US Presidency
1988

And finally, we need to recall that in the years of detente we tended to forget the greatest weapon the democracies have in their struggle is public candor: the truth. We must never do that again. It's not an act of belligerence to speak to the fundamental differences between totalitarianism and democracy; it's a moral imperative. It doesn't slow down the pace of negotiations; it moves them forward. Throughout history, we see evidence that adversaries negotiate seriously with democratic nations only when they knew the democracies harbor no illusions about those adversaries. A second reflection I have on all this concerns some recent speculation that what is happening in the Soviet Union was in its way inevitable, that since the death of Stalin the Soviet state would have to evolve into a more moderate and status quo power in accordance with some vague theory of convergence. I think this is wrong. It's also dangerous, because what we see in the Soviet Union today is a change of a different order than in the past.