Dad2three
Gold Member
Hell, I thought you Klowns thought communism was a failed ideology? NOW ytou claim it took St Reagan to bring it down???? lol
Did Reagan end the Cold War? Immediately after the Berlin Wall fell, a USA Today survey found that only 14% of respondents believed that. Historians mostly credit forty years of “Containment” by eight U.S. presidents. As Tony Judt’s Postwar concluded: “…Washington did not ‘bring down’ Communism – Communism imploded of its own accord.” I served in the USSR during perestroika and glasnost and later, in Russia after the breakup, and can attest to that; Gorbachev tried to reform a repressive, dysfunctional system and lost control of the process.
Vox Verax The Whitewashing of Ronald Reagan
Fool....
So, did Ronald Reagan bring on the end of the Cold War? Well, yes. Recently declassified documents leave no doubt about the matter.
Recently? 2004? No you link goes nowhere, lol
OPINION is what it is though, I've heard about it for YEARS. Mythology spread by right wing 'think tanks' is ALL you have
Was Gorbachev prepared to loosen Soviet control over Eastern Europe and let the states there choose their own way (the “Sinatra Doctrine”)? Obviously so. Did he, however, think that this would lead to the rapid and complete collapse of socialism in all its forms? Apparently not. It was one thing seeking a looser, and hopefully less costly, relationship with countries like Poland and Hungary. This did not necessarily mean that Gorbachev actually intended to lose control of the USSR’s “cordon sanitaire” completely. In reality, Gorbachev miscalculated and it was this miscalculation that brought the Cold War to an end.
Ronald Reagan and the End of the Cold War The Debate Continues The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Why Ronald Reagan Didn't Really Win the Cold War
1) One flaw in the consensus story is the claim that Reagan's confrontational first term and large military buildup was important in undermining the Soviet economy. It is true that defense spending comprised an excessively large share of the overall Soviet economy, but this fact well pre-dated the Reagan presidency. In fact, most observers agree that the Soviet economy had begun to stagnate by about 1975, in part dragged down by over-spending in the Soviet military at the expense of consumer needs and other necessary investments. And by the time of Leonid Brezhnev's death in 1982, many in the Soviet leadership knew that their economy was beset by long term problems, including eroding worker discipline, rising alcoholism, wasteful investment and the Soviets' striking failure to integrate computer technology into their production systems. None of these factors owed anything to the Reagan military buildup, which began only a year before Brezhnev's death and several years after Soviet growth rates began to sputter.
2) A second misplaced claim is that Reagan's policies prompted beleaguered Soviet hardliners to promote the reformist Gorbachev as Communist party leader.
Gorbachev's rise to power had nothing to do with the Reagan administration's hostility to the Soviets. Brezhnev's two immediate successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, each died within fifteen months of attaining power. If not for this relative fluke, there might well have been no progress in easing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union during Reagan's second term. Only Gorbachev's premature ascension to power and extraordinary departure from prior Soviet leadership patterns allowed for the stunning breakthroughs of the late 1980s.
Why Ronald Reagan Didn t Really Win the Cold War Jonathan Weiler
What’s more, it has done so even though it runs counter to Mr. Reagan’s actual policies toward the Soviet Union at the time. From the autumn of 1986 through the end of his presidency in January 1989, Mr. Reagan was in fact moving steadily closer to a working accommodation with Mr. Gorbachev, conducting a series of summit meetings and signing a major arms control agreement — steps that were strongly opposed by the American right.
The opposing perspective on the Reagan speech is that it was nothing but a stunt. The adherents of this interpretation include not just Democrats or liberals but many veterans of the George H. W. Bush administration.
In a 1995 book about the end of the cold war, “Germany United and Europe Transformed,” two former officials of the first Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice and Philip Zelikow, minimized the significance of the Berlin Wall address and its role in the events leading up to the end of the cold war. They argued that after the speech was given there was no serious, practical follow-up. No one pursued any policy initiative with respect to the Berlin Wall. “American diplomats did not consider the matter part of the real policy agenda,” they wrote.
Others agreed. “I thought it was corny in the extreme,” Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to George H. W. Bush, told me. “It was irrelevant, that statement at that time.”
Even some of Mr. Reagan’s own senior foreign-policy officials seem to think the speech was not particularly noteworthy...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/opinion/10mann.html?pagewanted=all
N.Y. Times???!!!!!! You mean the ones that just altered the French Jihardist death tape???
