The first, last, and only time I ever saw my father lose was in 1976. After a closely contested primary campaign against President Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan ended up a few delegates short of winning the nomination. During the closing days of the Republican National Convention, the Reagan family gathered around Dad in his Kansas City hotel suite.

I took my father aside in a corner of the suite and asked him, “What are you thinking about, Dad?”

“Michael,” he said wistfully, “the thing I’ll miss most by losing this nomination is that I won’t get to say ‘Nyet’ to Mr. Brezhnev. I was really looking forward to arms negotiations with the Soviets. For years, the Soviets have been telling us what we have to give up to get along with the Soviet Union. I was going to let the General Secretary of the Soviet Union choose the place, the room, and the shape of the table, because that’s how they do those things. And I was going to listen to him tell me what we would have to give up to get along with them. Then I was going to get up from the table and whisper in his ear, ‘Nyet.’ It’s been a long time since the Soviets have heard ‘Nyet’ from an American president.”

Well, 1976 wasn’t Ronald Reagan’s year—but his time was coming.

A few months later, in January 1977, defense analyst Richard V. Allen visited my father at his office in Los Angeles. During their conversation, Dad said, “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose. What do you think of that?”

One of the key behind-the-scenes players in Dad’s administration was Herb Meyer, special assistant to CIA Director Bill Casey. “Ronald Reagan was the first Western leader whose objective was to win,” Meyer once said. “Now I suggest to you that there is a gigantic difference between playing not to lose and playing to win. It’s different emotionally, it’s different psychologically, and, of course, it’s different practically.” Ronald Reagan’s actions toward the Soviets, Meyer said, “flowed from a decision to play to win.”

Again and again, we’ve seen what happens when our side chooses to “play not to lose”—when we do not set out to win. In the 1950s, the United Nations was in charge of the Korean War. The UN’s goal was to make sure that the war ended in a draw, that neither side won. The UN achieved its goal. There were no winners in that war—and North Korea has been a thorn in the side of the civilized world ever since. Suppose President Truman had said to the UN, “Stalemate is unacceptable. I will pursue a different strategy: ‘We win, they lose.’”

During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson issued restrictive rules of engagement to our armed forces: the piers of Haiphong Harbor could be bombed if no tankers were moored there; ships firing on U.S. planes could only be attacked if they were clearly marked as North Vietnamese; and no air strikes could be conducted on Sunday, the day of rest. The Vietnam War might have ended very differently if LBJ had said, “We win, they lose.”

And what if George H. W. Bush had said, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, “We win, they lose—we’re going to Baghdad.”

“We win, they lose.” That simple statement was the cornerstone of my father’s policy toward the Soviet Union throughout his administration. In fact, it was the essence of his approach to global Communism throughout his career.

Almost two decades before he became president, Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he declared that the best way to prove the unsustainability of the Soviet system was to “let their economy come unhinged.” His approach, he said, was “based on the belief (supported so far by all evidence) that in an all-out race our system is stronger, and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause.” These words, spoken in 1963, were amazingly prophetic. They described exactly how Ronald Reagan ultimately brought the Evil Empire to its knees.

In January 1981, Ronald Reagan stepped into the Oval Office, tossed the old policy of détente out on its ear. He replaced détente with a new policy: “We win, they lose.” And that’s when the world began to change.

His first order of business as president: Quit propping up the Soviet economy. On July 6, 1981, Ronald Reagan chaired a National Security Council meeting on the subject of the Soviet trans-Siberian oil and gas pipeline, which was then under construction. Once the pipeline was completed, it would bring a major cash infusion into the Soviet economy.

The meeting ended with frustration that the U.S. could do nothing to halt construction of the pipeline.

Less than two weeks later, on July 19, Ronald Reagan was in Ottawa, Canada, for an economic summit. During a break in the summit, French president François Mitterrand took my father aside and told him that French intelligence had a KGB officer working for them. The Russian’s name was Colonel Vetrov, but the French called him by a codename, “Farewell.”

Information in the “Farewell Dossier” indicated that the Soviets were stealing Western technology at an alarming rate—everything from machine tools to computers.

When Ronald Reagan returned to Washington, he assigned the “Farewell Dossier” to NSC staffer Gus Weiss. After studying the documents, Weiss suggested a creative idea. Instead of trying to stop the flow of Western technology to the Soviets, why not use Soviet thefts to disrupt the Soviet economy? Let the Soviets continue stealing—but let them steal what we want them to steal.

Ronald Reagan loved the idea. The CIA arranged to have a specially “fixed” pipeline control system sent to Canada, where it would fall into the hands of KGB agents. Sure enough, the control system was stolen by the KGB and sent to Siberia, where it was installed on the pipeline. The stolen technology was supposed to regulate pressure in the pipeline. Instead, it caused pressure to build up, producing a massive explosion. The blast was the most powerful non-nuclear explosion ever observed by spy satellites—the equivalent of a three kiloton bomb.

The explosion dealt a serious blow to the pipeline project and the Soviet economy. U.S. complicity in the incident wasn’t disclosed until twenty years later. It was one of many stratagems Ronald Reagan employed to collapse the Soviet economy and bring down the Iron Curtain. It was one of the opening gambits in an eight-year policy of “we win, they lose.”

In October 1986, President Ronald Reagan went to Reykjavík, Iceland, for a summit with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Topping the agenda was strategic arms control and the proposed Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). Just as my father expected, Mr. Gorbachev demanded that the U.S. give up the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) missile shield. And just as Dad had told me more than a decade earlier, he said, “Nyet” to Mr. Gorbachev.

No, he didn’t use that exact word. But he refused the Soviets’ demands—and he pressed Gorbachev on a number of moral and political concerns, including human rights abuses in the USSR, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the Soviets’ refusal to allow emigration by Jews and dissidents.

For the first time in decades, an American president told the Soviets what they would have to give up in order to get along with us. As a result, the talks in Reykjavík concluded without an agreement. Believe me, it gave my father no joy to walk away empty-handed. But he did what he had planned to do: He demonstrated American strength and resolve—and in the fullness of time, it paid off.

On the return flight from Iceland aboard Air Force One, Dad’s longtime friend and advisor Charles Wick told him, “Cheer up, Mr. President. You’ve just won the Cold War.” And, of course, Mr. Wick was absolutely right.

The Reykjavík summit was the climactic moment Dad had dreamed of for years, ever since he had gotten into politics. That was the dream he revealed to me as we sat in his hotel suite in Kansas City. That was the reason he ran for president—unsuccessfully in 1976, then triumphantly in 1980. That was the goal he pursued throughout the last half of his life. And it was the centerpiece of his presidential legacy.

He said “Nyet” to Mikhail Gorbachev, and the world was changed.

Portions of this column are adapted from Michael Reagan’s book The New Reagan Revolution.