The GOP'S Reykjavik Moment

WillowTree

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Sep 15, 2008
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Each man put on his overcoat and walked silently, side by side, out the front door into the blinding klieg lights of the cold Icelandic night. The look on Reagan's face was instantly clear to everyone.

He was mad. Furious. He made no pretense whatsoever about the fact. A thousand cameras snapped in the darkness, transmitting the image of the unsmiling president and his Soviet counterpart around the globe. Gorbachev was so startled by all of this that he had blurted a semi-apology to Reagan: "I don't know what more I could have done."

Replied Reagan: "You could have said yes." And with that, the President slipped into his waiting limousine and went home.

As the showdown in Washington between President Obama and Republicans reaches its peak, the story of Reagan in Reykjavik is worth recalling for one very, very important reason.

What Ronald Reagan was really about in Reykjavik, as history now records, was a crusade. He didn't see the summit as one more chapter in an endless procession of summits between American presidents and Soviet leaders. That was the view of Washington elites and their international counterparts, the crowd who long ago began treating the Soviet Union as just one more respectable international player.

Reagan was about something different altogether.

"We win, they lose" he had told his national security advisor when discussing his strategy.














The American Spectator : The GOP'S Reykjavik Moment
 
That's what's really at stake in this fight. The idea of freedom.

And the real question for Republican leaders in this fight is: whose side are they on? Are they the modern version of what Thomas Paine once called in another time the "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots" in the fight against socialism in America? Are they going to be buffaloed by a weak and defensive President Obama who last night tried once more to panic them with poll-tested language of extremism-costumed-as moderation? As balance? Just as a defensive and weakened Gorbachev's staff tried to whipsaw President Reagan by breaking a press embargo in hopes of intimidating Reagan into an agreement that required dropping SDI? Portraying the Reagan insistence on SDI as an extremist president's unwillingness to compromise? The same SDI that, Soviet bluster notwithstanding, finally turned out to be a key in ending not just the Cold War -- but the Soviet Union itself?

Or are they Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik? We are about to find out
 

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