Look, I’m one of the biggest Reagan boosters around here, and I don’t think for one second that he thought the Soviets would be defeated so easily.
That makes the shift in American policy that he fought for so much more profound. If the Soviets were so obviously beatable, do you think even a weak president like Carter would have done the things he did regarding them?
Reagan fought so hard for a policy shift so that American (and Western) policy could be put on a long term track to force changes in Soviet behavior and their eventual defeat. Thankfully, this came sooner rather than later, because many of Reagan’s political opponents did not grasp the wisdom of this move, and returned to power would have reverted to a detente policy that served to prop up the Soviets.
No, Reagan never thought they would fall immediately. He thought it could take another generation. But he knew what had to be done to bring them down, and he put in place the policies that led to their fall. You can see it in NSDD-32, NSDD-66, and NSDD-75 in particular. He specifically talks about undermining the economy through increasing sanctions on high technology, machine equipment, and other critical industrial supplies. He talks about opposing them rhetorically, to cause unrest in the client states. And he talks about countering their military strategy to force them to spend much more money to maintain the status quo. And those directives even say that should the Soviets respond by making overtures towards various freedoms, the rhetoric would be softened and an attempt would be made to forge a personal relationship with a reformer.
OK, but we’d have to (a) know that his economy couldn’t handle any more, (b) spend on defense in a way that would force him to spend more, too, and (c) show that more peaceful means of economic warfare wouldn’t accomplish the same result. (Unless you’re into military spending for its own sake, rather than in pursuit of a strategy.) I don’t see where anyone has shown either one of these applies here.
There’s a big difference between saying, “We’re going to make things more costly for them,” and “we’re going to do so because their economy is in such bad shape that if it gets just a little worse, they won’t be able to maintain their empire.”
If there’s anything in NSDD-32 that suggests the latter as opposed to the former, please spill; I’m not going to go through the PDF line-by-line unless you say it says something relevant. Like I said, I think it was a good approach for the Reagan Administration to try to combat and hinder the USSR in many different ways (excepting, of course, the ways that involved supporting the D’Aubissons, Savimbis, etc. of the world), but I see no indication that the Reaganauts knew where the weak link really was.
Its eventual demise, as both you and Mr. Moto point out.
If you concede that even from the much closer vantage point of the 1980s, Reagan wasn’t predicting the near-term demise of the USSR, then it’s silly to criticize anyone in 1969 for failing to see that Soviet Communism wasn’t going to last for quite a while yet. You’re saying they somehow blew it in failing to see from a greater distance what Reagan failed to see close up, with the full panoply of classified intelligence that a U.S. President has access to - but you fail to criticize Reagan for the same failure of vision.
That makes no sense at all, except of course if you want to deify Reagan and bash pointy-headed academics at the same time. What fun.
Look, I’ve been reading stuff like that since the 1960s, when Barry Goldwater was my political hero. But here’s the deal about all that: none of it was used to suggest that it represented a threat to the Soviet government’s control over its empire, unless it could somehow lead to something like Hungary 1956, only on a more massive scale; just that it was a system that massively failed the people living under it. It was a strong indictment of the Soviet system, and a ringing affirmation of why we should combat them, but it was *not *about ‘here is how we will win.’
First of all, we’ve somehow managed to twist the argument about predicting the Soviet collapse away from the original reason it was brough up: tomndebb’s claim that “the intelligence analyses beginning around 1977 pointed to a collapse between 1988 and 1995”. It appears you disagree with him.
In short, here are the arguments variously used against the notion that Reagan was instrumental in ending the cold war:
The Soviets were about to collapse anyway. Reagan was just lucky and presided over the start of it. This was tomndebb’s point in claiming that every intelligence analysis since 1975 (before Reagan was in office) claimed that the Soviet Union would collapse precisely when it did. So it couldn’t have been Reagan’s doing.
Reagan was just one of a number of presidents who fought the cold war. He happened to be the guy there at the end, but he didn’t do anything the presidents before him didn’t do.
‘Everyone knew’ the Soviet Union was going to collapse anyway. It was conventional wisdom. Reagan was nothing special in this regard.
Those are the typical arguments that are trotted out when someone says Reagan won the cold war, and those are the arguments I’m trying to rebut. And here are the essential points of that rebuttal:
I’ve seen no evidence that the intelligence community widely believed the Soviet Union was about to collapse. The CIA report from 1985 makes my point - by 1985, the Soviet Union was reeling economically due to the multiple shocks put on it from policies that emerged from NSDD-32, 66, and 75. In fact, tomndebb’s link refutes your own point that Reagan was not predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union any time soon. The CIA was apparently telling him exactly that.
As for whether the Soviet Union would have collapsed anyway, I don’t know. My belief is that it would have eventually done so, but dictatorships can hold together for a long, long time if the political leadership thinks they have something to gain by doing so. North Korea has been a basket case for 50 years, and it’s still a dictatorship run by the same people. Had the U.S.S.R been given signals that it could still ‘win’ through conquest and through trade, it might still be around. If the left had had its way and gotten a nuclear freeze, it would have taken big financial pressure off the Soviets. If they hadn’t had their pipeline blown up, if oil revenues had stayed high, if they could have continued to import high technology and sell oil and weapons whether they wanted, if they could have continued to fund rebels in Africa, Central and South America and see communist countries spring up and stay in their sphere of influence, if Grenada had remained Communist and opened relations with the Soviet Union, things might have been very, very different.
