Michael Reagan wrote a newspaper column last week in which he said something that I had not heard before. Reagan said that Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa all worked together to undermine the Communist government of Poland back in the 1980’s. Michael Regan says the Pope and the CIA provided covert financial support to the Solidarity movement. The three government leaders provided political pressure and Walesa agreed to risk his life to become the face of Solidarity.
Looking back, we now see that the Solidarity movement spelled the end of the Polish Government. The Polish people were emboldened by the fact that the government did not crack down and kill the demonstrators. They were further heartened by the fact that the Soviet Union did not invade, like they did in Hungary in 1956 and Chekoslavakia in 1968.
In the meantime, Ronald Reagan was holding firm by refusing to stop development of the Strategic Defense Initiative, forcing the Soviets to keep spending money on their military.
Within five years, every eastern european soviet satellite was free and the Soviet Union itself was out of business.
My question is this…everyone is quick to credit Pope John Paul and Lech Walesa for the collapse of communism in europe. Why are they so reluctant to give the same credit to Reagan and Thatcher?
Just to spread some credit about, a lot of the resources that the Reagan-era CIA and the Church funneled to Solidarity came from the AFL-CIO and Western European, especially Swedish, trade unions. Lane Kirkland was an unsung hero in this effort, and while I won’t often have nice things to say about Mr. Kirkland, he was instrumental to this effort.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, and the Cold War made for some strange ones indeed, as decent politicians of every persuasion in the West found in the Soviet Union a common enemy that had to be resisted.
Are folks slow to credit Reagan helping in breaking communist control of Europe? Seems to me there has been a lot of praise (some of it rather exagerated) for this, especially during the time of his death. Some folks, mainly ones that don’t like Reagan have tried to minimize his roll, while others who really like Reagan have overstated it. But on the whole, I don’t think people are reluctant to give him credit. The Pope to has gotten “props” during the time of his death, and I’m sure that when Thatcher goes to that English tea-time in the sky, her eulogies and obits for the first few weeks will make it sound like she personally wrestled Stalin to the ground and made him beg for mercy.
I think that the way that the Cold War ended has left some people in a lurch, they want some great group of people to have heroically triumphed over evil, like Wellington over Nepoleon, Churchill/FDR/Stalin over Hitler, MLK over white segregationists, etc… While certainly there were many brave folks (Lech Walesa being one of the formost), the Cold War ended with kind of a wimper, the Soviet Union falling as much under it’s own weight, and folks like Gorbachav being unwilling to sanction further attrocites to save it, as it did from pressure from outside powers.
I’m sure that Reagan and Thatcher will get their due. But I doubt that we’ll see a statue on the Mall anytime soon of Reagan on horse back trampling over the bodies of fallen communists. The end of the Cold War was as much about fatigue amonst the Soviets as it was about bravery and forsight amonst NATO et. al., and as such it’s harder to assign any one hero (or group of heros) to its demise.
It is far from clear that the Communists could have kept control of Poland if they’d only had more money to throw at the problem. It’s amazing how the same people who think it doesn’t work that way for us can think it did work that way for them.
There were always far more subjects than overlords, in a manner of speaking, there, and when they stopped being frightened it was all over. The Pope gave them that encouragement, and Walesa and many others gave that new hope coherence.
But what did Reagan and Thatcher actually do that withstands scrutiny? Soundbites in Berlin?
Myabe. Certainly people here aren’t overly eager to give Reagan and Thatcher credit because of thier political views. But then, that’s easy for them to do because, as Elvis says, there isn’t a lot of uncontestable analysis that Reagan or Thatcher were that instrumental. The evidence that Churchill helped destroy Nazism came in the form of thousands of troops/tanks/bombs landing on the coast of France. The evidence that Reagan helped destroy communism comes in the form of him asking, granted he was using very strong language, for the communists to give up and leave Europe.
The United States funded Solidarity to the tune of several million dollars per year, and coordinated additional aid to the movement through cooperation with the groups I named above.
I don’t quite buy this. What evidence is there that (1) the Soviets attempted to match US military spending and (2) that this is what led to collapse of the USSR? I think the USSR fell from its own inefficiency plus the reluctance of Gorbachev to forcibly put down a rebellion.l
Why is it, then, that the customary reason given for assigning credit to Reagan is the SDI budget, followed by the Wall speech? Based on the above, I’ll happily give him credit for overlooking his contempt for unions in order to serve a greater goal - if in fact he was *aware * he was doing that. Quartz, what chain of events would you like to point us to?
No doubt. But Reagan was hardly unique amonst US presidents in funding anti-Soviet groups (and the Soviets happily funded anti-US groups as well). In this case Reagan picked a very effective group to fund, and his administration and the other groups that you mentioned did a good job in handling this. Reagan deserves (and despite the OP’s claim, I think he receives) credit for this. But it’s a bit nearsighted to say that it was the US funding of Solidarity that did the Soviet’s in. The Russians had crushed many a US supported opposition group over the course of the Cold War, and their failure to do so to Solidarity was not due to the amount of US funding.
This site shows how much we were spending by comparison. At the height of the Reagan defense build-up, when the Soviets were spending a crippling 17 percent of their GDP on defense, we were spending 6.2 percent of our GDP on our military. 2003 figures show the number at 3.7 percent.
There is no way the Soviets could have sustained this rate of defense spending forever. Reagan almost certainly hurried things along by getting them to boost their spending at a time they could ill afford to do so.
Many former Soviets who were involved in the higher echelons of government at the time have said that the Soviets were vexed by the technological advantage the United States had. SDI was viewed as part of that. I watched a documentary on this very subject on the History Channel. The Soviet Union was faced with the choice of keeping their economy afloat, maintaining military spending and holding onto eastern europe. They were not able to do all three simultaneously. That’s why Gorbachov was willing to give away the store in Iceland…to reduce the financial pressure.
Once eastern europe started to break away, the dominos fell from the outside to the inside.
I think all of these measures were taken with the goal to keep extreme pressure on the Soviets, with an eye toward eventual collapse of the system. I think lots of folks were happily surprised it came crashing down when it did.
It would be a mistake, too, to blithely dismiss Reagan as anti-union, especially given his own labor activities. He had a view towards the proper place of unions that some union activists don’t share, true, but that didn’t stop him from working with unions when they had coordinate interests.
I’m still unconvinced of the Soviets bankrupting themselves on the military. I’ve found a few cites such as this that cite a 1983 CIA study. From the cite noted:
You do know that Reagan was himself a union president at one point in his career? He didn’t have contempt for unions per se, but had much contempt for some union practices, such as, in the case of PATCO, illegal strikes.
Reagan was a liberal Democrat then, by his own statements, but he also claimed he realized that was a mistake and practically asked forgiveness for it. By the time he was in office, though, he damn sure did have a general contempt for unions, even if his staff found ways to use them.
Let me ask the “Reagan bankrupted the USSR” faction: If the Polish Army, or even the Red Army, had had twice as many tanks as they did, would it really have made a difference in the outcome? Or ten times? What else would they have had to buy, and how much would it cost? How much more money would they have had to spend above their actual means to keep control?
Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? The system was imploding, the economy was starting to tank, and more military spending was not going to help any. And the military was really the only thing holding the whole mess together.
I’m not saying Reagan and the Pope and Thatcher won because of military spending. The pressure came from many fronts, including internal ones intrinsic to the Soviet system. By maintaining this pressure, the system likely ended a few years before its natural lifespan.
I have no doubt, for instance, that the current regime in North Korea is destined for failure someday. It would be a mistake to assume, though, that that means it must fail tomorrow. And anything we do to hasten it along is a worthwhile thing.
Yes, that’s the point. If more military spending wasn’t going to help the Communists stay in power, then Reagan’s attempts to force them to spend more money on the military shouldn’t get credit for effectiveness - if in fact that *was * his plan, not a post-hoc rationalization.
I don’t share your views about the inherent instability of totalitarian regimes - they can and have lasted many decades and over multiple generations, simply because anyone who might want power of their own is either executed or co-opted. A regime that rules by fear collapses when its people stop fearing it, not because of structural reasons. If NK didn’t collapse after Kim Il Sung’s death, when would be a more likely time?
Has anyone “in the know” from the Reagan years actually stated that they increased US spending in an effort to bankrupt the Soviets.
No doubt that they were vexed, I would be to if my opponent had the technological edge (which the US certainly did at that point, missle shield or no missle shield). The question is did they massively increase spending to try and develop a SDI system to match, or counter measures to the SDI system.
I think the single most important event in the fall of the Soviet Union was the fortuitous death of Cherchenko and Gorbachav coming to power. A hard liner might have held a decaying Soviet Union togeather for decades, as the Ils have done in Korea by increasingly oppressing the populace. Instead Gorbachav, not content to simply slow the Union’s decline, decided to try and fix it. The end result certainly wasn’t what he intended, but by liberalizing the economy/press/etc. and abandoning the Brehznev docterine he saved it from a slow and painful decline.
So I guess my question would be, rather then why is Reagan not given credit for the demise of the Soviet Union, why is Gorbachav not given credit?