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Forty years ago this week, President Ronald Reagan lit the fuse that would bring down the empire. In his address to the National Evangelical Association, Reagan did not cut his words short. He blamed the Cold War solely on the Soviet Union, calling it an “evil empire.”
He rejected our policy of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. on our terms. without firing a shot.
For decades, American leaders of both parties have argued that there are only two options for dealing with the Soviet Union: an uncomfortable Cold War peace or a hot nuclear Armageddon with no winners or losers. is.
Reagan joked that his new policy was simply “We win, they lose.” He believed that winning the Cold War was not only possible, but that it was our only correct course of action.
President Reagan’s Powerful ‘Empire of Evil’ Speech Awarded for 40th Anniversary
For Reagan, the Cold War was not just a battle between two morally equal powers, but a battle between good and evil, the light of freedom and the darkness of totalitarianism. He said that communists “preach the supremacy of the state, proclaim the state’s omnipotence over individuals, and predict eventual domination over all peoples on earth.”
As a result, the communist Soviet Union became “the focal point of evil in the modern world.” They prohibited the worship of God. They believed that an unelected and unaccountable government was supreme and that all humans were destined to be slaves to an all-powerful state. They believed that human rights were given by governments, not by God.
Reagan shook many people, especially intellectuals, with his “Evil Empire” speech. For years they played with socialism and communism. As secularists, they thought we were living in a world after God. They were not fixated on the idea that ordinary people could make their own decisions. They believed in the benefits of a centrally planned economy. They argued that the modern world is so complex that governance should be left in the hands of expert elite executives.
Regarding the Cold War, they believed that both the United States and the Soviet Union were to blame for the nuclear arms race. They saw her two superpowers as representatives of competing political and economic systems. The two superpowers are just the world’s latest version of great power politics.
Reagan thought otherwise. The Soviet Union was an evil empire, not our moral equivalent. We didn’t have to live in constant cold war.
Thus, America’s old national security strategy of peaceful coexistence became Reagan’s “peace through strength.”
Reagan’s new policies were criticized by both parties as naive, unrealistic and dangerous.
Experts dismissed Reagan as an ignorant, superficial figure, a second-rate actor past his prime, and possibly insane enough to start World War III. But he wasn’t. The United States will win the Cold War, not by escalating it into the Cold War, but by pitting the United States’ superior economic, political, and security systems against the deeply flawed equivalent of the Soviet Union.
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Reagan believed that the Soviet Union’s greatest vulnerability was the inability of a top-down communist system to feed its people. He believed that the communist world would eventually collapse. However, he wanted to rush the day. So he brought together all the elements of our national power – economic, political, moral, diplomatic, military, technological – and put great pressure on their economies. done.
The rest is history. Within a decade of Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, the Soviet Union had collapsed. The former Soviet client states seceded. Millions of people once under the yoke of communism had a new taste of freedom and autonomy.
Thanks to Reagan, we won the Cold War without firing a single shot. We have come to enjoy the greatest period of peace and prosperity in history. And for a generation there was no war in the world.
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