July 27, 2007
Reagan as Military Victor Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:15 PM EST Fred Allen writes “Fred Smoler and Alex Burns have basically been asking why so many Americans think Reagan was their greatest President when usually, around the world and through time, people name the winner of a major war as their greatest leader. Isn’t it possible that people think Reagan was the winner of a major war—the Cold War?” The traditional argument that Reagan did something that won the Cold War holds that Reagan’s defense budgets exhausted the Soviets while his moral clarity debunked them. I do not find either part of this argument particularly plausible. Most American Cold War Presidents, probably all American Cold War Presidents, were fairly explicit about their conviction that the United States was morally superior to the Soviet Union, and most of them spent a healthy chunk of money on defense. As it happens, most of the great strategic investments of the 1980s—assuming for the sake of the argument that those were what did the trick—were authorized by Jimmy Carter, who also championed human rights in the East Bloc, and who began aiding anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan (another alleged cause of our Cold War victory) six months before the Soviet invasion of 1979—and I say all of this as someone who has grown to think less and less of Jimmy Carter. So while it is certainly possible that people think Reagan won the Cold War, I am not sure why they think this. Even if they do think it, it seems implausible to admire as a military victor someone who never waged victorious war on any foe more formidable than Grenada, an occasion he absurdly called our finest hour, while allowing our forces to be massacred and driven into the sea in Beirut. Even by the most generous assessment, it is hard to argue that Reagan won the Cold War, since the Soviet Union disappeared on the next President’s watch, and the crucial decision, the Central Committee’s agreement to give up its monopoly of power, only occurred on February 7, 1990, also occurred on Bush’s watch. In any case, why admire the alleged and improbable victor of the Cold War more than one admires as victors people who commanded the forces that destroyed Hitler’s Reich?
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