# Posted 3:48 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

HOW REAGAN WON THE COLD WAR: In response to my recent post, RG makes a very well-informed argument about Reagan's impact on the Soviets:

Your posting on the Gorbachev factor contains one serious error of fact and a couple of analytical deficiencies.

The factual is:

"Kaplan's 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 point of fact, Andropov's demise was the one that was unexpected. Chernenko was known to be sick when he was elevated to the post of general secretary, as can be verified by reviewing newspaper and magazine articles of the time. His appointment was widely considered a surprise for the fact of his being sick, and came about only because the even sicker older men in the Politburo weren't quite ready for the coming generational shift in power.

The analytical deficiencies are:

1). The failure to reckon with the effects of the Pershing II deployment. I haven't read Kaplan's piece but would suspect this failing is present in his analysis too. Pershing II, not SDI, was Reagan's decisive contribution to the resolution of the Cold War. The deployment came despite massive protests in Western Europe (this is the time of "The Fate of the Earth" and the rise of the Green Party in Germany) and negated the Kremlin's hopes of driving a wedge between the US and the European allies. It took skilled diplomacy to keep Germany and the Benelux countries in the fold, and under a different president the confrontation very likely would have had a different outcome.

2). The failure to reckon with the inspirational effort of Reagan's rhetoric behind the Curtain. I think the testimony of folks like Walesa and Havel to this point is quite irrefutable. And I don't see either Carter or Mondale either saying the things Reagan did, or inspiring the same reaction among the captive peoples if they had tried.

Bottom line: I read Brown's book several years ago and fully agree that without Gorbachev, the end of the Cold War doesn't play out as it does. But I also think Reagan's presence in the White House and conduct of policy narrowed Gorbachev's options and forced him onto a path it wasn't his intention to take. I say this as someone who voted for Anderson in 1980 and Mondale in 1984. My academic specialty at the time was US-Soviet relations and I remember full well that no one in the field, not Hough, Stoessinger, Bialer, Ulam, Gaddis, etc., saw the demise of the Soviet Union coming. That it did come forced me to reassess Reagan, and I had to conclude he got quite a few more things right than he was generally given credit for.

RG makes some good points. With regard to Andropov & Chernenko, I'm to guess that my bad memory is responsible for the error. I'll also go back to Brown and see what he says.

With regard to the Pershing deployment, I disagree with SG's suggestion that it was a sort of final gambit on the Kremlin's part, after which they gave up on opposing the West. I'm not sure what the state of the evidence is on this point, but I was under the impression that the Pershing deployment was one more step in the arms control dance, rather than a historic watershed.

Finally, regard to the inspirational effect of Reagan's rhetoric, the testimony of Walesa, Havel and others is all but irrefutable. Yet it was Carter who first energized Soviet dissidents with his unprecedented support for international human rights. To be sure, Carter's rhetoric on Soviet human rights violations became much less confrontational after his first year in office. Even so, it did make a difference.

The more important point, however, is that the inspirational value of Reagan's rhetoric had a negligible impact on Gorbachev's decision to let the the Eastern European satellites break out of the Soviet orbit. I think the best book on this subject is Jacques Levesque's The Engima of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe. It's basic argument is that the primary determinant of Gorbachev's Eastern European policy was his absolute refusal to use force to keep the satellites in line. Nor did he actively encourage reforms in Eastern Europe. Rather, Gorbachev simply decided to let the Soviet Union's puppet goverments fend for themselves.

While fending for oneself may have been harder in the face of an inspired opposition, Reagan's rhetoric was hardly the decisive factor that motivated widespread opposition to Soviet rule. Moreover, the satellite governments' unwillingness to use force was an extension of Gorbachev's refusal to back up their security services with Soviet armed forces.

In the final analysis, I don't believe that either Pershing episode or the impact of Reagan's rhetoric provides the sort of evidence one would need to say that Reagan 'won' the Cold War rather than that he accepted Gorbachev's surrender. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion