permafrost wrote:
Decades of constant economic sanctions were what ended the USSR. Reagan simply was the president at the time of the collapse..
The rest of your post has been rebutted time and again.. not going to bother today..
Dream as you wish..
That is total Barak Manure. If the Soviet Union had been in a decrepit condition going into Reagan's Presidency in comparison to America maybe, perhaps, possibly you might be .01 % right, but of course that was not the case. Lets us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, the Reagan Presidency rides again.
Coming out of the 1970s I would argue that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in a relatively better condition economically and most certainly militarily than the United States of America.
The United States militarily had not fully recovered from the strains of the Vietnam War. Our military had been worn down from those years. Take in also the fact that Jimmy Carter had starved the Military to deal with the budgetary strains and rampant inflation of his later years. Oil production in the US had not kept up with demand and you had the energy crisis. Economically and therefore militarily the US was in decline. Other countries could take advantage of our relative weaknesses, which of course Iran did with the hostage crisis.
So going into the 80s America was not very impressive. Culturally we had the 60s rot from the hippie generation who were just beginning to claw their way into the power structures of America. All of those anti war radicals like Hillary Clinton. Fresh from their intoxicating anti Nixon days these cultural parasites were a drag on the morale of America. So we have established the pathetic condition of America that Ronald Reagan inherited from Mr. Peanut.
What of the USSR ? They had rot of their own that set in during the late 1960s. Their command and control economy which had worked so well during the great patriotic war with Hitler was sputtering. The military was consuming too much of GDP. Where in the West the spoils of the economy went to evil capitalists, in the Soviet Union it went strictly to party leaders. Unlike in the West there was no middle class, and unlike the Western capitalists who have incentives to invest in economically valuable assets, Soviet party leaders had no incentives and little knowledge of how to allocate resources efficiently. Political loyalty and not economic success was what they were paid for.
These problems in the Soviet economy were worrisome long term but not especially acute through the 1970s. The Soviet Union was able to deal with the strains without cutting military spending or it's foreign adventurism. In the mid 70s Brezhnev attempted to control the increase in military spending with arms treaties with the West. In the late 1970s things began to worsen. The Soviet adventure in Afghanistan started and began to strain the economy, not just because of the military commitment, but by Western trade retaliations for it.
I concede that the Reagan Presidency began during a shift in the fortunes of the Soviet Empire, but I do not agree that it was inevitable that the Empire would begin it's collapse during his term in office. Soviet leadership had the problem of cutting it's military spending in order to reform and incentivize it's economy just as Reagan came in. The problem was two fold. Their military was part of their political control so cutting back there jeopardized the Communist hold on power. Also the military was entrenched and would resist any spending cutbacks.
I contend that the Soviets would have survived all of these strains on their system if not for the leadership of Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. They stood up to the Soviets. They opposed them in Afghanistan by giving aid to the Mujahedin. They encouraged dissidents in Russia and it's Warsaw Pact slave states. Reagan's increase in military spending forced even more military spending by the Soviet Union at a time when their only long term hope for survival was to decrease it.
Part of the problem with the USSR was it's aged political leadership which was not up to the new challenges of dealing with the changing world and Reagan. They were old men who could not change and they kept dying. Gorbachev was a new young leader who tried to reform the system and actually he and Reagan trusted one another not to blow up the world. By the time Gorbachev came along it was too late for the half measures he tried to implement. After 70 or so years of oppression the Soviet citizens were not going to give him the time to reform his collapsing economic model and he was too much of a Communist to totally scrap it.