June 12, 2007
On Evil Empires Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:50 AM EST In his front-page feature today, John Steele Gordon notes the anniversary of one of Ronald Reagan’s greatest performances–his speech at the Berlin Wall. Mr. Gordon says at the start of his piece that Reagan’s speech is still a good read and an important primary source from recent history. Mr. Gordon proceeds to give a good overview of the Berlin Wall’s history, its place in the divided German nation, and its educational value as a case study of the Cold War. Mr. Gordon alludes briefly to another case study in Cold War history that nicely illustrates the balancing act of international politics. He writes: “Reagan called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’ in 1983, rhetoric that would have been impossible a few years earlier and that caused much tut-tutting on the left.” Reagan’s speech, in which he first referred to the U.S.S.R. as an “evil empire,” was a controversial one delivered to the National Association of
Evangelicals. The year before, in a speech to Britain’s House of Commons, Reagan had already begun experimenting with the language that he used with such flair in 1983. In a short sequence of rhetorical questions, Reagan had asked Parliament, “Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?” It was obvious to his listeners to which “totalitarian evil” Reagan was referring. Reagan remains famous for his uncompromising stand against Soviet Communism. But what makes these strident speeches useful as illustrations of Cold War power politics is the extent to which they clashed with Reagan’s actual policies. Today, no one could get away with calling the fortieth President soft on Communism. In the year he coined the term “evil empire,” however, that was not the case. A September 18, 1983, column by David Broder, “The Right is Really Sore at Reagan . . . ,” highlighted conservatives’ disapproval of Reagan’s temperate response to the Soviet downing of Korean Air Flight 007. Activist organs like the Paul Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, Howard Phillips’s Conservative Caucus, and Richard Viguerie’s Conservative Digest blasted the President for his thoroughly un-militant reaction. Though Reagan called the Soviets’ attack “an act of barbarism,” his punitive response consisted mostly of a few gestures, like closing a couple of Aeroflot facilities in the United States. Activists like Weyrich believed that, by electing Reagan, they had installed a President who would be a tireless crusader against Communism, willing to go to almost Hobbesian lengths in order to advance the cause of capitalist democracy. And so they had. But Reagan, and the men who advised him, understood that rhetoric like the “evil empire” speech would be most effective when matched up with more measured, deliberate actions. For all the concern about his admitted belief in an impending apocalypse, Reagan did not actually want a nuclear war.
By berating and intimidating his Russian counterparts with fierce, even reckless rhetoric (which angered the left), but simultaneously showing them that the door to negotiated reform was open (angering the right), Reagan helped lay the groundwork for the substantive breakthroughs of the late 1980s.
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