Let's try something new. Instead of me telling you what to believe, (as if!), you tell me what to believe: Most favorable obituaries of Ronald Reagan attribute our victory in the Cold War to his aggressive policy against the Soviet Union. By launching an arms race he forced the Soviets to spend more than they could afford, hastening their economic crisis, and encouraging a new policy of reconciliation with the West, which was followed by the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet empire.

The question is: If you agree, why, and if you don't, why not?

I ask as someone who doesn't know much about Reagan, and don't have many views about him either way. Note: I'm not asking if Reagan was a good president, or a good guy, or a smart guy. Granted that he was right to call the Soviet Union an Evil Empire, granted that his critics underestimated him, granted that he had a keener view of the weaknesses of the Soviet Empire than others, and granted that he had an admirable vision of the strength of free societies, this by itself does not show that his contribution to the end of the Cold War was vital. So what are the facts that conclusion is (or isn't) based on?

I'll start things off by saying that any analysis of Reagan's role in ending the cold war that doesn't mention Gorbachev is going to be shallow.

Michael: Well, then that's a follow-up question. To what extent did Reagan's success depend on external factors such as the right people being in power in the Soviet Union? Could it have had the opposite or no effect with a different Soviet leadership, and would outsiders like Reagan have been able to tell the difference between the right and the wrong leadership of a secretive totalitarian state?

I believe Robert Spengler at the Asia Times put it quite well:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FF08Aa01.html

To a generation that has come of age after the fall of the Soviet Empire, it is hard to imagine that the smart money in Europe wagered on Russian dominance when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. I can attest that the closest advisors of French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt thought NATO would lose the Cold War. So humiliating was the later collapse of the communist regimes that the pundits could argue credibly that it had fallen of its own weight. No such thing happened. Reagan took office at a dark hour for the West, and did things that the elite of Europe had deemed impossible.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/

I think the Q iu not answerable, but good for debate. It is a varient of "do great men become presidents or do events make a great president?" It happened on his watch and he did pursue it. Michael Ferris is right on with his comment; this was NOT a one man show. The more intriguing Q that I have ponder (at least I think it is intriguing) is: when this process started did Gorbi anticipate the result or was he simply attempting to have Soviet society evolve and because of internal contradictions it imploded?

I've been trying to listen to as much of the commentary about his presidency as I can. I needed to do this because I used to be a Reagan hater but have really altered my views over time. That he greatly speeded up the collapse of the USSR is not in doubt. As far as I can tell most of the people in that Empire give him credit for it. It seems that it was the totality of his acts that showed he meant business. I even heard that Soviet intelligence took note of his stance in firing the air controllers. This was an amazing act in it self. The Pershing missiles in Europe, and star wars threats. These all closed in the the old USSR. There was also the wonderful coincidence of Gorbachev and ongoing discontent within. I also wonder if the intelligensia (CP here) themselves did not like living within a lie.

I've been trying to listen to as much of the commentary about his presidency as I can. I needed to do this because I used to be a Reagan hater but have really altered my views over time. That he greatly speeded up the collapse of the USSR is not in doubt. As far as I can tell most of the people in that Empire give him credit for it. It seems that it was the totality of his acts that showed he meant business. I even heard that Soviet intelligence took note of his stance in firing the air controllers. This was an amazing act in it self. The Pershing missiles in Europe, and star wars threats. These all closed in the the old USSR. There was also the wonderful coincidence of Gorbachev and ongoing discontent within. I also wonder if the intelligensia (CP here) themselves did not like living within a lie.

Book: Reagan approved plan to sabotage Soviets

'82 pipeline blast just one way U.S. tried to damage economy, author says

By David E. Hoffman / Washington Post

WASHINGTON — In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a new memoir by a Reagan White House official.

Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time, describes the episode in “At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War,” to be published next month by Ballantine Books. Reed writes that the pipeline explosion was just one example of “cold-eyed economic warfare” against the Soviet Union the CIA carried out under Director William J. Casey during the final years of the Cold War.
http://www.detnews.com/2004/politics/0402/27/a06-76436.htm

One way of looking at it is that if Reagan really had nothing to do with it and the Soviet Union collapsed from its own flaws, then George H.W. Bush would be getting the credit for it, not Reagan, since the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But we all know that Reagan's policies set the tone, and Bush 41 just continued them.

