When Ronald Reagan f…

When Ronald Reagan first proposed a missile defense system, Democrats dubbed it “Star Wars” and derided it to no end. The international community was concerned about it being the next rung of the ladder in arms escalation. The Soviet Union was dead-set against it. It was the brunt of jokes by late-night talk show hosts and scoffed at by Democrats all around the country.

Today, an unnamed senior administration official said “there really has been a sea change” with regards to this idea. Even Russia is on the bandwagon. There’s no longer a concern about how nations with WMDs might interpret this; everyone wants it now (with the probable exception of Democrats that just can’t stand seeing a Reagan idea vindicated). In fact, there’s so much international support for it that the “National” is being dropped from the name “National Missile Defense”. The Bush administration is accelerating the program’s funding and is receiving support from Canada (who opposed the Iraq war), Poland and many other countries who are pouring billions into it.

What changed?

Not much, really. The world is just as, if not more, dangerous than it was during the Cold War. Nukes are still around, with some countries threatening to use them. Ideology is still turning nation against nation. What has changed is that the international community now realizes that they too–not just the US or Russia–are just as likely to be targets of a madman’s bomb. The change in these country’s stances is, I believe, more a heightened concern for their own neck than some humanitarian, globalist gesture.

It was Reagan who was the humanitarian. He wanted to save the world from nukes, and to prove it he promised to share the technology with the Soviet Union itself. Some Democrats even found fault in that! His goodwill, his concern for more than just himself and his people, and his forward thinking were never appreciated. When Bush proposed scrapping the 1972 ABM treaty and replacing it with a missile shield, he was criticized up and down for starting a new arms race and destroying US-Russian relations. Instead, both of us have agreed to slash our stashes of nukes by two-thirds. And this by the man liberal protestors called the biggest threat to world peace.

But now the debate on this topic is simply over the details of how to implement it. Reagan was right. Bush is right. Both had a good understanding of the world we live in, and of human nature, when they proposed their solutions. They also had in mind the good of, not just themselves and their own people, but of everyone in the international community, in spite of jeers from that peanut gallery when they thought they were safe enough.

Yes, they’ll still be vilified by the far left. That’s to be expected. But they’re right, and that trumps all.

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