What Reagan had to do with the Soviet Union’s collapse was not his crooked smile but plan to defeat them economically. Reagan promised the Saudis AWACs because they were worried about an Israeli sneak attack. This was very politically unpopular, Reagan had to veto a congressional resolution cancelling the sale. In exchange the Saudis dropped the price of oil and the Soviet Union lost one third to one half of its hard currency income. Then Reagan supplied with Mujahadeen in Afghanistan with billions in arms and the contras in Nicaragua with arms so the Soviets had to spend billions in both places. The Soviet economy was caught with lower income and higher expenses and so Gorbachev tried to instiute perestroika to grow the economy to keep up.
Don’t misunderestimate the moral effect of Reagan’s intiatives. Doing so made several facts brutally, abundantly clear to the Soviets:
(1) The 70’s had been rough but we recovered completely, and became even more grossly wealthy.
(2) Even with the trouble, we could turn out enough guns to match to them while still expanding our national butter production.*
(3) To garble and old physics joke, they couldn’t win, and they couldn’t break even, so the only option left was to quit. Put the USSR against America in any contest and the Sovs would lose. Even a complete nuclear exchange would go our way, and they knew it.
(4) Even if we couldn’t build the Star Wars system - though we’ve made significant progress over the years - we could afford to burn billions to find out. And not even really notice.
The net effect of this was that even though the Sovs had plenty of military power even after Afganistan, and even though their budget was hemorraging, they could still have held on. North Korea alone shows that a regime harsh and desperate enough can basically hold the line indefinitely even if it’s a complete wreck internally. And there were no real pushes from below within the USSR, and even the Polish, Hungarian, and Czech movements were wary and slow of pissing off the Sov military.
But the leadership came to believe that none of it mattered. Gorby probably wouldn’t have completely let the whole thing fall apart, but he recognized pretty quickly that Russia’s entire role would have to change, and that there was really no going back, eve if Russians wanted it which they didn’t. The regime didn’t lose its power. But they lost their heart and ironically weren’t evil enough to hold on. The Soviet leadership in the 1980’s simply wasn’t willing to massacre people to keep power. Hell, Gorby basically told the East Germans outright to stop being jerks and that they simply weren’t going to police Eastern Europe anymore.
*I’m sure BrainGlutton will get this but in case anyone else is confused: Guns and Butter are economists’ shorthand for military/industrial production and consumer goods. In general, the first may make the second possible, but don’t actually make anybody’s lives better off. There are whole books filled with investigations of the trade off, why people whoose one or the toher, whether or not it’s a good idea, how many guns you can actually produce and when they’re no longer worth producing, etc.
Yeah, sure. I see no reason to buy the retcon of history that makes Reagan into some geopolitical genius who was the mastermind behind it all, instead of a senile old man who just happened to be in office at the time.
Cite that that was “in exchange” for anything Reagan did?
Well, at least we’re clear from the get go about the level of thought involved in this fantasy.
Pure, unadulterated nonsense and fantasy. Nobody knew this because it is patently false. Both sides had arsenals large enough to destroy each other many, many, many, many times over, hence the assured in mutual assured destruction. Even if 90% of the Soviet arsenal was destroyed in a first strike or turned out to be duds when fired, the remaining 10% was more than enough to turn the United States into a glowing radioactive wasteland. Under no reasonable definition of the words could this be termed ‘going our way’.
For starters SDI was and remains entirely unfeasible. The ability today to intercept a single accidental launch is still extremely iffy. The ability to stop over 2,300 ICBM and SLBMs launched simultaneously, most with MIRVed warheads was and remains entirely impossible. Due to the built in level of overkill, even stopping half that number would have the same effect as stopping none of them, and a 50% interception and kill rate is and was entirely outside the realms of scientific possibility. Regarding being able to set billions of dollars on fire and not even really notice it, I gather you didn’t actually live through the Reagan years. The nation debt exploded during these years as a result of Reaganomics:
One would have to have been in a political coma not to have heard of the problem of the growing nation debt during the 1980s.
Latro:
Then why the invasion of Afghanistan? Why the establishment of puppet regimes in the Western Hemisphere (Cuba, Nicaragua)?
While I agree with most posters that the USSR was never likely to directly invade the USA, I do not think they were at all content with the status quo. I think that they were aggressively expansionist, and they might well have had their ultimate sights on Mexico as a puppet state, and were looking to expand their influence to a nation with an Indian Ocean port.
This is exactly what Soviet policy was about.
During the Reagan presidency (or shortly thereafter) Saturday Night Live had a sketch depicting Reagan as a ruthless and efficient multilingual real politik mastermind in private, and a bumbling fool in public. Of course the conservative argument isn’t that Reagan was a genius, but that blatant belligerency is a brilliant policy even when carried out by the powers behind the throne, such as Ollie North. You and I happen to disagree and think that a chief executive with Alzheimer’s is a disaster in motion.
Despite the fact that my mother often accused me of eating like the Russians were in New Jersey, I don’t remember anyone - even John Birchers - anticipating a Russian invasion. They were more worried about Reds in the State Department and, more importantly, Hollywood. I don’t remember any books or movies about this. Even Red Dawn had the Cubans invading, not the Russians. Nuclear war, sure.
While with hindsight it makes sense to say the Russians would never have invaded Europe, at the time we were not so sure. Remember lots of people never thought the Germans would invade Poland either. American troops were stationed at the border not to stop anything but to be a trigger, to ensure the Russians knew that an invasion of Europe would bring the US in.
I have a novel from the very early 1980s by a general with assistance from other military experts about a Russian invasion of Europe in the 1990s. Wiki entry on it.. (Spoiler alert: they lose.) Interestingly, the invasion fails when the Eastern European states rebel, and after nuclear attacks on Birmingham and Minsk.
The Soviets did not “invade” Afghanistan. They were invited in by a purely homegrown Communist government which needed Soviet help to defend it from rebels (many of them Islamist rebels, proto-Taliban). At least, it started out that way – soon they were acting like an occupying army. But I’ve read how Afghans, looking back, thought that the Soviets, who at least built schools and clinics and things while they were there, compared favorably to the Americans.
Those were also purely homegrown revolutions. Castro did not even align with the USSR until it became clear the U.S. was not going to help or even to tolerate him.
Do you mean Iran or Pakistan? I can’t recall the USSR ever making nice with either, nor threatening to invade either. Cite?
Of course, Russia has coveted a warm-water port (Constantinople/Istanbul, preferably) since long, long before Lenin was born.
Hiding under a school desk would be very helpful in the event of a nuke. I wish I remember who it was, but someone on this very board described it like this.
When a nuke is dropped, there will be a relatively small area where people will be vaporized. A larger area where people will be burned to death by the heat wave. Lastly a HUGE area where people will be killed and injured by objects being thrown around and roofs collapsing from the shock wave. Hiding under a sturdy desk would be a good benefit in this situation.
Zero chance–no warm water ports for Winter (Winter is a great Russian General, but a shitty Admiral), & no shipping fleet with the capacity.
NATO may have come close to the WP in terms of manpower if you include Turkey, which has a very large conscript army(currently about as big as Germany and France combined). How much use this large Turkish army would have been in defending Northern Germany from a Soviet invasion is questionable and NATO would have been operating from a numerically inferior position in Europe.
The United States builds schools and clinics in Afghanistan too.
That may have been true in the Fifties and even into the early Sixties, but definitely from the Seventies onward you really did have two superpowers each of which had the capacity to destroy the other.
A nuclear strike was another possibility.
A nuclear strike was another possibility.
(A Soviet invasion? Surely you can’t be serious!)
Aren’t we constantly reminding ourselves that we have Our Troops to thank for the fact that we haven’t had our freedoms taken away from us? Who could we have been referring to as threatening said freedoms if not the Soviet-led communists?
I heard a commentator/historian recently say that the chances of the missles in Cuba being fired at us were about 50-50 for those few days in October of 1962. I don’t know what the range on them was, but for those few days, the fellow students at my college didn’t talk of much else except our fear. Many of us saw Kennedy give his televised announcement of the threat live. We were very frightened.
In high school we were given dog tags that had our names, blood types, religious faiths, our father’s name, and his address. I still have mine. That would have been somewhere around 1958.
There was a TV program in the early to mid fifties that kept things stirred up. It was called I Led Three Lives. It was about an American whose assignment was to infiltrate Communist groups around the country. It was supposed to be based on facts.
During the hearings on UnAmerican Activities in Congress, I didn’t understand what it was all about. I do remember learning an appropriate 5th Amendment response:
“I respectfully refuse to answer on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.”
The Red Scare continues in a way. Just last night I heard that someone had accused President Obama of being a Communist and a Nazi. I couldn’t have rolled my eyes any further back in my head.
I am serious.
And don’t call me Shirley.