Niall Ferguson
Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign very deliberately echoed the one that Ronald Reagan ran in 1980. “Peace through strength” and “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” are the two Reagan slogans that are best remembered today. Less well known is that in 1980, Reagan used the slogan “Make America great again,” including in his convention acceptance speech.
Few commentators have paid much attention to these parallels, partly because the two presidents’ personalities are so different, partly because paying tribute to Reagan has long been a vacuous ritual for Republican candidates. But the analogy is instructive—and Trump should use it to his political and strategic advantage, remembering (as others have forgotten) what exactly “peace through strength” turned out to mean in the 1980s. Although it has become fashionable to credit the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev with ending the Cold War, in truth it was the Reagan administration that forced Moscow down a path of reform that ultimately led to drastic disarmament and the end of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe.
Reagan opened with strength. He boldly reasserted the American rejection of communism as an ideology and Soviet expansionism as a strategy. At the same time, he initiated a major increase in defense spending that sought to exploit U.S. technological superiority. When the right time came, however, he pivoted to a series of summit meetings with Gorbachev that ultimately produced stunning breakthroughs in both disarmament and European security.
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