I really wonder how much of a real threat the Russians were prior to Reagan. They helped keep the Middle East in check, so to speak, invading Afghanistan, etc. Sure, they had nuclear missiles, but so did we. Like anyone was going to win? Then along comes Reagan who fabricates reasons to Congress why we must start beefing up our military. I’m sorry, but from my younger perspsective grwoing up in the 1970’s, I don’t see the former USSR as such a threat to peace on this earth. If anything, Reagan merely threw stones at a hornet’s nest instead of letting sleeping dogs be.
Thank goodness we had level-headed JFK at the trigger to deal with Castro! Yes, we still have castro to deal with today, but now today we also don’t really know who controls all those CCCP weapons, now do we?
So, do you think Reagan reinvented the Cold War? If not, was the Cold War really equally alive and well under, let’s say Ford or Carter? I don’t see it, but I was much younger, too…
Reagan sure cranked the Cold War up a notch or three. I don’t remember tensions being as high in my lifetime as they were under Reagan. In the 70s (in my own experience) nuclear war seemed a remote and hypothetical prospect. Reagan’s saber-rattling made it seem like a very real possibility.
As for the “Reagan won the Cold War” rhetoric that’s been bandied about in the past couple of weeks, I have two points to make:
I would be much more apt to buy into this notion if there were any evidence that Reagan *intended * to spend the Soviets into bankruptcy. Is there any such evidence? Or did Reagan ratchet up defense spending for the more mundane reason (nay, venal reason) that he was beholden to the defense industry and wanted to reward its campaign contributions?
Besides which, is there any evidence that Reagan’s actions caused the Soviets to increase their spending? Gorbachev has said (and I believe the numbers back him up) that the Soviet Union was headed for bankruptcy with or without Reagan’s budget-busting defense spending. (US budget, that is.)
There is abundant evidence. National Security Directive 75, enacted in 1983, changed the official policy of the U.S. from ‘Detente’ to ‘Rollback’.
Richard Allen quotes an interview he had with Reagan before Reagan became president:
Reagan stated that he planned to win the cold war, and not just maintain it. Today, that may not sound like a big deal, but trust me - in the 1970’s, no one was thinking about ‘wiinning’. We were all thinking about finding a way to coexist. Reagan’s talk of winning scared people.
When he came into office, he increased defense spending dramatically. And there was SDI. The Soviets were terrified of SDI. At Rejkavik, Gorbachev offered to remove all intermediate range missiles from Europe and begin dismantling other nuclear weapons, on one condition - the U.S. give up on SDI. Reagan spotted weakness, and said “This meeting is over” and flew home. A few months later, he gave his, “Mr. Gorbachev - Tear down this wall!” speech. Within a year, Gorbachev came back and offered to remove all the intermediate missiles from Europe, and this time without demanding that SDI be scrapped.
Note that Reagan would have scored a huge political coup had he accepted the Rejkavik offer. But it would have given the Soviets a whole bunch of breathing room. Reagan didn’t want breathing room or coexistence - he wanted to bankrupt them.
The Soviets actually wanted to reduce weaponry. Their arms buildup WAS bankrupting them. That’s why they kept calling for a nuclear freeze, so they wouldn’t have to keep building new weapons. But Reagan didn’t want a freeze - he wanted those weapons eliminated. And the only way to do that was to force the Soviets to capitulate. So he began a huge military buildup.
But that’s not the only way Reagan hit the Soviet Union. He also used the CIA heavily in Afghanistan, arming the Mujahadeen with Stinger missiles, which was very controversial at the time but pretty much grounded the Soviet helicopters. Those missiles were decisive in that war. Then there was his arming of anti-communist rebels in South America and Cambodia - The message was sent that the Soviets were not going to be allowed to conquer their way out of financial trouble. Their sphere of influence was now as big as it was ever going to get.
Then he stirred up trouble in the client states, giving speeches about freedom, calling the Soviet Union an evil empire (something that we’re now finding gave a huge psychological shot in the arm to the dissident movement).
Then there was outright sabotage. Recently declassified documents are showing that the Reagan policy was a lot more aggressive than previously thought. For example, the government of France gave the United States a list of spys who were stealing technology for the Soviet Union. Rather than publically arrest them and score a propaganda coup against the Soviets, which would have been standard procedure for most presidents, Reagan signed an order to use them to smuggle booby-trapped technology to the Soviets. Flawed computer chips, inaccurate designs, software with back doors. A piece of software used to control pipelines was stolen from the U.S., but the U.S. knew about it and put a trojan horse in it. The software malfunctioned in a way to cause the pipeline to explode.
Cite.
