Reagan Was Noble, But Obama Got the Prize

by Thomas Del Beccaro

In an age where style trumps substance in so many ways, few can be surprised that a fledging President would receive a Nobel Peace Prize.  It bears repeating that Obama was President for just a matter of days before the nomination process was closed.  Nevertheless, and without any substantive accomplishment, Obama was awarded the Prize – unanimously – apparently for things to come.  No wonder 58% of Americans believe that politics was behind the choice.

reagan

By contrast, consider the accomplishment of Ronald Reagan who, last I checked, did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  According to Margaret Thatcher, Reagan won the Cold War “without firing a shot.”   In the words of Henry Kissinger, it was “the most stunning diplomatic feat of the modern era.”  In the wake of that victory, millions upon millions of people were set free – and, as history has shown, a free people are far more likely to be a peaceful people.

So why didn’t Reagan get the Prize?  The answer is simple, the political Left, including the Nobel committee, didn’t like the way Reagan went about setting people free.   Reagan, we well remember, installed missiles in Europe.  He did so because he believed what Thomas Jefferson told us long ago:  “Whatever enables us to go to war, secures our peace.”  Reagan, in time, would modernize Jefferson’s wisdom by advocating “peace through strength.”

The Left, to be sure, did not and does not believe in that.  Indeed, at the time, former Vice President Walter Mondale stated that “Four years of Ronald Reagan has made this world more dangerous.  Four more will take us to the brink.”  It turns out that Mondale was wrong.  Rather than danger, Reagan brought millions to the brink of freedom because shortly after the Reagan Presidency, the Berlin Wall fell.

The Left, during Reagan’s time, was similarly distressed by Reagan’s designation of the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire.”  After all, what Hope can there be in such language?  The Soviet dissident, Natan Sharansky, stuck in a Soviet Gulag had some idea. According to Sharansky:

In 1983, I was confined to an 8-by-10-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” By tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s “provocation” quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth — a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.

Reagan may have confused names and dates, but his moral compass was always good. Today’s leaders, in contrast, may know their facts and figures, but are often woefully confused about what should be the simplest distinctions between freedom and tyranny, democrats and terrorists.

The legacy of Reagan will surely endure. Armed with moral clarity, a deep faith in freedom, and the courage to follow his convictions, he was instrumental in helping the West win the Cold War and hundreds of millions of people behind the Iron Curtain win their freedom.

Contrast that, if you will, with Nobel Prize winner, Barrack Obama who bowed before a foreign dictator, withdrew missile deployments, and, in the face of an obviously rigged Iranian election designed to crush the peaceful aspirations of Iranians seeking Liberty, stated that “It’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling … in Iranian elections.”  

In light of that, ask yourself whose foreign policy has been more productive?  Ask the millions of now free Eastern Europeans who was more Noble.  I am quite certain they prize their freedom, as would Ronald Reagan, far more than Obama’s false prize.


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Posted Oct 11th 2009 at 11:00 am in Culture, History, Politics | 113 Comments