Exactly. This isn’t Crusaders versus medieval Islam, or even European Imperialists against Native Americans; this is closer to the modern US versus a Stone Age tribe. We wouldn’t even have the ability to fight back, much less win.
I dunno. When I joined the military I realized that giving everyone the same haircut, the same clothes and the same enemy (drill sergeants!) goes a really long way towards erasing some fairly drastic differences among people and getting them to cooperate towards common goals. Along the way lots of understanding and friendships happen.
It would be foolish, IMO, to discount the effect because it doesn’t work perfectly, or all the time. Even half of humanity unifying that way would be a formidable and scary thing.
Wow, what a strange thing to see as controversial. He clearly meant that the differences between the two countries were small compared to our shared humanity. It seems obviously true that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R would have cooperated easily were the world under threat from some common foe - after all, they did just that when Hitler was a common threat.
It’s also quite a liberal sentiment, and was clearly meant to foster a sense of shared purpose and a reminder of shared values between the two countries. So I’m surprised to see this statement of Reagan’s to be used by liberals to indict him.
I know people around here still like to hate on Reagan, but that’s an attitude not shared by the world leaders who were on the stage with him at the time - including Mikhail Gorbachev who had much respect for him.
Reagan managed the difficult feat of taking an extremely hard line with the Soviets until they started to crack - then taking a rather dovish line with them when they elected a leader clearly interested in change (in opposition to the hawks in his own party, I might add).
The Reagan administration not only helped to break the back of the Soviet Union, but it also helped engineer a ‘soft landing’ that prevented any spasms of violence or chaos in the wake of its downfall. I would include the Bush I presidency in that, since it carried on the Reagan foreign policy almost completely intact.
As for SDI, Reagan may have been optimistic that a 100% effective shield could be created by the year 2000, but that’s no different than the optimistic statements about many things that every president has made. Clinton said his policies would make America self-sufficient in energy. So did Presidents Nixon and Carter and Bush (both Bush’s, in fact).
Bush II touted hydrogen fuel cells and cellulosic ethanol as being the path to energy independence. Both turned out to be either dead ends or way premature. Bill Clinton pushed for corn ethanol for the same reason - and was wrong. Jimmy Carter said that solar energy would make the U.S. energy independent and installed solar panels on the White House to prove his point. He specifically said that solar energy would make up 20% of America’s energy by 2000. He was wrong too.
But the fact is, Reagan was more right than were the opponents of SDI, who said it would never work. Ask Israel today if they’d like to give up their missile shield. And in any event, a the time it was the threat of such a shield that worked the Soviets into a tizzy and brought them to the bargaining table, so it had a very valuable effect even if it would never be 100% effective. Reagan may even have known its limits then, but if you’re going to bluff you don’t start by admitting that you’re bluffing.
The beauty of SDI is that it changed the military calculus between the two nations. The Soviets could always match the U.S. missile for missile, and could always outmatch them with sheer numbers of conventional weapons in Europe. What they couldn’t do was match the U.S. technologically. By moving the front of the cold war to the high technology space, Reagan trumped the Soviets. That’s why they were scared of SDI, and why it gave Reagan such a powerful bargaining chip.
The other part of SDI that the critics of it never admitted or accepted was that in terms of deterring a nuclear war it didn’t have to be 100% effective - it just had to insert enough uncertainty into the other side’s ability to first-strike and take out the other country’s retaliatory capability. That’s why Reagan offered it to the Soviets as well - even if it was 10% effective, it meant that a country with 8,000 nukes could be guaranteed to retaliate with at least 800 if struck, which meant that a first strike was simply not a feasible strategy.
This was the same rationale used to justify hardening missile silos, building ballistic submarines, and building the MX ‘racetrack’ missile. Under the logic of the cold war, anything that make a first strike uncertain made war impossible. The thing is, the Soviets felt they could match the U.S. with ballistic subs, they could outbuild them in quantities of missiles, and they had an intelligence advantage in that the U.S. was an open society where Soviet agents could move freely, while the Soviet Union was not. SDI put the U.S in a position of permanent advantage.