Reagan's moral courage in being willing to call evil by its name gave courage to dissidents across eastern Europe. And the fact that America's economy could afford to create guns AND butter, while the creaky communist Soviet economy couldn't create either one, led to the victory of capitalism over communism. We spent them under the table like a lightweight Russkie who couldn't hold his vodka. Today, that communist ideology is discredited everywhere except for Cuba, North Korea and Berkeley, California.

I also think that Gorbachev's role really shouldn't be overrated, because from history's standpoint (and his countrymen's), Gorbachev is the one who lost the Soviet Empire. He's their Jimmy Carter, or something even worse. His main contribution was an unwillingness or inability to send in the tanks as the Russians had done in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Nobody CHOOSES to take the loser role. Gorbachev was forced into it by Reagan.

"...any analysis of Reagan's role in ending the cold war that doesn't mention Gorbachev is going to be shallow."

I dunno...I think there is an argument that if Reagan had not been pushing the Soviet Union so hard that there never would have been the need there for a reformer like Gorbachev. Gorbachev's ascension to power was pretty much an acknowledgement that the old Soviet system was failing. I suspect that this might not have happened so easily if there had not been a powerful world leader like Reagan focusing on the flaws in the Soviet system.

Giving Reagan credit for "causing" the fall of the USSR is a very dangerous line of reasoning, as it implies that there is something one nation can do to make a powerful, dangerous enemy vanish without cost.

The USSR fell because of the utter incompetence with which it was designed, built and run. Most empires are competently run, and don't collapse without decades of economic, demographic, and/or military pressure, from without and within.

Reagan threw them an anvil or two as they were sinking, but nothing a well-run state couldn't handle. Unless you want to say that their ideology was shipped from America with built-in flaws that caused it to implode, no American can take credit for "causing" the fall of the USSR. Those Stalinist morons sank themselves (and murdered tens of millions of innocent people in the process) with no outside help, thankyouverymuch.

One thing for which Reagan CAN take credit, is that he did not do anything that caused a violent, explosive, panicky overreaction by a dying regime with lots of firepower. The collapse of the USSR could easily, and quickly, have become bloodier than it was. Any shortsighted attempt to take advantage of their plight (i.e., supporting a coup or rebellion, a strike to liberate the Baltic states, etc.) could have resulted in a totalitarian backlash, as central power is strengthened to fight an external threat.

So Reagan does deserve credit for sensible restraint in an extremely sensitive and unprecedented situation - he deserves it ESPECIALLY from liberals who spent years calling him a hateful stupid warmonger who wanted to start WWIII.

Raging bee well said

Reagan deserves credit for naming the enemy an "Evil Empire", which it was. If only our leaders today had the guts to name the "Islamic Empire" as our enemy, not just hide it under the label "War On Terror"......

http://www.secularislam.org/discussion35/Default.htm

In 1980 almost everyone thought the Soviets were winning the cold war decisively.

In 1989 the Soviets were in big trouble, on the verge of collapse.

From 1980 to 1989 Reagan carried on an unrelenting campaign against the USSR on every level, and on every possible field of battle. He put the entire weight of the United States into his campaign, and he carried out his plans without apology, without letting up.

Taken together, Fletcher's statements about Soviet strength and decline could mean that the USSR went from strong to weak; or they could mean that "almost everyone" overestimated Soviet strength and competence; or they could mean that a strong nation was horribly misruled until it fell apart.

Yes, Reagan spoke bravely and clearly against the Soviet threat, and yes, he led a concerted political fight to counter the threat; but other evil empires have withstood far worse for far longer before collapsing.

Let's not diminish Reagan's real accomplishments by misunderstanding them.

OT, but too good to miss: Allah against bathing shoes in Denmark:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/002184.php

Any assessment of Gorbachev's role must take into account that Yuri Andropov held the reins until his death in 1984: by then, the Soviets had clearly surmised the threat Reagan presented to them. Gorbachev's ascension was a response to this, albeit not soon enough to make a difference.

It is in the nature of democratic states to appear indecisive at times to outside observers. America surely sent this impression abroad when Jimmy Carter was president. What distinguished Reagan was his ability to create a new role model for democratic leadership. Democratic leaders do not need to appeal for broad public support; all they need to do is convince the public that they have a plan and they intend to follow it.

In the end, it really doesn't matter if an American president is a Republican or Democrat. All that matters is that they have an actionable plan that can be implemented. The voting public doesn't respond to nebulousness, only strength. The convincing display of strength is eventually more than half the battle, and can usually tip the scales just enough to cause the complete collapse of the opponent.

