Did Reagan Win The Cold War For The U.S.?

The Cold War ended most unexpectedly in 1989-1990 with a U.S. victory. Many in the U.S.- including an overwhelming majority of the American people- give Ronald Reagan the credit for the
outcome. His strong attacks on the Russians made them realize, it is said, that this time they weren't dealing with a U.S. President who- like Carter- they could push around. Realizing this, they caved. As a British writer put it, "Ronald Reagan was successful in his dealings because he was right all along--- He believed that if the United States put forth its strength- military, material,
& moral- the Soviet Union could not live with it. And he was right."* Others give the credit to
Mikhail Gorbachev & the changes he ushered in to the U.S.S.R. & the Soviet bloc. Although I per-
sonally am in the latter camp, I nonetheless here ask-

Did Reagan(& his tactics)win the Cold War for the U.S.?

*- Godfrey Hodgson, THE WORLD TURNED RIGHT SIDE UP, p. 270 of the 1996, paperback edition.
 
Reagan was a poor president at best. Demented and corrupt, he oversaw the Able Archer 83 military exercise that came close to start WW3, sold weapons to the Iranians to illegally fund one side of a civil war in Central America, let the HIV pandemic spiral out of control, ect.

Conservatives like to wank this absolute fraud, but the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 due to internal issues within the Soviet Union years after Reagan left office, and also almost a decade after he should have left office due to Alzheimer's.
 
It's complicated.

One can give credit to Reagan for handling the Cold War and its end as diplomatically as possible. During the last years of the USSR, the US could easily have empowered hardliners and prolonged or escalated the conflict if they mishandled US-Soviet relations. If Reagan had followed through 100% on his hardline rhetoric towards the USSR, there's a good chance the Cold War wouldn't have ended in 1990, or the transition would be messier.

However, if the question is did Reagan's hard line and military spending binge win the Cold War, the answer is no. The Soviet system was pretty much inevitably going to run into the problems they faced, buildup or no buildup. The Soviet Union would either collapse or reform. The attempted reforms of the USSR were enabled by Reagan's wilingness to negotiate, even with the so-called "Evil Empire."

Ultimately the credit for the Cold War's outcome can't really be given to a single person. It was the culmination of systemic failures in the USSR and personal decisions by many different individuals on both sides that led to this result.
 
Probably the single biggest factor was the oil glut of the 1980s caused by a combination of rising supply and falling demand following the 1970s energy crisis. Carter gets rather unfair treatment, as he inherited a crappy post-Vietnam economy which was going to take time to work its way through the system. This period saw undue pessimism of American strengths and underestimated Soviet weaknesses.

I think Reagan saw these strengths and weaknesses more clearly than most American leaders. His borrow and spend policy stimulated the economy, and his aggressive confrontation with the Soviets gave them a hard kick while they were down. He should be credited for that, but every President had been trying to squeeze the Soviets. Decades of Cold War confrontation and bad economic policies left the USSR ready to crumble. Reagan was more successful his predecessors, but he also had better timing.
 
Reagan was a poor president at best. Demented and corrupt, he oversaw the Able Archer 83 military exercise that came close to start WW3, sold weapons to the Iranians to illegally fund one side of a civil war in Central America, let the HIV pandemic spiral out of control, ect.

Conservatives like to wank this absolute fraud, but the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 due to internal issues within the Soviet Union years after Reagan left office, and also almost a decade after he should have left office due to Alzheimer's.

LOL

"Reagan bolstered the U.S. military might to ruin the Soviet economy, and he achieved his goal. I see President Reagan as a grave digger of the Soviet Union and the spade that he used to prepare this grave was SDI, a Strategic Defense Initiative, so-called ``Star Wars.'' The trick was that the Soviet leadership believed that this SDI defense is possible and then--because it's possible, we must catch up with the Americans. And this was an invitation to the arms race, and the Soviet economy could not really afford it and this way Reagan really contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union."

Gennady Gerasimov, final spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry


There's more to US history than Zinn.
 
Ultimately the credit for the Cold War's outcome can't really be given to a single person. It was the culmination of systemic failures in the USSR and personal decisions by many different individuals on both sides that led to this result.

