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Comment by rolux | Hacker News Reader

You may want to read the actual article. It says pretty much exactly that.

> In the decades since, many Americans have come to believe that the wall fell thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s direct, personal intervention. In a 1987 speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in a divided Berlin, he told Soviet leaders to “tear down this wall” — and so, we’ve been told, they did.

> This misreading of the actual fall of the wall is, at best, incomplete; at worst, it’s dangerous, contributing to the belief that American leaders can go “from Berlin to Baghdad,” shaping world events while ignoring the complex realities of the locals.

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Yes, sorry for being unclear. The article is a good thing and hopefully helps to clean up the misconception that Reagan single-handedly liberated us. My impression of him was more that he was a diehard cold-warrior who'd rather start dropping the nukes. Basically the western equivalent of Brezhnev and pretty much the opposite of Gorbatchev. But that was a long time ago, and I was a teen in the 80's so my memory might be a bit off.

From my viewpoint in the US, a bit off.

E.g. he resumed food exports to the USSR; I can't find the quote, but I remember something like "we don't use food as a weapon".

The attacks on the USSR were, rhetoric aside, a lot more subtle: bleed it in Afghanistan, deny it hard currency by keeping the price of oil down with the help of the Saudis, and resist and sabotage the export of gas to Western Europe. Further their military bankruptcy, $$$ and capabilities (already in bad shape due to supplying the equipment for 3 complete armored armies to North Vietnam), by continuing Carter's late in the game rearmament program, and make their Strategic Rocket Forces potentially obsolete with SDI (even a partly effective strategic defense negates a counterforce first strike capability). Countering the Soviet's theater nuclear SS-23 deployment. And of course support those in Eastern Europe resisting the occupation.

Or even seemingly small things: ending the Brezhnev Doctrine by taking back the tiny island of Grenada. I've read from many behind the Iron Curtain that that sent shockwaves across it, for it was the first time the US used main force to take back a Communist country. It signaled something important, like Reagan's firm rhetoric.

Diehard Cold Warrior, yes, but a lot more subtle than would "rather start dropping the nukes". He wanted to free those trapped behind the Iron Curtain, not kill them.

Sounds like we're about the same age. I sort of had this impression of Reagan when I was a teen in the US, having grown up in a decidely Democrat household and most of my friends having been as well (university faculty brats, mostly). He was certainly hated and ridiculed in the popular media and entertainment, for the most part.

As I grew up and gained some perspecitve I have come to see Reagan in a much more favorable light.

Can you provide any examples related to Reagan being a risk to start dropping nukes? Or where he ever said or gave the impression that his preference was to start dropping nukes?

I think you're extremely wrong in your character assessment. There are numerous books available on Reagan in relation to what he actually said and wrote about his time as President, none of it indicates he was eager to start a nuclear war.

I can believe that flohofwoe honestly got that impression growing up behind the Iron Curtain (per his website, 12 in 1984). Heck, at the time most of the US Main Stream Media (MSM) portrayed Reagan as being like that. I'll bet that if he tuned into the BBC back then he'd had heard the same thing.

Although we had West German TV in the area I lived I might have been influenced by Eastern propaganda of course (and by MTV with Frankie's "Two Tribes" music clip) ;) TV and magazines were full of how the US is moving the arms race into space (SDI or 'Star Wars' program) in the mid-80's, while 'of course' the Soviet Union was only interested in peaceful research of space.

According to "Command and Control," Regan at one point sincerely proposed to Gorbachev that both countries completely eliminate their nuclear weapons, much to the chagrin of his military advisors.

I don't think a significant number of people actually think Reagan was responsible for the wall coming down. I think the article projects that opinion onto the populace as a straw man to make its point work.

Presidents (mostly rightly) get the credit or blame for what happens on their watch. Reagan was not there opening the gate on that night, no, but his policies and strategy to bring an end to the Soviet Union made it possible for that to happen.

I think the best thing Reagan did was not fuck it up.

The soviet union's collapse was inevitable because their government system simply didn't work, and that reality was starting to land on them in the mid-80's when oil prices started to fall as a catalyst.

Of course, a lot can be said for not fucking it up. I'm not trying to minimize it (much) but I don't think it's fair to say the Soviet Union's fall was due in any part to any "strategy" of the west. At best our strategy helped the fall happen a little faster, but it was inevitable.

You believe it's essentially coincidental that Reagan was the first and only President to have the goal of ending the Soviet Union, not "containing" it? Or as I've noted elsewhere in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=8577120) that the oil price fall just happened?

There were very few people at the time that considered it "inevitable". As late as 1989, that very year, Paul Samuelson, in the introductory university text on economics, still claimed that "[T]he Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and thrive." The conventional wisdom of our ruling class at the time was that the Soviet Union was solid enough that Reagan's material attacks on it were folly, and therefore unjustifiably dangerous.

> You believe it's essentially coincidental that Reagan was the first and only President to have the goal of ending the Soviet Union, not "containing" it?

Coincidental with what? The actual policy change of "Reagan's" that is usually credited for destroying the Soviet Union is the escalated military buildup -- a policy conceived and initiated late in the Carter Administration.

And the actual collapse of the Soviet Union occurred during the first Bush Administration.

In order for there to be even a coincidence, there'd have to be something for this alleged "first and only" status to be coincident with.

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