Mythbusters
Ronald Reagan’s supercharged renewal of the arms race and destruction of detente singlehandedly obliterated the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War, right? I mean, that’s what the wingnuts say. It’s been repeated so often that it’s conventional wisdom.
Except it’s not true. And thanks to an unintended consequence of wingnut welfare, there’s even more evidence that it’s not true. David Frum, hack, excerpts a paper paid for by the American Enterprise Institute and delivered by the former Prime Minister of Russia, calls it “deeply interesting”, and, of course, makes no mention of Ronnie Raygun.
What caused the Soviet Union to collapse? Its own lack of structural integrity; economically, the Soviet Union was dependent on oil exports to get hard currency to buy grain, since in its stupidity it had lost the ability to feed itself. When the price of oil fell in the mid 80s, it sounded the death knell of the Soviet Union. Frum acts as if this is a new thesis. Actually, even a retard like me in Ark-Tenn has known the facts of the Soviet collapse for so long that… well, I’ve damn near forgotten my sources. I think I first read the oil explanation in detail in one of Marvin Harris’s last efforts, while Dan Morgan’s Merchants of Grain, written in the 80s, told enough of the state of Soviet agriculture to make one understand that they were desperate. (I want to say Emmanuel Todd’s book goes with the same thesis as the AEI paper; I haven’t read it because it’s so expensive but that’s no excuse for Frum.)
If any external force was responsible for the Soviet collapse, what or who was it? Well, it was not Ronald Reagan himself, neither was it the fact that Reagan caused many more warheads to be aimed at Soviet targets (what warheads were aimed in the cheeriest days of detente were more than enough), nor still was it that St. Ronnie the Belligerent called the Soviet Union an Evil Empire and joked about nuking its cities on weekend radio. No, if one wants to give proper credit, it would go to the Saudis — you know, the same folks Frum the neocon loves to hate:
The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.
As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.
Who won the Cold War’s last battle? Well, absolutely not the senile old Tele-Prompter reader who, had he gone to the ends that Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, etal., were prodding him toward, would have left the world inhabitable to only cockroaches and Keith Richards. Nope, the world’s more complicated than that. Saudi Arabia won it in a sort of subtle yet devastating geopolitical counterblow to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The AEI paper proves it…
..which inspires the questions: Was this paper an accident? Why did this Russian AEI person just shit the bed at neocon central? How long til this paper is buried? Or, can they spin it to their advantage while maintaining their central myth that Reagan’s military spending destroyed Soviet Russia? What the hell is going on over there? I dunno. The paper is interesting, but not because of what it says — which is common sense — but more because of where it comes from, and who is pushing it to the public.
Well, maybe our new Saudi overlords have just decided it’s time to stop hiding behind the Carlyle/Halliburton figleaf, and are recalibrating the propaganda so the Amurkin Base will understand why this week’s chant is “Four legs good, two legs better.” I’m sure it has nothing to do with Halliburton’s CEO moving its headquarters to Dubai this week, because the protestors complaining that Halliburton is using both our military and our tax dollars to support joint Halliburton/Saudi global investments are uncivil and therefore must be wrong if not actually criminal. As the Catholic Church discovered many centuries ago, there’s nothing so easy to re-write as hagiography when fleeting political realities require a new lineup of Us versus Them, and neither Saint Ronnie nor the USSR are liable to complain on the evening news.
damn, i wish i could get a job writing for the national review. i, too, can produce megasentences (four commas! four!) and then paste excerpts of other people’s papers. and i’d do it for half of what they have to pay frum.
also, i love it when people accidentally tell the truth, thereby failing to support the tired old “nucular deterrance is teh bestest!!!11!eleventy-one!” argument. (an argument that is alive and kicking, and part of the justification for complex 2030, the most recent effort toward
increased nuclear proliferation. sigh.)
If a senile, mediocre actor was all it took to bring down the Soviets, what a LAME ASS cold war, man!*
One could probably make a comprehensive argument that the Cold War militarization drive was a major band-aid that kept the CCCP going all those years.
*Only three. I’ll try harder next time, Sarah.
