Me: > Given the overwhelming leftist bias of most academic historians, > it's hard to imagine how this could play out, whatever you > think of Reagan. As our distance from the political battles of > the 1980s increases, it seems almost inevitable that his > rating will improve, simply because there will be fewer historians > who remember him as their hated conservative enemy and more who consider him as the man who was elected in 1980 (when the most important IR > book of the last generation or so, _War & Change in World Politics_ was > published and spent its last chapter on how the US would deal with the > Soviet Union's _inevitable_ rise to equality in terms of world power) and > left office in 1989 with the USSR almost on its knees. This is not a small > change, to put it mildly. >
Doug: You, may be right Gautam, but its always been my contention that the Soviet Union was doomed to failure with or without -- Doug Me again: Oh, I'm sure it would have failed eventually as well, but there's the question of _how_. It could have failed slowly, in a gradual collapse that gave its leaders time to realize what was happening and take drastic measures - or quickly, as it did. It could have failed but, at the point of failure, maintained a conventional superiority in Europe that tempted it to invade and prop itself up off the spoils of conquest. But that too did not happen, because of the Reagan defense buildup. History suggests that negotiating the collapse of a Great Power and the realignment of the new power structure is one of the most difficult feats in all of diplomacy - the European powers botched it so badly in the early 20th century that it lead to the First World War. Communism was a catastrophically bad idea, of course - although it's easy to forget that when Reagan said things like that in the early 1980s it was treated like a controversial statement - but there were many ways for it to fail, and Reagan managed to negotiate it in such a way that the world got something that fairly closely resembled the best possible outcome. The failures in the economic restructuring of the post-Soviet states that came _after_ his term were certainly not his fault, and were probably unavoidable in any case. Gautam
