Reagan Kept Faith in America

American strategy and politics during the Cold War frequently worked from contradictory positions. On the one hand, American strategy, summed up by the doctrine of containment, was to outlast the Soviet Union. That was not a simple thing to do: it took courage, determination, and a lot of hard and contentious choices. But in the end it was based on the correct belief that the Soviet Union’s system was weak, and would grow weaker as the initial ideological impulse of its revolution faded, as it lost political legitimacy, as its subject peoples became restive, and as its economy, stifled under top-down controls, failed to grow, innovate, and adapt.

That calculation stemmed from a recognition that the free American system possessed all of the virtues that the Soviet one lacked. In other words, American strategy did not rest on the belief that the U.S. system was morally superior, though the moral appeal of freedom versus Communism was never absent. It rested on the belief that freedom worked, that being free would bring better results in practice. Freedom was a slower virtue, true: the Soviet Union had the ability to order money and people around, and ran the Warsaw Pact with a much tighter grip than the U.S. sought to do, or could do, in NATO. But the important thing about orders is getting them right, and the Soviet system was bad at that. As a result, all they got was extremely efficient inefficiency.

The U.S., by contrast, recognized that the virtue of its system was that it was limited, that orders issued from the top could never organize society as satisfactorily as free individuals making their own choices. The essence of American Cold War strategy, therefore, was to beat the Soviet Union by staying American, and by relying on them to stay Soviet. And it worked. Freedom turned out to be both morally preferable and practically superior. Politics in a democracy are rarely pretty, but they turned out to work much better than the politics of the sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy. Freedom didn’t win just because it was nice. It won because it worked.

The amazing thing about American politics during the Cold War, and especially the downbeat 1960s and 1970s, is how many people didn’t believe this. We suffered from a kind of schizophrenia. On the one hand, we fought the Cold War and proclaimed our faith in freedom. On the other, we worried that the Soviet Union was catching up to us economically, and that their empire had a legitimacy that our alliances lacked. At its more moderate, the argument was that both systems had something to be said for them, and that they would meet somewhere in the middle, in a mushy gray bureaucratic socialism. At its more extreme, the belief was that our system was simply less efficient than theirs, our politics a distraction, and our alliances a sign of our moral degradation, and that it was we who needed to change if we wanted to live in a world that they would define.

One of Reagan’s greatest contributions was to return to the commonsense faith that America worked, that the Soviet Union could not, and that we should, and could, win the Cold War by playing to our strengths and against their weaknesses. He was a remarkable orator, and one who was not afraid to speak simple truths plainly: his statement that the Soviet Union was an evil empire shocked an intelligentsia unused to hearing the obvious about an enemy that many no longer regarded as such. But he was more than an orator. Reagan believed that values could drive strategy, that if the U.S. and the West returned to freedom, if they abandoned the controls of the Nixon and Carter era, if they reduced taxes, if they put government back in its proper place, the U.S. would not only be doing the right thing. It would be fighting the Cold War to win.

The Soviet Union was doomed by its own failures. But the pressure Reagan exerted on it – economically, diplomatically, politically, and morally – hastened its demise. That strategy flowed fundamentally from his belief that the Soviet system did not work, and could not work. As he put it in a radio broadcast on May 25, 1977, “The Soviet U[nion] is building the most massive mil[itary] machine the world has ever seen and is denying its people all kinds of consumer products to do it. We could have an unexpected ally if citizen Ivan is becoming discontented enough to talk back. Maybe we should drop a few million typical mail order catalogs on Minsk & Pinsk & Moscow to whet their appetites.” It was his faith in America, his belief in the value of freedom, his ability to put this into words and to make it a strategy for victory that helped make Reagan a remarkable leader.

That is not just a lesson for history. It is a lesson for policy. Today, we are encumbered by commentators like Tom Friedman, who believe that “There’s only one thing worse, in my view, than one-party autocracy – the Chinese system – and that’s one-party Democracy. . . . [O]ne-party autocracy . . . can actually order the right things . .. collective action from the top down.” Even worse, we have since Reagan left office steadily expanded government in every direction, trying in vain to control everything and in reality only imposing new burdens on a steadily less free economy and citizenry. Obamacare, with its devil-may-care attitude to the Constitution and its claim that the government should have the power to tell Americans what to buy, is only our latest and largest retreat from Reagan’s belief that freedom works at home, and will work in our competition abroad.

It is no simple matter to build policies that respect freedom, but the sooner we return to trying – and the sooner we recover Reagan’s optimistic spirit that we can actually do it – the better we will have learned the lesson that he taught us during the Cold War.