15 August 2015

By Michael G. Waltz

As I wondered through the Reagan Library in the hours before Governor Jeb Bush’s first major foreign policy speech this past week, I was struck by the similarities between what Reagan found when he entered office to the world the next U.S. president will encounter. By 1980, America had been embarrassed by Iran, was on the back foot against the Soviet Union, had seen its military forces “hollowed” out, and generally believed it was in an inevitable decline — a “crisis of the spirit in our country” as President Carter put it. Our policy against the global expansion of communism was to contain it and to cut deals with our enemies rather than try to defeat them. [Read article at War on the Rocks]