America’s victory over the Soviet Union was a triumph that freed millions from the yoke of tyranny and reduced the threat of global nuclear war. Though the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, after Ronald Reagan left office, his operational plan won a war that persisted through the course of nine presidencies.
Today, the principal author of the USSR’s destruction is often belittled by those who do not fully understand his legacy of strength. We who know, who stood next to President Reagan, must speak, for the grasp of history is diminished as its actual witnesses die.
Despite what is averred by those who played no direct part in the Soviet Union’s destruction, the presidency of Ronald Reagan caused the USSR to implode. To state that Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet Union may be analogized to contending that a bank robber acted as a Good Samaritan by falling to the ground after the police chased him. The contention is ludicrous.
A revision of history is necessary when evidence is discovered, permitting meaningful reinterpretation, to transform understanding through explanatory power. Revision, however, must not become a tool to negate the past, which when wielded to promote an agenda conveys propaganda.
Ronald Reagan ended détente: He sought to demolish the Soviet Union, not coexist with it. Some who argue otherwise seem to seek the debasement of President Reagan’s conception of American exceptionalism, which reveres the primacy of the individual and not the collective. We believe this errant history is, in part, promulgated to serve America’s bureaucratic state and thus diminish President Donald Trump’s ability to place our nation’s interests first. It is thus both unacceptable and deeply dangerous.
President Reagan’s strategy instilled mastery of all important bases of national power, thereby influencing the outcome of events across the globe. His genius established the predicates that ordained the demise of the Soviet Union without resorting to war.
President Reagan believed that to deify the state is not only to mock God but to elevate the collective above the individual. These sins, ruinous to liberty, were committed by the Soviet Union and its leadership and were thus impermissible, for they were wedded to horrific offensive force. To vanquish this evil empire, President Reagan drew on a lifetime of learning and thought.
A voracious reader who lived through four major wars in which Americans died, Reagan was a student of history who prized percipience and not the avowal of labored narratives. President Reagan’s worldview was honed by his study of our founders. In economics, Reagan absorbed the verities of Nobel laureates F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, who extolled the benefits of personal freedom. The president’s conception of national defense reflected the views of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, President Eisenhower, and naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan; their thoughts mixed with Reagan’s revulsion to the idea of unrestrained strategic bombing, as advocated by Giulio Douhet.
To extend freedom to Eastern Europe, the president turned to the words of Lincoln and the scholarship of Lev E. Dobriansky that described the yearnings of captive nations beaten on Moscow’s anvil. Comprehending that avarice can subvert security, Reagan did not hesitate in confronting the multinational companies that sought to complete the Trans-Siberian Pipeline, which was designed to be the economic lifeblood of Soviet suzerainty. President Reagan, facing unprecedented international rancor, severely delayed the first part of the pipeline and terminated its second strand, thus strangling the USSR’s source of desperately needed hard currency.
The interruption of this pipeline formed a principal component of the most effective geostrategic plan in modern history. Revisionists bent on destroying President Reagan’s legacy focus their attention on aspects of this plan exogenous to its core and its success, for they disregard or refuse to comprehend that the president’s grand strategy had one objective: the expansion of liberty to those who sought and bled for it.
President Reagan applied unremitting pressure to critical nodes that were the foundation of the Soviet Empire. The proclamation of God’s reign throughout Eastern Europe as a result of President Reagan’s work with Pope John Paul II, the diminishment of Soviet hard currency reserves, and American aid to forces arrayed against Soviet military operations in Afghanistan and in client states ignited discord within Soviet elites — as liberating forces, such as Solidarity in Poland, grew in strength.
Reeling from these blows, the Soviet Union next saw its remaining symbol of power destroyed when Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative, born from an abhorrence of war and a rejection of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. The burgeoning strength of the USSR’s nuclear arsenal hinged on its coercive capacity as conveyed by its ability to conduct a first strike that would partially destroy America’s deterrent. The value of the USSR’s missile forces as an accepted measure of national strength, however, evaporated as the perceived capacity of these weapons was flayed by America’s potential deployment of defensive systems. The USSR was thus forced into a technological race that it could not even mount.
The ruptures that President Reagan induced within the USSR — supported by the rebuilding of our nation’s armed forces, as exemplified by the achievement of American naval supremacy — could not be answered by any conceivable array of actions Gorbachev could have taken, for any measure to stop Soviet hemorrhaging opened another lesion that amplified and broadcast to the world the poverty, insularity, and gigantic corruption of a communist empire built on death. This is what caused the USSR’s immolation.
The Space Force, which President Trump created, embodies Reagan’s vision of peace through inexorable defensive strength. Technologies developed under the aegis of the Strategic Defense Initiative now guard Israel and parts of the United States.
America today faces a constellation of adversarial states and terrorist threats that exceed the challenges the Soviet Union posed. President Trump has met these challenges decisively through his articulation, fusion, and use of our country’s levers of power. Russia claimed no new territories during Trump’s first term, China was constrained, ISIS was defeated, Israel was supported, and Iran was hobbled. These successes were part of a unified plan Trump created that secured our primacy among nations: A second Trump presidency will expand this legacy of peace through resolve.
John Poindexter, Richard Levine, William Martin, Paula Dobriansky, Roger Robinson, Christopher Lehman, and Ken deGraffenreid served together on the Reagan National Security Council staff.
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