The Myth of the Gipper - Reagan Didn’t End the Cold War

By WILLIAM BLUM

Ronald Reagan’s biggest crimes were the bloody
military actions to suppress social and political
change in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and
Afghanistan, but I’d like to deal here with the
media’s gushing about Reagan’s supposed role in
ending the cold war. In actuality, he prolonged it.
Here is something I wrote for my book Killing Hope

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512526/counterpunch

It has become conventional wisdom that it was the
relentlessly tough anti-communist policies of the
Reagan Administration, with its heated-up arms
race, that led to the collapse and reformation of
the Soviet Union and its satellites. American
history books may have already begun to chisel this
thesis into marble. The Tories in Great Britain say
that Margaret Thatcher and her unflinching policies
contributed to the miracle as well. The East
Germans were believers too. When Ronald Reagan
visited East Berlin, the people there cheered him
and thanked him "for his role in liberating the
East". Even many leftist analysts, particularly
those of a conspiracy bent, are believers. But this
view is not universally held; nor should it be.

Long the leading Soviet expert on the United
States, Georgi Arbatov, head of the Moscow-based
Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, wrote
his memoirs in 1992. A Los Angeles Times book review by
Robert Scheer summed up a portion of it: Arbatov
understood all too well the failings of Soviet
totalitarianism in comparison to the economy and
politics of the West. It is clear from this candid and
nuanced memoir that the movement for change had been
developing steadily inside the highest corridors of
power ever since the death of Stalin.

Arbatov not only provides considerable evidence for
the controversial notion that this change would
have come about without foreign pressure, he
insists that the U.S. military buildup during the
Reagan years actually impeded this development.
George F. Kennan agrees. The former US ambassador
to the Soviet Union, and father of the theory of
"containment" of the same country, asserts that
"the suggestion that any United States
administration had the power to influence
decisively the course of a tremendous domestic
political upheaval in another great country on
another side of the globe is simply childish." He
contends that the extreme militarization of
American policy strengthened hard-liners in the
Soviet Union. "Thus the general effect of Cold War
extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great
change that overtook the Soviet Union."

Though the arms-race spending undoubtedly damaged the
fabric of the Soviet civilian economy and society even
more than it did in the United States, this had been
going on for 40 years by the time Mikhail Gorbachev
came to power without the slightest hint of impending
doom. Gorbachev’s close adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev,
when asked whether the Reagan administration’s higher
military spending, combined with its "Evil Empire"
rhetoric, forced the Soviet Union into a more
conciliatory position, responded: It played no role.
None. I can tell you that with the fullest
responsibility. Gorbachev and I were ready for changes
in our policy regardless of whether the American
president was Reagan, or Kennedy, or someone even more
liberal. It was clear that our military spending was
enormous and we had to reduce it.

Understandably, some Russians might be reluctant
to admit that they were forced to make revolutionary
changes by their arch enemy, to admit that they lost
the Cold War. However, on this question we don’t have
to rely on the opinion of any individual, Russian or
American. We merely have to look at the historical
facts. From the late 1940s to around the mid-1960s, it
was an American policy objective to instigate the
downfall of the Soviet government as well as several
Eastern European regimes. Many hundreds of Russian
exiles were organized, trained and equipped by the CIA,
then sneaked back into their homeland to set up
espionage rings, to stir up armed political struggle,
and to carry out acts of assassination and sabotage,
such as derailing trains, wrecking bridges, damaging
arms factories and power plants, and so on.

The Soviet government, which captured many of these
men, was of course fully aware of who was behind
all this. Compared to this policy, that of the
Reagan administration could be categorized as one
of virtual capitulation. Yet what were the fruits
of this ultra-tough anti-communist policy? Repeated
serious confrontations between the United States
and the Soviet Union in Berlin, Cuba and elsewhere,
the Soviet interventions into Hungary and
Czechoslovakia, creation of the Warsaw Pact (in
direct reaction to NATO), no glasnost, no
perestroika, only pervasive suspicion, cynicism and
hostility on both sides.

It turned out that the Russians were human after
all — they responded to toughness with toughness. And
the corollary: there was for many years a close
correlation between the amicability of US-Soviet
relations and the number of Jews allowed to emigrate
from the Soviet Union. Softness produced softness. If
there’s anyone to attribute the changes in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe to, both the beneficial ones
and those questionable, it is of course Mikhail
Gorbachev and the activists he inspired. It should be
remembered that Reagan was in office for over four
years before Gorbachev came to power, and Thatcher for
six years, but in that period of time nothing of any
significance in the way of Soviet reform took place
despite Reagan’s and Thatcher’s unremitting malice
toward the communist state.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S.
Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II,
Rogue State: a guide to the World’s Only Super Power
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...> . and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War
Political Memoir
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...> .
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...>
He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com