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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

"In later years, however, former Soviet officials cited SDI as a factor in the eventual collapse of their country, for it showed that the Soviet Union was politically unprepared for and economically incapable of competing in a new arms race with the United States, especially one led by someone as unrelenting as Reagan."

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ronald-Reagan/Relations...

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It had a lot more to do with changes that were already in progress. The soviet union hadn’t been able to care for its citizens for a while. Most tellingly, life expectancy had been declining. In the late 70s/early 80/ there were elements within the us government strongly arguing, based on this and other data, that the USSR would collapse within a decade, but the cold warriors laughed at them.

It had a lot more to do with changes that were already in progress. The soviet union hadn’t been able to care for its citizens for a while. Most tellingly, life expectancy had been declining. In the late 70s/early 80s there were elements within the us government strongly arguing, based on this and other data, that the USSR would collapse within a decade, but the cold warriors laughed at them.

Note “a factor” - you could say the same about the peaceful space program, computer age, biotech, etc. Most of the world was advancing faster than the USSR in every way and there’s no reason to think that arc wouldn’t have continued under a second Carter administration.

I mean you can guess that might have happened, but I can't imagine a weak president like Carter saying "Tear down that wall" or calling USSR the evil empire.

He didn’t have Reagan’s stage presence to be sure, but did either of those really change what actually happened to the USSR? I’m pretty certain most of the work was being done by socioeconomic factors which weren’t affected by sound bites.

"And according to Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University and the history consultant for CBS News, many observers saw the speech as "disastrous." Communist leaders were critical of the remarks, and even West Berlin's then-mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, was wary.

"We were all a little more skeptical than American politicians -- the significance and the chances of tearing down the wall, there we were skeptical," he recalled in an interview years later.

"It was not well-received within the foreign policy community or the pundit class," Brinkley said, in an interview with CBS. "Many people called foul."

As Brinkley notes, however, history has been kind to the president's speech.

"It's seen as a turning point in Cold War," he said. "I think Reagan's speech bolstered the morale of the pro-democracy movement in East Germany."

"There was a movement that was growing and building toward liberalization and this gave great impetus to it in the aftermath," added Duberstein. "Even though people in the Soviet Union thought the speech was provocative, it worked."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/remembering-reagans-tear-down-t...

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