Donald Trump vs Ronald Reagan on ‘Peace Through Strength’

Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and the GOP candidates for Congress like to say they are advocates of “Peace Through Strength.” The phrase traces a noble lineage from Hadrian through George Washington, but in modern American politics it is fully attributed to Ronald Reagan.

I knew Ronald Reagan’s Peace Through Strength. And Mr. Trump is no Ronald Reagan, even if that’s how he labels his foreign policies.

To be sure, Mr. Trump and the GOP have every right to press for a foreign policy they see as best for our nation. And their America First, often neo-isolationist views are resonating across a nation understandably exhausted by two decades of Forever Wars and ongoing battles to control our borders.

But words matter. These Republicans who wrap themselves in Reagan’s Peace Through Strength motto are creating a misleading, even false echo of Reaganism.

As Moscow correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, I spent five years in the Soviet Union (a time my bride calculated as five winters), overlapping Reagan’s years at the White House. My tax dollars helped pay for the Pershing II intermediate-range nuclear missiles aimed toward my family in the Soviet capital from bases in West Germany. Reagan deployed those new nukes – the first arriving in 1983 — through strenuous collaboration with our NATO allies, over the objections of massive street protests across West Germany and much of Western Europe.

Reagan’s muscular deployment of those missiles, to counter the Soviet Union’s existing arsenal of theater nuclear weapons there, certainly got the attention of the Kremlin and its General Staff.

Trump, though, has repeatedly dismissed the importance of this nation’s European allies as unnecessary drains on U.S. security — at the moment NATO is holding a strong line against Putin’s neo-czarist, re-expansionist desires for other sovereign, neighboring territories.

And recall Reagan’s signature, visual, visceral moment of his Peace Through Strength policy: In June 1987, he stood at the Brandenburg Gate in a divided Berlin, and publicly challenged the Kremlin leader, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

If he were alive in February 2022, Reagan would have been among the first to Kyiv after the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine, shaking his fist eastward toward the Kremlin, and declaring, “Mr. Putin, pull back your troops.”

Mr. Trump still has not held Vladimir Putin wholly guilty for his wholly unlawful invasion of a sovereign neighbor.

The Republican Party’s members of Congress marching behind Trump also behaved in an un-Reagan manner when they blocked essential military assistance to Ukraine last year, in allegiance to their presumed presidential candidate.

Timing is everything. Who knows how different the battlefield would look today if Ukraine had received those effective weapons a year ago when the aid package first was proposed, instead of months and months into 2024. The region might be closer to an honorable cease-fire.

And it goes beyond the Atlantic Alliance, to the very heart of how to keep this nation safe in a new age of danger, when a rising arc of authoritarianism spans the globe from Moscow to Beijing to Pyongyang to Tehran and its proxies.

One of this nation’s powerful asymmetrical security strengths is that the United States has true allies and friends. China has only clients. Russia has only enablers. Our nation must play to its strengths, and nurturing alliances is core to that.

Reagan was a creature of the Cold War – the previous one, anyway — and he aligned American power with what, to him, was right and just in standing strong against significant authoritarian adversaries. In fact, he was more committed to NATO and the strategic importance of the alliance than NATO populations were to American priorities.

That point was made strongly when Reagan’s hugely unpopular Pershing deployments were proven a successful strategy and drove negotiations that banned U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear weapons. Yes, those Pershing IIs were removed under the “Zero Option” treaty. Benefits from Reagan’s true Peace Through Strength were felt on both sides of the Atlantic.

The way we define a problem defines the solutions, and therefore can limit them. We have to be clear about what our words truly mean, and what they do not, in order to get it right if politicians are trying to garner votes by promising Peace Through Strength.

Thom Shanker is director of the Project for Media and National Security at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. He formerly was a national security correspondent and editor for The New York Times.