Posted on 06/07/2004 11:16:35 AM PDT by meandog
How important was the presidency of Ronald Reagan in winning the Cold War? Try vital.
HEARD THE ONE about the hillbillies playing poker? Big Joe Bob has a real good hand, so he raises. Li'l Clem has a daisy, too, so he sees and raises. Back and forth it goes. Finally, Joe Bob calls. Clem spreads his cards, grins broadly, and says, "I got me four aces!" He reaches for the pot. "Jest a minute," says Joe Bob. His hand goes to his boot and brings up something long and shiny. "I got me this right sharp knife." The color drains from Clem's face. Then he recovers, shakes his head, and laughs. "Doggone you, Joe Bob," he says. "You're the luckiest feller I ever seen!"
Commenting on Ronald Reagan's role in ending the Cold War, some academics are saying he's the luckiest feller they ever seen. These scholars claim that Mr. Reagan played no outsized part in knocking down a Soviet Union that was on its last legs anyway. That the Evil Empire was sounding its death rattle when Mr. Reagan left office--after it had enjoyed geopolitical advantage over America in every theater eight years earlier--is, they say, just another manifestation of that confounded Reagan Luck. But Ronald Reagan made his own luck, and it had a sharp edge.
Mr. Reagan's approach to the Soviet menace was not one of containment, but of purposeful confrontation. The purpose was to pressure the Kremlin from all sides--militarily, economically, politically--to alter its totalitarian nature. In one way, the revisionists are right. The Soviet system was impoverished, corrupt, and, despite encompassing 15 nation-sized states over two continents and possessing a nuclear arsenal capable of pulverizing the planet, surprisingly weak. The funny part is, however, Mr. Reagan was almost the only one in 1980 who thought so.
Indeed, before 1980. Richard Allen, Mr. Reagan's first national security adviser, recalls visiting his boss-to-be in 1977 at his home. The discussion, recounted by Joseph Shattan in the excellent "Architects of Victory," turned to politics. Mr. Reagan said, "My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: 'We win and they lose.' What do you think of that?" Mr. Allen writes, "Until then, we had thought only in terms of 'managing' the relationship with the Soviet Union. Herein lay the great difference between Ronald Reagan and every other politician: He literally believed that we could win."
A partial list of the policies Mr. Reagan employed to realize his vision: He more than doubled the defense budget, buying 3,000 combat aircraft, 3,700 strategic missiles, and 10,000 tanks; supplied helicopter-killing Stinger missiles to the Afghani mujahedin, who sent the Red Army home in dispirited defeat; funded African and South American rebels on the edge of the Soviet Empire; channeled perhaps $50 million in secret funds to Poland's Solidarity in the borne-out hope of spreading the "contagion" of freedom behind the Iron Curtain; cut off credits and technology transfers to Moscow; and refused to budge in his plans to build a missile-defense system that would have neutralized the Soviets' single qualification as a superpower.
This had an effect, notwithstanding the judgment of Harvard dean Joseph Nye that the Soviet Union collapsed because its economy failed to "come to terms with the communications revolution." All who think Al Gore's Internet did the trick, say aye. But first hear Yevgenny Novikov, a senior Politburo staffer, who described the Kremlin mood in 1985: "We very firmly believed that the correlation of forces was shifting against us. In the military-technology sphere, in the ideological sphere, in the economic sphere. Something had to be done." The something was perestroika, glasnost --all those funny Slavic words that lit the fuse of Soviet implosion.
Ronald Reagan once said, "There are no easy answers but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what is morally right." Lucky? Yes, the world was, that this man was this country's president when it mattered most.
The libs have had a whole slew of bad luck, going all the way back to Lenin
The libs have had a whole slew of bad luck, going all the way back to Lenin
You know what Clem's mistake was? Not having a six-shooter unholstered and lying in his lap all the while, so when he reached for the pot, he had a position to retreat to when Joe Bob hauled out the knife. Then negotiations may proceed.
It's worth adding that before Reagan, containment wasn't even succeeding; when Reagan took office, the Soviet Empire was expanding, into Afghanistan, into Central America. The Soviets were winning. If the policies of the Democrats had prevailed, the Soviet Union would not only still exist, it would include Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras...and on and on. Make no mistake about it: when Reagan took office, the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War. Never forget. Never.
¡Viva Reagan!
Right on!
Exactly Right!
Well said.
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