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Did Ronald Reagan and his policies win the Cold War?
End of Cold War Source I
By the time Ronald Reagan became president in January 1981, the Cold War had entered one of its most
confrontational periods. Despite some initial signs of promise, the movement toward relaxed relations between the
superpowers in the 1970s had collapsed in the wake of Soviet aggression and Western responses to it. Even though
President Jimmy Carter had begun to devote substantial U.S. resources to a military buildup, the American people
elected Reagan on a vociferously anti-communist platform. Believing communism to be an evil and morally
bankrupt ideology, Reagan, during his tenure as president, repeatedly criticized the Soviet Union and predicted its
demise.
Throughout his administration Reagan oversaw a wide variety of diplomatic and military challenges to the power of
the Soviet Union. Anti-communist governments and guerrilla movements in the Third World, especially in
Nicaragua and Afghanistan, received large amounts of U.S. military and economic support. The American defense
buildup continued with the growth of the armed forces and introduction of substantial technological innovations.
The nuclear deterrent of the United States was enhanced by the deployment of Pershing II cruise missiles in Western
Europe in 1983 and the declared intention of the administration to develop a ballistic-missile-defense system based
in orbit. Economically, the Reagan administration annulled many commercial agreements with the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) and adopted policies intended to deny the Soviets the ability to develop or even
stabilize their economy through trade with the West and exports of their natural resources. Until the last two years
of the administration, Soviet attempts to ameliorate tensions were by and large ignored.
By the time Reagan left office in 1989, the Soviet Union was in serious trouble. Almost every communist regime in
the Third World was on the verge of being toppled; the communist governments of Eastern Europe, under Soviet
control for more than forty years, had all fallen. Soviet military power and diplomatic influence were incapable of
stopping these events. Within the Soviet Union itself, government-sponsored programs of reform produced little,
while proponents of radical reform and democratization demanded and gained concessions from Moscow. Over the
next two years the U.S.S.R. faced serious domestic crises that resulted in the collapse of its communist system and in
the actual disintegration of the union. Many people believed the Cold War was over, but how significant were
Reagan's policies in bringing that about?
Viewpoint I:
Yes. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War through a combination of aggressive containment and economic warfare.
The policies of the Reagan administration won the Cold War. Under diplomatic, military, and economic pressure
from the United States, the Soviet Union found itself increasingly unable to function. Within three years of Ronald
Reagan's departure from office, the tumultuous decline of the Soviet Union led to its physical disappearance.
Although many scholars suggest that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) was faced with inevitable
collapse and that Reagan's policies did nothing to help that process along, the fact of the matter is that his
administration played a decisive role in precipitating the decline and fall of the Soviet Union.
Reagan entered office in 1981, with strong personal notions of good and evil. For a long time he had seriously
believed that communism was the greatest threat to liberty and that it had to be destroyed. The Soviet Union, in his
eyes, was quite literally an evil empire. Like many other critics of detente, Reagan fundamentally rejected the notion
that a proven aggressor could be bargained with or bribed into becoming a guarantor of international peace, to
transpose into plainer language former secretary of state Henry Kissinger's doctrine of granting closer commercial
and diplomatic ties in exchange for Soviet geopolitical restraint.
Reagan applied his ideas assiduously in the international arena. The rival strategy of containment, the historical
counterpart to detente, did not go far enough in the minds of leading personnel in the administration. While the
reactive qualities of containment were intended to resist further expansion, they nevertheless confirmed indefinite
Soviet influence in the regions in which Moscow was established. The Reagan administration adopted a relatively
simple threefold approach in its relationship with the Soviet Union. First, it determined to "roll back" Soviet
influence the world over, including its previously secure (with respect to its confrontation with the West) position
around its periphery. Secondly, the Reagan administration undertook an aggressive program of economic warfare to
spoil Soviet attempts at modernization and development. Finally, it adopted as its formal goal the fundamental
restructuring of the Soviet regime through the accumulation of political, economic, and military pressure.
