'Evil empire,' 40 years later
By Donald KirkThe U.S. and the Soviet Union were still waging the Cold War, immersed in concerns about arms control and nuclear proliferation, when President Ronald Reagan, on March 8, 1983, warned against “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire” in “the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” Forty years later, those words ring truer than ever.The “evil empire” of the Soviet Union had broken up by the end of 1991 with the fall of Communist rule over the lands that Josef Stalin had seized from the devastation of World War II. In the relief of the post-Soviet, post-communist days, the prospects for democracy in Russia and the former Soviet “satellites” appeared quite bright.The Soviet Union may no longer exist, but Russia's President Vladimir Putin, in his long-running invasion of Ukraine, has visions of reviving Moscow's role in Europe and elsewhere. From Russia's former eastern European satellites to North Korea, he yearns to recover what he sees as the days of Russian grandeur going back not merely to the era of commun
