As I noted above, I doubt this.
I seriously doubt that, in the Reagan years, we could have gotten a credible SDI working against the Soviet Union. Heck, I doubt that today we can get an effective one going. They didn’t have to build more missiles – it’s unlikely that SDI could have even approached the 100% effectiveness it was being sold on.
Certainly! Have always wanted to see that statue of Frank Zappa in Prague. At that same time, perhaps you can take a little jaunt down to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, tell the local indian population about Ronnie’s firm committment to, like, freedom and stuff. A lot of them are dead, of course, but they have an approximate idea where they are buried. Thousands of them. But these aren’t the freedom-craving peoples you have such sympathy for, are they?
Batista, Trujillo, Pinochet, Uguarte…the roll call of brave, patriotic, and, most importantly, fervently anti-Communist patriots supported by our tax dollars is quite lengthy. Were they invited to your victory celebration? Hope they washed thier hands first.
Wasn’t talking about worthy. Talking about risky.
Seven presidents preceded Reagan who fought the cold war: Three Democrat, two Republican. The Soviet system was supremely dysfunctional and collapsing from within.
Reagan did win the cold war in that he landed the final blow and had the sense to recognize nuclear bombs in and of themselves as intrinsically immoral. But, considering his opponent and in terms of this forceful he-man stuff being bandied about by worshipful propagandists, he deserves about as much credit as Michael Tyson would get for punching the lights out of a cancer patient.
Yeah, braintree, he saw the rot in the system.
He knew that the Soviet Union would fall over if he pushed hard enough. I don’t think Reagan ever anticipated that it would happen so quickly, but there you go.
When you compare this to Carter, or Ford, or even Nixon, the differences are striking. These administrations sought to accomodate the Soviets and take the pressure off of them, all in the name of stability. Grain sales? No problem. SALT talks? No sweat. But, as Afghanistan showed, this goodwill on our part was not a guarantee of good behavior on the part of the Soviets.
elucidator, the thing that sucks is, good democratic governments have been a rarity in world history until pretty recently. Even now, they’re pretty scarce in some parts of the world.
The United States, under administrations of both parties, has had to deal with dictators in the past, and will have to do so again. In the Cold War, it had to do so mindful of the fact that a dictatorship like Castro’s could be a staging ground for attacks against its neighbors or even the United States.
That’s the kind of decision that was made in Latin America. I’m not defending it, but it’s really easy to see why it was made.
I can’t believe anyone today would question whether the end of the cold war and the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism was a good thing. Thanks for amazing me, elucidator.
So far, we’ve shown that Reagan intended to bring down the Soviet Union. I’ve pointed to specific acts that were undertaken to bring this about - economic military, and diplomatic. We’ve shown that this was a dramatic departure from previous policy. And in fact, the Soviet Union did collapse.
Against mountains of evidence that Reagan deserves special credit (not SOLE credit - many were involved) - evidence that most people on the right and left now accept, we have people in this thread arguing alternatively that A) The Soviet Union was about to collapse anyway (but offering no evidence for this claim), B) that the deficits required to change the world weren’t worth it, and C) That maybe it was wrong to bring it down, and we’d all be better off today staring down the silos of 20,000 ICBMs while Eastern Europe stays enslaved.
Truly amazing.
It’s always easy to argue that an alternative future might have happened that would have been even better. But you need to provide some sort of evidence that this was inevitable. Because the way I see it, if Reagan hadn’t been elected, there would have been another hardliner in the Kremlin, rattling his sabers to extract concessions from the west. A round of arms reductions might have taken some economic pressure off the Soviet Union. Perhaps they might have even won in Afghanistan without the CIA propping up the mujahadeen. And certainly they would have gotten their pipeline to Europe established, and had some oil revenues to take the pressure off. Outright economic aid from the west as well, with the implicit threat that a ‘destabilized’ Soviet Union could trigger a nuclear war. That card was already being played when Reagan came along.
The Soviet Union could have creaked along for another 50 years. Dictatorships can do that. That’s 50 years of having to avoid nuclear accidents, accidental launches, brinksmanship, and proxy wars around the world. That outcome is at least as plausible as having the Soviet Union spontaneously collapse without outside pressure.
Frankly, I prefer Reagan’s solution.
Umm… Kruschev banged a shoe on the table and said “We will bury you.” I think that’s pretty unequivocal.
He was followed by Leonid Brezhnev, author of the Prague Spring, and he was followed by the head of the KGB. These were not amicable men.
Nice mixed metaphor 
Saying Reagan’s strategy was risky is entirely fair. Saying it was irresponsibly risky is certainly defensible.
