Photograph of President Reagan and Vice-President Bush meeting with General Secretary Gorbachev.

With the exception of Donald Trump, no president in my lifetime had a more shallow knowledge of history and foreign policy than Ronald Reagan.  Reagan entered the White House in 1981 with an extremely negative and ideological view of the Soviet Union, and it was no surprise that Soviet-American bilateral relations deteriorated to their worst level in twenty years.  In Reagan’s first press conference, he noted that Soviet leaders “reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.”  Reagan told the West Point cadets that the Soviet Union was an “evil force,” and in 1983 he told Christian fundamentalists that the Soviet Union was the “focus of evil in the modern world…an evil empire.”

Reagan was in his 70s in his first term, but had never been to the Soviet Union.  He refused to attend the funeral of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 as well as the funeral of Yuri Andropov in 1984.  While testing his voice for a radio interview in 1984, Reagan told “my fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever.  The bombing begins in five minutes.”  Unsurprisingly, Soviet diplomats and “Americanologists” such as George Arbatov began to compare Ronald Reagan to Adolf Hitler.

When two countries distrust each other as much as the United States and the Soviet Union did in the early 1980s, national security policy becomes militarized.  There is no discussion of arms control and disarmament, and no discussion of confidence-building measures to improve bilateral relations.  In 1984, there were no discussions between Moscow and Washington on any issue; forty years later we are confronting a similar scenario.

The debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump last week gave no indication that either one of them would be looking for ways to break the current freeze that exists between Washington and the two other major nuclear powers, Russia and China.  Even more worrisome, Harris chose to dodge a question from one of the ABC moderators, Linsey Davis, who asked the vice president if she had ever met Russian President Vladimir Putin.  Harris’s experience in national security and foreign policy is not extensive, and she obviously didn’t want to admit that she had never met Vladimir Putin…or any Russian leader for that matter.

It’s still not clear why Reagan was such an extreme ideologue in his first term, but an active negotiator in his second term, although the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze played a significant role in the process.  The emergence of George Shultz as secretary of state, and the experience of such diplomats as Jack Matlock also helped to move Reagan off his ideological positions to become an active participant in superpower diplomacy in the mid-and late-1980s.  Reagan himself had a pragmatic streak; he was willing to consider alternatives to his hard-line views. 

We have no real idea of Kamala Harris’s policies toward the war between Israel and Hamas or between Russia and Ukraine.  Her positions on defense spending and disarmament remain a mystery.  Harris has given nonspecific answers to specific questions, which didn’t

stop David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s leading columnist on national security, from writing an oped titled “Clues to imagining Harris as commander in chief.”  Ignatius believes that Harris would “continue the traditional bipartisan foreign policy consensus,” whatever that may mean.  Ignatius noted that Harris as vice president was “careful to support Biden when he’d made his choices,” but isn’t that what vice presidents always do?

Meanwhile, the Biden administration and the Republican leadership in the Congress are tying Harris’s hands regarding policy toward China.  In order to project a tough policy toward China in an election year, the White House last week announced additional tariffs on Chinese products worth tens of billions on dollars.  Congressional Republicans introduced a long list of bills in order to get tough on China.  There is no more important bilateral relationship in the global arena than the Sino-American relationship, but at this juncture these relations remain on dead center with no sign of movement.

We had four years of Donald Trump in the White House, so we have a good idea of what another four years would look like.  As Jeb Bush said eight years ago, “Donald Trump is a chaos candidate, and he would be a chaos president.”  Trump’s impulsive and bellicose manner led a few congressional voices to search for limits on the presidential power to use military force, particularly nuclear force, which the Founding Fathers placed in the hands of the Congress.  

The only congressional effort to push back against Trump’s militarism took place in the Senate in December 2018, when a resolution was unanimously passed to censor the Saudi killing of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and to call for an end to U.S. support of the Saudi-led war in Yemen at that time.  When then secretary of state Rex Tillerson referred to Trump as a “fucking moron,” he was responding to the president’s case for expanding nuclear forces and justifying the use of nuclear force.  Trump’s nuclear strategy reversed the Obama administration’s belated efforts to reduce the size and scope of the U.S. arsenal and minimize the role of nuclear weapons in defense planning.

Our democracy depends on citizens having trust in the sense and sensibility of our leaders.  In a global environment that appears to be spinning out of control, we need to have faith in the decision making capabilities of our leaders.  At the point of its dissolution in 1991, the people of the Soviet Union found its leaders were no longer credible.  The increased cynicism of Americans toward their leaders, manifested in the high level of support given to 

Trump, weakens the underpinnings of our democracy.  

Our recent presidents have conducted foreign policy on the basis of faith in “might makes right.”  They have struggled with the relationship between power and principle.  President Biden proclaimed that he would pursue a “foreign policy for the middle classes,” but until we divert hundreds of billions of dollars from our bloated defense budget to the domestic economy and its infrastructure, there will be no change.  Unfortunately, the mainstream media have been a mouthpiece for U.S. defense spending, nuclear modernization, and overseas deployments, which will ultimately harm the domestic challenges in the U.S. economy.

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