How Ronald Reagan's courage changed America and the world

Ronald Reagan's Achievement

Ronald Reagan has changed America and the world, but the changes he made were to restore historic conservative values, not to impose artificially constructed ones.

Take his economic policy, for example. It was certainly a very radical thing to do when he removed regulations and cut taxes and left the Fed to squeeze out inflation by monetary means. Supply-side economics, Reaganomics, Voodoo economics-all these descriptions and mis-descriptions testified to the perception of what was proposed as something outlandish. But it really wasn't, and Ronald Reagan knew it wasn't.

After all, if you believe that it's business success that creates prosperity and jobs, you leave business as free as you possibly can to succeed. If you think that it's governmentstaxing, spending, regulating, and printing money-that distort the business environment and penalize success, you stop government doing these things.

If, at the deepest level, you have confidence in the talent and enterprise of your own people, you express that confidence, you give them faith and hope. Ronald Reagan did all these things-and it worked.

Today's American prosperity in the late 1990s is the result, above all, of the fundamental shift of direction President Reagan promoted in the 1980s.

Perhaps it's something of an irony that it's an administration of instinctive spenders and regulators that now is reaping much of the political reward. But we conservatives shouldn't really be that surprised, for it was the departure from some of those conservative principles, after Ronald Reagan and I left office, that left conservative politicians in both our countries out in the cold. One of Thatcher's iron laws is that conservative governments that put up taxes lose elections.

It is, however, for fighting and winning the Cold War that Ronald Reagan deserves the most credit-and credit not just from Americans, but from the rest of what we called in those days the Free World, and from those in the former Communist states who can now breathe the air of liberty.

President Reagan's "expert critics" used to complain that he didn't really understand communism. But he understood it a great deal better than they did. He had seen at first hand its malevolent influence, under various guises and through various fronts, working by stealth for the West's destruction.

He had understood that it thrived on the fear, weakness and spinelessness of the West's political class. Because that class itself had so little belief in Western values, it could hardly conceal a sneaking admiration for those of the Soviet Union. For these people, the retreat of Western power-from Asia, from Africa, from South America-was the natural way of the world.

Of course, there were always some honest men struggling to arrest the decline, or at least to ameliorate its consequences. The doctrine of "containment" was envisaged as a way of conducting a strategic resistance to Communist incursion. Similarly, the doctrine of "detente" also had its honorable Western advocates-none more so than Henry Kissinger. But the fact remains that it meant different things to different sides.

For the West, detente signified-as the word itself literally means-an easing in tension between the two superpowers and two blocs. This made a certain sense at the time, because it reduced the risk of a nuclear confrontation which Western unpreparedness had brought closer because we had allowed our conventional defenses to run down.

But it also threatened to lead us into a fatal trap. For to the Soviet, detente signified merely the promotion of their goal of world domination while minimizing the risk of direct military confrontation.

So under the cloak of wordy communiques about peace and understanding, the Soviet Union expanded its nuclear arsenal and its navy, engaged in continual doctrinal warfare, and subverted states around the globe by means of its own advisers and the armed forces of its surrogates. There was only one destination to which this path could lead that of Western defeat. And that's where we were heading.

This was a message which few newspapers and commentators wanted to hear. It was at this time-the mid-1970s that after one such speech I was generously awarded by the Soviet military newspaper Red Star the sobriquet of the "Iron Lady."

You might imagine that it would be easier to call for a return to military strength and national greatness in the United States, a superpower, than in the United Kingdom, a middleranking power. But, oddly enough, I doubt it.

America, as I found from my visits in the '70s and early '80s, had suffered a terrible decline of confidence in its role in the world. This was essentially a psychological crisis, not a reflection of realities. We now know that the arms build-up by the Soviet at that time was an act of desperation. The Soviet Union was dangerous-deadly dangerous-but the danger was that from a wounded predator, not some proud beast of the jungle.

The more intelligent Soviet apparatchiks had grasped that the economic and social system of the USSR was crumbling. The only chance for the state that had so recently pledged to bury the West, but which was now being buried by its own cumulative incompetence, was to win an arms race. It would have to rely for its survival on the ability to terrify its opponents with the same success as it had terrified its own citizens.