Reagan at Westminster in 1982 Predicted the Soviet Collapse Out Loud

Imagine the forecasting industry as it stood in the summer of 1982. The experts of the foreign policy establishment agreed that the Soviet Union was a permanent feature of the landscape, as fixed as the Alps and a good deal better armed. The task of statesmen, in that view, was to manage the thing, to negotiate its terms, and to avoid saying anything that might upset it. Then an American President, a former actor whom half the press considered a menace and the other half considered a joke, walked into the Royal Gallery of the Palace of Westminster and told the assembled Lords and Commons that the Soviet system was finished.

He did not say it was finished tomorrow. He did not say it with a date. But he said it, in public, in a hall where a great many people had spent the century making accommodations, and the speech deserves to be read as what it was: an act of strategy conducted by means of the English language.

The setting

The date was June 8, 1982. The address was delivered to members of both Houses of Parliament, an honor extended to very few foreign leaders. It came in the middle of a trip through Europe that had already taken him to Rome and Paris and to the economic summit at Versailles, and that was to go on to Bonn and Berlin. The room was full of a political class that had a great deal of reason to be nervous.

Consider the mood of the moment. The Falklands War between Britain and Argentina was in its last days, and Reagan himself noted in the speech that young men were fighting for Britain on distant islands in the South Atlantic; the Argentine surrender came on June 14. In Poland, the government had imposed martial law in December 1981 to crush the independent trade union Solidarity. In Western Europe and in the United States, a large movement in favor of a nuclear freeze was gathering strength, and the largest demonstration of that movement would fill the streets of New York four days after Reagan spoke. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 and was still there. Commentators spoke of "détente" in the tone one uses for a departed relative.

Into that atmosphere Reagan brought a thesis. It was not a thesis that the Soviet Union was weak in the sense of being easy to beat. It was that the Soviet system was brittle in the sense that matters over a long horizon, because it could not give its people either prosperity or freedom, and a system that cannot deliver either one cannot last.

The passage everyone quotes

Here is the sentence, as delivered:

"...the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people."

Two observations. First, the phrase "ash heap of history" has a pedigree. Trotsky is credited with a related image, the dustbin of history, in 1917, aimed at the Mensheviks who walked out of the Soviet congress, though the phrase was in print long before him and the exact words he used are disputed. Reagan took a figure of speech that Marxists had used to consign their opponents to oblivion and aimed it back at the ideology that embraced it. That is not just a joke; it is a form of argument, in which the other side's own vocabulary is made to deliver the verdict.

Second, notice the grammar. The sentence does not say the United States will defeat Marxism-Leninism. It says that a march of freedom and democracy will leave it behind, "as it has left other tyrannies." The subject is a historical process in which the free peoples are participants, not a military campaign in which America is the sole actor. It is a more modest sentence than its reputation, and a more confident one.

The surrounding passage makes the economic case. The decay of the Soviet experiment, Reagan said, should come as no surprise, because wherever the comparison between free and closed societies had been made, it was the democratic countries that were prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people. His examples were pairs that any listener could check: West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam. He added that in the Soviet Union the same system had produced a crisis, and that the crisis was visible in the figures: the shortfalls, the stagnation, the inability of a command economy to feed its own people without help from abroad.

The plan inside the prediction

If the speech had been only a forecast, it would be a footnote. What turns it into a document worth reading is that it proposes something to do.

The relevant sentence is the one that gave birth to an institution. Reagan described the objective as simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.

Read those nouns slowly. A free press. Unions. Political parties. Universities. These are not weapons systems. They are the civil institutions that distinguish a society from a state. A regime that rules by monopolizing every one of them has to fear anyone who builds even a small version of any of them. That is what Solidarity was in Poland: an independent union that grew into a national movement. Reagan's insight was that the right strategy toward such a regime is to help the people on the other side of the wall to build exactly those things, and then to refuse to treat the regime's veto on them as legitimate.

He also asked a question of his listeners, and the question is the moral hinge of the address. What kind of people do we think we are? And the answer he offered: free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well. It is a plain sentence, and it is a Founding sentence. It echoes the claim of the Declaration of Independence that the rights of man are not the property of a single nation. We hold these truths to be self-evident; the Founders did not say that they held them to be self-evident for Virginians.

From a sentence to an institution

The proposal did not die with the applause. In 1983 the National Endowment for Democracy was founded, a private, nonprofit organization funded by Congress through an annual appropriation, to support the growth of democratic institutions abroad. The Endowment grew out of the study that followed the Westminster address, and its structure reflected an argument that conservatives and liberals of the day shared: that the public support of democratic civil society should be open, not a covert activity run through the intelligence services.

That is worth pausing on because it is easily forgotten. Before 1983, much of the American support for foreign political parties and unions had been done in secret, and the revelations of the 1970s about that practice had been damaging. The Westminster speech proposed to do it in the open, with the names and the amounts on the record. It was an attempt to make an old tool consistent with a free country's habits of publicity.

A conservative reader may reasonably have mixed feelings about the later history of the Endowment, as about any taxpayer-funded body. Questions about its budget, its grants, and its oversight are proper questions, and Congress, which created it by statute, is the body that should be asking them. But the original proposal is not the same as every later grant. The idea that a free society should be willing to help others build free institutions, in public and with accounting, is an idea that deserves to be argued on its merits.

What the press made of it

If you want to see the gap between how an event looks on the day and how it looks later, read the coverage. The reception of the Westminster address was polite. The trip was covered as a tour in which an American President met allies, spoke to crowds, and tried to calm Europe's anxieties about nuclear weapons. The ash-heap passage was noted, and in many accounts it was treated as the sort of rhetorical flourish that presidents deploy to fill a long speech, a line to be quoted and then quietly set aside.

