[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Yes, they did. They represented a 180 degree turn in U.S. policy. Go read National Security Decision Directive 75. As I said above, before Reagan the official U.S. policy was one of detente’. There was no effort to pressure the Soviets or to try to collapse the system. At most, there was ‘containment’, in which the U.S. attempted to stop Soviet expansionism. But there was no policy of regime change. Until Reagan…But Gorbachev was picked in part because of Reagan, Walesa, et al. The Soviets decided to go with a ‘gentler face’ because of problems in the client states and the ratcheting up of rhetoric against the regime. They thought Gorbachev would carry out the same old policies, but with a more human face. In fact, this just sped things up. Reagan put the heat on Gorbachev, pushed him towards reforms (which Gorbachev himself was amenable to), and when Gorbachev started taking steps in that direction, Reagan gave him some carrots and helped solidify his position.
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This is all patent nonsense. First of all, the official policy of open containment stopped with Johnson. Nixon was an avowed anti-Communist, and under his and Ford’s administration the United States was actively involved in repelling Communism or anything that looked like it in Latin and South America and Africa, as well as supporting any tin-pot despot in Southeast Asia who claimed to be against Communism. The situation in Europe had stagnated, to be true, in large measure because of the strategic parity, and with the expense of the conflict in Viet Nam there wasn’t money to fund the kind of strategic arms race that had been the hallmark of the 'Sixties. Nonetheless, the Soviets continued to advance the science of rocket engineering and fielded several new and powerful ICBM and SCBM systems, as well as intermediate range “tactical” nuclear and chemical delivery systems. The whole “Nixon goes to China” business was entirely about splitting the perceived Sino-Soviet Communist alliance, although it was not well appreciated at the time that any real alliance between the two nations was symbolic at best, and the nations were as culturally incompatible as Felix and Oscar. In short, while Nixon and Ford weren’t as flashy and bombastic about fighting Soviet Communism, they were heavily invested in it.
The Carter Administration, too, had the policy of goading the Soviet Union into error, while striving to reduce the threat of nuclear confrontation. Despite the assertion that it was initiated by the CIA giving Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen insurgents, in fact it was the policy of Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to induce the Soviets to “giv[e] to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War.” Weapons (mostly small arms, mines, and FIM-43 ‘Redeye’ SAMs were given to Afghan tribes, while CIA advisors distributed propaganda and advised rebels how to agitate the Daoud and Taraki governments. Much of the motivation came from ethnic suppression of the Pashtun people. It’s true that the Reagan Administration continued the policy of funding and supplying the Mujahideen, including some factions that later became part of the Taliban, but it did not initiate this policy.
In regard to the ascension of Gorbachev and his policies, the old party hardliners, and the somewhat more moderate apparatchiki who fronted for them were literally dying off; indeed, Brezhnev’s last couple of years, as well as the entire tenure of Andropov and Chernenko were marked by terminal illness. This was intentional, as the Politburo and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union wanted to prevent cults of personality like Stalin and dynamic, iconoclastic leaders like Khrushchev. Gorbachev was expected to be just another, albeit younger, Party hack, and had been advanced through the ranks through the mentorship of Andropov and Suslov. His reforms were not unique; during the later Brezhnev era, as economic stagnation become problematic (those long lines for bread and soup) the Soviets attempted reform, but the grip of ideologues was still strong and Brezhnev was too much of a rubber stamp, which is why he was selected to succeed Khrushchev. By 1985, when Gorbachev came to power, Suslov and other ideologues were either dead or dying. Gorbachev had travelled widely outside of the Soviet sphere and had been exposed to both economic capitalism and Eurosocialism, and saw the value of reforms in both. Almost immediately after he came to power he started instituting both economic and social reforms intent upon raising the standard of living and quashing crime and substance abuse that had risen in the 'Seventies. Margaret Thatcher may have famously recognized him as “a man we can do business with,” but Gorbachev had been a strong favorite for succession long ago by the dominate moderate elements of the Central Committee, who were nonetheless surprised at the speed and feavor of Gorbachev’s reforms. Certainly, rallying international support behind Gorbachev helped him, and Reagan and Thatcher deserve credit for that, but I daresay that any leader of a Western nation would have done the same, and it was a reactive, rather than proactive stanced to liberalism of Soviet ideology.
As for Reagan, history has well documented his bombast, and his characteristic cluelessness of the impact of off-hand statements he would make. To the Soviets (and much of the rest of the world) he didn’t come off as a strong leader; he came off as a goading, chest-beating buffoon who threatened to march the band right over the cliff and take the entire world with it rather than back down from the Soviets. He seemed to think he was staring in a Dirty Harry film rather than playing Russian roulette with an opponent that owned a massive nuclear stockpile and little incentive not to use it if the barbarians were at the gate. He may have been compassionate and sympathetic in private, and his tears after watching “The Day After” may have been genuine rather than a publicist’s fiction, but he scared the bejezzus out of a lot of people, including some of those already at death’s door who had their thumb on the button. (Thatcher was hardly better, her claim of “A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us,” is obtuse, even within the context in which it was stated.) And it was in no way the strategy of the Reagan Administration to bring about sudden and total collapse of the Soviet Union, which was as much a surprise to Western observers as to the Soviets themselves; Reagan was digging in for the long haul; he enunciated well and made good theater, but his policy was just another phase of the same type of containment combined with funding insurgency that had been esssentially the same plan from Nixon onward. It’s true that the military got more toys (though in raw numbers Kennedy was an even better Father Christmas to the Department of Defense) but this was of marginal interest to the Soviets who already had superior numbers in both conventional and strategic weapons.
SDI was a red herring, something to argue about rather than talk directly about ideological differences. Technologically and strategically it was nonsense. It was never going to be an all-protective shield, and by Reagan’s era a disarming first strike was virtually impossible, so to speak of it as something the Soviets “feared” is absurd. Even if deployed it would have little effect on deterrence and counterstrike capability, if for no other reason than SLBMs with suppressed trajectories would have skirted in and released RVs before any boost or mid-course interceptor would be able to respond. Defense against terminal phase RVs is essentially limited by geometry and time to point defense of installations; there would have been no means to protect the unguarded population and industrial infrastructure from attack, regardless of Reagan’s babbling on about “protective needles of light” zapping incoming RVs from the sky.
Stranger