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Reagan's Record IIDid he win the Cold War?

By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, Feb. 16, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

"I've become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence," said President Reagan in his "Star Wars" address of 1983, in which he first proposed to build a defense against nuclear missiles. Its purpose, he said, would be "introducing greater stability" in the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. "We seek neither military superiority nor political advantage."

Reagan's hagiographers, currently frolicking in celebration of his 90th birthday, now say he was lying about all this. They don't put it that way, of course. But that is the necessary implication of their claim that Reagan's tough rhetoric, his costly defense buildup, and his Strategic Defense Initiative in particular were all part of a successful strategy to defeat communism and win the Cold War.

If Reagan was lying in order to hide an actual intention to destroy the Soviet Union, whom was he trying to fool? Not the enemy, since the whole theory is that Reagan scared the Soviets into giving up. If he was lying, it must have been in order to deceive the American citizenry about the most important issue facing any democracy. Not nice.

But more likely he was telling the truth. In favor of this theory is the fact that in all his denunciations of communism and the Soviet Union, before and during his presidency, the emphasis was on the enemy's enormous and allegedly growing military strength and the need to counter it for our own survival—not the hope, let alone the intention, of toppling it.

The famous exception is his "Evil Empire" speech of 1982, in which he predicted that communism will end up "on the ash heap of history." Reagan's critics wrongly denounced that speech for stating the obvious about who were the good guys and who were the bad guys of the Cold War. But even on this occasion he described the collapse of communism as "a plan and a hope for the long term." He (correctly) gave most credit to communism's own economic and political failures. And the "concrete actions" he advocated to hasten the day (although "we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change") were entirely unmilitary—basically the creation of what became the National Endowment for Democracy.

In the economic sphere (discussed in last week's column), the Reagan hagiographers give him credit for things he intended that never happened, such as smaller government. On the world stage, they credit him for things he never intended that did happen.

Well, so what? Even if Reagan didn't intend his military buildup to achieve victory, that was the happy result—wasn't it? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly the half-centurylong bipartisan policy of containment played a role. The effect of variations one way or another is debatable. The notion that Jimmy Carter left us weak and vulnerable is certainly exaggerated. Once you give up the idea that Reagan planned it all, the notion that his buildup (for which we're still paying) made the crucial difference becomes less than obvious.

Some former Soviet apparatchiks have testified that Reagan's policies were devastating. This is oddly persuasive to people who wouldn't have believed a word these guys said when they were following the party line of their previous masters. But it's amazing how credible you can become when you tell me what I want to hear.

Suppose events had played out closer to the way Reagan actually predicted. Suppose that, two decades later, communism's internal collapse was continuing on a long fuse, but meanwhile its military strength had continued to grow. And suppose we had responded with continued Reagan-style increases in defense spending. What would the Reagan hagiographers be saying then? Would they be saying, "Well, he did a lot of great things, but his defense policy doesn't seem to have worked"? No, they would be saying exactly what they're saying now: that history had proved him right.

Winning an argument you refuse to lose is a Pyrrhic victory. If no outcome short of outright defeat or nuclear annihilation would be accepted as evidence that Reagan's policy was a failure, no particular outcome is evidence that it was a success.

One Reagan foreign policy initiative almost no one tries to defend is trading weapons for hostages in Iran-Contra. It was morally contemptible, it violated one of the central principles that got Reagan elected, it trampled the very value of democracy it was ostensibly designed to promote. And it didn't even work.

But the question history must decide is: Was it better or worse than oral sex with an intern? It seems to me that subverting the Constitution on an important policy matter is worse than embarrassing everybody with your private squalor. It seems to others that overzealousness in freedom's cause is easier to forgive than raw self-satisfaction. Whoever is right about that, the mantra of the Lewinsky scandal was that the lying, not the original transgression, is what counts. If so, Reagan's sins are at least equal to Clinton's. He never testified under oath until he was out of office and his claims not to remember things had become sadly believable. But at the height of the scandal Reagan lied to us on television just as spectacularly as Clinton did, with that little shake of the head, rather than a Clintonian bite of the lower lip, as his signature gesture of phony sincerity.

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Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time and the founding editor of Slate.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: Most of the posts below had to be shortened, and generated (or were part of) good threads, so further reading is recommended. Jack Baltimore and CCB seem to reach the same conclusion from radically different political positions, while Peter Kauffner's defense of Iran-Contra has extreme rarity value: most Reagan supporters left that one severely alone.]


As I understand it, Reagan is credited with two acts that caused the end of communism:

1) Saying that it would end some day. A very effective strategy. He said it, and communism ended…
2) Spending a whole lot on weapons systems. He did it, and communism ended. Here, can we develop a theory of causation?... [Some] say that the mere existence of our weapons systems caused Russia to capitulate to East German demands to take down the Berlin Wall. The biggest problem with this theory is that neither the Reagan nor the Bush Administration ever suggested it had even the slightest interest in using its weapons to take down the Wall... Our weapons, of course, were never used or threatened with use against any Communist regime except Grenada since Vietnam.

I do give Reagan all of the credit for the fall of Communism. But the credit goes entirely to his magical powers, not to any of his policies. His apparent casting of spells to cause the deaths of Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov in rapid succession was his most effective work

--History Guy

(To reply, click here.)


The real victors in the Cold War were those of us who believed most fervently in the efficacy of mixed economies, as practiced in the U.S., and also believed that Soviet-style command economies would eventually grind themselves up on their own internal friction. It was the complete internal economic collapse, a massive collapse of public faith and support for the USSR's economic regime, not brought on by the cost of war, but by the inability of that regime to keep pace with Western economic performance in peace time, that lead to the USSR's devolution and the end of the Cold War. Mr. Reagan's military spending policies or Star Wars hype had precious little to do with the cycle of economic dysfunction.

--Jack Baltimore

(To reply, click here.)


Reagan happened to be on deck when the Soviet ship went down. He looked across the water told us all the Soviet empire's time had come. But it actually began sinking the day Lenin betrayed the Revolution. Sadly, we threw the idealistic baby of socialism out with the tyranny of dictatorial communism. And now there's no genuine hard line left response to the hard line right's ambitions

--CCB

(To reply, click here.)


We generally give Lincoln credit for the successful execution of the Civil War and Roosevelt for World War II. Certainly neither of them predicted exactly how the war would go or had every decision turn out successful. To not give Reagan the credit due him for the successful execution of the cold war would be similar to me not giving Roosevelt credit because I oppose his economic policies.

--Michael Murray

(To reply, click here.)


The reason no-one tries to defend President Reagan's arms-for-hostages policy nowadays is not because it was morally contemptible or undemocratic. It is because we have the advantage of hindsight and know that the policy didn't work: The only result was more kidnappings. But if you look at the issue in realpolitik terms, one could reasonably expect that a "strategic opening" of the sort Reagan made would work. After all, the United States and Iran have common enemies in the form of Iraq and Russia. Who knew that the Iranians would take their "great satan" rhetoric so seriously?

--Peter Kauffner

(To reply, click here.)

(2/19)

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