Had it looked like world events were moving in the Soviet Union’s direction, it could have held on for a long time.
It’s clear now from declassified documents that Reagan was not just another cold war president. Under the Reagan Administration, U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union changed from an official policy of containment and detente’ to an explicit policy of bringing down the Soviet Union through economic warfare, a new expensive round of arms buildups, opposing them by funding anti-communist rebels wherever possible, and strong political rhetoric to change world opinion against them. That was the plan. It’s described in detail in those directives. It was carried out to the letter. And it worked.
I hear the ‘everyone knew’ argument all the time. It’s trotted out to basically claim that Reagan was just lucky to get the credit for an event that everyone saw coming. But in fact, this isn’t the case. The vast majority of academics did not believe the Soviet Union was collapsing. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Many of them thought the Soviet Union was more stable than the U.S. This was also the common opinion on the left.
This is what John Kenneth Galbraith said in 1984:
Paul Samuelson, Nobel Laureate in Economics, wrote this a year later:
Lester Thurow, MIT economist said in 1989 (!!):
That was certainly the prevailing wisdom in the university I went to. It was the prevailing wisdom on campuses throughout the United States as well. If you wanted to read about the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, you had to turn to National Review, or listen to Ronald Reagan’s speeches.
No, right now I’m simply arguing that the Knopf quotes you brought in @16 are wrongheaded. Whatever the intelligence analyses began saying in 1977, for instance, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s silly to make anything, one way or the other, out of those 1969 predictions. People, on the right, much later - who had the benefit of those analyses - got it wrong in the same direction (and often even more so) than the librul academics of 1969 did.
Nor do those analyses demonstrate that Reagan was focusing in particular on the USSR’s economic weakness as the lever by which he or his successors would bring it down.
This is a side issue, of course, but my point is that just because someone with credentials said nice things retrospectively about Reagan, doesn’t mean they’re true. Knopf and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee.
I have no opinion one way or the other on what the weight of the late-1970s (and going forward) intel analyses of the USSR looked like. tomndebbb has educated himself about these things; I haven’t.
Of those three arguments you say you’re rebutting, I’ll only let #1 stand as it is; tom~ can say better than I can whether you’ve summarized his argument accurately.
With #2, the question isn’t “did Reagan do the same stuff as his predecessors, or did he try new things?” it’s “what was different in his approach, how different was it, and what difference did it make?”
And since I can’t recall anyone ever saying that the CW was that the USSR was going to collapse anyway, I call strawman on that one. The CW was that the USSR had lasted quite a while, and would probably last a good while longer. Who argues that that wasn’t the pre-1989 CW?
Again, I’m not familiar with the intel analyses from the period. But claiming that tom~'s link refutes my point is bullshit. Just because the CIA said something to Reagan, doesn’t mean Reagan said it too.
Especially in the context of this discussion. The American Right had a history, throughout the Cold War, of claiming that the American intelligence agencies greatly understated Soviet strength. And this was particularly pronounced among Reagan’s crew in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Rather than claiming, “the USSR is weak - we’ve got a priceless opportunity to bring it down!” as a justification for their military buildup, they were claiming that the threat had grown, and we needed a huge buildup precisely because they were so strong, and we were so weak.
And on top of that, there’s the degree of daylight between Reagan and even his closest advisors. Reagan had what I, at least, regard as a ‘better side’ that wasn’t shared by many (if anyone) even in his own Administration, let alone the broader conservative movement. Reagan, the sunny optimist, was always looking for a way for everyone to ‘win’: from the beginning, his idea of ‘Star Wars’ wasn’t to beat the USSR, but to share the technology with them so that nuclear weapons would be rendered generally ineffective, and both sides could dispense with them. Similarly with the arms buildup: what Reagan seems to have really wanted was to bring the Soviets to the table, to convince them from a position of strength that we should mutually disarm.
That may be, but I don’t think you’ve made that case. And since this thread is about the role of the Saudis in bringing down the Soviet empire, I think the pieces that are missing are (1) evidence that the Reagan Administration’s effectively bringing the Saudis under the American security umbrella in the early 1980s was part of an attempt to get the Saudis to bring down oil prices for the purpose of economically weakening the USSR, and (2) evidence that the Reagan Administration saw this as particularly important, rather than one of a thousand cuts in its efforts to weaken the USSR.
It’s clear that Reagan’s desire for mutual nuclear disarmament ran counter to the effort to bankrupt the USSR, so it’s hard for me to see the bankrupting of the USSR as a core element in Reagan’s approach to the Cold War. No question that he was a different sort of Cold War President, but different in ways that cut both ways.
Clinton’s Economic Advisor (D’Andria Tyson) thought that Ceaucescue’s Rumania was a MODEL of entral planning! Academics frequently know little about real world conditions; Gailbraith was in LOVE with central planning 9he was head of federal price controls, in WWII).