The President has the right to draw the line where he chooses to draw it but I am someone who believes that when Ronald Reagan went to the Brandenburg Gate, he did not say “Mr. Gorbachev, that wall is none of our business.” He went to the Brandenburg Gate and he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” We know from people like Natan Sharansky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn that deep in the gulags of the Soviet Union, when Ronald Reagan was willing to call the Soviet Empire “the evil empire,” it gave encouragement to the people who were fighting tyranny within the Soviet Union.

There’s a lot here, and the Sharansky anecdote is true, but I’d just point out that Solzhenitsyn left the gulags in 1956 and that the “evil empire” speech came 27 years later. Was Reagan so inspiring that his words could travel back in time? Honestly, who can say?

I’m just thinking of President Reagan — he engaged fully with the Soviet Union to great effect while at the same time describing them as an evil empire, saying they would end up on the ash heap of history. That’s not a bad model.