So what point is the OP trying to make? That Reagan was not that great? That we’d have been better off with Mondale? That republicans are dumb? That everything would have happened the same with or without him?
What is your point sir?
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
Some people seem to feel that Reagan was somehow the first President to denounce communism.
[/QUOTE]
Who seems to think that? Not anyone in this thread afaict. Unless I missed someone posting here and saying that.
Pretty much every President from Truman on opposed communism in some way or other. The difference was that Reagan was directly confrontational, which was certainly a new direction for the US to take. I don’t know whether this was the straw that broke the camels back or whether the Soviet Union had run out of gas and would have fallen apart regardless. It DID fall apart during Reagan, however, so naturally he’s going to get some of the credit for that, both officially and in peoples perceptions.
The biggest thing he did was the confrontational aspect of his presidency…the perception that the US was resolute and would not back down. It was a scary time for a lot of people in the US, Russia and Europe (east and west)…which is part of the reason you get such polarized views on Reagan, especially from those of us who lived through that time as adults. He terrified left wingers at the time because they were convinced (and probably still are) that he was absolutely nuts and would take us all to war. He thrilled old fashioned type right wingers who WANTED the US to take a firm stand against communism and all it stood for. I’d say most moderates were somewhere between terrified and thrilled with his stance on these particular issues, based on the fact that he won re-election pretty easily at the time, and remained fairly popular throughout his administration…and remains so even today.
-XT
You need to contrast Reagan’s opposition to Communism with Carter’s kind of ineffectual bumbling.
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Carter boycotted the Olympics, which is a nice gesture but doesn’t do much. Reagan gave Stinger missiles to the Afghanis and actually helped them drive the Soviets out.
Carter decided to stage a rescue attempt for the Iran hostages. He botched it, partly because of his combination of timidity and micro-management. Reagan stages a rescue attempt for the medical students in Grenada. All of those folks came home safe and sound.
Carter asks his daughter for foreign policy advice. Reagan goes to Berlin and says, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” And it happens.
The Grenada example is particularly enlightening because it is the first repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine - that once a country goes Communist, it cannot go back. Grenada showed that no longer was going to work.
Reagan’s plan was for the US and the West to win the Cold War, instead of detente. That’s what happened.
I suppose the closest you are going to come up with as far as a plan is concerned is National Security Decision Directive 75, which Reagan signed off on in 1983, which stated
Several people go beyond that.
And it was only a few months into his first term when Reagan articulated his vision of Communism being left on the ash heap of history.
Even Reagan’s enemies recognized what he wanted -
Regards,
Shodan
(bolding mine)
So you’re saying that Reagan’s presidency lasted until 1991? :dubious:
I asked the questions because I am seeking answers.
I’ll admit I don’t see Reagan’s greatness. To me, he was undeniably charismatic but he made some big mistakes.
Wilson sent American troops into the Soviet Union to fight the communists. I’d say he was the only President who could claim to have directly confronted the Soviets. Every other President has confronted the Soviets by proxy, either by fighting a Soviet ally or by competing with the Soviets in a non-military way.
Roosevelt is mostly an exception. He opposed communism and the Soviet Union in his early terms but it was not a major priority. And in his later terms, the United States was allied with the Soviet Union against Germany and opposition to the Soviets took a backseat to maintaining the wartime alliance.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
Wilson sent American troops into the Soviet Union to fight the communists. I’d say he was the only President who could claim to have directly confronted the Soviets. Every other President has confronted the Soviets by proxy, either by fighting a Soviet ally or by competing with the Soviets in a non-military way.
[/QUOTE]
He did, but it had little to do with fighting communism. He wasn’t, afaik, a rabid anti-communist…I think it was more a matter of the destabilizing effect of the Russian Revolution and an effort to restore the status quo than about fighting communism in Russia. Going on memory here, but were the communists even in firm control when Wilson sent in the troops?
Prior to the post-WWII period and the Cold War I don’t think it was a major issue with any US President.
-XT
The fact is that before Reagan, the U.S.‘s policy towards the Soviet Union was detente’, or peaceful coexistance. Reagan, when asked on the campaign trail what his policy towards the Soviets would be, said, “It’s simple. We win, they lose.”
When in office, he started a multi-pronged strategy to crack the Soviets. First, he amped up the rhetoric, letting them know that the U.S. wasn’t about to submit to them or let them throw their weight around. He encouraged dissidents in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere. He made Soviet expansionism expensive by funding and arming opposition groups in various client states like Nicaragua and by invading Grenada. He worked with the Saudis covertly to lower the price of oil and hit the Soviet export economy.
When it was discovered that the Soviets were stealing western pipeline control hardware, rather than expose it he authorized a plan to let the Soviets keep stealing - but had the hardware equipped with logic bombs which ultimately caused them to modify the flow in the pipeline such that it exploded - the largest non-nuclear explosion in history, which further crippled the Soviet export ecoonomy.
He worked with Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, and Margaret Thatcher constantly to keep up the pressure on the Soviets from all angles. The combination of external rhetorical pressure, a degraded economy, a quagmire in Afghanistan (helped by Reagan’s stinger missile exports), and pressure on the Soviet client states caused uprisings, demonstrations, and unrest within the Soviet Union.
The Soviets responded by attempting to ‘put a modern face’ on communism by putting Gorbachev in power. Gorbachev never intended to end communism - he wanted to reform it just enough to make the economy work better and to take the pressure off the people and end the unrest. But ultimately, he was a new kind of communist who was capable of being reasoned with - a pragmatic man.
That brings us to the second major achievement of Reagan’s - he recognized that Gorbachev was a new kind of communist, and he went against the advice of the hawks in his own administration and his Republican base and started real negotiations on arms reductions.
And contrary to what the left believes, SDI was a major part of those negotiations, and missile defense was a major threat to the Soviets - not necessarily because they thought it would be ready immediately, but because it shifted the focus of the arms race from conventional weapons and armies (where the Soviet Union had parity or close to it) to high tech innovation, which was a battlefield on which the Soviets could not compete.
Every time Reagan met with Gorbachev, Gorbachev insisted on the dismantling of SDI as a condition of negotiation. Reagan refused. That allowed him to negotiate from a position of strength. Reagan and Gorbachev eventually built up a relatively warm relationship and had honest respect for each other, and that gave both of them the strength to stand up to hardliners in their own governments when they needed to.
No, Reagan did not single-handedly end the cold war. But he was the organizing focal point of efforts made by leaders around the world who found new courage in standing up to the Soviet Union, and his administration pushed and prodded wherever it saw the edifice of the Soviet empire crumbling.
No, the Soviet Union did not collapse during Reagan’s term. But it was clearly on its way to doing so by then, and it did collapse during George HW Bush’s administration, which carried on Reagan’s Soviet policy to the letter.
If you had to pick out the people responsible for the Soviet Union ending when and how it did, you’d have to name Reagan, Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and Boris Yeltsin - and probably in that order. Yeltsin might rank higher because he stood up to the attempted coup by reactionary forces in the Soviet military, but by his time it was just a matter of whether the Soviets would end peacefully with a transition to some form of Democracy, or whether a new military dictatorship would rise out of the ashes of the old Soviet Empire.
No, it was during the Russian Civil War so the Bolsheviks were obviously not in firm control of the country. But the Americans and other foreign troops were there to support the anti-Bolshevik forces so I’d say they were clearly fighting against the communists.
It’s true that prior to 1945, the United States didn’t have any major ongoing foreign policies (other than the Monroe Doctrine). The general consensus was that dealing directly with the Soviet Union was primarily an issue for the European powers. But the United States was against the Soviet Union and actively worked to keep communists (who were seen as representatives of the Soviet Union) out of the United States.
I give you my reasons why I liked Reagan.
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The USA was in really bad straights in the 70s, publicly embarrassed and right or wrong it looked liked we were losing the Cold War with us and our best allies, the UK in the dumps. Reagan built the military up, he said we could win the cold war, he gave us hope. He got the economy running strong.
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In the 70s the Unions kept crippling the country with strikes and Reagan’s time really broke the Union’s strength. (And yes, I realized it probably has swung too far the other way now.)
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Reagan put in motion the action that ended the Cold War. I’ve heard all the reason why the USSR was going under anyway, but I just don’t buy it. I think Reagan pushed it over the edge.
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Domestic terrorism largely stopped under Reagan.
Why I don’t like Reagan’s legacy:
- Terrible overall environmental record
- He opened the door for the downfall of the Republican party I liked, by letting in the Theo-Cons and the worst of the Dems, the Dixiecrats.
- Iran-Contra of course.
There was nothing remotely timid about Operation Eagle Claw, it was an extremely brazen plan, overly so in fact. Its failure wasn’t caused by Carter either being timid or micromanaging it.
Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson would be surprised to hear that they are now regarded as proponents of peaceful coexistence with the Soviets. They all thought they were confronting the Soviet Union in the manner you described.
Detente didn’t become American policy until the seventies under Nixon and Kissinger. All Reagan did was abandon a policy that was less than ten years old. And that abandonment had already begun before Reagan took office - Carter had admitted peaceful coexistence wasn’t working and was shipping arms to the Afghan rebels.
Then he went to the beach, and said, “Tide, go out!” And it did.
Erm… you guys really want to hang your hats on this one? 
I do believe the both of you are part of the “commanist” conspiracy…
There was a recession precisely because Volcker cranked up interest rates to double digit levels and consumer spending collapsed for a couple of years. Once inflation was under control and interest rates were cut, pent-up demand exploded and the economy grew incredibly quickly for a few years (consumer spending being two-thirds of US GDP) which is where the majority of Reagan’s growth came from. Once the demand explosion tailed off economic growth fell to lower levels and under the exact-same regime fell dramatically during the Bush 41 presidency. So it was a monetary policy started under Jimmy Carter (that stole some of the potential economic growth under his presidency and caused the recession) that caused the Reagan boom after interest rates were cut.
Reagan did basically what any other prez would have done at the time. When Reagan made speeches like the “tear down this wall” speech it was done opportunistically in the knowledge that the Soviets were abandoning their satellite states and that the Honecker regime wouldn’t be able to last very long without Soviet support. Yes, people said nice things about Reagan afterwards but they could equally have thanked all previous US prezzes for what they did too. reagan just happened to be right place, right time and gets all the credit for capitalism’s victory. I do give him credit for negotiating with the Soviets in the first place against the advice of the hawks in the administration though. that was the most significant thing he did and he deserves a lot of credit for that.
Gorbachev actually had very little to do with the fall of the Wall itself – and it happened AFTER Reagan left office.
So, if Obama works really hard for an economic turn around, lobbies really hard for it, works his ass off to make it happen, but it doesn’t happen until there is a new President in the Oval Office, then the credit should go to that new President, yes? 
I don’t believe that Shodan was giving a lot of credit to Gorbachev for the wall coming down there, btw.
The OP asked why Reagan fans think wrt what they admire about the man. Granted, the OP was a gotcha it seems, designed to get Reagan fans to come out and say what they admired about a President who is quite unpopular with the majority of posters in this forum, but the impression a President gives and the perceptions of the people who vote for him are part of the reality of what a President does or is. People THOUGHT Reagan did all the things mentioned in this thread…whether that is reality or not is, in most cases, debatable and is going to hinge on not so much the facts but on how the person debating SEES those facts…and in a lot of cases, what world view the person debating those issues is. Similar to how people perceive what Obama is doing right now. Ask a fervent lefty what Obama has accomplished and you are going to get a very different list than if you ask a fervent righty…or a moderate. Or a Democrat vs a Republican vs an Independent. Yet the facts are there, plain to see (in theory)…so, how come people perceive differently how well or poorly Obama is doing in his presidency??
-XT
:dubious:
Not really debatable whether or not he did something. Facts aren’t debatable; if they were we would be calling them something else. Here, I’ll bold the pertinent parts so you can’t miss them:
[
](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fact)
And before you start to crow about how what you were talking about was facts like defined in #4, let me remind you that the OP specifically said:
So if you want to be all impressed that Reagan said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” that’s fine, but don’t go inflating that into “Reagan defeated communism”.
[QUOTE=Snowboarder Bo]
So if you want to be all impressed that Reagan said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” that’s fine, but don’t go inflating that into “Reagan defeated communism”.
[/QUOTE]
Did the wall get torn down? I seem to recall something about it in the papers…
But thanks, SBB for the link to the definition on dictionary.com…it was VERY informative. As always, your contributions to a thread such as this are invaluable. 
-XT