If you are a Republican or a conservative, no doubt you hold Ronald Reagan in high regard. He is, for all practical purposes, the godfather of modern conservatism.
I regard him as the best president of my lifetime by a large margin. Thanks largely to his depth of character, spine of steel, and a crystal clear moral compass that guided his every thought, he led America out of one of our lowest periods, brought us back to life after the dismal Carter years, renovated our decaying national defense, opposed Soviet expansion everywhere on Earth, and for all practical purposes was arguably the single greatest cause of the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Domestically he was as pure a constitutional conservative as one could be. He supported getting government out of our everyday lives as much as possible by reducing taxes and regulation, shrinking federal government, and returning authority to the states. Internationally he was a HAWK who saw the tyranny of the expanding, imperialistic Soviet Union as a threat that needed to be stopped at all costs.
And clearly Reagan resonated with millions of voters as he took THREE LANDSLIDE electoral victories (Bush/88 was purely a Reagan victory – had Reagan been legally allowed to have a third term, he would have won 88 by a far wider margin).
If you are a Republican, or consider yourself a conservative, you’re probably 100% behind Reagan on all these things.
So why the glowing Reagan build-up?
Well, if you are a conservative Republican behind me on all these things, then it’s reasonable to wonder how Reagan would have approached many problems today.
But apparently some Republicans have forgotten Reagan and are running full-speed in a direction Reagan would have found repulsive (and found repulsive in his day).
I’m speaking of many from the MAGA persuasion who oppose providing Ukraine with the military aid it requires to defend itself from Russia’s brutal invasion. SOME from that segment even PULL FOR RUSSIA (looking at Tucker Carlson here).
And I would maintain that while some circumstances are different, there is almost no doubt that Ronald Reagan, if alive today, would be Ukraine’s best friend. He would not only support sending them aid, he would send everything they needed to WIN. And he would have no concern for “escalation”.
And if he were president now, he would be delivering frequent speeches to Congress and the American public appealing for approval for more aid to be sent.
I say this because it’s exactly what he DID DO in very similar circumstances when he WAS president.
A Time for Choosing Speech (October 27, 1964)
Even before Reagan became governor of California in 1966, his A Time for Choosing Speech (October 27, 1964) put him on the national map. It hit almost every major conservative point on the map, criticizing high taxation, over-regulation, and government inefficiency.
It is one of the most powerful speeches he ever gave. I highly recommend you read (or listen to) the whole thing. A few names have changed, but someone could pick up that speech today, make a few adjustments to use current situations, and it would be 90% applicable now almost 60 years later.
But after expounding so eloquently on all these timeless conservative bedrock values, he says:
… [Goldwater] is not a man who could carelessly send other people’s sons to war. And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all the other problems I’ve discussed academic, unless we realize we’re in a war that must be won…
…We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.”
It is important to note that AFTER expounding on all the conservative bedrock issues he says that his final subject makes those issues “academic” (Merriam-Webster: “having no practical or useful significance”). And his final point: The immorality of abandoning those enslaved behind the iron curtain just to avoid risking nuclear war.
There is no explaining this away. Reagan saw suffering at the hands of a brutal regime somewhere else in the world as OUR PROBLEM, and it was based on MORALITY. In later speeches he often added that our intervention overseas also had very practical national security value, but his moral reasons always seemed like his far more prominent consideration.
He just couldn’t stand by and watch innocent victims have their freedoms forcibly taken from them.
40th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion (June 6, 1984)
Then on June 6, 1984 at the 40th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion he gave another powerful speech:
We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars: It is better to be here [in Europe] ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.
What “lessons” was Reagan talking about?
Leading up to the start of WWII, Hitler assured the world he wanted peace (while he was building his military), but wanted only to take control of a small part of Czechoslovakia that was largely inhabited by a German minority who had been mistreated (Hmm, where have we heard THAT recently?).
He assured the world he had no further ambitions in Czechoslovakia or anywhere else, and certainly would never attack America.
