Archive

Think Again: Ronald Reagan

  • ptown_trojans_1
    A very interesting piece in the upcoming issue of Foreign Policy by Peter Beinart. In the piece, he pretty much has my line of thinking, that Reagan as portrayed by conservatives today is largely wrong. That Reagan was much more cautious, pragmatic, and not stubborn about the Soviets, or terror, or launching wars.

    http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/07/think_again_ronald_reagan?page=full

    I sort of disagree with the last part about Obama, because it is just too early to even think of a comparison. But, that said, I still largely am a fan of Reagan. He is the best President since Ike. I just think he gets blown way out of proportion.

    One section:
    "Reagan Frightened the Soviet Union into Submission."

    Hardly. Reagan's role in winning the Cold War lies at the core of the American right's mythology. The legend goes like this: Reagan came into office, dramatically hiked defense spending, unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative (his "Star Wars" missile shield), and aided anti-communist rebels in the Third World. Unable to keep pace, the Kremlin chose Gorbachev, who threw in the towel.

    The problem with this story is that Reagan began abandoning his hard-line anti-Soviet stance in late 1983, 18 months before Gorbachev took power. One reason was domestic politics. Today, commentators tend to believe that Reagan's hawkish reputation was always a political asset. But in 1983, after more than two years of epic defense spending, virulent Cold War rhetoric, and no arms-control talks, Americans were demanding détente. Public support for defense spending fell, and the U.S. House of Representatives endorsed a freeze on the production of nuclear weapons. Fearful that these dovish trends could threaten Reagan's re-election, White House chief of staff James Baker pushed Reagan to make an overture to the Soviets, a suggestion backed by Shultz, who was eager to restart arms talks.

    Their effort coincided with a change in Reagan, who had long harbored a genuine terror of nuclear war reflected in his decades-old belief -- often ignored by backers on the right -- that nuclear weapons should eventually be abolished. The terror had its roots, as did many of Reagan's inclinations, in movies. According to Colin Powell, national security advisor from 1987 to 1989, Reagan had been deeply affected by the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which space aliens warn earthlings that unless they stop settling their conflicts through war, the powers that be in the galaxy will destroy their planet. (During his presidency, Reagan repeatedly invoked the prospect of an alien invasion as a reason for the United States and the Soviet Union to overcome their differences. Whenever he did, Powell would mutter, "Here come the little green men.")

    In 1983, two movies triggered Reagan's latent anti-nuclear views: Matthew Broderick's WarGames, which portrays a young computer hacker who almost starts a nuclear war, and ABC's The Day After, which depicts Lawrence, Kansas, in the aftermath of one. For Reagan, who didn't draw a sharp contrast between reality and celluloid (he once told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he had visited Nazi concentration camps when in reality he had only seen them on film), the movies were chilling. Soon after viewing The Day After, Reagan attended a briefing on U.S. military procedure in the event of a Soviet attack, as if the doomsday movies were playing out before him in real life. His dread only grew by year's end when he learned that his nuclear buildup and anti-Soviet speeches had so terrified Kremlin leaders that they interpreted a nato war game as preparation for a real attack and put their military on high alert.

    This combination of electoral and psychological anxiety led Reagan, late in his first term, to begin a dramatic rhetorical shift. Declaring that "nuclear arsenals are far too high," in January 1984 he told the country that "my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth." By summer, he had largely scrapped preconditions on meeting Soviet leaders, and in September TIME magazine reported that he told Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko the United States "respects the Soviet Union's status as a superpower and has no wish to change its social system."

    Reagan's sudden infatuation with arms control didn't initially bear fruit, mostly because Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko had one foot in the grave. But in March 1985, within hours of Gorbachev's selection, Reagan invited him to a summit without preconditions. The same year, he overruled administration hard-liners and quietly scrapped some older submarines so the United States would not violate the never-ratified SALT II Treaty and thus anger the Kremlin. When Soviet troops in East Germany killed a U.S. soldier, giving Reagan a perfect excuse to avoid meeting his Soviet counterpart, he instead told journalists that such incidents just made him want to meet Gorbachev more.

