Given a recent comment here, I found James Freeman’s latest Wall Street Journal column amusing. It asks the question what would Reagan do about Ukraine?
Let’s hope for the best from Team Biden and let’s also be grateful that Alexander Vindman, one of the country’s foremost experts in the field of undermining presidential authority, is no longer in the government. Mr. Vindman was on CNN today dismissing “irrational fears†that escalating military assistance to Ukraine could lead to a direct U.S. confrontation with Russia. What’s irrational is to pretend that such risks do not exist.
Thank goodness that Mr. Vindman did not staff Ronald Reagan, who managed to take down the Soviet empire without ever having to fight it directly. The basic idea was to use the economic, technological and moral force of the United States and its democratic allies to break the repressive Soviet Union and its backward economy. Reagan fought and won a cold war because even a successful hot war might have resulted in the annihilation of a significant portion of our population.
The balance of the column is devoted more to President Reagan’s aspirations and what he tried than what he actually succeeded in accomplishing.
If I may make a modest observation, in order to “use the economic, technological and moral force of the United States”, don’t we need the economic, technological, and moral upper hand to do so? We’ve been sacrificing all three of those for the last twenty-odd years. Perhaps thinking about why and how we’ve done that might be helpful.
I feel like many of the familiar structures of the cold war don’t exist here, and maybe that’s because the Cold War was mostly fought outside Europe in proxy conflicts. And Reagan would have been fine providing military support to whomever was opposing whomever the Communists were supporting.
But NATO countries were dependent on Russia energy, and that was AFAIK just the acceptance of reality. Trade is just trade. And while Soviets starting storing dollar reserves in midsized UK banks in the midlands in the early 70s, nobody seemed to think about that either. UK regulated sterling not dollars. These seem new innovations.