight, and I wondered how we as a nation could use these cracks in the Soviet system to accelerate the process of collapse.”

One task therefore was “moral rearmament of the West.” Another was military rearmament, even if it meant very large deficits. Yet another was a negotiation from strength that would ease military tensions even as other pressure on the Soviets increased. Altogether, the “correlation of forces,” to use the Soviet phrase, would be changed for the benefit of the democracies.

None of this proved as smooth as the obituaries suggest. Reagan pursued policies that angered US allies and produced vast crowds of European protestors; he was scorned and derided by the chattering classes on both sides of the Atlantic. But his eyes were on the Kremlin. Reagan’s ability to rearm in the midst of a deep recession, and his readiness to decry the Soviet empire while remaining popular, made a deep impression. When Gorbachev finally appeared on the scene, the correlation of forces was shifting fast and the “process of collapse”—soon to be called perestroika—was under way.

The two did not hit it off immediately. “A real dinosaur” said Gorbachev after the first exchange; “a hardheaded Marxist ideologue” concluded Reagan. Nor was their progress gentle. In the famous collision at Reykjavik in 1985, Reagan angrily concluded that Gorbachev was after SDI, the missile defense system key to US security in Reagan’s mind. Yet, the two managed to salvage nuclear arms reduction in Europe. And two years later, Reagan would produce a favorite set piece in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

By 1989, Reagan declared that US-Soviet relations were fundamentally altered. Reagan had learned a Russian formula, which he repeated with tiresome frequency: “trust but verify.” And Gorbachev, he was sure, would take the evil out of the Soviet system.

Most analysts regarded Reagan’s conclusion as somewhat premature. This was largely because the Soviet empire still lay thick upon the world and geopolitical conflicts had hardly dissipated. It fell to his successor to manage the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union which accelerated, as he thought it would, once the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Nor were Reagan’s own policies uniformly wise or successful: Central America appeared a draw; Afghanistan was still aflame; the United States suffered a stunning reversal in Lebanon while making no headway on the Arab-Israeli conflict or peace in the Persian Gulf. Moreover, by the end of his term, Reagan had been hard-pressed by the Iran Contra scandal, a byproduct of a defective management system.

Reagan’s weakness in this respect was the darker side of his strengths. The presidential intellect was not at fault. Rather, it was Reagan’s detachment from issues that he did not fathom because he lacked curiosity or relied on others to fix. Reagan’s self-sufficiency let him pick a strong cabinet to do the people’s business while he focused on what mattered most to the country and where his instincts offered a sure guide….

Fittingly enough, Ronald Reagan died on the eve of another of his favorite set-pieces, the commemoration of D-Day. This was the event that marked the change in America that changed the world. And it would fall to Reagan to revive the spirit of that change and, in so doing, change the world once more.