This is a pretty common trope in SF/Fantasy. It is, of course, the point of Watchmen, but was used in the Outer Limits episode The Architects of Fear (which Alan Moore apparently didn’t know about when he started writing Watchmen, but whch he worked into the last issue). But it goes back farther than that. It’s the point, again, in the very odd 1959 SF novel The Stars are Too High by Agnew Bahnson (and of which I’ll have more to say, sometime).
The earliest use of it I know of is the short story Alexander the Bait by Willam Tenn (Phillip Klass) in the May 1946 Astounding Science Fiction, but I’ll bet someone will dig out an even earlier use of it.
It’s a great idea for a short story – The Aliens are threatening Mankind as a whole, so we all band together to stop them, thus ending world strife. The kicker is when the “alien” threat is actually a man-made hoax (as in Watchmen, Outer Limits, Bahnson, and Tenn). we are tricked into peace. Taken on in a longer work, the seams start to show. Exactly how do you get people to join together? They still don’t trust each other, after all. Something will eventually give, and we’ll revert to the status quo. The exception is when there is a real palpable alien threat, as in the aforementioned Turtledove series, or Independence Day. And, I observe, in those cases the alien threat fragments humankind, so people end up simply fighting the aliens directly, and there are no problems with “how do we joing up against the threat>” – we don’t, for most purposes. We each independently fight the Bad Guy Aliens on our own fronts, sometimes sharing intelligence. I could see that working.
The problem is that, it would only work in a careflly calculated balance of strength. Turtledove has his aliens calibrated to be just weak enough that we can believably battle them to a standstill. Plus, they don’t want to destroy the earth, or seriouslt damage it – they want to LIVE here, after all. But if the aliens had been just a bit more technologically advanced, or a bit better equipped, or just ruthless enough to drop meteors onto the earth’s major cities, then people would probably lose, whether they banded together or not.
Well, that “moron” always seemed to come out on top, didn’t he? The graveyard of history is filled with allegedly brilliant men (from Jimmy Carter to Mikhail Gorbachev) who underestimated Ronald Reagan.
I mentioned “Architects of Fear” upthread.
Re; losing the war, it really isn’t about whether you win or lose, it’s about how you play the game. 1988’s “They Live” had some interesting points to make about collaborators.
This. If He’s God of the whole universe, then the aliens are His children too, aren’t they?
Yeah, I had to wonder whether Reagan thought of God as the God only of this planet.
Of course, the “aliens threatening Earth” part of the scenario is extremely common, including such prominent examples as Wells’s War of the Worlds.
My impression (though I may well be wrong) is that, of all our recent presidents, Reagan (the former movie actor) thought most in dramatic terms—what would make a good story.
Uh, no. The Reagan administration did not break the back of the Soviet Union, which had long been in economic free fall. If any single act resulted in the eventual fall of the Soviet Union aside from Gorbechev’s own economic and political liberalization policies it was the involvement of the Soviet military in the disastrous 1980 invasion of Afghanistan. The events that led up to the Soviet invasion were instigated not by the Reagan administration but rather at the guidance of Zbignew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. Not that this is anything to pridefully champion as a victory, as this action (and the later arming and supporting of various factions of mujahideen and other partisan forces) is what reinvigorated the heroin trade and led to the rise of the Taliban regime and the current state of lawless warlordism. Nearly every Western intelligence authority believed that the Soviet Union, which was heavily dependent upon subsidized goods from its Warsaw Pact “client states” and the sales of raw natural resources for Western manufactured goods and technology at pennies on the dollar, would fail economically, although almost no one predicted the speed at which it would utterly collapse. (Soviet dissident and author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gets notable mention for probably being closest to guess and even he was off by about ten years.)
