Reagan Masterclass: Upholding Values and Interests Simultaneously
Jordan Schneider: So we are here at the Hoover Institution. A 2006 Chinese state TV documentary about the fall of the Soviet Union cited Ronald Reagan as saying,
The ultimate determinant in the struggle that’s now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets, but a test of wills and ideas.
Take that idea and apply it to the discussion we’ve been having.
Stephen Kotkin: Could that be truer today than it was when Reagan said it?
People have a hard time understanding Reagan. There’s so much partisanship, and he’s a complex figure. William Inboden’s book The Peacemaker on Reagan — it’s just a tremendous book, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly to your listenership.
So Reagan is two things simultaneously. It’s really important to understand. He’s a movement conservative: he believes in God; he talks about Christianity in God in his foreign policy speeches, as well as his domestic policy speeches. This is why Inboden — who wrote a previous book about the role of religion in the Cold War in our American foreign policy — is able to understand Reagan.
At the same time, he’s a dealmaker conservative — in the mold of the Shultz or the James Baker types: the people for whom free markets and open society are really important. And ultimately it’s about coming to agreements, and figuring out how to solve problems in enhancing prosperity and peace — and sometimes making some concessions, because you need to get to a better outcome. That’s what dealmaking is about. Making any concessions to a movement person is usually really hard. In fact, dealmaking for movement people is hard because your purity somehow gets … I don’t know if the word is “contaminated” — but the shine comes off a little bit in the nitty-gritty of the dealmaking.
So the beauty of Reagan — [who] once again, not everyone can grasp it because of the partisanship — is he’s a movement conservative and a dealmaking conservative simultaneously. And he’s a dealmaker because of the movement conservative side of him — because he wants a world of peace. He actually wants an end to nuclear weapons. He believes in this stuff, and he’s willing to deal as a result of those beliefs. So he’s an unusual person who combines both the dealmaking and the movement.
And so for Reagan, he can go to Moscow, and he can meet with the dissidents, including the evangelical Christians — who are the largest group of dissidents throughout Soviet history. It’s not the constitutionalists, it’s not the Western liberals who are as willing to die for their beliefs — [though] many of them are — it’s the evangelical Christians who are willing to die in order to practice their religion freely. And so Reagan will go meet with them — and then he’ll go meet with Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He’ll do both.
There are members of his administration who don’t like him meeting with the dissidents and the evangelical Christians, because it could undercut his ability to make a deal with Gorbachev. And then there are the people who are the movement conservatives in Reagan’s administration who don’t want any deals with the Communists — they don’t want any negotiations, let alone deals, with the Communists; they don’t think it’s proper for a US president representing the free world to even be in dialogue with such figures. And so for Reagan, it’s completely natural to meet with the dissidents at the ambassador’s house, and then to go over to the Kremlin and to meet with Gorbachev on the same trip.
And so, lo and behold, Reagan is able — in ways that we need to recuperate — to uphold American values and American interests simultaneously. He’s not just about values and democracy promotion or freedom promotion. And he’s not just about pragmatism and nitty-gritty interests. He’s not one or the other. He’s both of those things simultaneously. He can uphold our values, and he can uphold our interests. It’s not rocket science — but it is a history that we have to return to.
You know, I hear a lot of people saying, “Oh my God, no Cold War with China. God forbid we should have a Cold War with China.” And I think to myself, “What world do these people live in?” We’re already in a Cold War with China, because China started that long before we understood that that’s what they were doing.
Would you prefer a hot war? The alternative to Cold War is capitulation — which you can imagine I’m not in favor of — or hot war.
World War II was 55 million deaths; that’s the kind of low-ball number — it depends how you count the deaths in China, which are nearly impossible to fix with any accuracy in World War II. And it’s an exponentially larger number compared to World War I. So can you imagine World War III — God forbid, the exponential number of deaths increased over 55 million from World War II — that we’d be talking about? It’s just beyond comprehension — let alone that we have these nuclear weapons now, which we didn’t have in World War II until the very, very end (and in any case, the firebombing killed many more Japanese civilians than the nuclear weapons did).
And so just to keep this point: hot war is so bad, words couldn’t describe it. “Bad” is just an absurd word to describe what World War III would look like.
And so Cold War is this fantastic other option, where you can compete without hot war — where you don’t have to capitulate and you don’t get hot war. I mean, it’s just this fantastic solution sitting on the shelf for us.
And moreover, we’re good at it. We’ve done it before. We know how to do it. We have a lot of tools in the toolkit. Some of them need to be resharpened, some of them need to be refashioned — but we have this amazing body of knowledge and experience of Cold War that we can put to work again. And we’ve learned lessons of the mistakes that we made in the Cold War: for example, I would put Vietnam near the top of that list; and so there’s a lot of stuff that we did during the Cold War that we need not repeat because we’ve learned the lessons the hard way. The Vietnamese learned the lessons even worse than we did, because they died in much bigger numbers than we did; and so we can’t forget that either — the sacrifices that other places underwent because of our mistakes or our misguided application of the Cold War.
So not everything in the Cold War was magnificent, but there’s a lot in the Cold War that’s of great value, and it can be updated. And there’s going to need to be some new tools in the toolkit.
Now we see the technology export controls from Commerce on China in the tech sphere. Where did that stuff come from? What is that about? So people who are saying they’re in favor of technology export controls but they’re against the Cold War with China — I don’t understand how they could make both of those statements and hold them, because technology export controls were one of the great successes of the Cold War.
So I’m in love with the Cold War. I’m in favor of the Cold War. The Cold War is not only a good thing — it’s a necessary thing, because we have to uphold these values and these institutions. We have to uphold (what I’m calling) the terms of the way we share the planet.
The West is just this fantastic success story. It’s not a geographical term. It’s North America, it’s Europe, and it’s an enlarged version of Europe now; and it’s that whole first island chain in the Pacific in Asia: it’s South Korea; it’s Japan; you could include Taiwan or not, depending on your point of view about the One-China Policy in the West. You could certainly include Australia. And we could go beyond that, because it’s not just even North America, western Europe, and the first island chain. [It was] a club of institutionally similar, like-minded and -value-terms countries that was the basis for the GATT (before we got into the fiasco known as the WTO). It was the basis of this open, non-hierarchical, voluntary, free sphere of influence. That’s what the West is — as opposed to hierarchical, coercive, non-voluntary sphere of influence where you impede the sovereignty of your neighbors rather than enhance their peace and prosperity in a club that they’ve willingly joined (like Ukraine is trying to do).
And so this is our strength. This is how we should go forward. And China has to be a piece of that world. There can’t be a world without China — and that goes also for the Global South and all of those countries for whom we opened up the world order to allow peace and prosperity to spread. That was our policy. Our policy was for places like China or India to rise. That was an express policy. There was opportunity at home for social mobility, and there was opportunity abroad for other countries to join this enterprise.
The problem was always the terms of joining. You could join while cheating. You could join without abiding by the rules. You could join without having to do what you promised or what you signed in a treaty to do. I wouldn’t have done it that way. I would’ve upheld people to playing by the rules of the order that they were becoming beneficiaries of.
And so we need to open up that sense of opportunity for others — but we also need to understand what the terms are for them.
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