Morning Again

On a sunny day in Moscow, an American president addressed a packed hall of college students. "Your generation is living in one of the most exciting, hopeful times in … history. It is a time when the first breath of freedom stirs the air and the heart beats to the accelerated rhythm of hope."

President Barack Obama this week? No, President Ronald Reagan 21 years ago, in May 1988. Read together—Reagan's address to the students of Moscow State University; Obama's to the graduating class of the New Economic School—the speeches were delivered with the same goal: to speak directly to Russians, over their leaders' heads. Does Obama see himself as the heir to Ronald Reagan?

Reagan's visit came at the beginning of the end of the Cold War—he was the first president to be allowed to speak directly to a Russian audience—and he used the chance to catalog the freedoms of American civil society: "Go into any courtroom and there will preside an independent judge, beholden to no government power." Bits of the speech read now as if Frank Capra deserved a credit. But Reagan knew what he was doing: he was trying to open the eyes of both the young audience in front of him and the wider audience on Russian TV. (The speech was broadcast almost uncut.) And, beneath the rhetoric, Reagan was polite but pointed about how far Russia had to go: "We do not know what the conclusion of this journey will be, but we're hopeful that the promise of reform will be fulfilled."

In his speech, Obama didn't mention Reagan's visit; but he implicitly invited its recall as he looked back over "the two tumultuous decades" since then. "With the end of the Cold War, there were extraordinary expectations … [I]t was a time of ambitious plans and endless possibilities. But, of course, things don't always work out exactly as planned." To a Russia bruised by economic upheaval, resentful of loss of empire, and deeply suspicious of America, Obama didn't proffer Reagan's Rockwell portrait. ("By no means is America perfect," he said.) Instead, he gave examples from his personal background: "At the time of our founding, I had no rights—people who looked like me." And: "When I was born, segregation was still the law of the land in parts of America."

Obama's message, though, was the same as Reagan's: the possibility of change offered by the freedoms of democracy. "It is our commitment to certain universal values which allows us to correct our imperfections." Because: "Competitive elections allow us to change course and hold our leaders accountable." So: "America supports these [democratic] values because they are moral, but also because they work … Governments that promote the rule of law, subject their actions to oversight, and allow for independent institutions are more reliable trading partners." Reagan made just this pocketbook argument back in 1988: democracies and free markets bring prosperity. "In fact," Reagan told his Moscow State U. audience, "one of the largest personal-computer firms in the United States was started by two college students, no older than you, in the garage behind their home."

For much of this Moscow speech, in fact, Obama could have been channeling Reagan. But then the same was true of Obama's two previous bellwether addresses: his Prague speech on nuclear weapons in April and his appeal to the Muslim world in Cairo last month.