Ah, but two individuals may share more blame than most: Molotov and Ribbentrop. The "illegal" annexation of the Baltic states certainly was a ticking time bomb, and a reformer in the USSR was going to come no matter how long it can be artificially kept alive.
 
Reagan didn't "win" the Cold War for the U.S. because no U.S. president did. The Soviet debt crisis did, and once it really started to strangle them, to the point when they needed to mass import something as simple as grain (late 1970s-early 1980s), then the collapse was just a question of time - the USSR could no longer do something as simple as "send tanks to mow down protesters" lest they anger the West and thus lose the debt lifeline. And since the USSR was a regime built on terror and suppression, that's when everything started to fall down like a tower of cards.

And even if if was possible to make a point about Reagan's military spending surge putting down the final nail in the Soviet debt crisis (in combination with the 1980s oil slump, of course), then any destabilization of the USSR they made was completely accidental, because when the USSR really did start to collapse, the American administration and other Western countries tried to stop that collapse.
 
Reagan was a poor president at best. Demented and corrupt, he oversaw the Able Archer 83 military exercise that came close to start WW3, sold weapons to the Iranians to illegally fund one side of a civil war in Central America, let the HIV pandemic spiral out of control, ect.

Conservatives like to wank this absolute fraud, but the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 due to internal issues within the Soviet Union years after Reagan left office, and also almost a decade after he should have left office due to Alzheimer's.
Reagan didn’t let the HIV spread out of control. He didn’t create the disease, didn’t spread the disease and was not the one responsible for the reckless behavior of having unprotected sex that spread the disease in most cases. He and his administration acted far too slowly and their ideological outlook affected their view and response but that attitude exonerates those irresponsible reckless people who actions exacerbated it. I can only imagine the outrage and name calling that would have happens if he spoke out about behavior needing to change. He can’t make anyone use a condom. More money for research and study was needed but not many understood soon enough the scope of the problem. Those who did should have been listened too sooner but most time in history those who get the pending scope of a disaster are few and written off as panicking or exaggerating the size of the problem. The calls of Nazi, and fascist would be never ending if he spoke about behavior or responsibility as everyone would say he was trying to dictate people’s behavior. The Soviet Union did fall apart years after but Reagan’s policies did contribute to its collapse. US foreign policy from Truman on with containment , and the Soviets economy’s inability to keep caused the collapse. Reagan’s military spending and his rethoric pressured the USSR into spending themselves into oblivion. He put the final nail in the coffin that every US President shares in the credit for. Liberals like to blame him for everything in the entire world as much as conservatives say he could do no wrong. Just like almost everything there are good and bad aspects of decisions. Leaders do bad things in the name of a good cause and good things can often lead to bad outcomes. He is not God or the Devil.
 
Well said, @Caesars11

And no, Reagan didn't win the Cold War for the U.S., the Soviet Union fell under its own economic shortcomings and mismanagement in the long term, a testament to the nonviability of Marxist-Leninism more than any triumph of America (although us being able to twist them into spending till the cows come home helped, the outcome of the Cold War was IMO inevitable even without it).
 
Oh god no. The USSR collapsed from the colossal internal problems. Reagan did little in the grand schemes. He just made the process faster by a few years
 
The Cold War ended most unexpectedly in 1989-1990 with a U.S. victory. Many in the U.S.- including an overwhelming majority of the American people- give Ronald Reagan the credit for the
outcome. His strong attacks on the Russians made them realize, it is said, that this time they weren't dealing with a U.S. President who- like Carter- they could push around. Realizing this, they caved. As a British writer put it, "Ronald Reagan was successful in his dealings because he was right all along--- He believed that if the United States put forth its strength- military, material,
& moral- the Soviet Union could not live with it. And he was right."* Others give the credit to
Mikhail Gorbachev & the changes he ushered in to the U.S.S.R. & the Soviet bloc. Although I per-
sonally am in the latter camp, I nonetheless here ask-

Did Reagan(& his tactics)win the Cold War for the U.S.?

*- Godfrey Hodgson, THE WORLD TURNED RIGHT SIDE UP, p. 270 of the 1996, paperback edition.

