How Reagan Would Have Handled Putin

The Ukraine crisis makes me miss Ronald Reagan. More to the point, it makes me better appreciate his combination of moral clarity and realism: He understood that some governments are simply evil. Their leaders lust after power and seek to limit the freedom of their citizens. These governments are a threat to global security.

For Reagan, the No. 1 offender was the Soviet Union, but he held this view about communist governments more generally. He saw communism as an ideology that elevated the power of the state, a non-democratic state at that, over the rights of the individual.