Ronald Reagan's Birthday Centennary

Nixon and Kissinger micro minded all aspects of US foreign policy during their tenure.  They bought into treaty building and the like which implied equality to real enemies.  The Vietnam settlement was an abject failure and only provided a flimsy cover for what became congressional betrayal of the South.

Instead Reagan eschewed direct military power and used direct and indirect confrontation and unbending economic pressure and did not cede equality.  That succeeded because the opponents were not equal to the challenge of unrelenting pressure.

There is a remarkably subtle lesson here that few if anyone has properly understood as he did.  I do not know if it was instinctual or not.  I suspect that both he and the Pope understood were to apply levers and did not hesitate to do so.  Once applied, the pressure built every day until change started to happen.

This culminated in a resounding victory that also triggered reform movements everywhere.

I think that it will be fruitful to apply these considerations to our ongoing confrontation with Islamicism (Islamic neo Nazism).

I continue to be pleased that he is now been more fully recognized for his massive achievement.  I continue to be displeased that the structural changes made in the financial system in the late nineties that were never on his agenda for cause and that ended the Reagan bull market are now been claimed as an extension of his policies.  They were not - they were the contribution of stupid greedy men who committed treason knowingly.

Ronald Reagan: The Anti-Nixon/Kissinger

Posted by Paul Kengor on Feb 8th, 2011 and filed under Daily Mailer, FrontPage.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/02/08/ronald-reagan-the-anti-nixonkissinger/

Sunday, February 6, marked the birth centennial of Ronald Reagan. As a Reagan biographer, I’m often asked how Reagan was different from his predecessors, Republican and Democrat, and especially in the area of foreign policy. There were many ways, but here are two of the most fundamental:

First, Reagan actually believed he could win the Cold War. He committed himself to that goal early and unequivocally. To cite just one example, Richard V. Allen, his first national security adviser, recalls a discussion in January 1977, four years before the presidency, when Reagan told him flatly: “Dick, my idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose.”

In this, Reagan stood apart from not only Democrats like Jimmy Carter but Republicans like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and their chief foreign-policy adviser, Henry Kissinger.

But there’s another way Reagan was so different from the likes of Nixon and Kissinger in particular. It’s a poignant example involving long-persecuted Soviet Jews. It was recently driven home to me, yet again, when I heard newly released comments by Nixon and Kissinger.

Kissinger and Nixon placed détente with the Soviets above all else. Their approach was pure Machiavellian realpolitik. They did not frame the U.S.-Soviet confrontation as good vs. evil, as Reagan did. Their goal wasn’t to defeat the Soviet Union. Their prevailing priority was getting along with the Soviets. They pursued that objective at almost any expense, whether keeping Eastern Europeans captive behind the Iron Curtain or keeping Russian Jews from emigrating.

In the early 1970s, pressure had been building on the Nixon administration to lobby the Soviets to ease up on restrictions on Jews. Both Kissinger and Nixon were dismissive.

How dismissive? The latest round of released tapes shows Kissinger offering an awful assessment to his White House boss on March 1, 1973.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of Americanforeign policy,” Kissinger stated coldly. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Nixon responded: “I know. We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

Alas, here is a painfully instructive example of how Ronald Reagan so differed even from intensely anti-communist Republicans of his era. Reagan would have been aghast at these comments. In fact, Reagan was willing to “blow up” negotiations with the Soviets over matters like Jewish emigration.

Reagan hounded Mikhail Gorbachev on this issue. About 10 years ago, the official “MemCons,” or Memoranda of Conversation, from the various Reagan-Gorbachev one-on-ones were declassified, from the Geneva to Moscow summits. In these, Reagan repeatedly dug at Gorbachev on emigration of Jews, to the point where Gorbachev snapped at the president

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Such persecuted Russians (Jews and non-Jews) were constantly on Reagan’s mind. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci recalled that the president “would walk around with lists in his pocket of people who were in prison in the Soviet Union.” Each time Secretary of State George Shultz prepared to meet with a Soviet official, Reagan pulled out the names—“some of whom we’d heard of but most of whom we hadn’t,” said Carlucci—and say, “I want you to raise thesenames with the Soviets.” And sure enough, said Carlucci, “George would raise them and one by one they would be released or allowed to leave.”

Reagan advisers confirmed this to me, including Shultz. When I asked Shultz about it, his typical understated expression widened into a giant grin. “Oh, yes,” he told me. “He always had that list and never hesitated to give me a few names.”

I believe that Ronald Reagan’s feelings for Russian Jews might be traceable as far back as November 1928, when his devout Christian mother, head of theMissions Committee at their little church in Dixon, Illinois, brought in a Russian Jew named B.E. Kertchman. Kertchman spoke about persecution he faced. That empathy never left Reagan. Two decades later, in 1947, I discovered Reagan, as a young actor in Hollywood, a liberal Democrat, working with Eleanor Roosevelt to find safe haven for Europe’s “Displaced Persons” (mostly Jews) after World War II.

Again, this is a striking contrast with Kissinger-Nixon, but it’s more than that.

Reagan was seen as the ultimate Cold Warrior, giving no quarter to the “Evil Empire.” Yet, his care for the everyday lives of human beings languishing in the USSR went largely unnoticed. That’s too bad, as that concern is a moving testimony of where this president’s heart guided him. That’s something worth remembering as a nation remembers the life of Ronald Reagan this February 2011.

Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values. His books include “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,” “God and Ronald Reagan,” and the newly released “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.”