WHAT WOULD REAGAN DO? Newt Gingrich addressed the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday during the presentation of a new book, Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph over Communism, by Peter Schweizer.
When Reagan won the White House in 1980, he did not plan to engage the Soviet Union in detente. Instead, the new president set his sights on the higher goal of freeing Russia and Eastern European countries from the Communist yoke, Gingrich said.
Similarly, the United States today has to come up with “goals worthy of the leading power on the planet” in its dealings with the Muslim world. Merely aiming to defeat the Taliban or replacing the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq is not enough, he said.
“They have to be goals that represent a scale of change in the Islamic world fully parallel to the changes in the Soviet empire,” Gingrich said.
These changes must provide for “a rise in opportunity for every Muslim to live in safety, health, prosperity and freedom and for every woman in the Muslim world to live in freedom – and those are very, very big changes,” he said.
See also this recent article by Schweizer, for more on “What Would Reagan Do”.
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