# Posted 4:42 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

DID REAGAN WIN THE COLD WAR? Perhaps Kevin and I have lost our ideological bearings, but he's convinced that Reagan won the Cold War while I think that all Reagan did was graciously accept Gorbachev's surrender. According to Kevin, Reagan

Really did win the Cold War. Maybe it didn't happen in quite the way his fans would like to believe, and maybe it wouldn't have happened at all without Mikhail Gorbachev, but still: Reagan's defense buildup and his quixotic insistence on pursuing an unworkable missile defense shield really did help to bring down the Soviet Union. When I say this, it's not because I especially want to believe it, but because the historical record seems to show that it really happened.

Kevin's argument rests on a recent Fred Kaplan column in Slate which develops an argument based on declassified transcripts of Politburo meetings. My counterargument rests on the work of Oxford prof Archie Brown, as presented in his excellent book, The Gorbachev Factor.

Hardly a Reagan cheerleader, Kaplan begins by pointing out that

The Gorbachev factor — too often overlooked in this week of Reagan-hagiography — was crucial. If Yuri Andropov's kidneys hadn't given out, or if Konstantin Chernenko had lived a few years longer, Reagan's bluster and passion would have come to naught; the Cold War would probably have raged on for years; indeed, Reagan's rhetoric and actions might have aggravated tensions.

Kaplan point about Andropov is misleading, since the Politburo appointed him as General Secretary in the expectation that he would die. However, few of us now remember that Chernenko was born in the same year as Ronald Reagan. He was a hardliner and he wasn't supposed to die.

In the past, I've heard conservatives argue that Reagan's military buildup, and especially Star Wars, led the Politburo to appoint Gorbachev in the expectation that he would enact reforms and reduce tensions with the United States. However, Brown makes a solid case that after Chernenko's death there was no one left in the Politburo with Gorbachev's influence, so his elevation reflected power politics rather than a sense of impending crisis. The fact that the rest of the Politburo showed little enthusiasm for Gorbachev's reforms isn't all that surprising given their initial preference for Chernenko.

When it comes to Star Wars, Kaplan's supposed ace in the hole is the transcript of a March 1986 Politburo meeting at which Gorbachev said

"Maybe we should just stop being afraid of the SDI! Of course, we cannot be indifferent to this dangerous program. But [the Americans] are betting precisely on the fact that the USSR is afraid of the SDI. … That is why they are putting pressure on us—to exhaust us."

If somebody says, "Maybe we should stop being afraid of the bogeyman," it usually means he is afraid of the bogeyman. It's pretty clear that in the spring of 1986 Gorbachev and all those around with him were at least a little afraid of the SDI bogeyman.

From where I stand, being "a little afraid" doesn't count for much. The real question is, why did Gorbachev respond to an economic crisis not just with market-based reforms, but with radical democratic reforms that dismantled the Communist Party's total domination of Soviet politics? After all, why not follow the nascent Chinese example of liberalizing the economy without giving up political control?

According to Minxin Pei, Gorbachev's political reforms were a desperate attempt to kickstart an economic reform package that wasn't going anywhere. While Pei makes some excellent points -- especially his explanation of why economic reforms worked in China but not the Soviet Union -- he makes the same mistake as Kaplan by not asking why Gorbachev found political reforms acceptable at all.

It on this point that Brown presents his strongest evidence. As part of younger generation, Gorbachev grew up in a family that suffered horrendously under Stalin. By the same token, Gorbachev was young enough at 25 to have been profoundly influenced by Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's inhumanity in 1956.

As a rising but open-minded star in the Communist Party, Gorbachev took advantage of his contacts with Western European politicians to learn more about the democratic and capitalist way of life. From men like Willy Brandt, Gorbachev learned that democracy and human rights were not slogans of American imperialism, but humane answers to the tragic deficiencies of the authoritarian Communist model.

Neither Chernenko nor any of the lesser lights on the Politburo shared this sort of background. The idea that any of them would have negotiated the INF treaty, held elections or let go of Eastern Europe is simply beyond the pale. While they might have spent less on weapons and initiated some economic reforms, the most they would have given Reagan was a second era of detene, not an end to the Cold War.

Kaplan concludes his article by writing that

If Reagan hadn't been president—if Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale had defeated him or if Reagan had died and George H.W. Bush taken his place—Gorbachev almost certainly would not have received the push or reinforcement that he needed.

I don't buy that for a second. Gorbachev's political and military reforms had nothing to do with Reagan's push. Instead, they were the result of an intensely personal vision of ethics and society that Gorbachev had developed on his own. With Carter or Mondale in office, the US-Soviet rapprochment would have advanced just as rapidly -- with Democrats proclaiming all the way that their President had won the Cold War by abandoning the Republicans' alarmist and alarmingly expensive military build-up.

While Reagan deserves all the credit in the world for working with Gorbachev to end the Cold War, the bottom line is that he got very, very lucky. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion