Doug: You say he authored the push but in no way was responsible for the injuries that resulted from the fall?
Me: No, I'm saying that the injuries were self-inflicted. Transitioning over from Communism is difficult. I've become something of an expert on this topic thanks to my new job. An example - we now estimate that, by 1985, _60%_ of Soviet industry was _negative value-added_. That is, the stuff coming out of the factory was worth less than the raw materials going into the factory. This is nothing short of mind-boggling. Doug: I maintain that the push needn't have been so hard and that the upheaval in Eastern Europe and Russia's economic problems wouldn't have been as severe had the process been more gradual. I also believe that we came closer to a world wide conflict as the result of our meddling than we would have had we allowed events to proceed more naturally. Of course we probably wouldn't be as dominant as we now are.... -- Doug Me: You'd need some evidence of that, and I think you'd be very, very hard pressed to find it. There are three canonical examples of a bipolar conflict in international affairs - Athens vs. Sparta, Rome vs. Carthage, and the US vs. the USSR. I maintain that Europe in the few years before the First World War is a good example of a fourth, but that's a somewhat controversial interpretation - we can get into it if you're interested. Anyways, of those three, the first two were resolved by massive warfare. Athens lost to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and Carthage was destroyed by Rome. The third, however, ended peacefully. This was not an accident. It was a product of deliberate policy - the remarkable efforts of the Reagan Administration and, equally, the truly extraordinary diplomatic skill of the first Bush Administration, detailed very well in the marvelous _A World Transformed_ by Scowcroft and Bush Sr. The push had to be hard because international relations is not something conducted with perfect information. It is very easy for you, now, where there are no consequences to your views, to say, gee, if it had just been calibrated a little bit more carefully, a slightly better outcome might have occurred, and that shows that Reagan was incompetent. This is a caricature of your views, of course, but not much of one, from what I can tell. But that's not how these things work, because international politics is a lot harder to do than that. It's the greatest, most difficult game in human history. Reagan came into office in 1981 at a point in time when the general feeling in the US and around the world was that the United States was losing the Cold War, with Soviet-American relations deteriorating with extraordinary speed. Brezhnev's USSR was pushing _very_ hard. Reagan decided, for the first time since JFK was in office, to push back, and push back as hard as he possibly could. The consequence of that was the shattering of the Soviet Empire. Hundreds of millions of people living under one of the most brutal tyrannies in human history got to live in democracies instead. The roster of countries restored to freedom (or at least somewhat better governments) is incredible. East Germany. Poland. Czechoslovakia. Romania. Bulgaria. Lithuania. Latvia. Estonia. The Ukraine. Belarus. And, not least, Russia itself. I could go on. _Even if_ I agreed with your criticisms about the push being too hard - and I don't, because 1 - I don't think it was, any less and the outcome could have been very much worse, ranging anywhere from a Soviet invasion of Western Europe (successful) to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe (failed) to nuclear war and 2. There was no way to judge it that closely in advance _anyways_ - I would say that it's nothing more than quibbling around the edges. This was one of the most extraordinary diplomatic triumphs in history, and it seems to me that you have to really, really _want_ to blame Reagan to say that it was anything other than a remarkable achievement. It's equivalent, in my mind, to the right-wing insanity of saying that FDR handled the Second World War poorly because he didn't set up our post-war strategic situation in such a way that we had an advantage over Stalin. Now, that's true, and it was a mistake on his part, and I think that's actually a _fairer_ criticism than the one you're making of Reagan. But so what? The man _won the Second World War_. This isn't a trivial thing, obviously. Saying, "If he had a stronger line at Yalta, things would have been different 10 years down the road" is both true and irrelevant. When contrasted to the extraordinary scale of what he _did_ do, and the extraordinary difficulty of doing that, it just doesn't matter in terms of historical assessment. Gautam