In reality, the Reagan administration was engaged in outright economic warfare against the Soviet Union. For example, Reagan leaned on Europe to prevent the purchase of natural gas from the Soviet Union. It was clear at the time to anyone observant that the U.S. was attempting to collapse the Soviet Union. It was a dramatic shift in policy, and it scared the bejeezus out of a lot of people. Reagan faced peace marches and opposition protests as severe or more so than what Bush is facing. I remember the protests we had in Canada against cruise missile testing, and a number of cities declared themselves “nuclear free zones” and refused to allow Americans to transport unmarked cargo through them. Vancouver refused to let a U.S. into port because the Americans would not disclose if they were carrying nuclear weapons.
There’s no doubt that the Soviet Union was a creaky artifice. But Reagan was the one who saw it and decided to give it a hard push. Along with Thatcher, Walesa, Havel, and Pope John Paul II. Had Carter won re-election, we could easily have wound up giving the Soviet Union economic aid to keep them going - something Carter supported. The conventional wisdom was that if the Soviet Union collapsed it could trigger a nuclear war, and the way to move to a better future was through increased economic sharing and detente. In the 70’s we were all about rapproachment - Apollo/Soyuz, all sorts of joint projects. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was quite a shock to Carter. He thought we were all getting along so nicely.
If you grew up in the 1970s, you should probably know that the Middle East- including Afghanistan- didn’t really need to be “kept in check” back then. Of course, the Arabs and the Israelis didn’t get along, but it wasn’t as if the Soviets were doing the West a favor by invading Afghanistan. Far from it- it was a prelude to an mooted invasion of Pakistan, which would have provided Moscow with a warm-water port.
Ok, there’s evidence that Reagan wanted to beat the USSR. Could you show us the evidence that the “spend them into bankruptcy” tactic was a keystone of this plan from early on? It seems far more likely to me that the point of spending big on defence was look tough and therefore stare down the Ruskis, not force them to spend big and bankrupt themselves. Not trying to be sarky, just want all the facts.
Certainly not. Soviet and American manuverings during the Cold War are one of the major causes of the current unpleasant situation in the Middle East. Neither was keen on helping out the people of the Middle East, but merely on establishing friendly regimes (as dictatorial as necessary) and undermining regimes backed by the other guy. This went from rhetoric to military support to CIA (and presumably KGB) intervention in the form of coups etc.
The Cold War ‘stabilised’ the Middle East about as much as it ‘stabilised’ South-East Asia, Africa or Central Asia.
The evidence is in the very policies. Why in the world do you think the U.S. tried to stop Europe from buying gas from the Soviet Union? Why did they blow up that pipeline? They were squeezing the Soviet Union economically.
That stuff sounds like the exact kind of thing that every American government had being doing since the start of the Cold War. Prevent the USSR from getting trading partners and vital supplies, sabotage existing supplies.
Jinx seems to be talking about more than this - the common argument is that the US greatly increased its defence spending with the specific aim of provoking / frightening the USSR into spending a great deal on defence, thus overstressing its budget and bringing down the government. What have you got about that specific scenario, whether it was planned that way or merely claimed to have been planned that way after the fact?
When Reagan gave his March 23, 1983 “SDI” speech, I sat upright in my chair and my jaw dropped. I was in grad school studying lasers and this struck me as an incredibly off-the-wall suggestion. “He must know something I don’t”, I thought, and from then on read heavily about SDI. I now know what Reagan knerw then, and I still think it was a stupid notion. Furthermore, many of the most insightful criticisms of the feasibility of SDI came from the Soviet Union. I simply cannot believe that Gorbachev and the other Soviet leaders were “terrified of SDI”.
I can believe that they were terrified that Reagan was thinking about lobbing nuclear warheads into fractional orbits (which is what Teller’s “Excalibur” plan amounted to), and what sort of fallout – physical and political – might occur.
I grew up in the late 70’s and remember the difference between Carter and Reagan regarding the Soviet Union. Sam Stone is making obvious points, backed up by insiders who were there. If we are to believe every word coming out of Richard Clarkes mouth, then why aren’t we going to believe Thomas Reed? Because Reed makes points that are ideologically inconvienient to some.
IOW, “appeasement” is what worked. It wasn’t Reagan’s arms buildup that ended the Cold War; that made it harder by reducing his credibility when giving Gorbachev reassurances. Gorbachev ended the Cold War via tacit surrender, a fact made possible by the knowledge that Reagan, as instinctive a nuke-hater as any Green tree-hugger, was not going to “start the bombing in five minutes”.
Reagan definitely tried to paint a picture of the circa-1980 Soviet Union.
He tried to portray Brezhnev as the next Stalin or Kruschev, powerfully scheming against the Western World.