It is fair to say that the dominant view in elite opinion at the time was that Reagan's rhetoric was dangerous. Critics argued that talk of the Soviet system's demise would provoke Moscow, destabilize arms control, and confuse allies. Some suggested that a man who talked like this could not be trusted with nuclear weapons. That was a coherent position. It was a position built on a premise, that the Soviet system was durable and that the only question was how to coexist with it, and the premise is where the argument should have been conducted.

I will note, in fairness, that the opposite position was not unreasonable. A prediction that happens to be right is not proof that the reasoning behind it was complete. Reagan could not have known the course of the next nine years. What he did was to state a view of the long run, back it with an argument about incentives, and then build policy on it. That is what statesmen are for. The test of such a view is not whether it is certain; it is whether it is better than the alternative at guiding action in the meantime.

What followed by 1991

The record from 1982 to 1991 is short enough to run in order.

• 1983: The National Endowment for Democracy is founded. Reagan delivers the speech in March in which he calls the Soviet Union an evil empire, which drew far more commentary than the Westminster address, and announces the Strategic Defense Initiative later that month.
• 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the Soviet leader. The man who would preside over the end of the system is a believer in the system, and is looking for a way to rescue it.
• 1987: At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Reagan calls on Gorbachev to tear down the wall. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is signed in December, a deal explored in The INF Treaty Proved Arms Control Works Only When You Hold Cards.
• 1989: The Communist governments of Eastern Europe fall in turn. The Berlin Wall is opened on November 9.
• 1991: The Soviet Union is dissolved in December. The red flag comes down from the Kremlin on Christmas Day.

Does that sequence prove that the Westminster speech caused the collapse? No, and a careful writer should say so. The Soviet system's decline had deep roots in its own economics, in the burden of the arms race, in the Afghan war, in the courage of dissidents and of ordinary people from Gdansk to Prague, and in the choices made by Gorbachev. The sources tell a story about many causes. What the sequence does show is that the prediction was not foolish, and that the strategy it proposed, which was to arm, to pressure, and to support civil society, was at least consistent with the outcome.

For what the Soviet archives later added to the picture, and where the older textbook accounts went wrong, see Textbook Cold War Tales the Soviet Archives Quietly Overturned.

Words as a weapon: what a statesman is doing

Now to the point that I think matters most for a reader today. Reagan's address is a model of how a statesman uses speech.

1. He names the thing. The Soviet Union is described as a system of tyranny, not as a partner with a different perspective. Diplomacy that refuses to name a regime's nature cannot guard against it.
2. He asserts a direction of history without claiming a date. That keeps him honest and keeps him believed.
3. He connects the claim to a programme. The infrastructure of democracy is a thing a government can fund, a thing a citizen can volunteer for, a thing a dissident can use.
4. He appeals to principle, not self-interest alone. The question about what kind of people we are is a question about character. A free country that appeals only to its interests will find that its interests change with the polls.
5. He speaks to the people behind the wall. The address was delivered to the Parliament, but its audience was meant to include people who had been told for decades that the free world had written them off.

Contrast that with the contemporary habit of treating every foreign policy statement as a risk to be minimized. We have become a country in which officials rehearse their words until the meaning has been squeezed out, and then wonder why no one believes them. The Westminster speech, whatever its flaws, had the opposite virtue. It said what the speaker believed, in words that could be quoted back to him, and it was prepared to be judged by the outcome.

The objection, answered

The strongest objection to the conservative reading of the speech is that it is a classic case of post hoc reasoning. The Soviet Union fell; Reagan said it would; therefore the speech, or the policy, was the cause. A fair-minded skeptic will point out that predictions of Soviet decline were available in many quarters, that other presidents had spoken in a similar spirit, and that the system's collapse owed much to forces no American government controlled.

I accept the facts of that objection and reject the conclusion. The objection shows that the speech was not the sole cause. It does not show that the strategy was irrelevant. The question is whether, in 1982, a policy built on the premise that the Soviet system was durable was a better guide than a policy built on the premise that it was brittle. The first premise led to an arms control process that locked in Soviet advantages and a diplomatic style that treated dissidents as an embarrassment. The second led to the support of Solidarity, a military build-up that raised the cost of the competition, and a refusal to accept the permanence of the division of Europe. The first premise was wrong; the second was right. In strategy, that is most of what being right means. The general principle, that an enemy must believe you will pay the price, is argued in Deterrence Fails When an Enemy Thinks You Will Not Pay the Price.

The Founders would have recognized the underlying argument. The framers of the Constitution believed that free institutions were not only a good in themselves but a source of strength, and Federalist No. 1 opens by asking whether societies of men are capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend on accident and force. Reagan was answering that question for the twentieth century.

The case in brief

1. On June 8, 1982, Reagan told Parliament that Marxism-Leninism would be left on the ash heap of history, a forecast made against the grain of elite opinion at the time.
2. The speech was more than a prediction: it proposed to foster the infrastructure of democracy, a free press, unions, parties and universities, and that proposal led to the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983.
3. The contemporary press treated it as a rhetorical flourish; the record from Solidarity to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 treated it as a roadmap.
4. The speech did not single-handedly end the Cold War, but the strategy it described, to name the enemy, to press, and to support civil society, was better than the premise of permanence it opposed.
5. A statesman's words are a weapon of liberty when they are plain, tied to a programme, and prepared to be judged by events.

What you can do: read the full text of the Westminster address and then look up how the National Endowment for Democracy is funded, and ask your own senator in writing whether its grants are properly overseen.