Of Ronald Reagan and Freedom in the Middle East

The 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, the greatest President of the Twentieth Century and one of the three or four greatest Presidents in American history, is a fit time to consider what makes for social freedom and civil liberty. We need to have a clear understanding of such freedom if we are to make heads or tails of the current civil turmoil in the Middle East. American foreign policy since the days of Woodrow Wilson has all too often gotten this wrong.

First of all, we need to understand that the right to vote is an important but far from the most important of civil rights. Demagogues and dictators have long demonstrated their ability to survive and even control elections. Never underestimate the willingness of desperate electorates to vote away their freedoms. From Germans in the 1930s to Venezuelans in the Twenty-first Century we have seen voters elect leaders who promised to exchange liberty for stability. Soviet citizens and the citizens of the old corrupt European communist countries all had the right to vote. In fact, they could be punished for failing to vote. Free suffrage may be an essential part of liberty, but it can also coexist with tyranny.

Consider that our Declaration of Independence pointed to far more important purposes of free government: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What makes these more important is that these are all individual freedoms, founded on the recognition of the worth of the individual. While votes are counted and effective only in mass numbers, life is an individual matter, as is the liberty to use that life to pursue happiness as the individual sees fit.

Of equal importance is how the Founding Fathers sought to secure liberty. They trusted the safety of liberty to the rule of law. The signers of the Declaration of Independence believed that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men”. The purpose of government is to establish and enforce the rule of law on which freedom rests, freedom that is lost when anarchy and mob rule prevail just as surely as when kings and dictators impose their will on their subjects. The American Founders recognized and proclaimed a new idea, the idea that when government strays from the rule of law, or, in their words, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Bearing these principles in mind, we can be prepared to evaluate what is going on in the Middle East. Without argument, nearly all of the governments of the Middle East—with the important exceptions of the governments of Israel and of Turkey and perhaps the new government of Iraq—are tyrannies, where powerful dictators or oligarchies impose their will on their populations who are unable to trust in the law to protect them in the enjoyment of individual liberties. The cronies of these rulers, whether family or friends, are given special privileges to take property, impose prices, control businesses, and engage in wide varieties of corruption, impoverishing their nations in the process.

It is no accident that standards of living in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere continue to be depressed, while nearby Israel, with virtually no natural resources and almost no land—but a constitution that protects individual rights under the rule of law—is a comparative economic and social paradise. In fact, Israel’s prosperity based on individual freedom seems to be a fundamental source of the hatred of neighboring despotic regimes, not unlike the reason why despots have persistently fomented hatred of the United States.

The question is, will the rioters in the streets seek to replace despotism and crony capitalism with individual rights and liberties, founded upon the rule of law, or will they merely replace one despotism with another and more pervasive one? Iran gives us one chilling example. Can we really say that the totalitarianism of the Iranian mullahs is better than the dictatorship of the Shah?

Watch which liberties the emerging leaders of the rioters advocate. Surely they will call for elections. So did the Red Army in the wake of World War II, as did the ayatollahs in Tehran. But what about the rights to private property, what about freedom of worship, what about security from arbitrary arrest, the ability to start up and own a business and enjoy the fruits of individual labor. Most importantly, look for independent courts with authority and power to protect the rights of minorities and individuals. These are the rights that America should advocate and the promotion and protection of these rights that we should foster. When we have, in places like Poland, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and West Germany, the results have been sustainable freedom and dramatic prosperity.

Not quite 30 years ago, on March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan spoke to a big labor union meeting of the AFL-CIO. He explained why the U.S. economy was on the rocks and how to get it going again, stronger than ever. The problem, he said, was that America was not acting like America:

We’ve gone astray from first principles. We’ve lost sight of the rule that individual freedom and ingenuity are at the very core of everything that we’ve accomplished. Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.

A few minutes after that speech, President Reagan was shot. He recovered, and because he recovered and persisted with his policies of returning power to the individuals, America recovered. His policies led to America winning the Cold War and succeeded in a dramatic economic boom that lasted for almost 20 years. His advice, pointing to the fundamental principles for the success of America, are just as important now as they were then, just as important for us in the United States as they are for the people of the Middle East.