    When they did meet in Geneva, in November, Reagan whispered to Gorbachev, "I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands." An initial meeting scheduled for 15 minutes lasted five hours. The following year, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Reagan and Gorbachev came within a whisker of agreeing to destroy all their nuclear weapons (a deal Reagan scuttled because he would not limit "Star Wars"). But in 1987, the two men signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Cold War's most far-reaching arms-reduction agreement.

    By 1988, though the Soviet Union had not yet released Eastern Europe from its grip, Reagan was explicitly denying that the Soviet Union still constituted an "evil empire" and had begun calling Gorbachev "my friend." And contrary to the conservative fable, it was this second-term dovishness that played the crucial role in enabling Gorbachev's reforms. From virtually the moment he took office, Gorbachev was desperate to cut military spending, which by the mid-1980s constituted a mind-bending 40 percent of the Soviet budget. But within the Politburo, vast unilateral cuts would have been politically impossible; Gorbachev needed an American partner. And once he found that partner in the less-menacing second-term Reagan, Gorbachev was able to convince his Kremlin colleagues that the Soviet Union could risk losing its Eastern European security belt without fearing Western attack. In the words of longtime Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin, "If Reagan had stuck to his hard-line policies in 1985 and 1986 ... Gorbachev would have been accused by the rest of the Politburo of giving everything away to a fellow who does not want to negotiate. We would have been forced to tighten our belts and spend even more on defense."
  • Thread Bomber
    Actually, Reagan spent the Soviet Union into submission. Between Afghanistan and the threat of Star Wars, The Soviets amassed huge deficits and found it was time to pay the piper.

    I think you could draw some some comparisons to this time and that time.... I would agree with Ptown that the revisionist history president Reagan is mostly inaccurate...


    And HOW Dare you invoke the name of St Ronnie the great??????
  • fish82
    Thread Bomber;382887 wrote:Actually, Reagan spent the Soviet Union into submission. Between Afghanistan and the threat of Star Wars, The Soviets amassed huge deficits and found it was time to pay the piper.

    I think you could draw some some comparisons to this time and that time.... I would agree with Ptown that the revisionist history president Reagan is mostly inaccurate...


    And HOW Dare you invoke the name of St Ronnie the great??????

    Who are we spending into submission this time? Ourselves? ;)

    While I don't disagree with the crux of the article, Ron still is...and always will be the schiznit.
  • Belly35
    With all respect for PTown I find it very interesting that a he starts a Thread about Reagan when so many other news worth issue are abound.

    Ptown is this a distraction Threat to remove the ongoing lashing of the Obama Administration incompetency exposure?
  • ptown_trojans_1
    Haha, yea Belly, you got me, that was reason, haha.
    Actually, there are other things going on in the world, and I can multitask.
    Also, the piece was posted today and I thought I'd share.
    Finally, I'm a foreign policy nut and am a fan of Reagan and since Reagan is considered a hero to many on here, thought I'd pass it along.

    Yes, there is the oil spill, but there is also Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, START, Israel, possible missile deals between Saudi Arabia and China and and a whole host of other foreign policy issues.
  • jhay78
    I was going to say something similar, Belly. In the midst of one of the most disastrous presidencies ever, I've seen more than a few articles lately saying essentially, "Oh yeah, well Reagan did this" and "Reagan did that".

