Word: sovietize
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Reagan won that war not just with radical policies but also with a radically unashamed ideological challenge, the great 1982 Westminster speech predicting that communism would end up in the "ash heap of history" and the subsequent designation of the Soviet Union as the "evil empire." That won him the derision of Western sophisticates, intellectuals and defeatists of all kinds. It also won him the undying admiration of liberation heroes from Vaclav Havel to Natan Sharansky. Rarely does history render such decisive verdicts: Reagan was right, his critics were wrong. Less than a year after he left office, the Berlin...
...happened--as Hollywood would have seen fit to script it--the only people aside from Reagan who really believed in Star Wars were the military leadership of the Soviet Union. The Zap! Pow! Bam! comic-book defense strategy reinforced Moscow's growing despair about the future and hastened the end of the cold war. And that, finally, is what has proved most galling to the Gipper's ideological opponents: his glossy Hollywood optimism proved more supple than the professional pessimism of the intellectual left. Ultimately, Reagan's sloppy and often insensitive domestic governance will have little impact on his place...
...fact, I didn't understand how truly monumental, and morally important, Reagan's anticommunist vision was until I visited the Soviet Union in 1987. My first night there, I was escorted to the Bolshoi Ballet by two minders from the U.S.-Canada Institute. The Russians were thrilled that I had figured out the Cyrillic alphabet and was able to read the program. The young woman on my left rewarded me with a smile--a rare public act in that terrifying regime--and a whispered encouragement: reform was coming. Glasnost and perestroika, she assured me, were real. The minder...
When Reagan took office, the Soviet Union was 64 years old, nearly eligible, as it were, for Social Security. The rot in its marrow, while still hidden to the outside world and U.S. intelligence, was metastasizing. Reagan's great contribution to the end of the cold war was first understanding that Moscow's cancer was terminal and then working to ensure--through arms control, constrained rhetoric and personal diplomacy--that the end would come about, peacefully but inexorably...
Reagan's instincts, like his rhetoric, evolved over the course of his two terms as the ground began shifting beneath him. After a decade of Presidents carefully talking detente, Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and accused its leaders of claiming "the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat." To armor such rhetoric, Reagan demanded and got a huge increase in U.S. defense spending. He nearly doubled defense spending during his first term while deploying medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe and battling communists in Central America. He rarely gave ground, and fumbles in foreign...