Reagan's Passing

Though there will always be legitimate cause to find fault with Reagan's Administration, such criticisms shouldn't blind us to the magnitude of his greatest accomplishment. As Gorbachev points out in today's New York Times:

This was accompanied by confrontational rhetoric toward the Soviet Union, and more than rhetoric — by a number of actions that caused concern both in our country and among many people throughout the world. It seemed that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an "evil empire."

Yet his second term as president emphasized a different set of goals. I think he understood that it is the peacemakers, above all, who earn a place in history.
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I don't know whether we would have been able to agree and to insist on the implementation of our agreements with a different person at the helm of American government. True, Reagan was a man of the right. But, while adhering to his convictions, with which one could agree or disagree, he was not dogmatic; he was looking for negotiations and cooperation. And this was the most important thing to me: he had the trust of the American people.

In the final outcome, our insistence on dialogue proved fully justified. At a White House ceremony in 1987, we signed the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, which launched the process of real arms reduction. And, even though we saw the road to a world free of nuclear weapons differently, the very fact of setting this goal in 1986 in Reykjavik helped to break the momentum of the arms race.

Reagan bears an outsized role in our "victory" over the Soviet Union - a victory delivered by the force of ideals rather than those of arms. There are many things for which we can justly fault Reagan, and in many ways his ideological legacy has been a weight around our nation's neck. But he inherited a geo-political era of bristly nuclear stand-off and left behind a world measurably nearer to a stable peace. For all the alleged cold-eyed "realism" of the Kissinger camp, the visionary temperance of their guns never accomplished half so much as Reagan's intemperance of language.