No. The Soviet Union lost due to an inferior economic system. CEP is not a reliable means of sustaining long-run economic growth, and hence, unless it dramatically liberalized, the USSR was doomed to eventual stagnation. A country needs to maintain a balance in which the majority of goods and services are provided by markets subject to strong property rights, while the state steps in only in cases of positive/negative externalities (including the provision of public goods) and to correct market failures arising from information assymetries/monopoly etc...

By dogmatically relying on such extensive and unceccesary state control of the economy, the Soviet Union lacked the dynamism that allowed the OECD and other advanced economies to thrive.
 
Reagan (and HW) probably sped things up a decade or two but the USSR was bound to collapse.

Star Wars, rollback, and the good relationship with Gorbachev that fostered liberalization in the USSR (although IIRC Thatcher was the one who first identified that Gorby was someone who could be worked with) were big factors. I'm pretty happy it was HW Bush in charge when the USSR collapsed though, given how skilled he and Baker were at diplomacy.

Reagan was an above-average president. I'd put him below FDR and just above LBJ in terms of his transformational impact on US politics in the 20th century. He certainly wasn't as perfect as the Church of Saint Ronnie paints him as and a lot of his success was a matter of convenience, but he was a fairly good president. Carter deserves credit for appointing Volcker and starting to get tougher on the Soviets, but Reagan really let Volcker go at it on the inflation issue.
 
Even if he did, it was only after he came dangerously close to losing it, so I award him no points, and may God have mercy on his soul.
 
What Reagan unquestionably does deserve credit for is correcting the military balance between the USSR and NATO. That was a huge achievement, and it had never been done before in history. The Warsaw Pact has conventional superiority over the West from the moment Hitler shot himself in the bunker, which is why our tactical doctrine emphasized use of nuclear weapons. Things got even worse after Vietnam. Reagan managed to inherit that mess and get things roughly to parity by 1984-1985, and from 1986 onward we had decisive conventional superiority.

The reason that was important was because the Soviets basically had either two choices as the 1980s went on: war, or glasnost. Reagan did manage to pretty much single-handedly take war off the table.

And of course the force that crushed Saddam in 1991 was his doing.
 
What Reagan unquestionably does deserve credit for is correcting the military balance between the USSR and NATO. That was a huge achievement, and it had never been done before in history. The Warsaw Pact has conventional superiority over the West from the moment Hitler shot himself in the bunker, which is why our tactical doctrine emphasized use of nuclear weapons. Things got even worse after Vietnam. Reagan managed to inherit that mess and get things roughly to parity by 1984-1985, and from 1986 onward we had decisive conventional superiority.

The reason that was important was because the Soviets basically had either two choices as the 1980s went on: war, or glasnost. Reagan did manage to pretty much single-handedly take war off the table.

And of course the force that crushed Saddam in 1991 was his doing.

Though much of the hardware got it's start in the '70s, the M1 Tank, F-16, A-10 and Stealth. MX and B-1 were pretty much there for the propaganda to get the Soviets deeper into the 'Deep Pockets' game, along with SDI

Reagan's biggest accomplishment was in banishing the malaise. much came together for that to happen. It wouldn't have with Ted Kennedy.

Was the USSRs time about to end? sure, but absolutely no one was predicting that in 1980, the USSR would be dust after a peaceful implosion after the Warsaw Pact dissolved, a decade later after major disarmament agreement
 
Though much of the hardware got it's start in the '70s, the M1 Tank, F-16, A-10 and Stealth. MX and B-1 were pretty much there for the propaganda to get the Soviets deeper into the 'Deep Pockets' game, along with SDI

Reagan's biggest accomplishment was in banishing the malaise. much came together for that to happen. It wouldn't have with Ted Kennedy.

Was the USSRs time about to end? sure, but absolutely no one was predicting that in 1980, the USSR would be dust after a peaceful implosion after the Warsaw Pact dissolved, a decade later after major disarmament agreement

Yeah, but Reagan made sure we got the funding to kick production into high gear and then got *a bunch of them.* R&D might have started before he took office, but we would not have had so many being employed so widely and so well without him.

The scale was as important as anything else. We might have gotten the Arleigh Burke Class in some amount, but we wouldn't have had 600 ships in the navy. We would have deployed the M1s, but not in a 28-division army. Roots in Carter or not, Reagan deserves the credit for bringing them to full flower.
 
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