The Reagan –>> Star Wars –>> USSR collapse myth is of course ridiculous. And the contraction “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War” is infuriating. But it’s not entirely legit to completely wave away the impact the Reagan/Thatcher movement had on the Cold War’s denouement. The driving factors behind the collapse of Soviet-Bloc Communism are pretty clear: the central factor was the immensely better performance of Western capitalist economies and the greater wealth of Western consumers, which was increasingly visible to Soviet-bloc audiences through new information technologies and detente-era exchanges. That combined with Soviet overextension (attempting continued Russian dominance over resentful East Europeans) and a million other weaknesses of the Soviet system. For that matter, the USSR’s own detente-era “peace movement” rhetoric helped lay the groundwork for the collapse, by washing away any justification for armed intervention in Eastern Europe when those regimes started to defect.
But you have to concede that the way the conservative Thatcher/Reagan movement formulated an ideology of capitalist abundance and freedom contributed to changing the thinking of Soviet elites; and it was ultimately this changed thinking, the hollowing out of any remaining faith in Communist ideology, that ate away the foundations of the Communist states. Laissez-faire capitalist Reaganite ideology offered a convincing explanation of why Communists countries were poor — an explanation that actually wasn’t too far from the truth. Reagan helped engender the collapse of the Soviet Bloc mainly by simply embodying the free-market critique of the state economy as an aggressive and powerful political force. And tens of millions of Russians and other East Europeans bought the critique. That did play a real role in the end of the Cold War. A few helicopters don’t collide in the Iranian desert, Carter wins a second term as President, and we might have seen a more gradual winding-down of Cold War tensions.
And that, a lot of people have been saying recently, might not have been a bad thing. For Russia, anyway, if not for Poland. But that’s another argument.
The other point on this is that Soviet defence spending was essentially flat through the 1980s.
Wait, I thought it was the pope and Solidarity that ended the cold war.
I thought it was Gorby’s birthmark that ended the Cold War.
Mattsteinglass, what Reagan said was little different from what Nixon had said, or Ike for that matter. Doubtful that this was news to the Soviet elites, and equally doubtful that they suddenly caught on that capitalism is good. Why is Russia poorer than the US? Perhaps because it does not have the same abundance of resources, together with only harmless enemies on its borders? America has an immense military out of choice, as a product the military-industrial complex, and as the club of US global hegemony. The USSR had one out of necessity, recalling memories of invasions from both Asia and Europe which were far more serious than Mexican immigrants or poisoned cat food from Canada.
High overhead with shaky revenues killed the Soviet Union, not a fresh breeze of freedom from the West.
From the commie’s paper: “While intellectual capacity was not the strongest
quality of the Soviet leadership, they still understood the need to manipulate the oil market.”
hmm….
Why is Russia poorer than the US? Perhaps because it does not have the same abundance of resources, together with only harmless enemies on its borders?
Russia actually has a pretty good resource base. What they lack – and have always lacked – is the capability to efficiently exploit those resources.
Bravo!!! Thanks for posting this, HTML. For some reason, we see very little push-back against the Reagan mythologies. It’s time we saw a lot more.
As for the statement “Reagan helped engender the collapse of the Soviet Bloc mainly by simply embodying the free-market critique of the state economy as an aggressive and powerful political force,” let’s mark that as falling somewhere between laughable and obscene. In truth, if the US had not been protected from invasion by two immense oceans, and by relatively non-bellicose neighbors to the North and South, we would not have seen the accumulation of wealth we have seen in the 20th century. As for laissez-faire economics, there isn’t any, at least not in the USA. With the advent of federal manipulation of the financial markets, a practice that began with Reagan, the US economy has been a de-facto Communist enterprise.
These pitiful Libertarians — they just never, ever seem to get it.
Blasphemy! St. Reagan will slay you heathens with the rays from a thousand anti-warhead satellites!
Our Ronnie was in Afganistan, bare torso glistening with sweat over well-muscled tan skin, two bullet belts forming a Greek cross over his chest, a fully loaded M60 in one hand, a grenade in the other. He personally shredded the Red Army! He went to Vietnam and rescued the POWs. And when he met with Gorby, Ronnie bitchslapped him into submission and forced him to withdraw from Eastern Europe. And when he went to take that last repose on the White House porcelain throne, Freedom shone out his behind.
Spencer has it about right. The real reason the USSR fell behind after WWII is because the economic infrastructure was never properly repaired. The primary reason for that is the unremitting economic warfare that has been waged by the Anglophilic nations. Even the Bush family got involved with Prescott ponying up the last million dollars needed to fund the Bolshevik Revolution.
The shoe I have been waiting to hear drop is the “tear down this wall” speech was made after the plans to tear it down were already in motion.