Reagan provided the most excellent example of this kind of strength in recent American history.

Reagan did expand the US defense budget to fight the soviets, but that is only half the answer. Reagan not only opposed the Soviets *everywhere*, in just about every manner possible, but also formed a strong alternative ideology to Soviet Communism. The "Evil Empire" speech was extremely controversial when Reagan made it. But it was music to the ears of Soviet dissidents and the enslaved countries of Eastern Europe. Reagan not only said that the soviets needed to be defeated, he also said why.

Decades of containment and detente had obscured the fact that communism was the single most murderous ideology on the planet--worse than Naziism(25m-45m dead for Nazism, 80m-100m dead for communism). Reagan called out the Communists on the soul-crushing hell that their system of government was.

The military posture of the Reagan-era US was important--but his robust demands for freedom in the Warsaw Pact were just as important.

BTW, here are some words you won't hear any more, thanks to Ronald Reagan:

Mutual Assured Destruction
Throw Weight
Dense-pack
Missile Silo
The Midgetman
Detente
Inner German Border
Reforger
Fallout Shelter
Duck and Cover

There is no question that Reagan won the cold war, virtually single-handidly. Reagan will also be remembered for the longest peacetime economic expansion in US history. Shortly put, he deserves the title of one of the most important and successful presidents in US history.

I find it mildy amusing when leftists make claims such as "The Sovietunion would have collapsed anyway", and "He couldn't have done it without Gorbachev"...

I remember when the Russian people gave Gorbachev less than 1% of the vote in their first free presidential election. The liberated Russians knew better than anyone who to thank for the end of the evil empire. And his name was not Mikhael Gorbachev.

If Carter had been reelected in 1980, it's doubtful that the Soviets would have felt the need to put in power someone as radical as Gorbachev. I recall that his ascension was quite controversial within Soviet politics. It was Reagan that forced the hard-liners to concede that some change was necessary in order to meet the American challenge.

Once in power, Gorbachev aimed, to respond to Herbie's question, to merely reform the Soviet Union. He meant to be a kind of anti-FDR. Roosevelt transformed capitalism in order to save it. Likewise, it was Gorbachev's aim to reform communism in order to save it. Glasnost and perestroika were two of the policies he famously implemented to achieve this. He was as surprised as anyone when the whole system unraveled. He's talked about this in several interviews in the years following 1991.

Having said that, it's impossible to say what would have happened if the Soviets after Andropov had put in power more of the same. But it's clear to me that credit goes to Reagan for provoking the Soviets' desperate move which was their undoing.

For what it is worth Gorbi was interviewed on TV here and asked about the Q posted. He said that the USSR was starting to change from internal pressures and would have continued to do so without The Gipper, but that the pressure helped accelerate the changes.

Fred Kaplan has an interesting take on it in Slate: http://slate.msn.com/id/2102081/

Ultimately, we cannot know how the world would have looked like if Reagan (or Gorbachev) never lived. But we know how it looks like, and the evidence is pretty clear that Reagan actually planned to bring down the "evil empire" that way, and that the goal was accomplished.

It was also important that Reagan, through the relativistic "nuanced" nonsense of the Eurowimps, told the truth when he called the Soviet Union an evil empire, and wished for its destruction. Almost all so-called intellectuals scoffed at this, which is yet another reason to question what is so intellectual about people who throughout the 20th century (and beyond) constantly fall for deadly political cons that most "normal people" can see through.

I think Reagan certainly exerted the pressure that eventually led to the changes that ended the Cold War. The three pivotol events during his tenure:

1. Firing the Air Traffic Controllers in 1981. That act, while not directly related to the Cold War, shows that Reagan means what he says, and also opens the way for a more robust economy as companies see that they can trim work forces without repercussions. America's revitalized economy would later cause Gorby to acknowledge that the Soviets could not compete. While SDI could be viewed as Reagan's "trump card" in reality it was the strengthened economy that played that role.

2. Soviets install Gorby (in 1985) rather than Grigory Romanov or another hard-liner. As noted above, Gorby tries to reform the system in order to save it.

3. SDI, and in particlar the meeting in 1986 at Reykjavik. Gorby offers to abolish nukes, but under the condition that Reagan abandon SDI. Reagan balks and leaves. Due to SDI and the (by then) strong US economy, Gorby realizes that the USSR can no longer compete.

While there were other factors, those three events in my mind, two directly attributable to Reagan and one perhaps at least partly due to his being in office, exerted the necessary forces that led to the Cold War's end.

He gave it the shove and shovel it needed. W/O him, who knew how long it really would have lasted, another 50 years?

Via Tim Blair:

Dinesh D'Souza: Reagan won the Cold War

June 07, 2004
AMERICA'S economic boom from the early 1980s to the beginning of this century is in large part a legacy of the end of the Cold War, which confirmed the triumph of capitalism over socialism. Yet many historians and pundits have refused to credit Ronald Reagan's policies for helping to bring about the Cold War victory.

Rather, they insist that Soviet communism suffered from chronic economic problems and predictably lapsed, as Time magazine's Strobe Talbott put it, "not because of anything the outside world has done or not done . . . but because of defects and inadequacies at its core".

http://theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9764903%255E7583,00.html

I didn't save it, but out there is a posting about how he changed the info coming out of the CIA and how the old guard who thought there was no way to defeat the USSR. He wanted them to put together all the bits and pieces to see how rock solid the USSR really was. No one reported on the little incidences like a train was stopped by workers because one car had meat. The army was called out, but in the end, the meat was given to the workers. He wanted to see where their cracks were, this was early 82.

Then he pushed.

---

I am of the firm belief Americans are experiencing the Bermuda Triangle because we haven't finished it/put it to bed, either way, Korea - 50 years, Iraq - 1991, and domestically Viet Nam. That has been a scab which has been picked on for over 30 years. Hopefully the 04 election will begin the healing. There are A LOT of V Vs against Kerry. I think it's time to get back some of what was dished out over the past 3 decades. We won the damn thing, but like today, we are being led by the media - 60s boomers - to believe that we are losing. A fast one's been pulled, boys and girls, Iraq is already sovereign. 6/30 is the pomp and circumstance. A very, very rough and bloody road is ahead, but they know they have to make it work. They know what the other options are. Been there, done that, and I really don't think they want to go back. They're tired. They want to walk in the light.

One way or the other, these will be finished and we will live w/the consequences.

And let me point you to another posting by Howard Veit - Ronnie was a commie fighter from way back because Howard was there and was red, too. How Ronnie took on the Actors' Union:

http://oraculations.blogspot.com/2004/06/1-four-trillion-deficitronald-reagans.html

Posted 4:44 AM by Howard
"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done."

And the press that slobbers over his death now, never stopped calling him a dope.

heheheheheheheHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHABWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003. The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program.

---

Boy, there's going to be a lot of people in Europe's scrapyards.

I believe that no one person but the American and Western European peoples won the Cold War by sticking to the policy of containment for forty long years until the Soviet Union collapsed, resisting calls from the left to surrender and calls from the right to take more aggressive action that would have risked a nuclear exchange. Throughout, it was the people who steadied their leaders.

If any leaders should be given credit, it's the early ones who set the pattern and founded NATO -- Truman, Eisenhower, Adenauer, Bevin, Churchill. By Reagan's time the containment policy was practically set in stone and Reagan accepted it as a condition of getting elected. He certainly aimed to toughen the Western stance within the bounds of that policy. There's a fair argument that this delivered the last push; what's incontestable is that containment succeeded.

I was about to write that Reagan should also get credit for not making any major mistakes -- but then I remembered Rejkjavik.

My brother attended the Pushkin Institute in Moscow for several
months in 1982, or at least I think it was 1982. The christmas
after he got back we had a conversation about what things cost
in rubles and the average salary in rubles. From that it wasn't
difficult to calculate costs in terms of hours of work.

Many things on that basis turned out to be extravagently expensive.
Ordinary people in the Soviet Union, I figure, must have had little
more than the bare necessities. To me it looked like the real standard
of living was lower than that of Mexico.

In the larger scheme of things that really isn't that bad. People
in Mexico live better than most people in the world.

On the other hand it's hardly the sort of foundation one would
want to project military power at the level the Soviet Union
was in fact doing: the war in Afghanistan; the drain of resources
to and the cost of dominating eastern europe, the drain of resources
to Cuba; the war in Vietnam; defending the border with China; etc.

It's my suspicion that the soviet economy was under extraordinary
strain and had been for some time. I think Ronald Reagan was a good
president and maybe even a great president, but if he was able to push
the Soviet Union to collapse it was only in this context.

If containment succeeded, we wouldn't have had to go into Grenada and Central America.

It was getting awfully red in this part of the world.

Maybe Patton was right, should have finished them off in 45.

