The Ukraine crisis makes me miss Ronald Reagan. More to the point, it makes me better appreciate his combination of moral clarity and realism: He understood that some governments are simply evil. Their leaders lust after power and seek to limit the freedom of their citizens. These governments are a threat to global security.
For Reagan, the No. 1 offender was the Soviet Union, but he held this view about communist governments more generally. He saw communism as an ideology that elevated the power of the state, a non-democratic state at that, over the rights of the individual.
It’s impossible to know exactly what Reagan would have thought of Putin’s Russia, which is not a communist country. But everything Reagan said and wrote implies that he would have been highly suspicious of it. Putin’s Russia already has moved militarily in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. It imprisons political opponents and clamps down on free speech. It is far from a legitimate democracy.
