“Jimmy Carter was the president who made Ronald Reagan necessary”
Jimmy Carter was also the president who showed how to respond to the aggression of other countries, WITHOUT facing down towards World War 3, as the Neocons seems to enjoy doing at this point (until Russia resumes atmospheric nuclear testing, that is).
So, instead of send half of our ground weapons to the combat zone (well, maybe not quite half, but we won’t know until Hegseth does his AUDITS regarding Ukraine), Carter instead sent some defensive weapons there, but took OTHER MEASURES (with Reagan doing the same) that directly led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The two BIG POLICIES were:
1. Drill-baby-drill (to drive down the price of oil, Russia’s only hard currency export at the time)
2. A MASSIVE arms build-up, even bigger than what Reagan ultimately did.
With those two in place, the countdown was set for the Soviet Union to COLLAPSE, which it did 10 years later, due in large part to super-low oil prices at that time.
Uhh..dude...
I was in the military under cahtah..
We had sailors on welfare...
Our aircraft had no fuel...
We had no spare parts for our aircraft...
Our squadron had 4 aircraft, there was never more than 2 systems ready...
Cahtah DECIMATED Our military.
He was so bad that I still, to this day, don’t qualify for membership in the VFW, or the American Legion.
I don’t know what planet you were living on, but it wasn’t here.
I disagree with you one one point, being the military was allowed to deteriorate under Carter. Reagan is the one that got it back up to par.
Carter on his own in his first 2 years decimated the military. After that, Congress forced him to sign 2 large budget increases. BTW, even those budget increases were small compared to Reagan’s.
Look on page 1 of the following report: Carter drove the budget from 5.4% of GDP to 5.1% until Congress ramped it up a bit; Reagan took it to 6.6% of a larger economy. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1987/08/art1full.pdf