Mr. Obama, Stay Away From This Wall ; Democrats Tried to Thwart Reagan's Cold War Vision

Summary

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The images of the people of Berlin taking sledgehammers to the hated barrier and standing atop the wall celebrating are enduring symbols of freedom's march. The event marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, which disintegrated two years later, and the victory of liberalism over communism in the Cold War.

The wall's destruction was the culmination of a long-term national strategy of containment, which had withered before being re- energized by President Reagan. The fall of the wall was hard to conceive when Mr. Reagan took office and the Soviet Union was at the height of its imperial power. The term Cold War already had been retired and replaced with "detente," and Mr. Reagan's critics charged that his anti-communist rhetoric was a dangerous throwback to the 1950s. But Mr. Reagan understood that the ideological cleavage at the root of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry had not changed. The Cold War was the original war of ideas. When Mr. Reagan used the term "Evil Empire" in 1983, his detractors laughed at his old- fashioned notions of moral judgment. When he stood at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 and called on Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," his critics sighed, "There he goes again."

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Mr. Obama, Stay Away From This Wall ; Democrats Tried to Thwart Reagan's Cold War Vision

Yet Mr. Reagan's vision of a world without the Soviet empire was s...

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