But according to Alexander Sinyavsky, in his book “Soviet Civilization”, Brezhnev was almost universally regarded within the S.U. as an ineffective, incompetent bumbler, who had absolutely no clue what to do with the power in his grasp to effect positive change in his own country, never mind scheme against another hemisphere.
This is simply not true. The reason the Soviets wanted to bargain in the first place was because Reagan’s buildup scared them. Not just SDI, but the conventional buildup and the renewed opposition to expansionism.
If appeasement was the key, Nuclear weapons would have been eliminated during Carter’s term. But he didn’t get very far with the Soviets, did he?
I was going to add that by the time of the Rejkavik summit, the U.S. had already spent a tremendous amount of money on arms, and it was the prime reason the Soviets were at the bargaining table at all. But once they were there, Reagan has to be given credit for recognizing the institutional change with Gorbachev and agreeing to sweeping cuts in nuclear forces. Against the advice of many conservatives, I might add.
The reality was, as usual, far more complicated, friend. The USSR’s position in the world had deteriorated for decades, as has been pointed out to you unsuccessfully many times by many posters. The rotten tree was ready to fall over. Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko were creatures of and devoted to the old ideologies, but Gorbachev was devoted to a reconstruction of the USSR along more humanist and less militarist lines - and would have been regardless of US leadership, of course.
Spoken like yet another unreconstructed Cold Warrior dead-ender, thinking of “The Soviets” as a solid monolith with robotic, hive-mind leadership. Again, reality is more complex than your simplistic parody of it. Carter (and Nixon and Ford, whom you might have mentioned, had they not been Republicans) had Brezhnev and his own chosen hard-liner Politburo to deal with, not “The Soviets”; Reagan had Gorbachev and his young *perestroikniki * instead, not “The Soviets”. The “appeasement” that you hard-right ideologues would have, and do, deride Democrats for would indeed have been a miserable failure against the Old Guard. For Reagan, faced with someone who wanted to do what he eventually did, it worked. Tell us, what effect would there have been if Gorbachev had been in power in the 70’s? Would Carter have “not gotten very far” then? Or if Reagan had had Andropov, the KGB man, to deal with - would he have been “scared”?
Instead of trying to make the case that the USSR’s strategic disarmament was caused by any particular US leadership, you might instead consider what effect if any they really did have on the Soviet leaders who actually did it. You might consider, for once, that they were all actually human, actually patriotic, actually leading actual countries, and able to recognize and cope with actual reality. But you show none of that here at all; just the usual quasi-religious reverence for Saint Ronald - another human - and a fervor for quashing any heresy against him.
The Soviets could have built more missiles to counter SDI. But we could have countered that with more SDI measures.
The Soviets feared this immensely. At the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, they were spending about 20% of their GDP on defense. They simply couldn’t afford another arms race, especially with an increasingly disaffected population.
The United States never spent anything close to this level of its GDP on defense. We could have outspent the Soviets into oblivion, and we did.
The Arab-Israeli thing would have survived a nuclear war and continued ad infinitum, tongue in cheek, but seriously…I’m thinking East of Mid-East, I guess!
IIRC, Iraq and Iran were at odds esp. since the Iran hostage crisis ended. “The enemy of my enemy” was the way one anchorman put it on the national evening news. Also, I recall Iran having activity in either (or both) Afghanistan or Pakistan…with the Russians moving in. I just think Iraq and Iran would have had a lot less “free time” on their hands if they still had the Russians breathing down their clerics’ collective neck!
Also, what would have happened if the Russians did not pay Reagan any attention? I mean, here’s big-bad “won’t back down” Cowboy Reagan stockpiling weapons and let’s say the Russians didn’t even pay one bit of attention - leaving all their nuclear weapons in place. What was Reagan going to do next, huh? Launch one puppy just for kicks? I admit I may be naive here, but even almighty Reagan could lead his horses, but he can’t make 'em drink, right?
Even if this were so, what makes you think it was such a red-hot dandy idea? You have a former enemy sliding easily into decrepitude, who has already committed itself to detente and peaceful co-existence. Wherein lies the advantage of causing that government to collapse, and take your chances that the succeeding government will, necessarily, be an improvement?
Are you really, really sure that you are so much better off with nukes under the control of “Vlad the Impaler” Putin? Not too mention the years they were controlled by that drunken lout, Yeltsin.
“Victory”, however emotionally satisfying to the hard-liner, is not always the best option. Though, truly, I wonder how I can presume to dispute the opinions of Lockeed, General Gynamics, and Boeing - all of whom are unanimous in thier certainty that massive defense spending was just the swellest, bestest idea ever! The Shining Citadel on the Hill!