In a few weeks we will celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Reykjavík Summit from 1986, where U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev began what ultimately would become the fall of the Soviet Union.
As reported in Encyclopedia Britannica, “The meeting, the second between the two leaders, was intended not as a summit but as a session in which the leaders explored the possibility of limiting each country’s strategic nuclear weapons to create momentum in ongoing arms-control negotiations. The Reykjavík summit almost resulted in a sweeping nuclear arms-control agreement in which the nuclear weapons of both sides would be dismantled.”1
In Iceland’s capital, Reagan and Gorbachev would agree to a Washington Summit, to take place on December 8-10, 1987.
In 1987, I had an office in Washington, DC, on 2nd Street, NE. Each morning I drove up Constitution Avenue past the Capitol on the right to make a left to my office on 2nd Street. This particular Tuesday, I drove up Constitution Avenue and there on each lamppost, up and down Constitution Avenue, were Soviet flags, replete with hammer and sickle, flying from the metal posts that light the street at night.
“Reagan has lost his mind,” I thought.
Next came the agreed upon Moscow Summit, May 29-June 2, 1988, between President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev. Paul Kengor described the summit in a Christianity Today article under the heading “Ronald Reagan’s Mission Trip to Moscow.”
He wrote: “Appropriately, [May 29] was Sunday. Reagan’s self-ascribed role of religious emissary started in that initial ceremony. As he finished his conventional opening remarks, he stunned those gathered by pausing to deliver this direct salutation to the general secretary and his comrades: ‘Thank you and God bless you.’
“While such a closing is hardly unusual to American ears, it was unheard of in the Soviet Union, an officially atheist country where religious content was prohibited from television and radio [and where Sunday schools were against the law, children could not legally attend church, and parents were legally forbidden to teach their children about God even in their own homes]. … facts [that] Reagan knew well. As Reagan’s words were translated for all Russians to hear, the hardened Kremlin atheists visibly blanched.
“Gorbachev’s translator, Igor Korchilov, braced himself and recorded that these words rang like blasphemy to the Soviet officials: ‘The heretofore impregnable edifice of Communist atheism was being assaulted before their very eyes [by Ronald Reagan].’”
Secular historians will insist that Moscow was a meeting between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev held from May 29 to June 3, 1988. A meeting where they finalized the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty [INF], discussed bilateral issues like Central America, Southern Africa, the Middle East, human rights, and the pending withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan ... yadda yadda yadda.
What actually happened was that Jesus Christ, Son of God and Lord of Life, was advanced through the agency of Ronald Reagan and in one fell swoop outmaneuvered atheistic communism, initiating the future collapse of the Soviet Union.
The historical Reagan/Gorbachev event was brought to mind again through a report on the recent National Conservatism Conference in Orlando by David Brooks, a NY Times columnist and contributing writer at The Atlantic.3,4
Brooks expressed his appreciation for Rachel Bovard [born 1984], Policy Director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, and serving on the board of the Council for National Policy Action, among other high-level activities relating to fighting for conservative policies in Washington.
Characterizing conservatives as insufferably naïve in believing that liberals and conservatives both want what’s best for America, Ms. Bovard maintains that “Woke elites - increasingly the mainstream left of this country - do not want what we want. What they want is to destroy us. Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal, but they’ve already been doing it for years by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.”
“Bovard [had] the place rocking,” Brooks noted, “training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims’ fathers, declare math to be white supremacist, finance ethnic cleansing in western China, and who partied, a mile high, on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express.”
“The national conservatives,” he added, “thus describe a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.”