As for “engineer[ing] a ‘soft landing’ that prevented any spasms of violence or chaos in the wake of its downfall”, are you living in the same world as the rest of us? The Bush administration, which of course actually inherited the situation, starting with its loss of control of client states in 1989 and culminating with the dissolution in 1991, was basically at a loss as to what to do. Senior analysts at the CIA, DIA, and various service intelligence services were at odds over whether the collapse was genuine, a ploy to lure the United States into complacency, or actually real but engineered by unseen parties behind who intended to eliminate the moribund aspects of the Soviet Empire, retain the military strength, and launch an expansion into Western Europe. (Some of the now declassified intelligence estimates from the era are hilarious in retrospect, though given how quickly the USSR became a bunch of random countries that no one had heard from in about half a century they may be excused for engaging in flights of fancy.) The Bush administration position was basically one of “hands off” with regard to the fledgling Russian Federation and former East Bloc states while making tentative moves on the more remote Soviet client states. Mind you, this was not necessarily the wrong policy; certainly the efforts in nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan have aptly demonstrated that the United States is hardly qualified to tout its expertise in that category. But Russia and many of the central republics certainly experienced great chaos, including, if you will recall, a 1991 military coup to depose Gorbechev (which failed but was likely spurred on by indifferent Western support for the his attempts at market reform) and eventually having many critical industries and services taken over by oligarchs who made great profits at the expense of the population at large and political liberties of the nation.
If the Israeli “missile shield” you are referring to is the Arrow theater defense system then (as you are likely aware) this is a theater defense system roughly comparable to Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC-3) or Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) systems. It is specifically designed to intercept the unitary SCUD-based threats and is not remotely comparable in required capability to a mid-course or terminal phase ICBM defense system, which would have to intercept individual reentry vehicles moving five times faster than a short range ballistic missile.
The Soviets were well aware of the capabilities and challenges of missile defense systems including rocket-based kill vehicles, orbital interceptors, and projected energy weapons (laser, partial beam) as they had been working on multiple such systems since the early 'Sixties and had achieved considerable success in both high altitude interception and ‘blinding’ weapons. They were also aware of the fundamental problems with such systems which made Reagan’s pledge to bring them to the world in relatively short order (within a couple of decades) a technical falsehood. Many American scientists and engineers were also aware of this and attempted to bring this issues to the public, notwithstanding Edward Teller’s championing of directed energy weapons, a field in which he had never worked and had only a superficial knowledge of, as many of his ill-informed statements about overcoming the technical challenges indicated. What the Soviets were most concerned about was not that the United States would develop and field such capabilities, but that the illusion of doing so would result in competition among the various design bureaus to produce their own equally bogus ABM systems which would dilute resources and result in another arms race. I suppose that could be considered a kind of bluffing, but Reagan was actually absolutely sincere about developing an impenetrable missile shield, which is about what you would expect from someone who promoted a brand of heat pump by saying, “I don’t know how it works…”
While this statement–that a system which could be guaranteed to protect at least enough of the arsenal to respond with a devastating counterstrike–is true on the surface, it absolutely wasn’t what Reagan was championing. In fact, the United States once had such a system; the Safeguard ABM point defense system which was deployed to protect the Minuteman launch complex and silos near Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota. This system was demonstrated as being workable to intercept incoming RVs and was actually a phenomenal technical development comparable to the development of the Minuteman system itself; perhaps even more impressive given its capabilities, which consisted of the ‘Spartan’ high altitude interceptor and the ‘Sprint’ low altitude interceptor, the latter leaving the silo accelerating at over 100 G. Of course, both interceptors were equipped with ‘enhanced radiation’ nuclear warheads which disabled their targets with a burst of neutrons; not exactly what you want to have going on overhead your residential neighborhood. And they could only protect a relatively small area, making them unsuitable to protect large metropolitan or industrial areas. The system was also extremely costly to install and maintain, and was demonstrated in simulation to be incapable of withstanding a concerted attack by even the single payload capacity of a Soviet SS-18 ‘Satan’ ICBM, which could carry up to 30 RVs.
But this is all pointless; the fact is that a disarming first strike has been essentially impossible since the development of early warning radars in the 'Sixties and the deployment of the rapid response time solid propellant ‘Minuteman’ and later ‘Peacekeeper’ ICBMs, as well as the retaliatory capability by the precision C-4 ‘Trident’ and D-5 ‘Trident II’ SLBMs, which were functionally as accurate as their land-based counterparts. From a deterrence perspective, ABM gives nothing accept the ability to protect empty silos.
You mean the guy who sat in a joint Congressional hearing and repeated variations of the phrases, “I don’t remember” and “I don’t recall” over 120 times regarding the activities of his administration up to the highest levels of his cabinet in an explicitly illegal arms-for-hostages/drug trade/covert arms supply to violent reactionary militia scheme about which millions of people of the general public appeared to be more aware of than the chief executive? That guy?
I will give Reagan full credit for this: he had the guts and compassion to sit down with Gorbechev and baldly say, “Let’s make a world without nuclear weapons,” something his closest advisors warned him against. He sincerely hated and feared nuclear war despite being portrayed as a war mongering hawk, and if other issues, such as the Soviet deployment of short range nuclear missiles in Poland and Reagan’s only feckless adoration of SDI had not gotten in the way, the United States and the Soviet Union may have actually come to an agreement on the elimination of active nuclear arsenals. As it was, his efforts directly led to the START treaties, which themselves did not wipe out the threat of nuclear war did place limitations (some thoughtful, others ill-conceived) on the development and deployment of nuclear weapons and launchers. For that, he should be lauded. But ‘Star Wars’ and “bringing down the Soviet Union”? This is credit unearned and undeserved.
Stranger
Were you around then? I was. The Soviet economy was not in ‘free-fall’ when Reagan took office. It was worse than the Soviets claimed, and Afghanistan was certainly a strain, but it was hanging together. You also must not underestimate the ability of a totalitarian state to stay together even with a rock-bottom economy. Cuba is still Communist, and it’s been an economic wreck for decades. North Korea’s people are starving, and that government is still in place. Vietnam remained Communist for decades despite starvation-level economic performance.
You also have to recognize that the Soviets were responding to their problems by trying to force concessions from the west, electing increasingly hard-line new leaders to replace Brezhnev, and expanding their power in central America and in their client states at home. They were also hoping for the west to pull them out of their economic difficulties with foreign aid and open trade of high technology. They supported a nuclear freeze to take the pressure off their arms buildup. They had many strategies planned to weather the economic storm. They also thought they could win Afghanistan.
Reagan changed all that. He changed official U.S. policy towards Russia from one of peaceful co-existence to outright opposition to the Soviets in pretty much every sphere except for trade of non-strategic goods.
I know you don’t want to give Reagan credit for any of this, but here are the facts: When Reagan took office he began a program of active opposition to the Soviets. He armed the Mujahadeen with Stinger missiles. He funded opposition groups in Soviet-backed states in Central and South America. He began calling the Soviets an ‘evil empire’ and announced a new arms buildup the Soviets couldn’t afford to match.
I suggest you read NSDD-75, the National Security Directive that explicitly changed U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union. It lays out in detail the Reagan’s administration identification of weaknesses in the Soviet Union and its plan to exploit them to bring the regime down. It is remarkable to read that document and see just how Reagan’s subsequent actions were part of a planned strategy that started early in his first administration.
Certainly that was a major factor, but you forget that Reagan helped make that very costly for the Soviets. But that wasn’t the precipitating factor. More important was the loss of oil and gas revenue the Soviets experienced. That was a major source of hard money for the Soviet Union, and it collapsed in the 1980’s.
Why did their revenue collapse? Several factors, all driven by the Reagan administration. First, in 1982 there was a huge explosion of the Trans-Siberian Pipeline that appears to have been industrial sabotage carried out by the CIA by injecting trojan horse software into SCADA pipeline control hardware stolen from the west by the Soviets (cite). I know the Russians dispute this today, so let’s call it ‘likely’.
One thing that is not in dispute however is that the Reagan administration discovered Soviet technology thefts, and instead of arresting the spies who stole the documents they instead injected flaws into the technology which eventually caused the Soviets to distrust their stolen technology and forced them to back away from it at a time when they thought the thefts would help them maintain technological parity.
Second, the Reagan administration sent George Bush, whose family had connections with the Saudis, to negotiate with King Fahd to increase Saudi oil production and help drive down the price of oil. The result was a decline in the price of oil from $30/bbl to $10/bbl, which had a bigger impact on the Soviet economy than did the cost of the war in Afghanistan. It cost them tens of billions of dollars.
The Reagan administration then expanded its program with the Saudis, selling them advanced AWACS planes and other military hardware in exchange for the Saudis helping to fund anti-communist insurgencies around the world, but especially the rebels in Afghanistan.
Reagan then partnered with Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II to step up the moral and social pressure on the Soviets. The pope traveled to Poland repeatedly and helped build support for the Solidarity movement and Lech Walesa. The Vatican bank probably funded Solidarity as well. This all happened due to considerable prodding from Reagan, who wrote to the Pope repeatedly calling on his help in bringing down the Soviets.
Here’s the big picture: In the 1970’s, the Soviets saw the U.S as a weakening power, gripped by inflation and malaise, with a dispirited military. The Soviets saw a path to the middle east through Afghanistan, and had allies there in Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries. Oil prices were rising, helping the Soviet economy. Detente’ was opening up their country to trade - not just in consumer goods and food, but in technology critical to their military.
By the end of the 1980’s, America was growing at a rapid clip, Soviet client states were rebelling and pulling away, Afghanistan was a disaster, Soviet influence in the middle east and Central/South America had collapsed, their oil revenue was a fraction of what it had been, the U.S. military buildup erased their belief that they could match the U.S. in an arms race, etc. The Berlin wall fell, Germany reunified, and it was all over.
To say that Reagan had nothing to do with any of this and that it was just the inevitable march of history is just crazy. Go back and read NSDD-75, which reads like a prediction of the near future.
This is either a misreading of history or an exaggeration. There were plenty of western intellectuals and State Department officials who were convinced that the Soviet Union’s economic model was sound, and many who thought it superior to the U.S. Perhaps not in consumer goods, but in education, ‘social justice’, labor, and other aspects of the economy. In fact, Reagan was opposed by the State Department who wanted NSDD-75 ‘toned down’ to remove any suggestion that the U.S. wanted to bring down the Soviets. They didn’t think it was possible.
Reagan helped to engineer a soft landing by changing his policy and rhetoric to help support Gorbachev. There was always a risk that Gorbachev would be deposed and replaced by a hardliner. Reagan and Thatcher both embraced Gorbachev, and both developed friendly personal relationships with him and helped him by praising his efforts on the world stage. Reagan signed the INF treaty in part to give Gorbachev a ‘win’. He also helped raise Gorbachev’s stature with little things like giving him full military honor guards, 21 gun salutes, etc. Thatcher announced that Gorbachev was a man she could work with, after years of taking a very hard line against other Soviet Leaders.
Reagan’s shift in tone towards the Soviets was opposed by many Republicans in Congress and by some in his own administration. Caspar Weinberger was opposed to any sort of concessions. Others wanted Reagan to push for ‘regime change’ and a switch to Democracy, but Reagan rightly saw that as too threatening to the Soviet power structure and instead focused on common goals and offering carrots like enhanced trade and agricultural aid to help Gorbachev domestically.
Hindsight is easy. It’s easy to say that without Reagan the result would have been the same, and there are no counterfactuals in history. But when a president takes power, says he’s going to bring down an empire, lays out a blueprint for how he’s going to do it, follows that blueprint, and the empire comes down after surviving and growing for the previous 60 years, he deserves some credit.
Of course, others deserve a lot of credit as well. Gorbachev probably more so than Reagan. Lech Walesa. Pope John Paul II. Margaret Thatcher. Brave resistance fighters around the world. NATO allies who backed the defense buildup. But Reagan was at the center of it all, pushing for it to happen.
I’m aware of that, but much of the technology came straight out of the SDI program. But in any event, there is already an ICBM missile defense system in place - the Ground-Based Missile Defense program. There are 26 interceptor missiles in Ft. Greely Alaska, and the Obama administration has ordered 14 more. There are also interceptors at Vandenberg, and no doubt other components that are classified. The Russian A-135 system that protects Moscow is also an operational ballistic missile defense system.
I find this amazing. Would you have the same defeatist attitude towards solar and wind power? Fusion? The technical hurdles to SDI were never impossible - they were just engineering problems. In the meantime, the same people who declared it ‘impossible’ were advocating for more money to be spent on fusion and solar and wind power, which all face obstacles at least an order of magnitude greater in terms of being able to replace fossil fuels as a widespread, cost-effective energy source.
And it clearly wasn’t a ‘technical falsehood’, since the ability to shoot down an ICBM in mid-course has already been demonstrated. Hell, the Soviets managed to intercept an ICBM in 1961. They also felt that their missile defense shield around Moscow was important enough to risk violating the ABM treaty.
That’s an interesting take, since the Soviets had already been building missile defense systems for a long time, including a long-range radar in Krasnoyark that was in violation of the ABM treaty.
That’s just a cheap shot. He was a pitchman for GE, and read a script. And yes, Reagan had a dream of a day when ICBMs would be rendered useless by comprehensive missile shields. So what? If Barack Obama had a dream of one day seeing a world entirely powered by solar and wind power, would that invalidate any plan he might have for funding research into the technology of wind and solar power?
The calculus of MAD was a little more complex than the simplified version I offered before. In some scenarios, the worry was that you could be hit by a first strike with enough missiles to take out most of your retaliatory strike capability, while the attacking country retained enough missiles to threaten a further devastating strike if any retaliation was attempted. In others, the worry was that a first strike ‘overkill’ would target individual missiles with multiple attacks in case of failures or point defense, or that a first strike would be intentionally extreme in order to rapidly destroy command and control and make a coordinated retaliation impossible.
But to be honest, I tend to agree with you that a first strike was not feasible. Ballistic missile subs alone seemed to be a pretty good defense against that. To me, the value of SDI was always that it moved the arms race to an area in which the U.S. had superiority, and that it would be useful not against a massive first strike, but against rogue missile attacks. I also felt it would make the world safer because if a country has the ability to shoot down an individual missile or small numbers of missiles, then it wouldn’t feel the need to be quite so hair-triggered in responding to what looked like threats - accidental missile launches, software glitches, etc.
I also felt that if you’re going to have an arms race, it’s much better to have it in high technology and space where there will be numerous spinoff benefits rather than a race to see who can build the most tanks to populate the Fulda Gap.
Wow. A politician says “I don’t remember” in response to a congressional hearing under oath when asked an incriminating question. That’s unprecedented! No politician before or since has ever done that.
You honestly seem to be under the impression that Reagan was a dim bulb. I suggest you read his own writing. Reagan was a voracious reader, student of history and philosophy, and he held a degree in economics. He was a two term governor of the biggest state in the union. He made a career of being underestimated and then wiping the floor with his critics. Those same critics said that Gorbachev was going to eat him alive at their summits. Instead, Reagan came away every time having gotten some or all of what he wanted.
Sam, you are a smart guy and I respect your opinion, but I think you have led your personal admiration for Ronald Reagan cloud your judgment and lead you to attribute accomplishments and actions to Reagan or his administration which are at best speculative and mostly not even correct. I’ll agree that Reagan led the rhetoric train, but he came to office at a time when the Soviet Union was already slowly collapsing from within, and the one deliberate action that brought the empire to its knees–the invasion of Afghanistan–was unambiguously engineered by his predecessor’s administration. It is absolutely true that Reagan armed, equipped, and funded various mujahideen factions (as Carter’s administration had previously, albeit to lower levels) but this is hardly something to be proud of, as it essentially destroyed the existing civil structure and led to increases in the heroin production and trade as well as making the nation a hotbed and training ground for the aggressive brand of fundamentalist Islam that we’ve subsequently come to fear. To suggest that Reagan is the champion and almost singular cause that ended the Cold War approaches an offensive lack of recognition for the actual people who were on the front lines, suffering, fighting and sometimes dying for that cause. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Dubček, Marta Kubišová, Lech Wałęsa, Piotr Duda, and Andrei Sakharov all deserve more credit for the ultimate dismantling of the Soviet Union than Ronald Reagan.
Oh yes, I am very familiar with GMD. This is the program that has failed all three intercept tests that have been conducted in the last five years. Despite this fact, and that major components of the system have repeatedly failed qualification, the system remains as the only operational missile defense system advertised to be capable of intercepting ICBM-class weapons. However, it is by no means the “protective umbrella” which Reagan touted in speeches. It is avowedly a system capable of intercepting only a very limited number of fairly primitive weapons launched by a “rogue state”, presumably North Korea, which is fortunate because it is unlikely that North Korea will be capable of reliably or accurately delivering a nuclear weapon via ICBM for the foreseeable future. If GMD is your “proof” that Reagan was right about the capabilities of missile defense, then your argument on that issue pretty much fails right there. Even if GMD were reliable, it would take tens of thousands of interceptors to have provided even a reasonable defense against the Soviet nuclear arsenal as it stood circa 1982.
The A-135 is a point defense system analogous to the Safeguard system I detailed previously. Its efficacy is unknown, but nonetheless it is not a system suitable to scale to defend an entire country unless your country is San Marino.
It wasn’t that he said a single, “I don’t remember” or even evaded admitting knowledge of a couple of acts performed by some mid-level bureaucrats. He repeated variations of “I don’t remember,”, “I can’t recall”, et cetera over a hundred times in a three hour period about actions which were going on at the highest levels of his Cabinet, involving illegal shipments of weapon materials to a hostile foreign nation, covertly supplying weapons to violently abusive insurgents in direct violation of US law, and having tacit knowledge of drug trade supported by members of the US intelligence and security services, all of which Reagan himself, an avowed opponent of “dealing with terrorists” and a champion of the War on Drugs, should have been morally and ethically opposed to. Either Reagan, acting as the chief executive of the United States, has less knowledge of what was going on in his own house than millions of ordinary people, or he utterly and completely abandoned his supposed principles and then turned around and lied about it stupidly. Compared to this, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” was not only unworthy of a perjury charge but doesn’t even add up to a little white lie.
As for the “soft landing” you really need to talk to someone who was there in the East Bloc nations in the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. Economically and socially, the conditions went from lower middle class (by Western standards) to desperately impoverished for the majority of the population. Hunger, lack of oil for heating, closure of schools and hospitals for lack of operating funds, scientists and doctors fleeing the nation to work custodial jobs for peanuts just to send money back home, women and children forced into prostitution; the former Warsaw Pact countries were a total disaster, and the West did virtually nothing to help while “businessmen” sold surplus weapons and vital pieces of infrastructure and oligarchs took over major industries to line their own pockets. The Russia we see today–posturing and hostile–is a direct result of the failure to support more liberal regimes and provide a cushion to buffer the change from a failed planned industrial economy to a viable profit-based one. Of course, it is easy to say, “What if…” and there is no guarantee that an attempt at Western involvement and support would have been successful, but the failure to even try has left the average Russian with a bad feeling about the United States and the West in general as having tacitly supported the fleecing of their national resources.
As I said, I respect your opinions and knowledge on most topics, but in this regard I think you are searched for and rationalizing every possible excuse to justify the canonization of Reagan as the patron saint of freedom, when his actual record–especially in the regimes he chose to support and the blowback of actions taken by his administration–is questionable at best and risible in many ways.
Stranger
I’m not attributing ‘everything’ to him. I pointed out very specific things he did for which there is much documentary evidence. His administration armed the rebels in Afghanistan and in Central and South America, helped to engineer the collapse of oil prices, and most likely sabotaged a main pipeline feeding the Soviet economy. He also began a defense buildup that forced the Russians to spend more on their military, and engaged in a long, well documented program of anti-Soviet propaganda and rhetoric that helped motivate resistance groups. He worked with Thatcher and the Pope to encourage Solidarity in Poland and with dissidents elsewhere. This isn’t handwaving or attributing ‘everything’ to Reagan - these are specific acts, well documented.
I’ve read works by some of those dissidents, and they talk about how valuable it was for Reagan to be out there championing their cause. It helped them keep their own groups together.
Was Reagan solely responsible? Of course not. There were many factors that caused the Soviet Union to fail, and it would eventually have collapsed anyway. But it might have taken 50 years.
Also important is what he didn’t do: He cut off all trade in strategic goods and high technology, and refused to give financial, agricultural, or technological aid to the Soviets. The Soviets had been lobbying for years for such aid. Had another president been elected, he might have taken all the pressure off the Soviets and allowed their system to creak along for a long time.
You say that I’m blinded by my ‘adoration’ of Reagan. I would flip that back on you: You’re blinded by your dislike of him, and therefore refuse to give him credit where he deserves it.
Pick your favorite president: if that President had presided over the collapse of an enemy, and there was a security directive recently declassified that showed in detail just how he planned to do it and it matches the historical record of what he did, would you just dismiss it?
How DO you respond to NSDD-75? I notice you’ve not mentioned it. Have you read it? Have you looked at its action plan and its identification of Soviet weaknesses and compared them to what the administration actually did and the results it got?
It wouldn’t even take a meteor, just a really big rock would be devastating. And our own moon has lots of them.