See for yourself: September 26, 1938 in Berlin and Address to the Reichstag (January 30, 1939).
But he took ALL of Czechoslovakia, half of Poland, UKRAINE, and most of Europe, all while America STILL tried to remain neutral (we “took blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom was lost”). Only after Japan bombed the U.S. Naval fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 did we enter the war (and Germany declared war on the U.S. on December 11, 1941).
Clearly the desire to stay out of it and remain neutral while evil tyrants rampaged freely around the world did not give us the security and safety we had hoped for. Reagan would later say “There is no security, no safety, in the appeasement of evil” (Source: Address to the Nation on the United States Air Strike Against Libya (April 14, 1986)).
Had France and the UK taken a strong stand sooner and especially if America hadn’t “taken blind shelter across the sea,” the war may have not even started, and if it had, far fewer people would have died. But, not knowing that lesson, between 35 and 60 million people died.
That was obviously the lesson to which Reagan was referring.
The events in Ukraine now are so eerily similar to the context of WWII, there’s no doubt that Reagan would see the lessons from WWII applying here.
Ukraine is an internationally recognized sovereign country with internationally recognized borders. In 2014 Russia illegally seized Crimea and attempted to seize the Donbass area indirectly (supposedly to protect the Russian-speaking populations in these areas), then in 2022 launched a full scale invasion in an attempt to take control of the whole country.
And Putin is not shy in declaring his unhappiness with the breakup of the Soviet Union, and would clearly like to get the old team back together. That sounds pretty damned “expansionist”.
His actions in Georgia and Ukraine are clear expansionism, always with the lame excuse that “Russian speaking minorities there were being oppressed” (an oldy goldy from Hitler’s play book).
By any measure, Russia is a textbook case of a “tyrannical government with expansionist intent.”
Central America
During Reagan’s time as president the Soviet Union constantly attempted to expand, and Central America was one of its targets.
Reagan wanted to arm the Nicaraguan “Contras” (the non-Communist resistance). The “Contras”, or “freedom fighters”, opposed the communist takeover of the country, but they were insufficiently equipped. Since they were fighting for freedom and democracy against the tyranny of Soviet-backed communism, Reagan wanted to divert some of the U.S. defense budget to arming them.
It was a win-win. It was the RIGHT and MORAL thing to do, but it also meant that motivated, passionate people could fight a battle that would reduce the likelihood we would ever need to send U.S. troops. All we needed to provide was the weapons and ammo. Win-win.
In an address to the nation on March 16, 1986, he said,
The United States Congress has before it a proposal to help stop [the threat of Soviet control of Nicaragua]. The legislation is an aid package of $100 million for the more than 20,000 freedom fighters struggling to bring democracy to their country and eliminate this Communist menace at its source. But this $100 million is not an additional 100 million. We’re not asking for a single dime in new money. We are asking only to be permitted to switch a small part of our present defense budget to the defense of our own southern frontier.
…But let me make one thing plain: I’m not talking about American troops. They are not needed; they have not been requested. The democratic resistance fighting in Nicaragua is only asking America for the supplies and support to save their own country from communism…
Forty years ago Republicans and Democrats joined together behind the Truman doctrine. It must be our policy, Harry Truman declared, to support peoples struggling to preserve their freedom. Under that doctrine, Congress sent aid to Greece just in time to save that country from the closing grip of a Communist tyranny. We saved freedom in Greece then. And with that same bipartisan spirit, we can save freedom in Nicaragua today…
A few months later he gave another similar address to the Nation on United States assistance for the Nicaraguan Resistance:
… President Truman said, “that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” … Congress… supported Truman’s request for military aid to Greece and Turkey — just as 4 years ago Congress put America’s interest first by supporting my request for military aid to defend democracy in El Salvador.
