Sebastian Gorka
Evil can be vanquished. Remember, our victory over Soviet communism was never preordained, never a done deal. After fearful events such as the Sputnik launch, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the crushing of the Prague Spring, those in the West who believed in “coexistence” with the totalitarian system felt empowered and vindicated. But then, on a clear November night in 1989, the human souls imprisoned within Marx’s “Workers’ Paradise” decided to liberate themselves from the hollow decrepit nullity that was communism, as the inhabitants of East Germany bravely dismantled the Berlin Wall that separated them from liberty and democracy.
We face another globally capable and motivated threat today, not a secular ideology but a death cult President Trump has rightly described as “radical Islamic terrorism”. And this week, as he travels across the Middle East and Europe, the President is galvanising a new coalition of partners to defeat today’s enemy, just as his predecessor, President Reagan, decades ago mobilised the West and the people of the “captive nations” together to defeat communism and end the Cold War.
All analogies fail if pushed too far, but in this case, what President Trump is doing today bears a great resemblance to the leadership and policies of President Reagan during the 1980s. Reagan began by applying truth to the threat assessment. He called the “Socialist” USSR what it truly was: an “evil empire”.
This week, President Trump went into the heart of the Middle East, to the land of Mecca and Medina. Surrounded by the leaders of the Arab and Muslim world, he jettisoned the social science nostrums of the last eight years, during which his predecessor explained away the horrors of al-qaeda and Isil with phrases such as “local grievances” and “upstream factors”. No. The mass murder by jihadists, as in Manchester, is not the product of unemployment or political disenfranchisement. It is driven by a heinous fanaticism.
President Trump also provided the long-needed, essential and honest assessment for victory when he told those gathered: “This is a battle between good and evil.” The same was true of the West’s war with Nazism as well as our cold war with communism. As such, he told our Muslim partners that “there is still much work to be done, including honestly confronting the crisis of Islamist extremism,” that those assembled “must drive the terrorists and extremists out of your places of worship, out of your communities”.
The cowardly slaughter of children in Manchester was not caused by the actions of the West, or of our closest friend in the Middle East, Israel. It is the spawn of a hybrid totalitarianism, informed by a worldview as absolutist and dangerous as fascism or communism ever was. America, under the leadership of President Reagan and staunch allies such as Margaret Thatcher, defeated the last totalitarians who threatened our way of life. Now, under the leadership of President Trump, and with our Muslim partners and traditional allies in Europe together, we are, as he said, “going to defeat terrorism and send its wicked ideology into oblivion”.
Sebastian Gorka is a White House strategist and deputy assistant to President Trump
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