1. The Cold War between Freedom and Tyranny. The Cold War was waged in a range of “hot” and “cold” forms of warfare between free and tyrannical protagonists, not by regimes with moral equivalence or equal political and international legitimacy. Reagan’s new strategy did not win by means of predominant traditional diplomatic and defense assumptions and policies based on bringing “stability” of “spheres of influence,” a “balance of power,” or a “balance of [nuclear] terror.” The Cold War’s roots, stakes, and uncertain course in a nuclear age were always most fundamentally about the principles and institutions of human peace and freedom versus those of the totalitarian Communist promotion of permanent civil and external warfare and tyranny. The conflict’s chief cause was the Soviet Union’s backward-looking, violently anti-democratic Marxist-Leninist ideology, its totalitarian party-state, and its global imperial warfare that sought to eliminate the freedom principles and institutions of individual human value, pluralism, constitutionalism, and peaceful reform and progress, i.e., the principles at the heart of modern democratic Western civilization.

2. America’s Freedom Faith. The United States of America was the principal protagonist and target of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and, at the same time, the democratic world’s principal and indispensable source of resistance to the threats to peace and freedom emanating from the Soviet Union and its militant allies and fronts. As reviewed in Chapter 1 and referenced throughout the book, the core of America’s exceptional strength and role has been its freedom faith, democratic institutions, natural blessings, and uneven but very real progress in valuing God-given human rights and expanding the sphere of human freedom. It was this that justified not only the nation’s founders, but also Abraham Lincoln’s actions and words as well as those of Martin Luther King, Jr.—including his proclamation that “I still have a dream.” Ronald Reagan’s national security policy was very much in this tradition.

3. Marx’s Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics. The Cold War was rooted in Karl Marx’s claims to infallible scientific empirical discoveries of historical keys and iron linkages in a nineteenth-century mix of narrow scientific and intellectual work with German metaphysics. His theory of History, with a capital “H,” replaced God and God-given individual human rights and the potential for peaceful human progress at the foundation of modern Western civilization. Marx’s theories were irreconcilably anti-democratic and anti-humanitarian for, unlike other socialist thinkers of his time, he invented an inevitable historical process of “dialectical materialism” in which man is a material, malleable, soulless, and collectivist creature to be reshaped in a perfectly harmonized society Marx called Communism.

4. Marx’s Communist Blueprint. Marx’s Communist blueprint proclaimed in his Communist Manifesto and Critique of the Gotha Program and other writings is grounded in dogmas that lead him to insist, against reformist-minded democratic socialists of this day, on a series of violent, historically inevitable “class war” revolutions ending in a proto-totalitarian Communist “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Unlike societies envisaged by most major reformers, including most socialists and conservatives, Marx’s theory of history ends with an elite Communist vanguard cadre/party of monopolistic power, property, and privilege establishing an all-encompassing dictatorship to eliminate existing “bourgeois” classes, laws, institutions, families, culture, and religions. Ironically, Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” was in design and implementation more “capitalist,” unequal, and corrupt than any democratic, pluralistic, market economy, and civil society could possibly be when compared to a Communist state. For Marx, it is the state which now exclusively owns, centralizes, administers and regulates all property, capital, production, distribution, taxation and multi-year national planning priorities. This absolutist state is enforced through a bureaucratic complex designed to create a “socialist,” then “communist,” “new man” who is a collectively harmonized creature lacking individual views and value. The model is global as “workers of the world unite.”

5. Marxist-Leninist Totalitarian “Religion” from Stalin to Mao and Beyond. Marx’s vision and dogmas were seized, possibly quite cynically, by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik movement to claim historical/scientific legitimacy in opposing all paths to peaceful reform and progress such as proposed by Russia’s conservative Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, or by Alexander Kerensky and the Social Democratic Party. Lenin’s seizure of power in October 1917 was thus not a progressive revolution against the Czar but a reactionary coup against Kerensky’s Social Democratic-led Russian Provisional Government coalition that had forced the Czar’s abdication in March 1917 and was setting Russia on a democratic path. Lenin’s coup established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that then violently implemented a full-scale Communist revolution. Not only the “Red Guard” Communist Party cadre 

[Book pg. viii]