An interesting retrospective from Dinesh D'Souza as the media, congress and elites continue to call for withdrawal from Iraq.
Equally scornful was Sovietologist Stephen Cohen of Princeton University, who wrote in 1983: “All evidence indicates that the Reagan administration has abandoned both containment and détente for a very different objective: destroying the Soviet Union as a world power and possibly even its Communist system.”
Finally, a wise man gets something right. But then he spoils it by condemning Reagan for pursuing a wrongheaded and suicidal objective, one that revealed that the president was suffering from “a potentially fatal form of Sovietophobia ... a pathological rather than a healthy response to the Soviet Union.”
Perhaps one should not be too hard on the wise men. After all, explains Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse: “History has an abiding capacity to outwit our certitudes.” The wise men may have been wrong, Schlesinger concedes, but then “no one foresaw these changes.”
But here is the problem with this view. The dummy foresaw them! Consider what he said long before the wise men issued their pronouncements. In June 1980, Ronald Reagan met with a group of editors at the Washington Post. As reporter Lou Cannon, who arranged the meeting, recalled the incident to me, his colleagues expressed grave concerns that Reagan was escalating the arms race. Reagan told them not to worry: “The Soviets can’t compete with us.” Everyone around the table was astonished, because no one shared Reagan’s presumption of Soviet economic vulnerability. Yet Reagan assured them, “I’ll get the Soviets to the negotiating table.” Cannon recalls, “When he said that, nobody believed him.”