But from the vantage of 2004, having seen it play out, having access to the documents and the testimony of the Russians, it’s pretty damned hard to argue that he didn’t do exactly what he set out to do. Whether that success redeems the risk up to you.
If for one second I believed Ronald Reagan had intended to bankrupt the Soviet Union into revolution, I’d be the first one saying we should dig up his corpse and hang him. It would have been a act of insanity for any President to try to create a revolution in the Soviet Union; think how easily a panicky politoburo could have started a nuclear war. As it was, nuclear war was narrowly averted. We were lucky that Gorbachov and other Soviet leaders were willing and able to step down when the time came.
But I don’t believe that it was ever Reagan’s plan to overthrow the Soviet Union by economic warfare. Reagan increased the size of the American military because he thought we needed a bigger military. And he thought that because he expected the Soviet Union to be an ongoing military threat to the United States. That’s nothing to be ashamed about; virtually every political and military leader thought that back in the 70’s and early 80’s.
Just so. It is indeed easy to see, its entirely obvious, and I commend your good sense in refusing to defend the indefensible. I only insist you remember this when you pontificate on Ron-boy’s valiant liberation of the dreadfully oppressed Eastern Europeans, while shrugging off his collaboration in the oppression of equal numbers of Central Americans. As well, please keep in mind that however dreadful a grey and lifeless socialist existence may be, most such as those would prefer it to a life of hunger, malaria and murder endured by countless numbers of Central Americans at the hand of thier rulers.
That is not to say that St. Ronald of Bakersfield was the only President to behave disgracefully in this regard, or that only Republicans did so. But he was certainly the most openly enthusiastic, to the point of defying the stated will of Congress.
Least I could do, you have astounded me on so many occasions. At the moment, my jaw gapes in wonder that you could derive such an astonishing theme from what I wrote. I only wrote in humble, home-spun good sense, you have lifted it, formed it and polished it into a miracle of gibberish.
I don’t actually accept your premise of single-handed slaying of the Soviet system, it smacks too much of mythology. But I do suggest that if that were the intent, it was a foolish intent, destabilizing a nuclear power is taking a global risk for entirely selfish gain. If we started the Big One …(oopsy-daisy, everybody dies, darn it)…, we would take everyone else along for the ride, yippie-ti-yay. It turned out quite well, you attribute that to brilliance and geo-political genius, I say we got lucky.
If you are playing five-card draw, and you bet your money, your house, your wife and first-born to draw one card to an inside straight, and you win, you are no less a fool for the risk.
Or allowed a dictator to rise, or a rogue officer, or lax security measures resulting in nuclear warheads getting released. Yea, it ended well. We were lucky. Sometimes you gamble big and win, though, and history remembers your name. Crazy world.
It wasn’t that big of a gamble. I don’t know if Reagan was intending to bring down the regime itself, he just wanted to deal from strength. His intent wasn’t to have a nuclear freeze, but to get the Soviet Union to give up its missiles. And he wanted political reforms. He dealt quite willingly with Gorbachev, and if Perestroika and Glasnost had been the extent of the reforms in the Soviet Union, Reagan might well have accepted that. He wanted to win the cold war. I don’t know if he expected that ‘winning’ would mean the complete collapse of the Soviet Union and its fracturing into many states. He probably thought he could start the process of internal reform leading to an eventual, peaceful transition to democracy.
It beat the hell out of any of the alternatives. Detente in the long term was a doomed policy. Maintain a stalemate long enough, and eventually someone will screw up and make an error in judgement, or an accident will happen, or tensions will just rise naturally until war occurs. If Reagan gambled, the gamble has to be compared with the calculated gamble of attempting to maintain the status quo.
Elucidator, I have to ask, how do you feel about dealing with dictatorships in general?
Right now we’re talking with Gadhafi about disarmament. He was never elected. His human rights record is abysmal. He is a known sponsor of terrorism. But the facts on the ground are, he runs Libya.
Cold self interest dictates that we deal with him, distasteful as this may be. Do you have a problem with that?
Sam, you remember what caused World War One? The Hapsburgs worried that their empire was going to break up over domestic problems, so they figured a short little foreign war against Serbia would be just the thing to unite the country. And Germany was worried that its enemies were going to grow too strong and might launch a war in a few years; so they figured the best thing to do was start a war in 1914 before the military imbalance grew worse.
Heck, for that matter, did you ever read Tom Clancy’s Red Star Rising? It was about the Soviets launching an invasion of Europe because they were facing an economic crisis. In fact, the specific incident that triggered it was the loss of an oil refinery - the same tactic you had Reagan supposedly using.