Hell, I thought you Klowns thought communism was a failed ideology? NOW ytou claim it took St Reagan to bring it down???? lol
Did Reagan end the Cold War? Immediately after the Berlin Wall fell, a USA Today survey found that only 14% of respondents believed that. Historians mostly credit forty years of “Containment” by eight U.S. presidents. As Tony Judt’s Postwar concluded: “…Washington did not ‘bring down’ Communism – Communism imploded of its own accord.” I served in the USSR during perestroika and glasnost and later, in Russia after the breakup, and can attest to that; Gorbachev tried to reform a repressive, dysfunctional system and lost control of the process.
Vox Verax The Whitewashing of Ronald Reagan
Fool....
So, did Ronald Reagan bring on the end of the Cold War? Well, yes. Recently declassified documents leave no doubt about the matter.
Recently? 2004? No you link goes nowhere, lol
OPINION is what it is though, I've heard about it for YEARS. Mythology spread by right wing 'think tanks' is ALL you have
Was Gorbachev prepared to loosen Soviet control over Eastern Europe and let the states there choose their own way (the “Sinatra Doctrine”)? Obviously so. Did he, however, think that this would lead to the rapid and complete collapse of socialism in all its forms? Apparently not. It was one thing seeking a looser, and hopefully less costly, relationship with countries like Poland and Hungary. This did not necessarily mean that Gorbachev actually intended to lose control of the USSR’s “cordon sanitaire” completely. In reality, Gorbachev miscalculated and it was this miscalculation that brought the Cold War to an end.
Ronald Reagan and the End of the Cold War The Debate Continues The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Why Ronald Reagan Didn't Really Win the Cold War
1) One flaw in the consensus story is the claim that Reagan's confrontational first term and large military buildup was important in undermining the Soviet economy. It is true that defense spending comprised an excessively large share of the overall Soviet economy, but this fact well pre-dated the Reagan presidency. In fact, most observers agree that the Soviet economy had begun to stagnate by about 1975, in part dragged down by over-spending in the Soviet military at the expense of consumer needs and other necessary investments. And by the time of Leonid Brezhnev's death in 1982, many in the Soviet leadership knew that their economy was beset by long term problems, including eroding worker discipline, rising alcoholism, wasteful investment and the Soviets' striking failure to integrate computer technology into their production systems. None of these factors owed anything to the Reagan military buildup, which began only a year before Brezhnev's death and several years after Soviet growth rates began to sputter.
2) A second misplaced claim is that Reagan's policies prompted beleaguered Soviet hardliners to promote the reformist Gorbachev as Communist party leader.
Gorbachev's rise to power had nothing to do with the Reagan administration's hostility to the Soviets. Brezhnev's two immediate successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, each died within fifteen months of attaining power. If not for this relative fluke, there might well have been no progress in easing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union during Reagan's second term. Only Gorbachev's premature ascension to power and extraordinary departure from prior Soviet leadership patterns allowed for the stunning breakthroughs of the late 1980s.
Why Ronald Reagan Didn t Really Win the Cold War Jonathan Weiler
What’s more, it has done so even though it runs counter to Mr. Reagan’s actual policies toward the Soviet Union at the time. From the autumn of 1986 through the end of his presidency in January 1989, Mr. Reagan was in fact moving steadily closer to a working accommodation with Mr. Gorbachev, conducting a series of summit meetings and signing a major arms control agreement — steps that were strongly opposed by the American right.
The opposing perspective on the Reagan speech is that it was nothing but a stunt. The adherents of this interpretation include not just Democrats or liberals but many veterans of the George H. W. Bush administration.
In a 1995 book about the end of the cold war, “Germany United and Europe Transformed,” two former officials of the first Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice and Philip Zelikow, minimized the significance of the Berlin Wall address and its role in the events leading up to the end of the cold war. They argued that after the speech was given there was no serious, practical follow-up. No one pursued any policy initiative with respect to the Berlin Wall. “American diplomats did not consider the matter part of the real policy agenda,” they wrote.
Others agreed. “I thought it was corny in the extreme,” Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to George H. W. Bush, told me. “It was irrelevant, that statement at that time.”
Even some of Mr. Reagan’s own senior foreign-policy officials seem to think the speech was not particularly noteworthy...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/opinion/10mann.html?pagewanted=all
The N.Y. Times!!!!! Why not make it the DemocRAT Underground....
SO NO, BESIDES A LINK GOING NOWHERE, FROM A RIGHT WING THINK TANK, YOU HAVE NOTHING. Got it
How did you think they did it...MAGIC???
