How to Win the New Cold War
To Compete With China, Trump Should Learn From Reagan
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. As he makes clear in his book The Art of the Deal, Trump lives to bargain. “There are times when you have to be aggressive,” he writes of one real estate coup, “but there are also times when your best strategy is to lie back.” Trump firmly believes that, in a negotiation with a strong adversary, one must open aggressively—but then seek the crucial moment to settle.
Today, the United States finds itself in at least the sixth year of a second Cold War, this time with China, a confrontation that has become even more dangerous under the Biden administration. In his first term, Trump recognized the American need to contain China’s rise and convinced Washington policy elites, despite their initial skepticism, that this required both a trade war and a tech war. In his second term, he should once again begin by piling on the pressure with a fresh show of American strength. But this should not be an end in itself.
His ultimate goal ought to be like Reagan’s: to get to a deal with Washington’s principal adversary that reduces the nightmarish risk of World War III—a risk inherent in a cold war between two nuclear-armed superpowers.
Same Difference
There are, of course, major differences between Trump and Reagan. Trump is a protectionist; Reagan was a free trader. Trump is as hostile to illegal immigration as Reagan was relaxed about it. Trump is as sympathetic to authoritarian strongmen as Reagan was keen to promote democracy. Trump’s public personality is as abrasive as Reagan’s was genial, as vindictive as Reagan’s was magnanimous.
Also important to note is that the economic context when Reagan was elected was quite different from today: it was far worse. Inflation, as measured by the consumer price index, was at 12.6 percent in November 1980. The unemployment rate was 7.5 percent and climbing; it would peak at 10.8 percent in December 1982. Interest rates were sky-high: the effective federal funds rate was 15.85 percent. The economy had emerged from recession in August 1980 and would return to recession a year later.
By contrast, at the time of the 2024 election, inflation was 2.6 percent, unemployment 4.1 percent, and the federal funds rate 4.83 percent. Nevertheless, the resemblances between Trump and Reagan—and their times—are numerous and significant.
It is easy to forget, for example, how widely Reagan was feared at the time by liberals at home and abroad, as well as by Washington’s adversaries. As Max Boot shows in his new, revisionist biography of Reagan, he was seen at the time of his first election victory as “an amiable dunce,” in the words of the Democratic Party grandee Clark Clifford. The liberal journalist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in Harper’s that it was “humiliating to think of this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin being our President.”
It was routine for cartoonists to depict a crazed Reagan astride a falling atomic bomb, like the character T. J. “King” Kong in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Trump is depicted the same way today. Reagan was mocked, belittled, and condescended to more than any other major politician of his era—and so, today, is Trump.
Consider also the strength of their political positions. On the one hand, Reagan won in 1980 by a much larger margin than Trump did in 2024. Carrying 44 states, Reagan was elected president with 489 votes in the Electoral College and a popular vote margin of 9.7 percent. Trump’s win was no landslide: 31 states, 312 Electoral College votes, a popular vote margin of around 1.6 percent.
On the other hand, the Republican Party, under Trump, will control both chambers of Congress, whereas under Reagan, it had only the Senate. Moreover, Trump moved the Supreme Court decidedly to the right with his three first-term appointments, whereas the court during Reagan’s term was distinctly more liberal.
Like Reagan—who was shot by John Hinckley Jr. barely two months after his inauguration—Trump has survived a brush with death at the hands of an assassin. In each case, survival was accompanied by a sense of divine oversight, although neither man was especially devout. Like Reagan, too, Trump has vowed to reduce the size of the federal government. Both men were committed to supply-side reforms (in particular, deregulation), as well as spending cuts.
And, like Reagan, one of Trump’s first-year priorities will be to extend the tax cuts of his first term. Also like Reagan, Trump is very unlikely to balance the budget. It is true that some of Trump’s nominees are more outlandish than anyone Reagan ever considered for a cabinet-level job: consider, for example, Kash Patel, a midlevel official during Trump’s first term whom Trump has tapped to lead the FBI and who has vowed to purge “the deep state” of Trump’s enemies and critics, and Tulsi Gabbard, an idiosyncratic former Democrat whom Trump has tapped as director of national intelligence despite her lack of experience and her puzzling sympathetic views of Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia and Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.
Many remember nostalgically the stars of the early Reagan years: James Baker as chief of staff, Caspar Weinberger as secretary of defense, and the wunderkind David Stockman as director of the Office of Management and Budget. But few have any memory of James Edwards, who had served as governor of South Carolina but whose training as an oral surgeon scarcely qualified him to be secretary of energy, the post for which Reagan nominated him in 1980.
Conclusion
Historians tend to judge modern presidents more by their foreign policy successes and failures than by their domestic achievements. Like Reagan, Trump will inherit several foreign policy crises from his predecessor.
All in all, the world seems more perilous than at any time since the end of the Cold War. China has supplanted the Soviet Union as the United States’ principal rival—a superpower that is both economically and technologically more formidable than the Soviets ever were. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are now cooperating openly both economically and militarily. It is not hyperbole to refer to them as an axis akin to the one Washington and its allies faced during World War II.
Trump’s commitment is to avoid entangling the United States in more “forever wars” and, above all, to prevent a third world war. Whatever members of his national security team may imagine, a deal with Xi should remain Trump’s ultimate objective in his second term.
Source: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-s ... l-ferguson