On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and said: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
On November 9, 1989, just two years after Reagan made his Brandenburg Gate speech, the people of Germany did tear down “this wall” and in so doing they freed hundreds of millions of people from the tyranny of communism. Reagan by no means single-handily brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall, but his leadership against despotism was widely recognized by the victims of communism. When he visited Poland in 1990, a dissident leader presented Reagan with a sword explaining: “I am giving you this saber for helping us to chop off the head of communism.”
But the leftists in America do not want us to remember Reagan’s role in history. That is why President Barack Obama (the same man who found time to jet to Copenhagen at the drop of a rumor that his presence could win the Olympics for his hometown of Chicago) could not be bothered to attend the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall last night. Instead, President Obama taped a video message that completely failed to mention Reagan or British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
More than petty partisan slights are at stake here. President Obama’s refusal to recognize the role President Reagan’s and Prime Minister Thatcher’s leadership played in defeating despotism goes to the core of Obama’s foreign policy priorities. Heritage scholar Nile Gardiner explains:
Barack Obama simply does not view the world as Reagan did, in terms of good versus evil, as a world divided between the forces of freedom on one side and totalitarianism on the other. For the Obama administration the advancement of human rights and individual liberty on the world stage is a distinctly low priority, as we have seen with its engagement strategy towards the likes of Iran, Burma, Sudan, Venezuela and Russia.
We commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall to celebrate the collapse of communism, to honor those who died resisting communism, and to resolve that never again will peoples and nations allow so evil a tyranny to terrorize the world.
Yet, at a time when the United States currently faces challenges as complicated as those confronted by Reagan (war in Afghanistan, the global fight against Islamist terrorism, the rise of a nuclear-armed Iran) Obama is bent on apologizing for our nation’s actions, betraying Cold War allies, and dithering on troop deployments.
Quick Hits:
- President Barack Obama told ABC News he does not support the taxpayer abortion funding ban in the House health care bill.
- The President also told ABC News that jail time is an appropriate punishment for not buying health insurance.
- According to Gallup, 67% of Americans believe Obamacare will either make their personal health care situation worse or no different.
- Even The New York Times admits the House health bill does nothing to control health care costs.
- In yet another effort to silence critics, the Obama administration has ordered two Environmental Protection Agency to take down a YouTube video that was critical of the Obama administration’s climate change policy.
The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which culmitated a series of events in the summer and fall of 1989, allows us to begin looking through the lens of history. Important lessons are to be learned from the “year of miracles,” as Czech play-write and dissident Vaclav Havel called it, lessons about American leadership and lessons about the importance of engaging in the war of ideas with enemies of ffreddom and democracy.
The world has changed so dramatically since 1989, but many of us will never forget those spine chilling moments when demonstrations throughout Central and Eastern Europe started to challenge the power of the communist puppet regimes. The images of East Germans breaking down the Berlin Wall and pouring into freedom through the gashes will never fade away. But a new generation has come of age that has not known a world divided by the Iron Curtain or by that grim, grey, barbed-wired structure that separated the two Berlins.
The Berlin Wall now exists only as museum pieces and desk top ornaments. But during the Cold war it was powerful, both as a symbol and as a very real instrument of power to keep the population of East Berlin locked in. Many East Germans lost their lives trying to breach, scale or tunnel under it. Standing at checkpoint “Charlie,” you could look across a broad minefield into the dark wasteland of East Berlin, where empty apartment buildings with gaping holes for windows formed part of the buffer zone. The contrast between the two Berlins was stark. West Berlin was a colorful, gregarious city, tinged by life lived on the edge of the communist world. East Berlin was grey upon grey with few cars in the streets, pedestrians with averted eyes, and leather-booted soldiers goose stepping in formation at the tomb of the unknown soldier.
Communism did not simply collapse because of its own internal improbabilities, as some scholars on the left would have it. It collapsed because it was met by an opposing cause – represented by those who love freedom, democracy, and the inalienable rights of individuals to pursue their fate and happiness. Throughout the Cold War, the United States was the indispensable leader of that cause.
The fact that Cold War ended with the relatively bloodless dissolution of the Soviet empire was in part due to the U.S. instruments of power used to engage in the war of ideas, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty which broadcast into the Soviet Union itself. These institutions had their origin as far back as World War II, but were dismantled after the War as was much of the U.S. military. Following the Soviet blocade of Berlin, however, and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, it was clear that cashing in such “peace dividends” was premature. Consequently, when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953, “international information activities” of the U.S. government were made central to the national strategy of confronting and containing the Soviet expansionism. It was a long-term strategy that worked.
This is not to suggest that the road to victory in the Cold War was not a very bumpy one. U.S. leadership did falter on some notable occasions, such as the up-rising in Hungary in 1956, which drew heavily on the information provided by Radio Free Europe’s Hungarian-language broadcasts, but which failed to elicit any other support from the rest of the U.S. government. The protests were crushed by the Soviets and their puppets, as were the up-risings in Berlin in 1961 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The value of providing information to parts of the world where censorship was the rule was, however, clear to both Democratic and Republican administrations. John F. Kennedy was keenly aware of its importance and made Edward R. Murrow director of USIA, giving him direct access to the Oval Office and a seat at the National Security Council. However, it was Ronald Reagan, who had the clearest vision of the potential of public diplomacy as an instrument of national power, combining a clear ideological, anti-communist vision and talents as a “great communicator.” Reagan brought a new infusion of resources and intiative to the ideological struggle with the Soviets, revitalizing the USIA, and providing it with a new clear mandate and strategy. Behind the Iron Curtain, dissidents and human rights activists took heart from the moral and material support that the U.S. government was able to privide them in their fight against communst oppression. When the Berlin Wall came down in on November 9, 1989, it was clear that ideas did matter, in the end.
Recommendations for the president:
Provide clear leadership on revitalizing U.S. public diplomacy intitutions, drawing on the lessons of the Cold War. This is particularly relevant for the struggle with ideological Islamism.
Propose an Agency for Strategic Communication to take the lead in formulating a national doctrine and strategy on communication and public diplomacy outreach.
Specify lines of authority and interagency cooperation to make sure the various parts of the U.S. government work together coherently in their messaging.