    We get it. He wasn't perfect. He even dared to change his mind and his stance toward arms and the Soviet Union. His foundational philosophy and core ideas were what get conservatives so excited today.
  • Pariah
    You can't understand the success of Reagan without understanding the dismal Carter years. Reagan was the "shining city on a hill" president and Carter was the "America is in a malaise" president. Iran takes our people hostage and Carter finally gets the nerve to go in and get them, but the helicopters crash in the desert (Carter believed the defense budget was too big). There were gas lines, over-regulation, high taxes, high unemployment, high teens interest rates, runaway inflation, and on and on. I was there, the ignorant son of politically naive FDR Democrats. Reagan simply made America believe it was the best country on earth again. Many on the left predicted that Soviet economics would crush capitalism and free markets. They advocated unilateral disarmament. I remember clearly the huge demonstrations in America and Europe demanding just that. Reagan ignored those idiots and decided to destroy the USSR, which he thought would collapse from the crap it was built on if it just had a little help. As the Soviets tried to save their empire, they became more congenial and that opened up more understanding, but there is no evidence that Reagan regretted the demise of Soviet communism. Reagan was a great president for putting them to rest, and you just can't get around that, so the left is doing what the left does - revising history. Reagan will be a far leftie in our school textbooks soon. But because I was there, I know... they hated his guts the whole way through his presidency and beyond.
  • Mr. 300
    Pariah;382980 wrote:You can't understand the success of Reagan without understanding the dismal Carter years. Reagan was the "shining city on a hill" president and Carter was the "America is in a malaise" president. Iran takes our people hostage and Carter finally gets the nerve to go in and get them, but the helicopters crash in the desert (Carter believed the defense budget was too big). There were gas lines, over-regulation, high taxes, high unemployment, high teens interest rates, runaway inflation, and on and on. I was there, the ignorant son of politically naive FDR Democrats. Reagan simply made America believe it was the best country on earth again. Many on the left predicted that Soviet economics would crush capitalism and free markets. They advocated unilateral disarmament. I remember clearly the huge demonstrations in America and Europe demanding just that. Reagan ignored those idiots and decided to destroy the USSR, which he thought would collapse from the crap it was built on if it just had a little help. As the Soviets tried to save their empire, they became more congenial and that opened up more understanding, but there is no evidence that Reagan regretted the demise of Soviet communism. Reagan was a great president for putting them to rest, and you just can't get around that, so the left is doing what the left does - revising history. Reagan will be a far leftie in our school textbooks soon. But because I was there, I know... they hated his guts the whole way through his presidency and beyond.


    Deserves a standing ovation!!!! Pariah, you rock!!

    I don't ever want to see someone compare Obama to Reagan. Laughable at best.
  • believer
    Pariah;382980 wrote:You can't understand the success of Reagan without understanding the dismal Carter years. Reagan was the "shining city on a hill" president and Carter was the "America is in a malaise" president. Iran takes our people hostage and Carter finally gets the nerve to go in and get them, but the helicopters crash in the desert (Carter believed the defense budget was too big). There were gas lines, over-regulation, high taxes, high unemployment, high teens interest rates, runaway inflation, and on and on. I was there, the ignorant son of politically naive FDR Democrats. Reagan simply made America believe it was the best country on earth again. Many on the left predicted that Soviet economics would crush capitalism and free markets. They advocated unilateral disarmament. I remember clearly the huge demonstrations in America and Europe demanding just that. Reagan ignored those idiots and decided to destroy the USSR, which he thought would collapse from the crap it was built on if it just had a little help. As the Soviets tried to save their empire, they became more congenial and that opened up more understanding, but there is no evidence that Reagan regretted the demise of Soviet communism. Reagan was a great president for putting them to rest, and you just can't get around that, so the left is doing what the left does - revising history. Reagan will be a far leftie in our school textbooks soon. But because I was there, I know... they hated his guts the whole way through his presidency and beyond.
    Well played. Reagan was not perfect. NO president is.

