Dick Morris
Tuesday, June 8, 2004

By adding America’s population to the combined totals of Britain and France, the U.S. entrance into World War I doomed Germany to defeat. It just didn’t have enough men.

Similarly, when Ronald Reagan upped the U.S. defense budget from 4 percent to 7 percent of our gross domestic product, he doomed the Soviet Union.

To match the American defense buildup, the Soviets had to devote between a quarter and a third of their economy to the arms race, an economic impossibility.

When Reagan added the threat of Star Wars to the mix, the Russians were lost.

But, in a deeper sense, this architecture of victory was based on the philosophical principle that free people could and would produce more than slaves.

By understanding the absence of incentive in a communist society and the virulent catalytic impact of the profit motive in a free one, Reagan realized that freedom would triumph.

He grasped that once the domestic constraints of regulation and high taxation were removed and the limits of arms control circumvented, capitalism would leave a planned economy in the dustbin of history, as Trotsky put it.

Where should Reagan rank among presidents?

If FDR deserves top rank for winning World War II and Lincoln gets it for the Civil War and Washington for the Revolution, why should Reagan’s Cold War victory gain him less?

Editor's note: