Inside the Cold War from Marx to Reagan is published at a time when militant ideologies and forces linked to weapons of mass terror and destruction are in the ascendancy. Democratic nations (including the United States) have at times reacted with incomprehension, indifference, confusion, and disengagement as global dangers accelerated. More than at any time since Ronald Reagan’s new Cold War strategy of “peace and freedom” and “peace through strength” achieved the collapse of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian Communist ideology, regime and empire a quarter century ago, America and its democratic allies are confronted with critical issues of peace and war, of freedom and tyranny. In the face of these dangers, a principled new national security strategy must be developed “to provide for the common defense” and “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

 

New Insights for Past and Present. In this book and its associated Internet elements the author provides a comprehensive guide to the ideological roots, historical record, strategies, and key policy debates and official documents of the long Cold War that became the Third World War of the twentieth century. These elements have too often been ignored by contemporary policy, academic, and media communities that, with few exceptions, are focused on narrow topics and time frames and exclude many key official document sources. Readers are encouraged to seek insights about the threat of the totalitarian Marxist-Leninist ideology and Soviet regime and pre-Reagan U.S. strategies that did not well understand, and thus failed to contain, moderate, or roll back rising Soviet threats to global peace and freedom. They will understand the Reagan Revolution and its contemporary twenty-first century relevance to speak and act truth to brutal power and to open, moderate, and ultimately roll back totalitarian power.

 

Understanding the Reagan Revolution Against the Soviet Totalitarians. In addressing the Communist Soviet Union’s wide range of “cold” and “hot” warfare against Western democracies and Third World nations, Reagan often referred to the Second World War waged by those seeking peace, freedom, and independence against the totalitarian forces of National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan—while also aware that in a nuclear age all-out warfare and “unconditional surrender” were not Cold War alternatives. Unlike his opponents, Reagan fully understood the nature of the Soviet threat and that existing U.S. Cold War strategies were failing to effectively take on the Soviet regime, its Communist ideology, and its global “active measures” intelligence operations.

 

Rejecting Faltering U.S. Cold War Strategies. Reagan’s own revolutionary U.S. Cold War strategy replaced three severe limitations of the predominant U.S. strategies he experienced throughout his political life and inherited as president. First, Soviet aggression had in many cases not been “contained” through the U.S. “containment” doctrine established in the late 1940s that relied on traditional diplomatic concepts of “balance of power” and “spheres of influence” which lacked moral clarity and faltered when applied to totalitarian ide-

 

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