Many brave Nicaraguans have stayed in their country despite mounting repression — defying the security police, defying the Sandinista mobs that attack and deface their homes. Thousands — peasants, Indians, devout Christians, draftees from the Sandinista army — have concluded that they must take up arms again to fight for the freedom they thought they had won in 1979. The young men and women of the democratic resistance fight inside Nicaragua today in grueling mountain and jungle warfare. They confront a Soviet-equipped army, trained and led by Cuban officers. They face murderous helicopter gunships without any means of defense. And still they volunteer. And still their numbers grow. Who among us would tell these brave young men and women: “Your dream is dead; your democratic revolution is over; you will never live in the free Nicaragua you fought so hard to build?”
… My friends, the only way to bring true peace and security to Central America is to bring democracy to Nicaragua. And the only way to get the Sandinistas to negotiate seriously about democracy is to give them no other alternative. Seven years of broken pledges, betrayals, and lies have taught us that.
The question before the House is not only about the freedom of Nicaragua and the security of the United States but who we are as a people. President Kennedy wrote on the day of his death that history had called this generation of Americans to be “watchmen on the walls of world freedom.” A Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, said much the same thing… He said far more had been achieved [by the Declaration of Independence] than just American independence from Britain. Something permanent, something unalterable, had happened. He called it “Hope to the world for all future time.”
… My fellow citizens, Members of the House, let us not take the path of least resistance in Central America again. Let us keep faith with these brave people struggling for their freedom. Give them, give me, your support; and together, let us send this message to the world: that America is still a beacon of hope, still a light unto the nations. A light that casts its glow across the land and our continent and even back across the centuries — keeping faith with a dream of long ago.
Reagan clearly thought – as did Kennedy – that it WAS our role to fight for freedom worldwide… i.e. it IS our business… disagree or not, Reagan, Kennedy, and Lincoln all believed it.
He said that his request to aid the freedom fighters was “about who we are as a poeple.”
Reagan saw the David vs Goliath war between the Contras and the Soviet-backed Sandinistas, where people joined the fight in unbearable circumstances and against all odds, far out-manned and outgunned, and he had the most moral thought one could have looking at such a situation: HELP THEM WIN! He said, “Who among us would tell these brave young men and women: ‘Your dream is dead; your democratic revolution is over; you will never live in the free Nicaragua you fought so hard to build?’”
Reagan couldn’t say to the billion human beings enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins [FROM NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON], we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters” (1964) just like he couldn’t say to the freedom fighters is Nicaragua “Your dream is dead, you will never live in freedom.”
I include so much context for these quotes above to show how eerily similar these situations were to those in our time.
How much of those large quoted segments above fit nearly exactly what is happening now in Ukraine? Just a find/replace “Nicaragua/Contras/Central America” with “Ukraine”, and the fine tuning of a few minor details, and these quotes could be 100% applicable to Ukraine.
Is it even conceivable that Reagan would not say all this about Ukraine today?
Ukraine is outnumbered and outgunned, just like the freedom fighters, fighting in horrendous circumstances – arguably worse than the freedom fighters, WHILE RUSSIA TARGETS THEIR CIVILIANS.
And to back up his thinking from previous highly respected presidents, he quotes Kennedy (“calling Americans to be ‘watchmen on the walls of world freedom’”) and Lincoln (“[American independence achieved] hope to the world for all future time”).
That was Reagan, a great leader with great aspirations and deeply held convictions of the value of freedom and the need to fight for it EVERYWHERE, and to always stand with those whose freedom has been attacked, NO MATTER THE COST.
Only after writing this entire article did I find a video of an interview with Peter Robinson, Reagan’s speechwriter who wrote the infamous “Tear down this wall” speech specifically answering the question of what Reagan would do about Ukraine. See “Tear Down This Wall” Reagan Speechwriter Talks Ukraine ft. Peter Robinson, April 7, 2022. Hint: It corroborates everything I’ve said in this article.
You may be a conservative Republican who opposes supporting Ukraine, and have had your mind muddied by Kremlin propaganda by way of Tucker Carlson, but at least admit the obvious: You are clearly on the opposite side from Reagan on this point.
Go ahead. I’m eager to see the mental gymnastics required to say how this is totally different!