I had a review in Sunday’s Washington Post of this fascinating new book on Reagan, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons by Paul Lettow. We tend to forget that Reagan was an utterly committed nuclear abolitionist. Couple of things occurred to me in reading the book:

1) There is a certain value in principled impracticality. Reagan’s deeply held utopian view is what prompted him to be so creative in terms of policy, embracing SDI and never giving it up, thus giving the Soviets a big push toward the dustbin of history. I have been occasionally critical of Bush’s unmodulated pro-democracy rhetoric, but it is reflective of a deeply-held, somewhat-utopian belief that has made him adamant about breaking with decades-worth of US policy in the Middle East.

2) There is no substitute for imagination and intuition. They are so much more important to a leader than area-expertise or intellectual sophistication. Long before he took office Reagan intuited the weakness of the Soviet Union (its economy) and a way to exploit it (the arms race) that was dismissed as nuts by the experts. He then had the imagination to believe that his basic beliefs on this question could be acted on, work, and change the world forever. He was right. The parallels with Bush in the Middle East are obvious.

3) You don’t have to be all hard-line all the time. Reagan pushed the US arms build-up to change the fundamental power relationship between the US and the USSR, but then was willing to engage in intense personal diplomacy with Gorbachev, which very well may have helped nudge the Soviet leader along the path of change. In a similar way, after the Iraq invasion created a major new reality in the Middle East, Bush is resorting to other means as circumstances warrant, including intense diplomacy in Lebanon and (for now) a compromise approach with the Europeans over Iran.