All three of these policy approaches were successful. Attempts to roll back what the Soviet Union had gained since
World War II began soon after Reagan entered office. In its first year the administration identified points where the
Soviet foreign presence was most vulnerable. In Nicaragua the revolutionary Marxist regime of the Sandinistas had
recently come to power and begun facilitating the supply of Marxist guerrillas in neighboring Latin American
countries. Reagan authorized support for the pro-American governments under assault and, beginning in 1981,
authorized Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) support for the anticommunist resistance (the contras) within
Nicaragua. No Latin American countries fell into the Soviet orbit in the years that followed, and the recently
established Marxist government in Grenada was deposed by a U.S. invasion in October 1983. Although fluctuating
Congressional restrictions on aid to the contras hindered their progress, the Sandinistas lost control of the country
and were ousted democratically in 1990.
Within the Eastern bloc the Reagan administration saw anti-Soviet resistance in Poland and Czechoslovakia as an
opportunity to destabilize Soviet power in those countries. Although the Polish government had resorted to martial
law, mass arrests, and military rule to prevent the spread of the dissenting Solidarity movement in 1980-1981, the
Reagan administration provided crucial financial, material, and moral support to the movement. Enlisting the
support of the Vatican—and even the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFLCIO), no friend of the administration to be sure, but consistent in its commitment to workers' rights—to help supply
both Solidarity and the Czechoslovak Charter 77 movement, Reagan kept both groups alive and operating. They
blossomed into leading democratic parties when free elections were allowed in those countries later in the decade.
Further afield, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 had dangerously exposed Moscow to a
potential Vietnam scenario of its own. While the Carter administration and most of the rest of the world had
denounced the Soviets and reflected their disapproval in largely passive-policy decisions, such as boycotting the
1980 Moscow Olympics, Reagan implemented an active policy to drive the Soviets out and inflict substantial losses
on them. Throughout the 1980s consistent support to the mujahideen, the anticommunist Afghan resistance, flowed
from the United States. As it had done in its efforts to support East European dissent, the Reagan administration
enlisted the help of other interested parties. Saudi Arabia matched American financial assistance to the mujahideen
dollar for dollar. Pakistan allowed the transit of supplies across its territory and the training of Afghan guerrillas on
its soil.
The results for the Soviet Union were catastrophic. It soon became apparent that the regime of Babrak Karmal, the
pro-Soviet puppet leader of the country, could not sustain itself without a constant Soviet military presence. More
than thirteen thousand Soviet soldiers died in the fighting, and the number of wounded and diseased ran into the
hundreds of thousands. From the mid 1980s the mujahideen was strong enough to attack targets inside Soviet
territory. It even broadened its operations to include the massive dissemination of illegal Islamic literature into the
Central Asian republics, which destabilized Soviet power there, too. Until the Soviets finally withdrew in February
1989, Afghanistan was an open wound into which Reagan ground salt.
The cost of the conventional war in Afghanistan was only the beginning of economic troubles for the Soviet Union.
Perceiving a general stagnation in the Soviet economy, Reagan used American technological advantages and ability
to sustain higher defense spending to challenge Moscow to an arms race it could never hope to win. Indeed, even
though U.S. defense spending reached a relatively high level, it never exceeded 8 per cent of its Gross Domestic
Product (GDP), while the Soviets invested anywhere between 15 and 40 percent of their significantly smaller GDP
in military expenditures. Even as the United States embarked on an unprecedented military buildup, its increase in
defense spending (starting in earnest in 1983) was complemented by an economic boom that ended the chronic
stagflation of the Carter years, caused federal tax revenue to double by 1989, and laid the groundwork for the
impressive economic growth of the 1990s.
Thanks to the prudent fiscal policies of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, Reagan was able to take
advantage of a broad domestic base. The consistent Soviet reliance on high expenditures for the military and heavy
industry, together with a crushing political system that destroyed initiative and efficiency, had simultaneously
weakened its domestic economy and left long-term modernization in any area extremely vulnerable. The United
States could afford a major defense buildup; the Soviet Union could not. Despite assertions to the contrary from
proponents of detente, intelligence assessments in the early 1980s made this fact abundantly clear to the
administration. Committed as he was to the destruction of communism, Reagan implemented policies designed to
disrupt attempts to modernize the economy of the U.S.S.R. and exacerbate its existing economic difficulties. Early
in his administration, Reagan determined to halt commercial trade that had allowed Moscow to acquire high
technology for both military and industrial purposes. Detente-era commercial relationships between the United
States and the Soviet Union, with the notable exception of American grain exports, largely came to a halt. The
administration outlawed high-technology sales and enforced newly revived legislation that compelled foreign
subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to obey American statute law in their trade practices. Diplomatic efforts were
made, albeit with mixed success, to prevent West European countries from selling indigenous high-tech products, or
those based on American know-how, to the Soviet Union. Subtle attempts to sabotage Soviet modernization plans
were also adopted. Taking advantage of Soviet desperation to buy or steal Western technology, for industrial
espionage had become an important Komitet gosudctrstvennoy bczopasnosti (KGB, or Committee for State
Security) activity, William T- Casey's CIA found out what Moscow wanted and arranged for products with defective
components or faulty blueprints to fall into Soviet hands.
The international petroleum market was another arena in which Reagan tried aggressively to best the Soviets.
Moscow had a history of trying to enrich itself by exporting oil. Even as early as the Eisenhower administration this
policy had been cause for concern. By the 1980s the Soviet Union relied on oil sales to produce between 60 and 80
percent of its hard-currency earnings. The degree of its reliance on oil exports was a major vulnerability. Part of the
assault on Soviet attempts to acquire high technology involved a series of measures that caused the failure of the
Urengoi pipeline, which was designed to move large quantities of Siberian oil to West European markets. The
deregulation of oil, and successful negotiations with Saudi Arabia [and other Arab nations to reduce international oil
prices, both helped to reenergize the U.S. economy and caused tremendous harm to Soviet purchasing power in
international trade. It has been calculated that every one dollar decrease in the price of oil per barrel caused the
U.S.S.R. to lose as much as $500 million in hard-currency earnings. By prices had fallen about 75 percent, or per
barrel. American intelligence noted increasing, yet unsuccessful, Soviet attempts to compensate by exporting
weapons and precious metals. Soviet attempts to modernize went nowhere.
As if that was not enough, once the rise in defense spending began to take form in 1983, Reagan announced his
intention to develop the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a ballistic-missile-defense system based in outer space.
Although many critics believed it would destabilize relations or be technologically unfeasible, the prospect of an
antinuclear shield sent the Soviet leadership, already conscious of its growing technological inferiority, into
paroxysms. Some estimates suggest that the Soviets spent as much $50 billion in research and development to find a
way to counter the American system.
Just as a large part of the Soviet leadership, led at first by Yuri Andropov and then by his protégé Mikhail
Gorbachev, began to believe that improved relations with the West would relieve pressure on Soviet economic
development and allow Moscow to devote more resources to domestic spending, social improvements, and
economic restructuring, they were faced with an insuperable challenge. It is important to remember that Reagan saw
no place for communism in the future, and was personally and politically committed to its destruction. For years he
refused to hold summits with Soviet leaders. When the superpowers did discuss arms control, the Soviet conditional
predication of any deal on the elimination of SDI, a prerequisite abandoned only in 1987, betrayed its obsession with
defusing U.S. military superiority.
The combined effect of these policies on the Soviet Union was tremendous. Reagan's resolve in checking and
reversing Soviet expansion around the world forced the Soviets to choose between maintaining a high level of
military spending and losing their international prestige. Domestic political stability was thereby threatened because
of Leonid Brezhnev's heavy reliance on pretensions to Soviet great-power status and the ideological superiority of
socialism. The collapse of communist regimes in the Third World and the draining mire of the Afghan war, events
that would almost certainly not have occurred without the firm commitment of the Reagan administration, allowed
the Soviets neither to achieve the modernization of their economy and society nor to save geopolitical face. Rather
than expanding commercial and diplomatic relationships to help the U.S.S.R. modernize, just as advocates of
"engaging" China have successfully done in more recent times, restricting those ties and adopting policies that
amounted to economic warfare condemned Moscow to financial disaster. The pursuit of an arms race based on high
technology that the Soviet Union simply did not possess, particularly with regard to the Strategic Defense Initiative,
in addition to the less overtly belligerent policies, condemned the U.S.S.R. to oblivion. Reagan won.
PAUL DU QUENOY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY
Selected Bibliography
Garthoff, Raymond L. The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations at the End of the Cold War. Washington,
D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994.
Kennedy, Paul Kennedy. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to
2000. New York: Random House, 1987.
Odom, William E. The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998.
Schweizer, Peter. Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994.
Weinberger, Caspar W. Fighting For Peace: Seven Critical Tears in the Pentagon. New York: Warner, 1990.