We just didn't have the stomach.

Gorbachev's only real contribution to the collapse of the USSR was that like the final leader of nazi Germany Adm. Donitz he knew when to throw in the towel. Gorby's real legacy is that he didn't do anything stupid to try to prevent the collapse and managed to keep control of the nukes. But it was Reagan's vision and policies that ended the cold war. Without Reagan the Soviets would not have suffered the defeat in Afghanistan nor would they have spent themselves into bankruptcy trying to compete. Reagan broke the Soviets' backs militarily and economically. While it is possible that the USSR would still have collapsed without Reagan, fortunately we can never know with the past being permanent and all, but it seems doubtful. The left in Europe and the US was more than willing to subsidize and naively prop up the Soviet regime out of their wildly misguided belief of Soviet power; ancedotal evidence is abundant in the writings of leftwing politicians, pundits, and academics of the time on the danger of Reagan's Soviet policies. They are as wrong about Reagan today as they were then, but with the left in the west denial has been a big part of their love affair with socialism and communism. Just ask the ghost of Walter Duranty.

Lech Walesa is certainly not in doubt that Ronald Reagan's policies greatly contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union:

http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005204

Many people who participated in the events of the 1980s - from patriots and dissenters like Lech Walesa, to Lady Thatcher, to Mikhail Gorbachev himself - say that Reagan played a key role in bringing about the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He did four things, all of which were vitally important:

- Reagan set the country on the right course economically. First, he chose to retain Paul Volcker as Fed chairman; Volcker's plan of extremely high interest rates to tame inflation caused some very difficult times economically, but ultimately brought inflation under control. Second, tax cuts: suddenly, it made sense to work harder and earn more money, because confiscatory taxation was ended. Third, indexing of tax rates to inflation: the government could no longer surreptitiously raise taxes by inflating the currency. Today, we take indexing for granted, but liberals in Congress fought it tooth and nail.

- Second, he used the "bully pulpit" of the presidency to restore confidence. One can never underestimate the power of public oratory in a republic: Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan all used their words and, in the case of the latter two, their powers of vocalization, to help restore public confidence in the presidency.

- Third, military build-up. The military was still stunned and demoralized from the defeat in Vietnam. In his first term, he rebuilt it.

- Fourth, negotiations. In his second term, as Mikhail Gorbachev pointed out in his NY Times memorial, Reagan built up the military when he felt it was needed; but when the time was right, he was also willing to build down: the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was the first, vital step to lessening the threat of nuclear war. Like the American eagle, he carried weapons in one hand, and an olive branch in the other.

The most important factor that Reagan brought, however, was simply the idea that the Soviet Union could be brought down peacefully. All the wise and learned men of the time thought he was crazy or a fool, or worse, for thinking such a thing was possible. But Reagan was right, and they were wrong, and that made all the difference.

Here are Lech Walesa's actual words:

GDANSK, Poland—When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can’t be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989.

Poles fought for their freedom for so many years that they hold in special esteem those who backed them in their struggle. Support was the test of friendship. President Reagan was such a friend. His policy of aiding democratic movements in Central and Eastern Europe in the dark days of the Cold War meant a lot to us. We knew he believed in a few simple principles such as human rights, democracy and civil society. He was someone who was convinced that the citizen is not for the state, but vice-versa, and that freedom is an innate right.

I often wondered why Ronald Reagan did this, taking the risks he did, in supporting us at Solidarity, as well as dissident movements in other countries behind the Iron Curtain, while pushing a defense buildup that pushed the Soviet economy over the brink. Let’s remember that it was a time of recession in the U.S. and a time when the American public was more interested in their own domestic affairs. It took a leader with a vision to convince them that there are greater things worth fighting for. Did he seek any profit in such a policy? Though our freedom movements were in line with the foreign policy of the United States, I doubt it.

I distinguish between two kinds of politicians. There are those who view politics as a tactical game, a game in which they do not reveal any individuality, in which they lose their own face. There are, however, leaders for whom politics is a means of defending and furthering values. For them, it is a moral pursuit. They do so because the values they cherish are endangered. They’re convinced that there are values worth living for, and even values worth dying for. Otherwise they would consider their life and work pointless. Only such politicians are great politicians and Ronald Reagan was one of them.

