Conventional wisdom often has it wrong; Reagan did not bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, writes El-Sayed Amin Shalabi* Ronald Reagan (b 1911), who served two terms as United States president from 1981 to 1990, died almost three weeks ago on 5 June. Although historians tend to agree that he was one of the most successful US presidents, they will continue to debate the part his policies played in causing the break-up of the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. Reagan came to power at the head of a rising tide of the American right. In particular, he championed the neoconservatives, and held that the Soviet Union was an inherently expansionist and aggressive power and that no amount of negotiations or agreements would alter these qualities. Only intensive pressure and the threat of force would be effective. Operating on this basis, the Reagan administration in its first term harked back to the grimmest days of the early Cold War period. It revived an aggressively anti-Soviet rhetoric, it pushed for modern arms build-up, and it severed all constructive political communications and all levels of negotiations over arms reductions in particular. To the neoconservatives in the Reagan administration, the conflict between Washington and Moscow was a life or death struggle between antithetical governing systems and beliefs, with the former championing those of the "free" world and the latter threatening universal enslavement and the expunction of all that was good. In his first statements as president, Reagan famously branded the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire", and its leaders as "people who will lie, deceive and cheat to achieve their aims". He cautioned his fellow Americans to remember the facts of history which told of the belligerent motives of the "Evil Empire", and not to be lulled by the claim that the arms race was the product of a simple misunderstanding. So fervent was Reagan's anti-Soviet rhetoric that he was described as the most ideologically motivated US president. If military might was the only way to check Soviet designs, and if the US hoped to recover the international prestige it had lost in the face of the expansion of Soviet influence, top priority would have to be given to carrying out a military build-up -- so went the thinking of the Reagan administration. It followed that Reagan would not continue implementation of the SALT 1 and SALT 2 disarmament agreements signed by his predecessors, agreements perceived to have worked only to the advantage of the Soviet Union. In addition, according to the thinking of this administration, even if the US agreed to enter new arms reduction negotiations that would only be after Washington was satisfied that it had accumulated sufficient military power to be able to negotiate from a position of strength and force Moscow to accept terms more favourable to the US. Reagan then set into motion the most ambitious armaments programme of any US administration in a time of peace. The programme culminated in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which set the arms race onto a previously unexplored direction, which the Soviets termed the "militarisation of space". When Reagan unveiled this initiative he declared that its aim was to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". However, Soviet leaders maintained that it upset the strategic balance between the two superpowers. The US would now have the advantage of a first strike capacity, which undermined the principle of equal security upon which the strategic balance had been based. In other words, if Moscow wanted to retain its superpower status, it would have to earmark enormous military allocations in order to compete in the new arena, which would further drain its already troubled economy. In addition to outstripping the Soviets militarily, the Reagan administration was also determined to check their influence in the Third World and eliminate their presence in Afghanistan, southern Africa and Central America. Signalling the inauguration of this policy, US officials warned Moscow: "The days of your reckless adventures in the Third World are over." According to some historians, the Reagan administration's Soviet policies accomplished their objectives. With its newly built-up arms and strategic weapons systems, the US had resuscitated its self-confidence, or as Reaganites put it: "America is tall again." The Reaganite school also maintains that these policies provided the initial impetus for the subsequent changes that took place in US-Soviet relations, especially between 1984 and 1988. Not only did the results of these policies lay the groundwork for the definitive shift from confrontation to negotiation and cooperation, they maintain, but they also stimulated the process of transformation taking place within the Soviet Union. Specifically, they hastened the long-awaited generational change and the rise of a Soviet leadership that was increasingly convinced that their country was in need of a "new way of thinking". It was this climate that brought Mikhail Gorbachev to power in March 1985 and drove him to revise the ideological, security, economic and foreign policy underpinnings of the Soviet system. Epitomising his ideological camp's conviction that their policies had triggered this transformation, Reagan in his farewell address said: "Our aim was to change a nation. Instead we changed the world." Reaganites