STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Like it or not, the world is changing. President Trump's reelection is just one of many signs of that. His expected meeting this week with Russia's leader may help us learn more about what that new world is. And in many conversations on NPR, we're trying to map the new world order. Today, we have a look at a past president in a time of change, Ronald Reagan.
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RONALD REAGAN: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
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INSKEEP: He's the Republican president in the 1980s who challenged the Soviet Union to remove the wall that divided Berlin. His biographers include the conservative writer Max Boot.
MAX BOOT: Following the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, stagflation, an awful lot had gone wrong. And America seemed ungovernable. It seemed out of control, destined to decline. But Ronald Reagan had this kind of invincible faith in America as a shining city on a hill.
INSKEEP: He was the leader of a conservative movement. He was a movie star, a salesman for his cause. Max Boot contends he also was a strategic thinker.
BOOT: I think that's one of the things that people don't understand about his success as governor of California and president of the United States. They tend to focus on his very conservative rhetoric and imagine that he was some kind of ideological purist. But in fact, just the opposite. He was somebody who was not just the great communicator but also the great compromiser.
INSKEEP: I'm thinking of the fact that he was criticized for calling the Soviet Union an evil empire. And yet he worried his own aides by going to such lengths to try to make peace with the Soviets or to work out arms control deals.
BOOT: That's exactly right. And there was a lot more to Ronald Reagan than people realized at the time, when they were deriding him as a warmonger. He was secretly a nuclear abolitionist. He was somebody who wanted to get rid of all nuclear weapons. And in fact, he segued in his second term from being strictly confrontational with the Soviet Union, as he was in his first term, to actually forging a friendship with Gorbachev and reducing tensions and setting the stage for the end of the Cold War.
INSKEEP: I guess we should note the Berlin Wall fell after Reagan's departure from office. But is there any doubt in your mind that Reagan was a prime mover?
BOOT: Well, I think, you know, the prime mover in many ways were, of course, the people of Eastern Europe, the people of Eastern Germany who didn't want to live under a communist dictatorship. And I think Gorbachev also deserves a lot of credit because he did not react in the way that the rulers of China did during the Tiananmen Square protests that same year. He didn't send out tanks to massacre people. He allowed the Berlin Wall to come down and thereby to end Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
INSKEEP: I'm glad to hear you phrase it that way because a question is on my mind. We tend to think of the president of the United States, whoever it is, as the main character in the world. And our media are set up that way. All the television cameras point that way. People hang on his every word. But listening to you, we could make a case that it was actually forces of history, and it didn't matter so much who the president was.
BOOT: Well, I think it did matter who the president was. But I think you're absolutely right that the president of the United States was not necessarily the prime mover in this drama. Reagan was certainly lucky in his timing. And he had the good sense to put a lifetime of anti-communist rhetoric behind him and to make common cause with the world's No. 1 communist, which is not something that anybody expected at the time. But nevertheless, Reagan I don't think was the prime mover in this historical drama.
INSKEEP: So let's move forward now. What is the world order that President Trump has encountered?
BOOT: Well, President Trump is presiding over a much more complicated world order with China presenting the most long-term and important challenge to American power. But Russia is a major threat, Iran is a threat and North Korea is a threat. So this is a very complicated strategic calculus that the president has to deal with, and I'm not sure that President Trump is aware enough of the nuances or the consequences of his actions.
INSKEEP: For that very reason, I wonder which of the president's actions we can see as changing the world and which we can see as getting attention, so to speak. Do you think that he is acting in a way that is transforming the world?
BOOT: I think he is transforming the world but not necessarily in a positive direction. I think the biggest change we're seeing is his imposition of a tariff regime on the entire world. He is basically imposing them using executive authority, which I think there's real cause to doubt whether he has that authority under the Constitution. But he is turning back on 80 years of the U.S. trying to promote free trade and lower tariffs. Trump is actually raising tariffs and thereby raising prices for American consumers and also creating barriers between the U.S. and our allies, who are smarting from all of these tariffs that he is imposing.
INSKEEP: Reagan, of course, is a dominant figure of the 1980s. President Trump can be thought of in many ways as a figure of the 1980s. A lot of his ideas seem to come from that period when he was a younger adult. His attraction to tariffs and his unhappiness with the decline of American industry sounds very 1980s, when steel mills were closing and so forth. And we could go through a lot of other things that the president stands for. He is in many ways a person of the same time as Ronald Reagan.
BOOT: That's exactly right. But one of the ironies with President Trump is that he now has a giant portrait of President Reagan hanging in the Oval Office. And yet at the time in the 1980s, Donald Trump, the real estate developer, was a caustic critic of President Reagan. And clearly, in the years since, he has become the preeminent figure in the Republican Party and taken the Republican Party in many ways in very different directions from those espoused by President Reagan.
INSKEEP: In the current president's constant changes of attitude and position toward other world leaders, toward various wars and other situations, do you see any possibility of something like you described with Reagan where he confronted the Soviet Union and then got to another phase, and things got better?
BOOT: That is probably what President Trump is trying to do. I mean, the problem is that President Trump is often very mercurial in the way that he implements his agenda. And so remember during his first term where he went from threatening to rain fire and fury on North Korea to talking about how much he loved Kim Jong Un, the dictator of North Korea. It didn't result in a deal. It didn't result in anything. We'll see if he has more success with Putin. But right now, it's very hard to figure out what his method is actually gaining us because, you know, all that zigzagging is, I think, very confusing not just to Americans, but also to other world leaders. And I'm not sure what it's actually going to accomplish, but if it has a good result, that would be wonderful.
INSKEEP: Max Boot is the author of "Reagan: His Life And Legend" and other books. Thanks so much.
BOOT: Thanks for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF KENDRICK LAMAR SONG, "RONALD REAGAN ERA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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