Words Worth Remembering: Reagan and the Cold War
He was not a man to mince words. Standing in the Royal Gallery at the Palace of Westminster in London on Tuesday, June 8, 1982, and speaking before the British Parliament, President Ronald Reagan rallied the free world around Western (and American) ideals at a time when great foreign adversaries threatened democracy around the globe.
Thirty-six years had passed since Winston Churchill had described the “iron curtain” that “Soviet influence” had closed across Europe. “We’re approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention—totalitarianism,” Reagan said at noon. “Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.”
Still, “optimism is in order, because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not-at-all-fragile flower.”
One paragraph earlier, Reagan mentioned the struggle then ongoing in Poland, the capital country of the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-dominated alternative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “Poland’s struggle to be Poland and to secure the basic rights we often take for granted demonstrates why we dare not take those rights for granted,” the president said. Poland, he added, exemplified the best in civilization “by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression.”
Reagan hoped the Soviet Union’s faltering march would serve as a lasting reminder of the fundamental error of appeasement and retreat. “If history teaches us anything,” he told Parliament, “it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.”
There were those who seemed more opposed to America’s response to Soviet aggression than to the Soviet crusade to dominate free people—“predictions of doomsday, antinuclear demonstrations, an arms race in which the West must, for its own protection, be an unwilling participant,” Reagan said.
“At the same time we see totalitarian forces in the world who seek subversion and conflict around the globe to further their barbarous assault on the human spirit.”
From Latin America to the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the iron fist of Soviet Communism seemed an unrelenting force, capable of quenching the fire for freedom and self-determination and hastening the rise of total state power. Reagan declared that “armed aggression must not be allowed to succeed, and the people must participate in the decisions of government under the rule of law.”
The legacy of appeasement, as ever, hung over all who were engaged in the day-to-day Cold War struggle. Reagan did not hesitate to assert that had there “been firmer support for that principle [of fighting back against aggression] some 45 years ago, perhaps our generation wouldn’t have suffered the bloodletting of World War II.”
Democracy by 1982 was a pervasive force that let loose and gained traction in the world. “In the United Nations,” Reagan said, “Eight of the ten developing nations which have joined that body in the past five years are democracies.” America—the entire West—had a responsibility: “How we conduct ourselves here in the Western democracies will determine whether this trend continues.”
“No, democracy is not a fragile flower,” Reagan firmly said. “Still, it needs cultivating. If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy.” Through action, Reagan foresaw “the march for freedom and democracy” leaving “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 Cold War was a political and military competition. But, at root, it was an inward struggle. “Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for 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, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated.”
To yield in such a struggle would be to forsake the principles on which America was founded—freedom, equality, self-rule, and the rule of law. To yield would also be to surrender the American struggle to realize, broaden, and maintain the American ideals, which is no less an international struggle than a domestic one, especially in the modern age.
Reagan concluded his remarks in London by calling for “a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation” and the realization of “a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.”
A year later, on Tuesday, March 8, 1983, Reagan repeated many of the ideas contained in his “Ash Heap” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals. Reagan condemned the call to put a “freeze” on American armament, reminding listeners that the Soviet Union represented “the focus of evil in the modern world.”
Reagan quoted the writer and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, who once wrote that the “greatest evil is not done now,” but “moved, seconded, carried and minuted in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
“If history teaches us anything, it teaches that simpleminded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly,” Reagan said. “It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.”
Reagan advised the Association against the high-minded desire to “label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
America, Reagan concluded, quoting the Book of Isaiah, would “mount up with wings as eagles,” “run, and not be weary,” and, in Thomas Paine’s words, wield its “power to begin the world over again.”