The ambiguity here is crucial: it produces the space for moral will, for decisiveness and action. Reagan knows what evil is. ·When he calls evil by name, he locates himself in a prophetic tradition dear to evangelicals and rooted in American history. He places himself in the position of someone with an ontological knowledge of the truth and with the m.oral courage to speak the truth. Evil's ambiguity thus enables the import and weight of the term, its eficacy, to shift to the one willing to invoke it.
In a later interview, Reagan emphasizes that in this speech the term evil was important not because it rightly characterized the Soviets (although it did), but because it explicitly acknowledged real diferences between the United States and the USSR. Responding to the interviewer's observation that the speech made it seem that reconciliation between the two powers was impossible since a confrontation between good and evil was at stake, Reagan explains: "I think it is somehow lifting that out of context-of this line and this description as the focus of evil and so forth. Certainly their entire beliefs, beginning with the disbelief in God-their beliefs are so contrary to what we accept as morality. Witness a Kampuchea and an .Afghanistan and so forth. But no, what I was pointing out there, and I still believe is time-tested and proven, is not the inevitability of war, but a recognition and a willingness to face up to what these diferences are in our views and between us, to be realistic about it:'46 Realism, for Reagan, involves recognizing the existence of evil in the world and willingly accepting the fact that the world is not a perfect place and never wil be. Reagan is a realist because he knows what the world is like and is strong enough to face this world without blinders.
This conviction, this willingness to acknowledge and name evil ir the world, does not depend on or require the disc rsive environment sustained by the Cold War. In fact, the Cold War's end releases evil from the already weak constraints of the confrontation between the United States and the USSR This spreading, flourishing evil, and the resolve to name it, is an additional aspect of Reagan's speeches flourishing in the rhetoric of George W. Bush. It appears most strongly in a speech Reagan gave in England after he was president and after the end of the Cold War.
On December 4, 1992, Reagan delivered the address, "Democracy's Next Battle;' at the Oxford Union Society.47 Noting that the fight against totalitarianism "was a grand and noble cause, one that united the entire civilized world;' Reagan finds that its end has "robbed much of the west of its uplifting, common purpose:' "Will we turn inward, lulled by a dangerous complacency and the short-sighted view that the end of one Evil Empire means the permanent banishment of evil in all its forms?" he asks. To answer, and in answering restore a sense of mission to the "civilized world;' Reagan returns to ontological evil: "Evil stil stalks the planet:'
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