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Entry: Gipper Anxiety -- The Struggle Over What Would Reagan Do Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/gipper_anxiety_the_struggle_over_what_would_reagan_do#31255 Post contents: Nikolas Gvosdev is one of our finest foreign policy analysts and this piece on Reagan is certainly thought provoking. I think he's got it right about Reagan, by and large. I served in the US State Department as a Reagan appointee from 1981-88, dealing mainly with US-Soviet relations. I find it hard to believe that Reagan would have subscribed to democratism. He was a conservative patriot who was at loggerheads with the Soviet system not because it wasn't democratic but because he saw it as contributing to our insecurity. I feel certain he would have had little use for our current in-your-face foreign policy in every nook and cranny of the globe. Reagan only got in your face if he had good reason to do so, i.e., if the national security depended on it. He was no kind of neo-con. He did not believe in any sort of secular materialist, apotheosis at the end of history. After all, he had just seen off the Bolshevik version of that kind utopia. Having said that, I would warn Mr. Gvosdev not to go too far in drawing parallels between Reagan and Nixon/Kissinger. While Reagan would never have endorsed any kind of neo-conservative crusade for democracy, he was equally skeptical of a foreign policy wholly given over to cold calculation, if for no other reason than that Americans by and large don't cotton to such an approach. The idealist strain in the US mind-set is very real, and a leader who taps into has a great advantage. In the context of today, it is clear that neo-conservatism (not conservative at all) is a complete moral, intellectual and strategic bust. But to replace it with a cold and calculating realism is not quite what the doctor ordered. Our next president must find the point of intersection between ideals and self-interest. President Medvedev and Foreign Minister Lavrov just handed it to him on a silver platter in their recent speeches in Berlin and Moscow, respectively. The Russian leaders called for an entente cordiale between US, the EU and Russia, the better to meet that challenges posed by a rising China and a resurgent Islam. The practical benefits of such an arrangement are too vast to spell out here. But think what a transformation the Northern Hemispheric world from New York to Paris to Warsaw to Moscow to Tokyo to San Francisco to New York would experience if the pan-European powers would move to bury the hatchet that has done so much harm since 1054. Not least among the benefits: it would pave the way for the flourishing of Christian culture, without which nothing good will come of pan-Europe. I am, of course, realistic enough to realize, that such a vision may have limited appeal in a country with such deep secular materialist and liberal roots as the US, but we must have the audacity to hope. Sent at: 2008 12 02