Several WAISers disagreed with Christopher Jones, who denied Reagan's role
in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Harry Papasotiriou writes: "The Soviet
Union certainly collapsed of its own weight, but Reagan helped speed up the
process. The following paragraphs are from a forthcoming book that I am co-authoring.Reagan’s conviction that the Soviet Union was both a dangerous military
power and a collapsing economic system derived not from any deep knowledge of
the Soviet Union. Yet he proved to be the proverbial right man in the right
place at the right time. By whatever means he arrived at his views regarding
the Soviet Union, he drew from them policy directions that were devastatingly
effective in undermining the rotten Soviet edifice. Because of the high oil
prices of the 1970s the Soviet leadership avoided serious economic reforms,
such as those that saved Deng Xiaoping’s China. Instead, it relied on
oil revenues as a means of keeping its decrepit economy going. By the early
1980s the Soviet Union was becoming a hollow shell, with an unreformed and increasingly
backward industrial base producing outmoded pre-computer armaments. Thus it
was highly vulnerable to the pressures that the Reagan administration was planning.<?xml:namespace
prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />From the outset, Reagan moved against détente and beyond containment,
substituting the objective of encouraging “long-term political and military
changes within the Soviet empire that will facilitate a more secure and peaceful
world order”, according to an early 1981 Pentagon defense guide. Harvard’s
Richard Pipes, who joined the National Security Council, advocated a new aggressive
policy by which “the United States takes the long-term strategic offensive.
This approach therefore contrasts with the essentially reactive and defensive
strategy of containment”. Pipes’s report was endorsed in a 1982
National Security Decision Directive that formulated the policy objective of
promoting “the process of change in the Soviet Union towards a more pluralistic
political and economic system”. [The quotes from Peter Schweizer, Reagan's
War.]A central instrument for putting pressure on the Soviet Union was Reagan’s
massive defense build-up, which raised defense spending from $134 billion in
1980 to $253 billion in 1989. This raised American defense spending to 7 percent
of GDP, dramatically increasing the federal deficit. Yet in its efforts to keep
up with the American defense build-up, the Soviet Union was compelled in the
first half of the 1980s to raise the share of its defense spending from 22 percent
to 27 percent of GDP, while it froze the production of civilian goods at 1980
levels.Reagan’s most controversial defense initiative was SDI, the visionary
project to create an anti-missile defense system that would remove the nuclear
sword of Damocles from America’s homeland. Experts still disagree about
the long-term feasibility of missile defense, some comparing it in substance
to the Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster Star Wars. But the SDI’s main effect
was to demonstrate U. S. technological superiority over the Soviet Union and
its ability to expand the arms race into space. This helped convince the Soviet
leadership under Gorbachev to throw in the towel and bid for a de-escalation
of the arms race.Particularly effective, though with unintended long-term side effects, was
the Reagan administration’s support for the mujahideen (holy warriors)
that were fighting against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Reagan was determined
to make Afghanistan the Soviet Vietnam. Therefore in 1986 he decided to provide
the mujahideen with portable surface-to-air Stinger missiles, which proved devastatingly
effective in increasing Soviet air losses (particularly helicopters). The war
in Afghanistan cost the United States about $1 billion per annum in aid to the
mujahideen; it cost the Soviet Union eight times as much, helping bankrupt its
economy.
Apart from his defense policies, Reagan also weakened the Soviet Union through
economic moves. His supporters’ claims that he brought about the fall
of the Soviet Union are somewhat weakened by the fact that he ended Carter’s
grain embargo, which had produced alarming food shortages in the Soviet Union.
On the other hand Reagan was able to reduce the flow of Western technology to
the Soviet Union, as well to limit Soviet natural gas exports to Western Europe.
One of the most effective ways in which his economic policies weakened the Soviet
Union was by helping bring about a drastic fall in the price of oil in the 1980s,
thereby denying the Soviet Union large inflows of hard currency".
Here are two more rebuttals of Christopher Jones' assertion that Reagan had nothing
to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Miles Seeley writes: "I cannot
agree with Mr. Jones that Reagan had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Yes, it collapsed mostly from its own weight, but his unrelenting pressure
certainly had an effect, as many former Soviet officials have said. I was no fan
of Reagan, but you can't just write him off, either. Mr. Jones somehow seems to
overlook the obvious. Ronald Reagan was at the helm when the USSR collapsed. I
have not heard people say “He won the Cold War,” nor that “he
defeated the Soviet Union.”
Randy Black writes: "On Reagan’s watch, the USSR collapsed, and the
huge military build up under Reagan after years of decay under Carter, coupled
with the failed attempts to keep up with the USA on those issues, contributed
to the collapse of the USSR, A decade ago in Siberia, when my Russian associates
asked me about the Cold War from my viewpoint I always told them that the US economy
simply had more resiliency than the Soviet economy. I dared not expose my complete
thoughts on the matter as a guest in Russia. They didn’t need to be reminded
that, while equality was the goal of communism/socialism, in practice, there were
still rich guys and poor guys, haves and have nots with no concept or hope for
anything better, “unless they were connected.”
Certainly, the Soviet system, in its attempt to equalize the workers, must have
also had to eliminate various elements of the human spirit. Take away a man’s
hope for a better existence and you take away his reason for being, I think a
big contributor to the demise of the USSR was the lack of spirit among the proletariat
that an individual could make a difference. As such, Mr. Jones is correct that
the communist leaders lost touch with the workers.
But contrary to Mr. Jones’ statement, Reagan had much to do with it. One
major thought that Mr. Jones and many others overlook is the thought that the
USSR truly began to collapse with Nikita K’s famous “secret speech”
which denounced Stalin back in the 50s".
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