    What Reagan had was an impeccable way of making Americans feel good about, or at least not feel guilty about, being American again. Reagan rarely, if ever, dodged bullets (political ones anyways) by blaming his predecessor. Instead, he called a spade a spade, took ownership, and did it all with wit and a sense of humor.
  • HitsRus
    ^^^^no revisionist history there...spot on.
  • ptown_trojans_1
    Pariah;382980 wrote:You can't understand the success of Reagan without understanding the dismal Carter years. Reagan was the "shining city on a hill" president and Carter was the "America is in a malaise" president. Iran takes our people hostage and Carter finally gets the nerve to go in and get them, but the helicopters crash in the desert (Carter believed the defense budget was too big). There were gas lines, over-regulation, high taxes, high unemployment, high teens interest rates, runaway inflation, and on and on. I was there, the ignorant son of politically naive FDR Democrats. Reagan simply made America believe it was the best country on earth again. Many on the left predicted that Soviet economics would crush capitalism and free markets. They advocated unilateral disarmament. I remember clearly the huge demonstrations in America and Europe demanding just that. Reagan ignored those idiots and decided to destroy the USSR, which he thought would collapse from the crap it was built on if it just had a little help. As the Soviets tried to save their empire, they became more congenial and that opened up more understanding, but there is no evidence that Reagan regretted the demise of Soviet communism. Reagan was a great president for putting them to rest, and you just can't get around that, so the left is doing what the left does - revising history. Reagan will be a far leftie in our school textbooks soon. But because I was there, I know... they hated his guts the whole way through his presidency and beyond.

    I'll agree with 90% of that, expect the unilateral disarmament. D's of any credibility at the time were for a continuation of the SALT Treaties, which Reagan unofficially accepted. Disarmament was in a bilateral nature. Also, the nuclear freeze movement was for the stopping of building new systems and not introducing the SS-20 (USSR) and Pershing 2 (US) Intermediate range into Europe. But, the movement died in the mid 80s.

    But, you are largely sport on.

    Same goes to you Believer, I completely agree.
  • dwccrew
    Pariah;382980 wrote:You can't understand the success of Reagan without understanding the dismal Carter years. Reagan was the "shining city on a hill" president and Carter was the "America is in a malaise" president. Iran takes our people hostage and Carter finally gets the nerve to go in and get them, but the helicopters crash in the desert (Carter believed the defense budget was too big). There were gas lines, over-regulation, high taxes, high unemployment, high teens interest rates, runaway inflation, and on and on. I was there, the ignorant son of politically naive FDR Democrats. Reagan simply made America believe it was the best country on earth again. Many on the left predicted that Soviet economics would crush capitalism and free markets. They advocated unilateral disarmament. I remember clearly the huge demonstrations in America and Europe demanding just that. Reagan ignored those idiots and decided to destroy the USSR, which he thought would collapse from the crap it was built on if it just had a little help. As the Soviets tried to save their empire, they became more congenial and that opened up more understanding, but there is no evidence that Reagan regretted the demise of Soviet communism. Reagan was a great president for putting them to rest, and you just can't get around that, so the left is doing what the left does - revising history. Reagan will be a far leftie in our school textbooks soon. But because I was there, I know... they hated his guts the whole way through his presidency and beyond.

    I agree with most of this. The only thing is that the Soviets couldn't save their empire because it had been dying since the 60's, far earlier than when Reagan took office. Reagan just happened to be in the right place at the right time and gets credited for the demise of the USSR. The USSR had been crumbling for years and were never close to the world dominance of the United States......ever.
  • KnightRyder
    believer;383232 wrote:Well played. Reagan was not perfect. NO president is.

    What Reagan had was an impeccable way of making Americans feel good about, or at least not feel guilty about, being American again. Reagan rarely, if ever, dodged bullets (political ones anyways) by blaming his predecessor. Instead, he called a spade a spade, took ownership, and did it all with wit and a sense of humor.

    he needed a sense a humor the way he put that make up on like cake frosting. on the global stage he was viewed as a buffoon
  • CenterBHSFan
    KnightRyder;389886 wrote:he needed a sense a humor the way he put that make up on like cake frosting. on the global stage he was viewed as a buffoon
    Oh really?
  • fish82
    KnightRyder;389886 wrote:he needed a sense a humor the way he put that make up on like cake frosting. on the global stage he was viewed as a buffoon

    no u
  • KnightRyder
    CenterBHSFan;390064 wrote:Oh really?

