Why London is getting a statue of Ronald Reagan

It was Thatcher who first noted that Mikhail Gorbachev was a man with whom the West could do business. Her certification of the Soviet leader’s bona fides led to face-to-face meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev five times – an unprecedented figure between American and Soviet leaders – and genuine negotiations on Strategic Arms Limitation and human rights.

At the same time, for their domestic audiences, Reagan and Thatcher maintained a stance of implacable anti-Communism.

There are enough grey areas in the historical record – not to mention events hidden behind official secrecy rules – to keep historians arguing for centuries about how precisely the Cold War was won.

The Soviet Union is thankfully dead, but people still make the trek to Highgate Cemetery, slightly north of the usual tourist path, to look at Marx’s enormous glowering head. It is a weird artefact of a different time in history.

Grosvenor Square will also find itself off the beaten track in 2017 when the American Embassy relocates south of the river Thames. The Reagan statue will remain. Will people make a special trip to view it?

It seems likely that, in the matter of posthumous memorials, Reagan and Marxism will be going head to head for decades yet.

Michael Goldfarb, external is a former London bureau chief for National Public Radio, and the author of Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance.