Brilliant post, Sam. Thank you.
Unfortunately, there are some out there who will read it and respond with the mental equivalent of putting their fingers in their ears while saying “YAH YAH YAH! I CAN’T HEEEEEAAAR YOU!”
No, what we’ll say is the same thing we said numerous times already - anyone can predict the past. Show us a cite, written before 1989, that says the American plan was to lock the Soviet Union into an arms race to cause their economic collapse.
Go read the two national security directives I just linked.
This argument is very frustrating, because I was there. I was heavily involved in the debates at the time, and knew exactly what the issues were. There was no doubt what the strategy was - hit the Soviets on all sides, squeeze them until they cracked. Even the opposition in the U.S. knew the strategy, as a common argument against Reagan was that the pressure he was putting on would lead not to a soft landing, but to a nuclear war. Reagan was backing the Soviets into a corner and everyone knew it.
Furthermore, there are all kinds of quotes from Reagan dating all the way back to the 1970’s where he expresses his desire to not just sustain the cold war, but to win it. Search for other threads about this - I’ve linked some of them before.
This latest round of claims that ‘everyone knew’ the Soviet Union was about to collapse anyway, and that Reagan wasn’t really doing what all evidence shows he was doing, is pure historical revisionism. Read the cites I posted. The damned KGB is willing to admit that Reagan played a strong role in bringing down the Soviet Union, but the American left is still trying to claim otherwise.
Of course, I can understand why - Left-wing foreign policy with respect to the Soviets has been shown to be utterly wrong-headed, and Reagan, who the left despised at least as much as they despise George W. Bush, turned out to be right. That’s a hard pill to swallow.
I just got to ask why you give so much importance to that little known story and don’t mention Chernobyl, which was a much bigger nuclear explosion that Soviets caused to themselves without any help from the outside. I think impact of Chernobyl was a lot more damaging to SSSR, because it demonstrated the depths of their own ineptitude and corruption.
I don’t think Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion in the sense that most people think of one. Was there not a steam explosion involving radioactive material, which blew the roof off, allowing radioactive material to escape into the amosphere?
I did. And as others have noted, they say nothing about using a military build-up as an economic strategy unless you “interpret” them. They require a lot of this interpretation due to the statement that the American arms build-up was intended to diminish Soviet military spending - the opposite of what happened and also the opposite of what people are now claiming was the goal.
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This argument is very frustrating, because I was there. I was heavily involved in the debates at the time, and knew exactly what the issues were.
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I was there also and I recall the issues as well. I thought the Soviets were a legitimate threat and favored increased military spending (although I thought we should be spending to build a better military rather than just a bigger military.) And I don’t recall a single argument ever being made that there was any strategy to this based on the idea that the Soviets were going to collapse due to overspending.
Nobody’s saying “everbody knew”. People are saying “nobody knew - including Reagan”. The collapse of the Soviet Union caught everybody by surprise.
The reason this revisionism causes concern is because it demonstrates how people can delude themselves rather than admit that occasionally they were wrong. People who cannot admit they were in error in the past are not likely to consider they might be in error now. And people who do not consider the possibility of error are certainly not going to correct any errors. That’s why it’s important to be able to look back at the past with clear eyes and recognize your mistakes - because you want to make fewer mistakes in the future.
What was that you were saying earlier about “mental gymnastics”?
Sam, what you *ought * to find “frustrating” is the absence of any contemporaneous documentation to support your cherished nindsight worldview. Ordinarily that situation leads one to reconsider one’s position.
I am, for one, along with several others. However, the biggest share of responsibility by far obviously goes to the Soviet and communist-bloc people themselves for deciding not to accept totalitarian rule anymore. But your implied point is right - when a thoroughly-rotten tree falls down, which gust of wind can claim the credit?
Such as those who thought that Reagan’s military buildup was a bad idea? Or those who opposed the deployment of medium range nuclear missiles in Europe? The ones that wanted coexistance with the USSR? I could go on all day. The same people that were saying that Reagan was an idiot who would kill us all back then are the same ones that would rather take a bullet than give him any credit now.
It might also be interesting to examine Nemo’s statement twenty years from now in relation to the current situation in Iraq and the middle east.
Elvis, I was in the military under Reagan and knew friends who were in the military under Clinton. I know firsthand how much difference the perception of a Commander in Chief can make a positive or negative difference. I’m not quite sure what your point was when you attempted to use my words against me, but I’m assuming you are trying to defend Clinton’s relationship with the military in some way. Good luck with that.
From the first paragraph of NSDD-75:
From page 2:
From page 4:
From the last page:
Quite frankly, I don’t know what else to say, sincce you guys seem determined to keep the bar moving around so you can’t be pinned down. What are you looking for? Reagan saying, “If we do these things, the Soviet Union will totally collapse in five years?” If so, you won’t find it. The Reagan administration felt that the Soviet Union would have to be changed gradually, with constant pressure coupled with benefits for changes that were deemed to be taking the empire in a positive direction. But that’s irrelevant. The fact is, the Reagan administration consciously changed U.S. policy from detente’ to an overt and covert effort to bring down the Soviet Union through economic, political, and military pressure. And the Soviet Union came down. That it happened as suddenly as it did was a happy surprise to everyone. But refusing to give credit to Reagan because he didn’t predict the exact nature of the collapse is simply churlish. Wars, even cold wars, are simply not that predictable. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t fighting it.
It’s not the size of the explosion, it’s the effect. The pipeline explosion did two things - it destroyed the Soviet’s hopes of gaining a major new source of hard currency, and it totally undermined their program of keeping up with the west through the theft of technology. However, it’s absolutely true that Chernobyl was yet another factor in the downfall of the Soviets. It’s just irrelevant to the discussion of whether or not Reagan was engaged in an attempt bring down the empire through calculated economic and military pressure.
Oh, I might as well quote from NSDD-32 while I’m at it, since people seem to either be not reading it or missing important passages.
From page 2:
If that’s not as direct a quote of the U.S. policy I’ve described, and its intent, I don’t know what is.
So, we have Reagan claiming, even before he was elected, that he intended not to sustain the cold war or seek peaceful coexistence with the Soviets, but to win it. We have national security directives that spell that policy out in detail. We have the evidence of all the publically available U.S. policy decisions, such as SDI, the force buildup, the pipeline sabotage, Reagan’s numerous speeches in which he called for the Soviet Union to liberalize and free its satellites. We have the evidence of Reagan funding opposition groups throughout the Soviet sphere. We have admissions by no less than Andre Gromyko and other senior Soviet officials that Reagan beared a good chunk of responsibility for forcing change.
And yet, here we are trying to find the magic quote that will get you guys to stop saying, “What? I don’t see any cause and effect here! Reagan did nothing.” On even days, you claim that it was obvious to everyone that the Soviet Union was doomed, so Reagan was irrelevant, and on odd days you claim that everyone thought the Soviet Union was so strong that Reagan couldn’t have seriously been trying to bring it down. The bar keeps moving around so that you can maintain your happy fiction that a conservative President the left hated with a passion was irrelevant to the biggest move towards world freedom and security we’ve ever seen.
And it would be hard to overstate just how much the left hated Reagan, and how strongly they opposed every single one of the policies that worked to bring down the empire. It makes the protests against Bush look mild by comparison. But that too is undergoing some serious revisionism now. I suppose its a measure of the man’s stature that the left is now attempting to bury the fact that they opposed everything he did and hated him with a passion.
Again, this is not to say that Reagan was the sole agent of change. Of course he wasn’t. There were numerous factors that led to the fall of the Soviet Union, and numerous other players in the game. Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Lecch Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Gorbachev. There were other events, such as Chernobyl, that helped hasten the demise. There was the growing inability of the calcified Soviet system to keep up with an increasingly technologically advanced world.
None of this changes the fact that Reagan said he’d fight the cold war to win it, instituted policies as president that worked towards that goal, and led the rhetorical, military, and economic fight that others joined. And the Soviet Union came down.
Is that the discussion your having! Then nobody is debating you. No one has proposed that Reagan wasn’t using economic and military pressure to try and bring down the Soviet Union. You offered those cites, however, in response to Little Nemo’s request that someone show Reagan desired to lock the Soviet Union into an arms race and spend them to defeat, which the NSDD documents don’t show, as we discussed back in the first page of this thread.
As I said before, I don’t doubt that Reagan was trying to weaken the Soviet Union (though as his NSDD show, he doesn’t seem to have thought he could bring it down), and he should get credit for this. But making life difficult for the Soviet’s was pretty much standing US policy for the last 50 years. There was a short period of detente due to Vietnam fatigue and the realization that MAD was a reality during the end of the Nixon/Ford terms and at the beginning of Carter’s, but the agressive stance of the Soviet’s during the late 70’s (Invasion of Afganistan, support of Iran, threatening to “invade” Poland, etc.) made this increasingly untenable even for Carter, who was hardly our most warmongering of presidents. Reagan’s policies were more a return to the status quo then a new tact in American policy, which is why I think that fifty years from now when the story of the end of the Cold War is written, there will be a few pages of material on those who exerted “outside pressure” on the Soviet’s (the Pope, Thatcher, Reagan) and the bulk of the text will be about events within the Union (Gorbechav, Havel, failure of soviet agriculture).
I’m sure glad somebody thought to post that quote in this debate :rolleyes:
If your going to make broad genealizations about the arguements the other side is making, you could at least trouble yourself to read the first page of the thread.
This is the source of the disconnect, I think. Some of you think that Reagan wasn’t doing anything unique, and that his policies were merely SOP (yawn). Therefore, why should he get any more credit than any other president who presided over the cold war?
But this simply isn’t true. Reagan’s policies were a very fundamental change from the U.S. policy of detente’ and coexistence. Part of what you say is true - the U.S. did adopt a more dovish stance towards the Soviet Union in the post-Vietnam era (thanks, Nixon and Carter), but even before that, the U.S. had a policy of only responding to Soviet aggression. I don’t know of any formal plan to actually bring down the Soviets or pro-actively cut their economic and military legs out from under them. Do you? The last one I can think of was the abortive attempt to stop Castro at the Bay of Pigs, but Kennedy backed out of that plan, leaving a whole bunch of Cuban expats in the lurch.
And regardless, even if Reagan’s policies were a return to past policies after a 12 year hiatus, the fact remains that the left opposed him every step of the way. Are you at least willing to admit now that opposition to the cruise missile, to deployment of medium range missiles in Europe, to the MX, to Reagan’s harsh rhetoric, to his military buildup, to SDI, his funding of the contras and other anti-communist forces, were all wrong?
I don’t remember that being Reagan’s plan. Admittedly, I was just a kid at the time, but what I remember is lots of breathless news reports about the tremendous superiority of Soviet conventional forces, and how that had to be countered. According to my memory, Reagan’s policies were not active, but reactive, not much different from pre-detente policy at all.
Not really. First, you haven’t presented us with any reason to believe that the Soviets’ economic woes were in any way a result of Reagan’s military buildup. Second, some of the items, like the deployment of medium range missiles, were unnecessarily provocative. What I remember was growing up not expecting to reach 30. If the Soviets were never a real threat to start a nuclear war, then the opposition to them was overdone. If they were, then provoking them was simply stupid. A less aggressive but no less steadfast opposition would have been more rational.
And supporting the contras (?!) was the right thing to do? You have got to be kidding. Do you have any idea what an evil man Somoza was? You rail against the atrocities of Saddam, but Somoza was at least a bad, even if his country was smaller, and he and his father before him had been committing the atrocities for a hell of a lot longer. And your precious anti-communist American foreign policy propped up his evilness, simply because the unrest he inevitably generated gravitated towards leftist views. The right thing to have done was never to have propped up the bastard in the first place. The Sandinistas were no more devoted Marxists than Castro was initially. It was the US that drove them into the arms of the Soviets. And after Somoza was kicked out by his own enraged populace, and that same populace voted in a government in a mostly free and fair election, you think it was the right thing to do to fund a bunch of mercenaries to blow up medical clinics in order to try to bring down that democratically elected government?
I can at least see the argument for cruise missiles and Pershing IIs. I don’t fully buy it, but I can see the argument. Funding the Contras, though, was just as evil as funding Somoza had been. Ortega was not a monster, and in the end he ceded power peacefully when he lost an election. Sure, maybe that was partly because of US pressure, but there’s no reason to believe that effective pressure couldn’t have been brought to bear without funding a bunch of terrorists, and there’s even less reason to believe it would have been necessary had it not been for the despicable support for a despicable, evil government that created the situation.
Well Nixon can hardly be said to have been Dovish, he was elected as an anti-war candidate and still managed to keep us in Vietnam for several years and expanded that conflict into Cambodia. On the economic/diplomatic front, he also did an excellent job of exploiting the Sino-Soviet split, probably the most effective anti-soviet move of the period. Ford did pursue co-existance, partialy I think because he was hobbled by the legacy of Vietnam, partly because he basically came to office as a lame-duck. Carter I think wanted to pursue co-existance, but he couldn’t because of Soviet agression. As a result he began several of the programs that Reagan continued (support of solidarity/mujahdeen, increased defense spending, “the Carter doctorine”, selective service, supporting various unsavory African and Middle Eastern gov’ts etc.). Reagan continued this with ratched up rhetoric, and he probably did a much better job of it then Carter or Ford would’ve done. But in many ways, he seems to me to have been responding to Soviet aggression as much as Carter was. He upped the military spending as an effort to catch up with a preceived advantage the Soviets had, he supported the mujahadeen because of the invasion of Afganistan, he supported Solidarity becuase the Soviets threatend to crush it, etc.
Who are the left? Dems in congress? That didn’t seemed to have stopped Reagan from passing his spending bills. Do you mean hippies and college students? I doubt their opinion counted for much on the domestic stage. I was to young to remember many details of the arguements at the time, can you be more specific as to who the different sides were in the debate. It would help my googling.
As for whether Reagan’s techniques were wrong, I’ll have to do some more reading. Certainly supporting anti-communist forces in Poland was right. I have varying views on the rest. I’ll post more later.
Seems to me you are leading yourself out of discussion here. If we accept your assurances that Sandinistas were not going to transform Nicaragua into another Soviet satellite state like Cuba, then the case of Nicaragua becomes completely irrelevant to US-SSSR stand-off; if it didn’t change anything, if it didn’t influence any side one way or another: why bring it up at all in this particular debate?
True, more like a dirty bomb.
On this board, we try to distinguish between facts and perceptions. When there’s a conflict, perception must give way.
To illustrate that your statements were based on perceptions, not facts. To illustrate that the reasoning you purport to use to acclaim Republican administrations is the opposite of the reasoning you purport to use to denigrate them. You brought it on yourself with the claim that *others * are using “mental gymnastics”.
Good luck with trying to ignore facts in order to prop up your perceptions. At some point there’s a collision, and you’d best be ready.
Not really. The topic of the thread, if you’ll recall, was the relative contribution of Reagan and the Pope to the situation. There are those claiming that Reagan was the person most responsible for the USSR’s fall, as a result of a grand strategy determinedly pressed forward. Well, friend, the fight to maintain a corrupt totalitarian regime in Nicaragua against democratic revolutionaries was a major part of Reagan’s grand vision of anti-Communism. There is no possible claim, in the hindsight that is available to all now and was widely recognized even at the time, that backing Somoza helped precipitate the end of the USSR, therefore we witness here the “mental gymnastics” of denying that it was even part of his plan at all.
Gorsnak, every word you’ve said is dead on here. You have my admiration.
Reagan increased defense spending because of one simple, stupid reason: he was conservative. Nothing more, nothing less. Also, he was from Califonia which, last time I checked, had and has a huge aerospace component to its economy. Said component doubtless contributed metric craploads of colored paper to his campaign.
No, I don’t have any cites. Simple common sense and a very basic idea of how politics is conducted should be enough.
The pressure on the USSR was bipartisan, continuous, and unrelenting, from Truman to JFK to Reagan. It had the support of the AFL-CIO all the way through, because trade unionists understood one simple truth: the first people the communists went for were independent trade unionists, so as to extinguish any idea of an alternative to their alleged solution. Kirkland was following through on an insight that American trade unionists had from way, way back. I’m sure he had his private doubts about having to team up with Reagan on this, but given a choice between Reagan and any sort of communist, well, there really wasn’t a choice; it was a simple question of survival for the international trade union movement.
Which is a long way of saying that Reagan’s participation in the USSR’s demise was entirely accidental, while the Pope’s involvement was entirely deliberate, as was Kirkland’s; the Pope had been and was until the day he died a staunch defender of worker’s rights. As for that turd Thatcher’s participation; her commitment to worker’s rights was shown when she hosted Pinochet on one of his visits to Britain.
The dynamic by which Gorbachev and the USSR fell was laid out very nicely in the last comment to this thread about Syria, another police state that may be on its way out; see especially point number five in this comment, which exactly describes the dynamic, to me:
Said dynamic presupposes a large amount of outside pressure, of course, and in the case of the USSR Reagan provided some of that pressure. But to the question of whether he provided more pressure than previous Administrations, the answer would have to be no. Just because he was there doesn’t mean he had any more to do with it than, say, Eisenhower.
It’s as simple as that: either Sandinistas were drawn into Soviet orbit and creating Soviet satellite state in Nicaragua, and had to be treated as opponents in great struggle, or they had no connection and support from USSR and Cuba, in which case they become irrelevant to present debate. So make your case, which is it?
As far as the claim that Sandinistas were not so bad, tough. Hungarian revolutionaries in 1956 or Chech revolutionaries in 1968 had very modest agendas: ‘socialism with a human face’. Remember what happened to them before you start crying over Sandinistas’ lot.