I want to go back and show this editorial to the TNR editors of the 1980s.
Here is your obituary/editorial, I will tell them -- and it's one of the more tepid ones the country is reading:
In the aftermath of Ronald Reagan's death, there is much glib obituary chatter about his contribution to the end of the cold war, but it all makes the cold war seem so distant and its end so inevitable. In truth, the cold war was a terrifying and titanic conflict between world powers and world principles, and it conferred upon those who lived it, not least because of the sickening thermonuclear power of the states coldly at war, a tense experience of history's contingency that they will never forget. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and its empire? It was impossible, even irresponsible, to imagine it.
And so the first thing that must be said in grateful memory of Ronald Reagan is that he imagined it, that he grasped the essentials, that he was not afraid. The quality of his mind aside, he never lost his head. What was most important to him was in fact what was most important to the future of the world. Was his anti-communism an obsession? Then it was a proper obsession, a noble obsession. No, Reagan did not bring down communism; communism fell of its own moral and political and social and economic failures. But he defied it into its final collapse. With his irrefutable demonstration of the philosophical and technological superiority of America, Reagan embarrassed his enemy into oblivion. With this one accomplishment, he won greatness.