Evil Empire speech

For other uses, see Evil Empire speech (disambiguation).

The phrase evil empire was applied to the Soviet Union by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and American conservatives, who took an aggressive, hard-line stance that favored matching and exceeding the Soviet Union's strategic and global military capabilities.

Some contend that this depiction of the Soviet Union, in the mid to late-1980s, marked a turning point in the Cold War, affording the U.S. a moral high ground that allowed it to take vastly more aggressive steps to deter and ultimately "rollback" the Soviet Union's significant engagement in global affairs. It has also been noted that the first recorded use of the phrase occurred in the same year that the immensely popular Star Wars motion picture trilogy reached its conclusion with the destruction of a fictional "Evil Galactic Empire".

British House of Commons speech

Reagan's chief speechwriter at the time, Anthony R. Dolan, reportedly coined the phrase for Reagan's use. Reagan first referred to the Soviet Union as the evil empire on March 8, 1983. Others mistakenly refer to Reagan's June 8, 1982, address to the British House of Commons as the evil empire speech. The Modern History Sourcebook, published by Fordham University in New York City, gives the 1982 date. In fact, while Reagan referred twice to the evil of totalitarianism in his London speech, the exact phrase "evil empire" did not appear. Rather, the phrase "ash heap of history" appeared in this speech, used by Reagan to predict what he saw as the inevitable failure and collapse of global communism. Ironically, this latter phrase was coined by Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky in November 1917 in the exact opposite context, using it against his opponents (the Mensheviks) and suggesting that communism was the future.

First Recorded Use

Reagan's March 8, 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida is his first recorded use of the phrase "evil empire." Reagan said:

In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

In the "evil empire" speech, which also dealt with domestic issues, Reagan made the case for deploying NATO nuclear-tipped missiles in Western Europe as a response to the Soviets installing new nuclear-tipped missiles in Eastern Europe. Eventually, the NATO missiles were set up and used as bargaining chips in arms talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who took office in 1985. In 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to go farther than a nuclear freeze. In an atomic age first, they agree to reduce nuclear arsenals. Intermediate- and shorter-range nuclear missiles were eliminated.

The phrase "evil empire" also was used several times during a televised speech Reagan gave on September 5, 1983, four days after Soviet jet interceptors shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on September 1, 1983, and that mass-media exposure resulted in the term becoming immediately known around the globe and becoming irrevocably associated with Ronald Reagan. The phrase was used intentionally to highlight the moral divide of the Cold War, depicting the Soviet Union as acting in "evil" ways and undermined conventional moral ethos.

By referring to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," Reagan meant to shame Soviet leaders for the relentless denial of human rights and freedoms within the Soviet Union and in nations under Soviet control. The phrase also proved useful to Western anti-Communists in justifying a significantly more forceful defense and foreign policy stand against the Soviets. In addition to using the phrase "evil empire," Reagan described the Soviet Union as a "totalitarian" regime, reflecting the nation's nearly total lack of political freedom. However, some members of the public thought his speech was reckless, and did nothing to improve superpower relations.

Global reaction

Michael Johns, writing for the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review magazine, prominently defended Reagan's assertion. In "Seventy Years of Evil: Soviet Crimes from Lenin to Gorbachev," Johns cited 208 acts by the Soviet Union that, he argued, demonstrated the Soviet leadership's evil inclinations.

The Soviet Union, for its part, responded as it had for most of the Cold War, alleging that the United States was an imperialist superpower seeking to dominate the entire world, and that the Soviet Union was fighting against it in the name of communism. In Moscow, the Soviet press agency Tass said the "evil empire" words demonstrated that Reagan "can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-Communism."

During his second term in office, almost three years after using the term "evil empire," Reagan visited the new reformist General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. When asked by a reporter whether he still thought the Soviet Union was an "evil empire," Reagan responded that he no longer did, and that when he used the term it was a "different era," that is, the period before Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost reforms. Still, Reagan remained a critic of the Soviet regime for its absence of democratic institutions.

Recent historians, such as Yale University's John Lewis Gaddis, have grown more favorable towards the use and influence of the phrase "evil empire" in describing the Soviet Union. In his book The Cold War Gaddis argues that, in their use of the phrase "evil empire," Reagan and his anti-Communist political allies were effective in breaking the détente tradition, thus laying the ground for the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.

Others, however, like al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, questioned this claim, declaring in 2007 that one of the prime reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union was its defeat in the Afghanistan war by the Afghan mujahideen resistance. In his statement, however, bin Laden did not mention the significant role of the United States and Saudi Arabia in providing military aid to the anti-Soviet mujahideen.

Reagan and Gorbachev had their last meeting at the Reagan ranch, Rancho del Cielo, in 1992. By this time, the Soviet Union was no more.

Later uses

Following Reagan's use of the phrase, the phrase "evil empire" took on a nearly icon status in global culture and was used in these and other contexts:

• The band Rage Against the Machine released a 1996 album titled Evil Empire, which featured songs generally critical of the United States government, including "People of the Sun" and "Bulls on Parade."
• In recent years, the American professional baseball team, the New York Yankees, has been nicknamed the "evil empire" because of their huge team salaries and success in seemingly obtaining any player of their choice with lucrative contracts. Ironically the first usage of this term relating to the Yankees was from John Henry, part-owner of the Boston Red Sox who have recently only been second in player payroll to the Yankees.
• A 2007 book, Evil Empire: 101 Ways That England Ruined the World by Steven A. Grasse, lists many major crimes committed by the British Empire and editorially makes the claim that the British acted in an evil fashion, particularly during their global colonial reign, but also afterwards, blaming the British solely for both the First World War, the Second World War and the Great Depression.