In the 1970s, an ideological struggle within the Republican Party pitted the views of Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, against those of Ronald Reagan.
Kissinger, a brilliant, German-born statesman, embraced realpolitik—a pragmatic, power-based approach to foreign policy that downplays morality and ethics. Reagan believed that although realpolitik might be pursued by other nations, the concept was alien to the United States. He thought that it undermined American ideals, which were a source of strength and not a weakness. He promised that if he became president, he would place human rights and the expansion of human liberty at the center of his national-security strategy.
In 1983, Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Time and again he framed the Cold War, and America, in explicitly moral terms. His loathing for totalitarianism was among the very few hatreds Reagan ever held, his biographer Edmund Morris said.
During a May 1988 trip to the Soviet Union, he made a point of meeting with more than 100 dissidents. The New York Times reported at the time that senior Soviet officials complained that “a planned Presidential meeting with Soviet diss
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