Bipartisanship: the Holy Grail of American politics. Long the go-to buzzword for presidents, elusive cross-aisle support at home has all too often been purchased at the price of good policy abroad.
I am going to talk about how Ronald Reagan and his team--a team widely characterized at the time, both here and abroad, as a group of inexperienced and impractical right-wing ideologues and fanatics--prevailed in the Cold War.
The inevitability of republicanism as the answer to infinite governmental woes seemed clear. Yet the belief that the world abhors an ideological vacuum was mistaken.
Western society tends to see disaster all around, from climate change to terrorism. But we live in a time of unbridled prosperity. Our age has nowhere near as great a measure of crisis as the age of total war.
