And here’s some clues for you. No, not even clues - let me solve the whole case for you.
There were actually three original treaties. Hong Kong was permanently ceded to Britain in 1841 by the Treaty of Nanking. In 1860 additional territory was ceded to Britain. Then in 1898 some more territory was leased to Britain for 99 years. So under the terms of the original treaties, Britain had a permanent title on the city itself.
Then in 1984, while Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, a new treaty was negotiated. Under the terms of this new treaty, Britain agreed to turn over all of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China when the lease for some of the territory expired in 1997. In exchange, China agreed to favor some British corporations in future trade agreements.
Admittedly there would have been difficulties with terms of the existing treaties - the city depended on the New Territories for many resources. However most of the residents of Hong Kong live in what was the permanent territories and would still be British subjects if Thatcher had not agreed to turn them over to the Chinese. But compare the silence over Hong Kong to the ideological outrage over Jimmy Carter’s negotiations over the Panama Canal.
Allow me to add my voice to those saying Cite? to the assertion that Reagan et al. intentionally baited the Soviet Union into spending itself into oblivion on its military. And I’ll also offer that latter-day reminiscinces of people who were there are the time do not avoid the implication of post hac rationalization. I’d like to see some contemporaneous writings or statements, please. Weren’t Reagan’s journals and letters published some time ago? You’d figure it would be in there, if it it was really his intent.
Quartz: You may wish to take note that Mrs. Thatcher was indeed P.M. in 1984, which was the relevant date offered by Little Nemo.
Are you refering to this quote from your link (pg 1):
I don’t think that phrase can be interpreted to mean that we were trying to encourage the Soviet’s to spend more, just that we wanted them to pay more for what they bought. Also, it only seems to refer to their support of proxy forces.
Also, this quote on pg 2 seems to contradict your thesis (bolding mine)
I’ll add that I read through the rest of Moto’s cite and didn’t find anything supporting his thesis (though it was interesting in its own right). It seems to be Reagan’s general statement of strategy and understanding of the National Defense in 1982. I think reading it, one can see the reason Reagan increased defense spending: he honestly thought (perhaps rightly, I don’t know) that the USSR had a strategic edge on us. Here’s an example from pg 3:
He upped spending because he thought the US would be at a disadvantage in a war against the Soviet Union.
Definitely a swing and a miss, Mr. Moto. The memo says that they wanted to “foster restraint in Soviet military spending,” not make the USSR spend itself into oblivion. The only thing it says it wants to “increase costs” for is “Soviet support and the use of proxy, terrorist, and subversive forces.” Not one word about making the whole communist system collapse under the weight of our mighty military dollar.
I would also like to point out that idea that the West was so technically superior over the Soviets’ is very overstated. Probably born out of propaganda purposes.
This has become more true for today’s world but during 70’s and 80’s the Soviets did not have equipment that was so vastly inferior compared to the West’s.
I only need to point at the Kalshnikov and the fact that Vietnamese pilots kicked ass with their MIGs at the start of the Vietnam war.
Fulcrum, anybody?
I remember how it was boasted that the FAL was so superior to the Russian Kalashikov because it was so very more accurate and every (aimed!) shot would surely be a hit. The kalashnikov was just a spray gun.
Then there was the numerological superiority. Oh yes, our, so superior tank-guns could take out 2 or 3 of theirs before being hit themselves. Uhmm, yes but how many tanks did they have again? And how fast could they have overrun Europe before sufficient forces might have been fielded against them?
I hold that the threat posed by the USSR military was very real an that renewed spending by Reagan was very much in response to that real capability not to force the Soviets to spend even more.
I also agree that the Falklands war was a kind of turning point that reestablished trust in the armed forces. A trust that was almost gone after the Vietnam war. It was a tremendous boost in morale.
I also believe that was a lesson well picked up by the US administration.
That that was the main reason behind Granada, to give the American people a military victory. It sure had the desired effect.
Surely it was simple coincidence that the operation was laid on within 48 hours of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. The effect of the “win” might have been greater if it had taken less than a week to defeat a crew of construction workers. No, ISTM history already records Grenada as a dog-wag and a clusterfuck.
It worked, too - that’s what perestroika was, reorganizing the USSR economy away from the military. Few paid attention to the history of revolutions in other countries and in Russia itself, though - there’s a pattern that they start when existing totalitarian regimes start liberalizing. The newly self-confident people get impatient with the process and see the regime as part of the problem that must be eliminated, not as an agent of the solution. Well, it happened again.
What’s with bickering how exactly Reagan was fighting SSSR? Every which possible way, of course.
It was not an intellectual game, both sides were playing for keeps. What if some old fart like Chernenko, learning he has three days to live, order a nuclear strike on US? Who’d stop him? Oh yes, the Politburo KPSS! Things were extremely dangerous. When you fight a very dangerous and formidable foe, you do all you can: get big guns, build traps, use diversions and disinformation. What’s uncontestable, Reagan didn’t play along with Communists but took a stand and said they go to “trash-heap of history”. That’s all that matters, I think.
My contention in my previous posts was that Reagan intended to keep intense pressure on the Soviets on multiple fronts, and to convince them that an arms race with America would be unwinnable. That is supported by NSDD-32 posted above.
Possibly no one in fact. The OP hasn’t yet produced an example of someone saying the Pope deserves more credit then Reagan for the fall of the USSR. Any which way, I think it’s a fairly minority position, if it exists at all.
The “Reagan spent the Soviet Union to death” meme is fairly popular. I figured there was at least some truth to it before reading Mr. Moto’s cite in the 1st pg of this thread. So it’s interesting to debate.
That’s certainly uncontestable. But every president since Truman has been more or less anti-Soviet. Reagan was simply following the foreign policy of his predecessors. Again, I’m not contesting that Reagan deserves credit, he was very effective with his “tough talk” of evil empires and such, his gov’t did a good job of supporting the Mujahadeen and Solitarity for example, while we have seen how easy it is to bungle support for such groups. But the Soviet Empire was had long survived the enimity of the United States, as the US had long survived the enimity of the Soviets. It fell becuase it couldn’t withstand that pressure anymore, due to it’s own internal problems and a willingness of its leaders to accept change.
Also, quick nitpick. Wasn’t the “trash heap of history” quote Kruschev’s when he was speaking infront of the UN?
Your quoteing of Minty Green in the post where you introduced the NSDD link makes it seem like you were answering his challenge for a cite that Reagan was baiting the Soviet’s into increased spending.
Given the fact that your link contradicts this, do you think that that contention is incorrect?
“Every which way possible” sounds nice in theory, but the facts are that it’s not possible to do everything. When you choose to do one thing you’re also choosing not to do something else. By choosing to spend money on building up the American military, Reagan chose not to lower government spending and taxes and chose to raise the deficit. Ideally, we’d use our resources only as needed and in the most efficient way possible. In the real world however, you usually have to settle for basing your decisions on estimates.
And the reason this is still an issue is because the same type of issues are still around: Should we divert troops from Afghanistan to other countries? Does Iraq have WMD’s? How closer to building nuclear weapons, Iran or North Korea? Do we need a SDI system? Will a SDI system work? - These are all the same types of situation that the Reagan adminstration had to handle when it asked, How much of a threat is the Soviet Union?
Well, since I started paying attention to political events (early 70-s) it was all about rapprochement. There were regular meetings between Brezhnev and Nixon, Ford and Carter, where some kind of agreements were signed. True, Soviet people were kept alert by regular caricatures of ugly Yankis eating children alive in some distant country, but general feeling of the 70-s was that “coexistance through strength” was certainly quite possible. Reagan refusal to compromise with USSR existance any longer felt sudden and explosive.
One thing important about SSSR, it was borne of internal problems and it was going to give them to the whole world. Bolshevik coup was carried out against all odds, SSSR was created and expanded in defiance of every precept of reasonable politics and common sense. From similar beginnings, French took over almost the whole civilized world in early 19th century. It was a basic principle of SSSR that it will overcome all obstacles and it can’t be stopped. So, how did it suddenly lost nerve and succumb? Kinda like a disease that ran its course, I suppose. Surgery was impossible, but containment was necessary.
Also, don’t forget the power of a song. I think Mick Jagger or Ozzy Osborne deserve hundred times more credit then any political figure for bringing SSSR down. Still, JPII and RR played their roles.
I dunno. I thought Khruschev promised “to bury” US. Dogonim-peregonim, “Catch up-leave behind”, that sort of thing.
That’s exactly why I said “possible”. US couldn’t “risk a frontal assault”, for instance. So many different and less risky ways had to be found. Important that the goal was made clear. And if there is anything politicians are useful for, that is for “keeping many irons in the fire”.
That made less sense than usual, didn’t it? The post I originally wrote ended with “mixed blessing”. I then rewrote it and intended to end it with “bad thing”.
Let’s step back and look at the geopolitical situation when Reagan took office.
In the late 70’s, the Soviet Union was being very aggressive. They were heavily funding military insurgencies in Central America, funding protest groups in the west, and in 1979 they invaded Afghanistan, which was an incredibly dangerous development. And while the Soviets were hurting economically, the 70’s boom in oil prices helped them a lot, and they were constructing a huge trans-Siberia pipeline that would have fed energy to Europe. This would have brought the Soviet union billions of dollars a year in hard currency, and also would have given the Soviets an economic lever over some countries in Western Europe.
At the time, the West’s response to the Soviet Union was detente’ and coexistance. The rhetoric of the time is that we are all just people of earth, and that the Soviets were just ‘different’, but no better or worse. Accomodation was the order of the day.
This is the environment that had existed pretty much through the cold war. In this environment, the west did virtually nothing when the Soviets brutally cracked down on dissident movements and uprisings in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Therefore, the dissident movements had very little hope of achieving anything, and Soviet control over its satellites was strong. The Soviets also had hope of maintaining their empire through constant expansion, accomodation and concessions from the west, etc.
Enter Ronald Reagan. He changed U.S. policy from one of accomodating the Soviets to winning the cold war. His harsh anti-Soviet rhetoric made explicit the good/evil dichotomy between the Soviets and the free world, and gave hope to dissident movements around the world.
Then Reagan began to roll back Soviet adventurism in Central and South America. Funding the Contras, repelling the Marxist takeover of Grenada, and with Lech Walesa, the Pope, and Thatcher, working with dissident movements in eastern Europe such as Solidarity, Fomenting unrest in Soviet satellite nations.
Under Carter, the U.S. response to the invasion of Afghanistan was feckless. An Olympic boycott, and providing a few old AK-47’s to the rebels was about the extent of it. Reagan stepped up, and authorized the CIA to provide high-tech weaponry to the mujahadeen. The Stinger missiles the U.S. sent to Afghanistan destroyed the Soviet tactic of using helicopter gunships to raze villages and smash pockets of resistence. The Afghanistan war began costing the Soviet Union a hell of a lot of money.
Then there was Reagan’s two-pronged strategy to choke the Soviet Union of oil revenue. First, he authorized the outright sabotage of the Soviet oil pipeline. The CIA knew the Soviets were stealing computer technology from the west, so rather than stop them, they let them steal software with a trojan horse in it. Once installed, the hardware closed valves in such a way as to cause the largest non-nuclear explosion to date, blowing up a big chunk of the pipeline and setting the project back years. This was a very aggressive, highly secret, and daring plan, and it worked spectacularly. Not only did it deny the Soviets the money that would flow from their pipeline, but it caused them to doubt the integrity of all the other software they had stolen, which caused a huge expenditure of money and manpower as the stolen code in various places had to be removed, replaced, inspected, etc.
Then Reagan choked off the Soviet Union technologically, instituting new export controls on computers and other high tech equipment including machine tools, and muscling other countries into following suit. This also damaged the Soviet economy.
Next, Reagan leaned on the Saudis hard, and got them to increase production dramatically, driving down world oil prices. This cost the Soviet Union big time in oil revenue, further exacerbating their economic problems.
This is the context in which Reagan was also building up the military and moving the military competition from a “how many tanks can you build” strategy, which the Soviets were very good at, to a, “how sophisticated can you make your military” strategy, which the Soviets were hopeless at.
So it wasn’t just one thing, and it wasn’t just Reagan. But Reagan started the ball rolling, and as the leader of the most powerful country in the world, took point on the events of the 1980’s. Detente’ changed to confrontation, and the Soviets were hit on all sides - economic, military, moral. Their client states were starting to rebel, and the Soviets lost hope of ‘winning’ through expansion.
“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”