Freedom triumphed over tyranny due in large measure to President Ronald Reagan, who summed up his strategy with four simple words: ‘We win, they lose.’
Freedom triumphed over tyranny due in large measure to President Ronald Reagan, who summed up his strategy with four simple words: 'We win, they lose.'
F or nearly four decades following World War II, the United States and its allies followed a policy of containment of communism. That policy cost tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet in 1980, communism was not only alive and seemingly well in the Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, mainland China, Cuba, and North Korea. It had also expanded into Vietnam, Cambodia, sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Clearly, containment was not working.
A new American president, Ronald Reagan, determined to challenge directly the vital center of communism — the Soviet Union. He directed his national-security team to develop a plan to end the Cold War by winning it. As he put it, “We win, they lose.”
Based on intelligence reports and his life-long study of communism, President Reagan was convinced that the Soviet Union was cracking and ready to crumble. While the USSR projected an image of strength, in truth, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary who assumed power in 1985, took command of an imploding empire.
Almost 70 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet economic growth was stagnant, farms were unable to feed the people, factories failed to meet their quotas, consumers lined up for blocks to buy the bare necessities, and the Afghan war dragged on with no end in sight.
With Harvard historian Richard Pipes as the principal author, the National Security Council drafted a strategic plan to be implemented through a series of NSDDs (National Security Decision Directives). NSDD-32 declared that the U.S. would seek to “neutralize” Soviet control over Eastern Europe and authorized covert action. NSDD-66 stated that the U.S. would attack a “strategic triad” of resources — financial credits, high technology, and natural gas — essential to Soviet economic survival. It amounted to a secret declaration of economic war on the Soviet Union. NSDD-75 said that the U.S. would no longer coexist with the Soviet system but would seek to fundamentally change that system.
The administration initiated a multi-faceted foreign-policy offensive that included covert and other support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, a psychological operation to engender indecision and fear among Soviet leaders along with an increase in pro-freedom public diplomacy, a global campaign to reduce Soviet access to Western high technology, and a drive to hurt the Soviet economy by driving down the price of oil and limiting natural-gas exports to the West.
Leading the U.S. offensive was President Reagan, who aimed a series of powerful rhetorical blows at the Kremlin. He went public with his daring prognosis of the systemic Soviet weakness in May 1982. Speaking at his alma mater, Eureka College, the president declared that the “Soviet empire” was “faltering because rigid centralized control has destroyed incentives for innovation, efficiency and individual achievement.”
One month later, Reagan delivered a prophetic address, much of which he personally drafted, to members of the British parliament at Westminster. The president said the Soviet Union was gripped by a “great revolutionary crisis” and that a “global campaign for freedom” would ultimately prevail. The president predicted that “the march of freedom and democracy . . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.” The words stung Soviet leaders because Leon Trotsky had used almost the same words in 1917 when the Mensheviks walked out of a Soviet Congress, inspiring Trotsky to say they were headed for the “dustbin of history.”
The New York Times scorned the Westminster speech as an appeal for “flower power,” and asserted that “curiously missing from his plan was any formula for using Western economic strength to promote political accommodation.” But Reagan did have a carefully detailed plan, one calculated to achieve victory, not more accommodation.
The Eureka and Westminster speeches prepared the way for perhaps Reagan’s most consequential foreign-policy address — his “evil empire” speech. Speaking to an audience of evangelical ministers on March 8, 1983, Reagan described the Cold War not as a strategic or economic or political conflict but as a war between good and evil, between those who placed man at the center of their existence and those who believed in a transcendent order.
He enjoined the ministers to pray for the Soviets but minced no words when referring to their attempt to communize the world.
“Let us pray,” he said, “for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness — pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”
Reagan drove the stake home, urging his audience not to ignore the facts of history but to acknowledge “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” No American president had ever called the Soviet Union what it truly was — an evil empire, responsible for the deaths of 100 million victims. Reagan concluded by echoing the language of his Westminster address, saying: “I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.” He believed this, he said, “because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual.”
Many historians consider Reagan’s “evil empire” speech the most important of his presidency, an example of what Vaclav Havel called “the power of words to change history.” Far off in the gulag, the Russian dissident Anatoly Shcharansky (later Natan Sharansky) saw the phrase “evil empire” on the front page of the Soviet publication Pravda. In his prison cell, he tapped out on the wall to other prisoners what Reagan had said about the Soviets. At last, he said, America had a leader who “understood the true nature of communism.”
John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of Cold War historians, argues that in using the “evil empire” phrase, Reagan and his anti-communist allies broke with the old policy of containment and laid the groundwork for the collapse of Soviet communism.
Conceding the importance of the U.S. defense buildup, the primacy of SDI (the Strategic Defense Initiative), and the American resistance to Soviet expansion around the world, the political analyst Leon Aron nonetheless stressed Reagan’s emphasis on the role of ideas. Reagan did more, Aron said, to delegitimize and demoralize the Soviet Union than anyone else.
President Reagan was not impressed by the Soviets’ military might — its hundreds of tanks and millions of soldiers. For Reagan, there was no parity between America and the Soviet Union for one key reason: Americans were free while communists were not.
President Reagan asserted that the time had come to defeat, not simply contain, communism. Seeking peace through strength, he nearly doubled defense spending, and inaugurated the Reagan Doctrine, which put the Soviet Union on the defensive for the first time in Cold War history.
As the famed Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it, the Soviet Union had no choice but to disarm. A clear and present danger that had occupied the United States and the world for 40 years was no more. Freedom had triumphed over tyranny due in large measure to President Ronald Reagan, who summed up his strategy with four simple words, “We win, they lose.”