boasted that it was Washington's ideological offensive against the Soviet Union and its leadership that had delivered the lethal blow to Moscow and confirmed the West's moral superiority. Behind this claim stands an entire political philosophy, according to which history is an ongoing battle between ideas and beliefs, on the grounds that, as Lenin put it, ideas are mightier than the gun. The proponents of this philosophy had nothing but contempt for the proponents of realpolitik, such as George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger. To them, Kissinger's programme for détente was a form of moral bartering and, hence, a process of unilateral ideological disarmament. Adherents to the Reagan school also held that this president's arms build-up -- and especially his SDI programme -- were the necessary prelude to the peace that followed. They argued that Soviet leaders only respected force and that arms build-ups were the only way to convince them that the West was still strong and determined to make the necessary sacrifices to resist any possible Soviet threat or pressure. On the effect of Reagan's military policy, his followers said that it had pitted the Soviets against two difficult alternatives: either they could try to compete with the US until they drove their country to bankruptcy, or they could abandon the race and thereby forfeit their only claim to superpower status. Indeed, they went so far as to contend that Reagan's armament programme was the only factor to have given a new dimension to the debate over whether the Soviet Union was in peril of becoming another Third World nation, one which was taking place towards the end of the Brezhnev era in the Russian military and academic establishments. Many research analysts are sceptical of the claim that Reagan's policies were ultimately responsible for ending the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union. It is inaccurate and fails to comprehend the events of the 1980s and the more profound forces that led to the end of the Cold War, they maintain. They explain that it is difficult to explain a major political and historical transformation by attributing it to a single factor, even if that factor is a superpower. Rather, such transformations are the product of the complex interaction between a multiplicity of factors and developments occurring on both sides of the conflict, if at varying degrees. According to the opponents of the Reaganite interpretation of events, the Cold War ended primarily because of the failure of the Soviet system itself, even if outside factors had hastened and intensified its crisis. They add that the primary problem of the Soviet Union was that it was unable to provide an acceptable standard of living for its people. Not only was its economic system cumbersome and inefficient, it could not sustain the burden of heavy military expenditure. Only to the extent that Soviet military expenditure was a response to Western armaments levels could it be said that the military build-up in the 1980s was the straw that broke the camel's back. Thus, the critics conclude, American policy under Reagan was no more than a contributing factor to Soviet decline. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, another detractor of the Reaganites' claims, maintains that credit for ending the Cold War cannot be attributed to the Reagan administration alone. Indeed, he argues, this outcome was the product of the cumulative effects of 40 years of sustained American efforts combined with 70 years of stagnation in communist thought and its application. On the other hand, in Kissinger's opinion, Reagan's success was due to the fortunate coincidence, character and opportunity. He said that the ideological stringency needed to rally American public opinion and the diplomatic flexibility, which the neoconservatives would never have accepted in any other president, were precisely what was needed at this time of Soviet weakness and self-doubt. In a New York Times editorial denying Republicans credit for ending the Cold War, US diplomat and Russian and Soviet affairs expert George Kennan wrote that the idea that an American government had the ability and power to decisively influence the internal interplay in another large country was "intrinsically silly and childish". A harsh critic of the emphasis the Reagan administration had placed on military might in dealing with the Soviet Union, Kennan holds that such hard-line policies caused the ruin of Gorbachev and his reforms and, more generally, "had the consistent effect of strengthening comparably hard-line elements in the Soviet Union". Contrary to the Reaganites' claims, what did ultimately tame the Soviet Union was the combination of a number of domestic factors, the most important of which were the Soviet people's disillusionment with the ability of their system of government to deliver on its material and social promises, the resentment felt by Soviet ethnic minorities at their subject status, and the growing awareness of the Soviet peoples of the world abroad and the gap between conditions of life at home and those in the industrialised nations in the West. These factors, according to Kennan, were what led Soviet leaders to conclude that only through radical reform would it be possible to curb the decline of the status and prestige of their country. * The writer is the executive director of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs.