The 1980s were a curious time—a time of realization that a new age was upon us. Communism was coming to an end. It had used up its means and possibilities. The ground was set for change. But this change needed the cooperation, or unspoken understanding, of different political players. Now, from the perspective of our time, it is obvious that like the pieces of a global chain of events, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and even Mikhail Gorbachev helped bring about this new age in Europe. We at Solidarity like to claim more than a little credit, too, for bringing about the end of the Cold War.

In the Europe of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan presented a vision. For us in Central and Eastern Europe, that meant freedom from the Soviets. Mr. Reagan was no ostrich who hoped that problems might just go away. He thought that problems are there to be faced. This is exactly what he did.

Every time I met President Reagan, at his private estate in California or at the Lenin shipyard here in Gdansk, I was amazed by his modesty and even temper. He didn’t fit the stereotype of the world leader that he was. Privately, we were like opposite sides of a magnet: He was always composed; I was a raging tower of emotions eager to act. We were so different yet we never had a problem with understanding one another. I respected his honesty and good humor. It gave me confidence in his policies and his resolve. He supported my struggle, but what unified us, unmistakably, were our similar values and shared goals.

leaving aside copyright, I really doubt if those are Walesa's actual words. His knowledge of English is _very_ rudimentary and the tone is all wrong.

Most people outside of Poland have no idea how Lech Walesa really sounds due to translators dutifully cleaning up his often nonsensical and/or crude language (not to mention his frequent lapses of etiquette that mortify most Poles).

Make no mistake, he has a very real place in history and the early Solidarity era Walesa is still one of my all time personal heroes. But he's the textbook case of the truism that the person who leads the revolution is not the best choice to lead _after_ the revolution. Even his strongest supporters couldn't count his presidential term as a success and not for nothing did he receive less than 1% of the vote in the last presidential elections.

I'd also say that most people I know in Poland have more neutral/mixed feelings toward Reagan (though Nancy was strangely popular here I found). Interestingly, the first Bush was very popular as was, in his own way, Clinton, but Bush II has yet to win over most Poles).

Just to be clear, I have no problem with the Walesa piece, I think it says what neeeded to be said on the occasion (from Walesa's viewpoint) very well, I just wanted to make the point that Walesa's day to day political voice is rather different, and that most people outside of Poland are unaware of that.

Do you give credit to a ventriloquist dummy for a good show?

My answer is complete.

Raging Bee, et al:

Reagan clearly read Sun-Tzu's _Art of War_

Asking whether Reagan caused the fall of Communism is problematic.
If you gave a political candidate an extra 10% of the vote, does it win him the elections? Maybe. But it might not be enough, and it might be that he would have won anyway. All we know is that every candidate would love an extra 10% of the vote.
Anyway, the brave dissidents under Communism should never be forgotten.

I'm interested in Raging Bee's remark:

"Giving Reagan credit for "causing" the fall of the USSR is a very dangerous line of reasoning, as it implies that there is something one nation can do to make a powerful, dangerous enemy vanish without cost."

So, you're saying that the reason we must not give Reagan the credit is not that he did not deserve it, or that it would be a simplistic reading of events, but because it doesn't fit our worldview? Clearly this is a tack many will take, but they usually don't admit it so boldly.

Besides, what is this "without cost" nonsense? Defeating the Soviet Union cost dearly, in blood and treasure, over forty years. It just didn't cost nearly what we feared it would.

A quick impression, Bjorn, from somebody who was about your age when Reagan became president. Reagan took a carrot and stick approach to the cold war problem. In public he talked tough and to the point. He said out loud what everyone else was thinking when he denounced the USSR as an "evil empire". He stated the obvious when he implored "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall".
Behind the scenes he was a negotiator. He negotiated the biggest arms reduction of the cold war with Gorbachev. I think this was his outstanding achievement.

Here is my own analysis, from a guest post on Sasha Castel's blog:

http://www.coldfury.com/Sasha/archives/004810.html#004810

History shows that governments can eviscerate their nations' economies and survive for quite some time. Cuba is a prime example: its economy collapsed decades ago, yet Castro managed to hold power for over 40 years, longer than any head of state in modern times. North Korea has been Communist for ten years longer, and during its entire existence the dictatorship has remained in one family. (Marxian hereditary monarchy?) Nations such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq have rich oil deposits, but the percentage of the population that actually benefits from petrodollars is quite small, although probably not as small as the privileged elite class in any given Communist nation.

[In retrospect, citing the Saudis and Iraq as an example wasn't a good idea. The Saudi and Saddam-era governments had plenty of cash despite the dysfunctions of their economies at large. The Soviets crisis arose when the public sector was becoming as cash-starved as the private sector. I will update the post with this observation soon. - AKH]

So what was unique about the Warsaw Pact nations? They, and they alone, were involved in an arms race with the United States. And they lost. And the Warsaw Pact governments needed to save face. Much of their domestic propaganda had focused on their ability to rattle the US. Cuba and North Korea never had such pretensions. (If their "defiance" of the US appeals to anyone, it appeals to Western leftists, UN flacks, and fellow tinhorn despots, not to their subjects.) I believe that this need to save face is what influenced glasnost and perestroika, what I referred to as "Plan B" in my previous post.

I can identify one other aspect of the Warsaw Pact not found in other Communist nations: the degree to which its atrocities, particularly the Soviet gulag, has been documented. Perhaps the party chiefs saw the need to downplay the Evil Empire image, just as Khruschev saw the need to condemn Stalin.

Does anyone remember 1980? The Soviets seemed invincible. They had penetrated Central America ( Nicaragua, El Salvador ), the Caribbean ( Grenada, Jamaica ) from their base in Cuba. They were in Afghanistan and long time U.s. Ally Iran had fallen to an insane cleric regime that hated America more than the USSR. Intellectuals regularly predicted that the Soviet economy was closing on the U.S. and might pass it. The American military was demoralized by Vietnam and by a weak President who as his first act pardoned those who avoided the draft. America was in retreat. The Soviets were winning. We only hoped to prolong the battle.

Reagan will always be hated by leftist intellectuals because he proved them wrong. The USSR was a third world country with a hugh army and nukes. Reagan pressured it into mistakes and when Gorbachev rose to power, the country was bankrupt. Gorby deserves credit for preserving the peace, but Reagan had undermined the USSR before Gorbachev arrived. What Gorbachev would have prefered can be seen in what he did in the Baltics.

The Soviet Union was a vampire and Jimmy Carter was a good little victim, fainting at the sight of fangs. Reagan slapped them with wolfbane until a stake could be driven through the heart. Another Carter term would have strengthened the Soviets, Reagan weakened them. He did not win the cold war alone, but he led the effort.

He said out loud what everyone else was thinking when he denounced the USSR as an "evil empire".

This is too kind to the opposition. I certainly don't recall that everyone was thinking this. Some people continue to think that the Cold War was one big misunderstanding and that thinking in terms of black and white is wrong. It's all about nuance you see.

A lot of people seem to be recalling the 80's as being a lot less turbulent and uncertain than they in fact were. This is surely a symptom of our complete victory (same happened for WWII). As complaints go, this one is a luxury- things could have turned out so that I'd have real things to complain about.

In any case, Ken's and others' reminders about what was really going on are quite useful. Reagan's policies seem so obvious and inescapable now, since we're living in the world that resulted from them. But at the time they were as controversial as the Iraq war is today. Reagan deserves a lot of credit for his leadership.

Most of my friends in Poland feel exactly the way Lech Walesa does about Reagan, with gratitude for his help in overthrowing the Soviet machine of oppression.

I suspect that those above who feel that Reagan would be a good foil to islamic terror may be mistaken. Reagan's life and experiences gave him insight into the failings of socialism, but he never really seemed to understand the dangers of islamic fundamentalism. He served the needs of his time very well. But these are different times.

Reagan inherited a bureacracy primarily intent on détente and accomadation, and the USSR seemed at least as powerful as the US; the prevailing wisdom was to not "rock the boat" and hope Mutual Assured Destruction continued to work with the US doing nothing to counter such things as the Soviet development and deployment of MIRV'd missiles.

He took a different approach. For example, he got the USSR/Russia to agree to a verifiable reduction in nuclear arms and missiles. Revivionists say this is because he was willing to trust the Soviets: actually, they had refused all approaches until Reagan deployed Pershing missiles in Europe. It had been thought he could not because the same "allies" we have trouble with today - France and Germany - objected strongly to the proposal for missiles, and no Europen country was actually in favor (Mrs. Thatcher was, but over bloody internicine political fighting in the UK).

There are numerous other examples, not all of them on the "good" side (taking down the Sandinista regime was good, but the Iran-Contra debacle and drug deals to accomplish it were bad).

Did he accomplish the dissolution of the USSR single-handed? Of course not. Hindsight shows that by the time of Andropov the leaders of the USSR were contemplating their own downfall. But by pressing ahead against "world opinion" and domestic pressure he probably cut decades off an even messier end.

"Giving Reagan credit for "causing" the fall of the USSR is a very dangerous line of reasoning, as it implies that there is something one nation can do to make a powerful, dangerous enemy vanish without cost.

The USSR fell because of the utter incompetence with which it was designed, built and run. Most empires are competently run, and don't collapse without decades of economic, demographic, and/or military pressure, from without and within."

I'm not impressed by this response. The USSR was not so blatantly incompetent that it couldn't take over scores of countries, it just had to throw away lots of lives to do so. It is perfectly banal to say that the USSR was bound to collapse eventually. That is the ultimate destiny of all human institutions. But it didn't just collapse eventually. It collapsed not long after Reagan's campaign to bring it down. It collapsed after the U.S. changed its tactics from mere containment to aiming at victory.

My take on Gorbachev is that he was able to come to power because Reagan had so decisively revealed the flaws of the hard-liners.

"...It collapsed after the U.S. changed its tactics from mere containment to aiming at victory."

One could just as easily say that the USSR collapsed when Gorbachev tried to run it with something other than continuous brute force, and found out the hard way that so few people had a vested interest in the status quo, and the regime had so little credibility left, that no one cared enough even to try to improve on what was left.

"He said out loud what everyone else was thinking when he denounced the USSR as an "evil empire".

This is too kind to the opposition. I certainly don't recall that everyone was thinking this."

Most intellectuals didn't think that way, but they aren't as common as you might think from watching TV. The majority of PEOPLE in the US (and in Russia) knew that the USSR was evil.

--I'm interested in Raging Bee's remark:

"Giving Reagan credit for "causing" the fall of the USSR is a very dangerous line of reasoning, as it implies that there is something one nation can do to make a powerful, dangerous enemy vanish without cost."--

And part of that treasure it cost was the debt in the 80s which we're still paying off. When people complain that RR busted the budget, they forgot it was building the military back from the brink.

So, Raging Bee - it did cost a lot, but would have cost even more if we were still in the Cold War. No one knows how much longer the USSR had, 10 years? 25?? 50? what about the cost then?

Raging Bee, why was Gorby put into office? And what about the study Adndropov(?) commissioned that they received 2 years later saying while we don't know if the US can do Star Wars, we know we can't.

Bjørn,

Don't know if a previous commenter mentioned this (since there are too many at this late date to sift through), but the following excerpt might be of interest to your question about Ronald Reagan's contribution to destabilizing, if not dismantling, the Soviet Union:

CIA slipped bugs to Soviets
Memoir recounts Cold War technological sabotage
By David E. Hoffman

In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a

Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a new memoir by a Reagan White House official.

Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time, describes the episode in "At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War," to be published next month by Ballantine Books. Reed writes that the pipeline explosion was just one example of "cold-eyed economic warfare" against the Soviet Union that the CIA carried out under Director William J. Casey during the final years of the Cold War.

At the time, the United States was attempting to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas. There were also signs that the Soviets were trying to steal a wide variety of Western technology. Then, a KGB insider revealed the specific shopping list and the CIA slipped the flawed software to the Soviets in a way they would not detect it.

'Programmed to go haywire'

"In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds," Reed writes.

"The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space," he recalls, adding that U.S. satellites picked up the explosion. Reed said in an interview that the blast occurred in the summer of 1982.

"While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy," he writes. "Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end. In time the Soviets came to understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended endgame for the entire operation."

More here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002

A lot of off-topic comments on Islam have been moved here: /warblog/000732.html

Via Fredrik Norman:

Norway's Foreign Minister: - Europe Misjudged Reagan
Said Norwegian Foreign Minister Jan Petersen, who participated in yesterday's ceremony in Washington DC:

- In our European arrogance, we saw him as a little simplistic and naïve, but nothing could be more wrong. Ronald Reagan had a vital historical role in the end of the Cold War. He forced the Soviet Union to its knees, and at the same time saw the opportunity for cooperation with Mikhail Gorbatsjov.

- Reagan connected with people, had warmth and spread a sense of security around him. His optimism and strong value-orientation appealed to a lot of people.

- To me, Petersen continued, Ronald Reagan was an extraordinary politician. His optimistic approach released the strength and enthusiasm of the American society.

(Source in Norwegian: Dagbladet, Norway's second largest tabloid)

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SashaCastel.com: Why did it happen?, June 14, 2004 01:42 PM

There is a sentiment among some that the Soviet Union was going to collapse anyway, and that Reagan didn't have...