Bruce’s History Lessons: Ronald Reagan: The Hedgehog

“The fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.” – Isaiah Berlin

Ronald Reagan, born this week (Feb. 6) in 1911, was a hedgehog from his tail to his snout. And the one big thing he knew was that Communism was an ideology devoid of a single redeeming factor, and that its chief practitioner, the Soviet Union, was the greatest threat to human freedom, and world peace, in all of recorded history.

And so, from his days as president of the Screen Actors Guild, where he battled a significant Communist presence, to his days as president of the United States, Ronald Reagan made it his highest priority to end what he called the “evil empire” of Communist-driven totalitarianism that the Soviet Union had created in Eastern Europe, and had inspired—and supported—in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

His plan to do this began with reversing a policy that a previous president from his own party had created — détente. Whereas Richard Nixon had resigned himself to “co-existing” with the Soviets, even to the point of propping up their tenuous economy with investment, loans, credits and improved trade relations, Reagan took a diametrically opposite approach. His goal was to force the Soviets into an ever-spiraling level of military spending that would eventually bankrupt them and force them to choose between imploding and changing.

Thus did Reagan embark on a military spending spree that resulted in a 600-ship Navy, a vastly expanded air bomber force, legions of new missiles and weapons systems, and his pride and joy, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics, it was meant to be a space-based missile defense system that could shoot down Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. ­

To be sure, Reagan’s military spending contributed to trillion dollar budget deficits in the United States, but when all was said and done, the U.S. managed to survive deficit spending. The Soviet Union did not. The coup de grace was SDI, which may have been a pipe dream (and as envisioned certainly would have been staggeringly expensive), but it convinced then-Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that radical changes were needed in the Soviet system, or the country would fall further behind the West. The “evil empire” soon fell, much to Reagan’s credit.

As a postscript, in 1994 a special on PBS television (not exactly a conservative mouthpiece) detailing the Soviet Union’s demise included an interview with Victor Kulikov, the former head of the Soviet Warsaw Pact military forces. During the interview, Kulikov said of SDI, “It was a piece of adventurism, an attempt to mow us down economically, to force us to spend all of our resources on counter-measures.”

He added glumly, “Unfortunately, it worked.”