Freedom's Beacon
The Bush doctrine is a Reagan legacy.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
opinionjournal
Tuesday, June 8, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
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"Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourists. Well, it wasn't. It was a Soviet-Cuban colony, being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. We got there just in time."
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--Ronald Reagan, Oct. 27, 1983
There is a time for choosing between standing up and fighting for liberty or sitting back and allowing evil to triumph. This is no quaint notion, but something that is at the heart of our politics today and central to our foreign policy and our security. Ronald Reagan's legacy is clear. It can be seen in the twin philosophies of peace through strength and security through the spread of liberty, from the liberation of Iraq to the larger push for democracy in the Middle East as a way of combating terrorism.
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Reagan wasn't the first to view America as a beacon of liberty. What he did so well at a time of great national self-doubt was to articulate what was at stake if America did not stand up for freedom and what it could accomplish if it did.<font size=3> He began articulating these ideas long before seeking elective office. He told the Eureka College graduating class of 1957 that "I have never been able to believe that America is just a reward for those of extra courage and resourcefulness. This is a land of destiny and our forefathers found their way here by some divine system of selective service gathered here to fulfill a mission to advance man a further step in his climb from the swamps."
For Reagan this was much more than a contest of big ideas. It was always about real people struggling to be free. In 1982 Hu Na, a 19-year-old Chinese tennis player, decided to put that to the test and defected. She quickly found that the bureaucrats in the State Department were unsure about granting her asylum. In Peter Hannaford's book "Recollections of Reagan," David Laux, who was director of Asian affairs for the National Security Council at the time, recalled what happened next. "Some felt that, as a teenage athlete, she didn't have a political thought in her head and didn't, therefore, qualify for 'political asylum.' " But when Reagan found out about it, he ended the debate: "We're going to give her asylum if I have to adopt her and make her a part of my own family." The bureaucrats caved in, and she got asylum over Beijing's protests.
Reagan made some missteps. Pulling out of Lebanon after the Oct. 23, 1983, bombing that killed 243 Marines sent a signal of weakness. Condemning Israel's 1981 bombing of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor was a mistake, as practically everyone now agrees. Yet in the broader view of his administration, it cannot be said that Reagan buckled in the face of adversity or left America weaker. To the contrary, he articulated a vision that both uplifted Americans' spirits and tied their security to the greater moral mission of freeing enslaved people around the world.
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Reagan understood that those who oppress others around the globe eventually come to threaten Americans at home.<font size=3> That's why he liberated Grenada a few days after the Lebanon bombing, crossed Moammar Gadhafi's "line of death" and in a thousand other ways signaled to the world that America was no longer ashamed to take a stand for freedom, through force of arms if necessary.
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This week President Bush is meeting in Sea Island, Ga., with the leaders of the industrialized world. At the meetings the president is pushing for a resolution demanding democracy, equal rights for women and a greater respect for human rights in the Arab world. Of the many tributes to Reagan, this is perhaps the most fitting. Reagan helped liberate millions in Eastern Europe and fought to save millions more in Latin America and elsewhere from the oppression of communism. Today's struggle against the tyranny of terrorism and Islamism is in line with the fight Reagan waged. Fundamentally both are moral struggles. Mr. Bush is picking up where Reagan left off and using individual liberty to undermine the tyrants who attack us. <font size=3>
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
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