    yea really
  • isadore
    KnightRyder;389886 wrote:he needed a sense a humor the way he put that make up on like cake frosting. on the global stage he was viewed as a buffoon
    it doesnt say much for those doing the viewing that they did not realize he was advancing America to a successful end to the Cold War and the ascention of the US as the world's sole superpower. those global viewers must have been a bunch of dumbasses.
  • KnightRyder
    isadore;390244 wrote:it doesnt say much for those doing the viewing that they did not realize he was advancing America to a successful end to the Cold War and the ascention of the US as the world's sole superpower. those global viewers must have been a bunch of dumbasses.

    did you forget about china? why didnt the worlds only superpower go step to them
  • isadore
    KnightRyder;393710 wrote:did you forget about china? why didnt the worlds only superpower go step to them
    you have a little problem with chronology, dont you. We were not the only superpower during his presidency. And his great success was putting the skids on "the evil empire."
  • ptown_trojans_1
    isadore;393776 wrote:you have a little problem with chronology, dont you. We were not the only superpower during his presidency. And his great success was putting the skids on "the evil empire."

    Sort of, but again, the system was failing anyways. When Gorbachev took over he saw the years and years of failings to the system. Reagan did help, but wasn't the cause. Besides, after 1985, he never used "Evil" again to describe them.

    If anyone put the skids on them it was Truman with containment, Ike with nuclear strategy, Kennedy with MAD, Johnson with Arms control, Nixon and Ford with detente, and Carter with cutting economic aid.
  • isadore
    ptown_trojans_1;393828 wrote:Sort of, but again, the system was failing anyways. When Gorbachev took over he saw the years and years of failings to the system. Reagan did help, but wasn't the cause. Besides, after 1985, he never used "Evil" again to describe them.

    If anyone put the skids on them it was Truman with containment, Ike with nuclear strategy, Kennedy with MAD, Johnson with Arms control, Nixon and Ford with detente, and Carter with cutting economic aid.

    Despite what you write, Reagan had much to overcome. Of course it was just obvious to everyone that the USSR was ready to fall. As Reagan came to the Presidency the United States appeared to the world as the nation about to fall from its superpower Dom .We had had Ford who did not seem to realize Poland was under USSSR. And Carter had made America look ineffective and incompetent with his handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. and had allowed the Communist to take over Nicaragua establishing a second base in the New World. Cuba troops funded by USSR were wrecking havoc in Southern Africa. USSR had occupied Afghanistan. Their empire in Eastern Europe was quiescent. They had the most powerful army and largest stock pile of nuclear weapons. The Western alliance and our nuclear shield was being undermined by the Nuclear disarmament movement. Many liberals in our country were ready to disarm and appease.
    In my opinion Reagan’s domestic policies did horrendous damage our nation, but he deserves his due in foreign policy.
  • CenterBHSFan
    isadore;393996 wrote:Despite what you write, Reagan had much to overcome. Of course it was just obvious to everyone that the USSR was ready to fall. As Reagan came to the Presidency the United States appeared to the world as the nation about to fall from its superpower Dom .We had had Ford who did not seem to realize Poland was under USSSR. And Carter had made America look ineffective and incompetent with his handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. and had allowed the Communist to take over Nicaragua establishing a second base in the New World. Cuba troops funded by USSR were wrecking havoc in Southern Africa. USSR had occupied Afghanistan. Their empire in Eastern Europe was quiescent. They had the most powerful army and largest stock pile of nuclear weapons. The Western alliance and our nuclear shield was being undermined by the Nuclear disarmament. Many liberals in our country were ready to disarm and appease.
    In my opinion Reagan’s domestic policies did horrendous damage our nation, but he deserves his due in foreign policy.

    Isa, did you really just attempt to see both sides of an issue???

    Proud of ya! ;)
  • isadore
    CenterBHSFan;394093 wrote:Isa, did you really just attempt to see both sides of an issue???

    Proud of ya! ;)

    Always appreciate your input, Ms.Center. Both sides of an issue, my side and those in error.