Intentionally destabilizing a country with nuclear weapons would be the act of madmen. I have my differences with some of the policies of the Reagan administration, but I never considered them to be literally insane.
I can’t believe you are still misrepresenting, via exaggeration and middle-excluding, any views that clash with your own. Haven’t you been nailed for that enough times to learn?
So far you have done nothing to show that it was induced by, or facilitated by, primarily external pressure from the US instead of internal pressure. Nor, for that matter, do you even acknowledge the possibility.
Add *post hoc, ergo propter hoc * to the list of favorite **Sam Stone ** fallacies.
Shouldn’t be surprised when you misrepresent your own posts either, then - “mountains”?
It gets very hard to fight the ignorance of the ideologue. Google “Soviet Union economic collapse” and you’ll find a “mountain of evidence”. Here is a brief excerpt from just one good summary:
There’s plenty more, if you’re *truly * interested.
As has already been shown, they weren’t “required”, and have had and still have serious repercussions in terms of continuing to weaken our economy,
I cannot give you credit for good faith after that particularly insulting misrepresentation. The plainly-made argument isn’t *that * the end of the Cold War was “wrong”, but that the *way * it happened was unnecessarily risky compared to alternatives.
Only to those unwilling, or perhaps unable, to reconsider their own quasi-religious beliefs.
Bullshit. There are no inevitabilities in predicting the future, but there are certainly probabilities, based on history and understanding of human nature.
You have exactly zero evidence for that belief, other than your own concept of the USSR as a monolith in which nothing ever changed except through outside pressure.
“Spontaneously” is another attempt at misrepresentation on your part, and unfortunately there is no reasonable way after all the other times you’ve done so to call it accidental. That’s a shame, really.
Well, there was economic and social collapse in North Korea too. Also Cuba. Same with Burma, and Libya, and Zimbabwe.
Somehow, though, these dictatorships manage to creak along. It’s an amazing thing.
The common feature of dictatorships is brutalizing the population for the sake of the regime’s self-preservation. By doing so, they can survive long past the point where any normal government would have been run off.
It’s hard to say at what point the crisis would come that would cause the collapse of the hard-line government in question. It’s different for each country. But Reagan did understand that that tipping point did exist, somewhere.
I think he anticipated, too, that it would happen in Eastern Europe first. So much work was conducted with the Pope, and with European trade unions, to provide massive support for Solidarity in Poland. This movement grew to the point where it couldn’t be ignored. The Polish Communist Party attempts to break it failed. And once they lost their monopoly on power, they lost the country.
It was this event, and Gorbachev’s failure to stop it, that caused the cascade of nonviolent anticommunist revolutions in the rest of Eastern Europe in 1989.
In general, soiled, muddied, and compromised. But “dealing with dictatorships” as a neccesity wasn’t remotely my point. My point is that you trumpet the “liberation” of Eastern Europeans under socialist rule as the triumph of the will of St. Ronnie of Bakersfield, yet blithely ignore his complicity and cooperation in the oppression of Central Americans. I don’t think its quite kosher of you to plead “realpolitik” in the one instance and a victory of compassionate liberation in another. Especially when one takes into account the massive bloodshed involved.
If he can take credit for the one, he must take responsibility for the other. And you, if you are to sing his praises, must either acknowledge that or explain it away. So far, you have done neither.
Not to speak for him, but IMO, It’s quite simple. When given a choice of supporting a gov’t that will be hostile to its citizens and hostile to America, or supporting a gov’t that will be hostile to its citizens and friendly to America, you pick the latter.
Indeed. Unalloyed cynicism and brutal realpolitik are certainly options. We are all grateful to friend Brutus for pointing out the advantages to be gained when one abandons all pretense of morality.
I guess he would be voted St. Ronnie here in Bakersfield.
They are the only options, unless you count doing nothing (defacto ceding the matter to the Soviets.) Fortunately for us all, we had a administration in the White House that understood that.
Not to mention that leftist dictatorships were hostile to their neighbors. Communism was an expansionist creed, while the autocratic Latin American states elucidator mentions typically didn’t threaten their neighbors or the U.S. in this way.
The Cuban Missile Crisis left a pretty bad taste in everybody’s mouth, and I don’t think any American president would have been overly enthusiastic about another Communist state in Latin America.
You can’t blame Pinochet on Reagan - that happened well before his watch. Same with Stroessner in Paraguay. He came to power in 1954.
I certainly think a strong case can be made that the U.S. has been overly accomodating to dictators in Latin America. But singling Reagan out in this regard seems quite unfair.