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| Author: | Michael Mandelbaum, Christian Herter Professor, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University |
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June 8, 2004
Newsday
When he took office as the 40th president of the United States in January, 1981, Ronald Reagan was convinced of two things that much of the world doubted: communism would disappear and free markets offered the most effective method for organizing economic life. History proved him right - with some assistance from Reagan himself.
A quarter century ago the global conflict between the free world and its Communist adversaries seemed destined to last indefinitely, with neither side willing to surrender to nor able to conquer the other. Reagan, however, considered communism to be not only dangerous and, as he called the Soviet Union itself, evil, but also transient. He believed that the Cold War could be won. A mere three years after he left office, Marxism-Leninism had ceased to be the ruling ideology of any country in Europe.
Of all the participants in the events that brought European communism to an end, the one who contributed most to this outcome was Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. It was his reforms that - partly deliberately and partly contrary to his wishes - set in motion the events that culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
And Reagan's predecessors as well as his successor also played important roles. The policy of relaxing tensions with the Communist world known as detente, which was inaugurated by Richard Nixon and carried forward by Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and opposed by Reagan, helped to open the closed Communist societies wide enough for Western ideas to enter, ideas that influenced Gorbachev and his colleagues as they implemented his reforms. And the skillful diplomacy of George H. W. Bush, Reagan's vice president and successor as president, helped make the collapse of communism a miraculously peaceful affair.
But Reagan's staunch and often-stated belief that Western values would prevail in the confrontation with communism, the major increase in the American armed forces he advocated that aggravated the Soviet Union's economic difficulties by raising the cost of the arms race with the United States, and his early recognition that Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader - one with whom he could make mutually beneficial agreements - all contributed to the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation - very much for the better - of international politics.
As a prophet of the triumph of the free market, Reagan shares credit with his colleague and political ally, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain. His policies of tax-cutting and reducing the governmment's regulation of business were controversial during his time in office and in retrospect not all of them seem entirely wise.
But his faith in individual initiative and ingenuity, harnessed by the institutions of the market, as the great engine of prosperity, has been vindicated by the events of the last quarter century: the sterling performance of the American economy and the rapid economic growth in other countries, some of them previously very poor. The economic successes of many countries in Asia, and especially China, in the last decades of the 20th century and into the 21st came about through an emphasis on the institutions and values that Reagan championed.
As with the end of communism, Ronald Reagan did not achieve the triumph of the market single-handedly. Deep and powerful social, economic and political forces were at work in both cases. But he recognized and encouraged these forces.
It was once put to the great physicist Ernest Rutherford that he had been fortunate to "ride the wave" of discoveries in his field in the early part of the 20th century. "But I made the wave, didn't I?" he replied.
Ronald Reagan did not make the wave himself. The tides of history, like those in the natural world, cannot be summoned by politicians. But he helped the wave along. That is his legacy; and it is a considerable one.
Michael Mandelbaum, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century."
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