The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal this morning has a piece that I thought I’d never see. Here’s a hint: It’s entitled “In Reagan’s Footsteps – Europe decides that Bush may be right after all.”
Visits by U.S. Presidents to Europe tend to have a template-making quality: Wilson, the peace maker, in Paris, 1919; Truman, the victor, at Potsdam, 1945; Kennedy, the stalwart, in Berlin, 1963; Reagan, the visionary, in Berlin, 1987. If President Bush’s trip this week has some kind of new theme, the word for it is probably conciliation. But our sense is that Mr. Bush is really following in Reagan’s footsteps.
Admittedly, this thought is not original: Der Spiegel beat us to it. Still, it says something that the leftish German newsweekly, which two years ago devoted an entire cover story to advancing the “Blood for Oil” thesis about U.S. ambitions in the Middle East, has gingerly raised the question, “Could Bush Be Right?”
“The Germany Reagan was traveling in, much like today’s Germany, was very skeptical of the American president and his foreign policy,” Der Spiegel writes. “When Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate—and the Berlin Wall—and demanded that Gorbachev ‘tear down this Wall,’ he was lampooned the next day on the editorial pages. He is a dreamer, wrote commentators. . . . But history has shown that it wasn’t Reagan who was the dreamer as he voiced his demand. Rather, it was German politicans who were lacking in imagination—a group who in 1987 couldn’t imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany.”
Words we will never see: “World decides – Canada’s liberal-left was right all along”.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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