You’re not kidding about the “common sense” nature of the information in that AEI paper. I first learned about what was driving the Soviets into dissolution in a freaking Tom Clancy novel.
Let’s not forget the other myth of life under Ronnie “Makes Deals With Terrorists” Reagan – The Iranians were so afraid of Ronnie’s macho is why they released the hostages when he took office.
“EK said, (…)
From the commie’s paper: “While intellectual capacity was not the strongest
quality of the Soviet leadership, they still understood the need to manipulate the oil market.�
hmm….”
Seems to me it’s a common trend in neo- conservative think tanks to attack any problem as if the choice is between either altruism and utter corruption and imperialism. Since the US evidently must always be aggressively defending peace, liberty and so on – in any way possible, if the world is not supposed to spiral into almost certain chaos. While the intellectually “brilliant” among them come up with some form of compromise between the two. A compromise which consists of “accepting realities” and claiming to be doing the opposite. Because this is what constitutes wise&responsible leadership.
And unless this paper has a huge amount of factual analysis, and specifically described scenarios to sustain the analysis, if any, that leads to the conclusion (which I will hazard is unlikely). Then it’s yet another example of this form of dogmatic religious writing – writing not intended to inform anyone, but to tell people what they already believe – that these think- tanks chug out at a constant rate.
I mean, the republicans or the Bush- administration isn’t looking to Reagan for advice on how to run the country when it comes to practical things. So this type of analysis is needed to put their worship in context, etc.
(Which is funny, since Reagan probably didn’t care about tiny, insignificant details that might cause the destruction of the world either. Just like these people.)
Post WWII to Reagan, this country engaged in non-stop doublethink about the Soviet Union. One side of the narrative bespoke of an authoritarian system doomed to collapse from its own inherent flaws and vast inferiority, the other side, from our own government bureaucrats and countless Team B’s and Committees on the Present Danger, shrieked that the SU was a monolithic, all powerful enemy who had the capability to outspend us in the arms race—viz. missile gaps, space race, etc. For example, we were constantly told how America was behind the SU in the costliest of weapons systems, even when it was patently untrue.
It’s no surprise that St. Ronald would be credited with the collapse of the SU since we’re a simple-minded folk who view the rest of the world through our own narrow prism (see Middle East, the). Yet it’s interesting to read any writing about the end of the Cold War that doesn’t include the words Gorbachev, glasnost, and perestroika, or Chernyobl for that matter. The SU may have been an overextended economic basket case, but sometimes internal events and politics of a country may also have something to do with what happens to it, notwithstanding almighty U.S. and our Heroes of the American Union.
I thought it was Gorby’s birthmark that ended the Cold War.
And that Sting song.
The thing that makes me crazy about the “Reagan Beat the USSR” line is that he and his administration based their entire foreign policy on the “fact” that the totalitarian regime of the USSR could never, ever reform from the inside.
The only way such totalitarian regimes came to an end was through violence. That is why we needed the MX missle, etc. Because the only way the USSR could come to an end was through a war.
Then, when the EXACT OPPOSITE THING HAPPENED, when the USSR reformed, which the Reaganites claimed COULD NEVER EVER HAPPEN, they want to take credit for it. It is absolutely insane.
Bingo, fardels bear; the collapse totally destroyed the Kirkpatrick Doctrine. When it happened, The Pod, Mean Jeane, Jean-Francois CounterREVELution, Perle, all of them, caught in the tautology, said ‘wait, it’s a trap!’ They insisted the the Eastern Bloc would get the Hungary 56 treatment, which of course never happened. Then it was insisted that the whole thing was a fakeout to get us to drop our guard, that satellites or not, Gorby was restructuring and retrenching, forced to go to some nefarious Soviet plan b to deliver the counterstroke right when the hippies and liberals thought there was peace at last. Liars. Morons.
Our Ronnie was in Afganistan, bare torso glistening with sweat over well-muscled tan skin, two bullet belts forming a Greek cross over his chest, a fully loaded M60 in one hand, a grenade in the other . . .
And he’ll save Tarrance and Phillip too,
That’s what Ronnie Raygun’d do.
It seems more likely that a vulnerable dictatorship like that of the Soviets was sustained longer than its expected shelf-life precisely because it had an insanely aggressive enemy such as the US foreign policy establishment, which invaded and subverted nations throughout the world and continuously made directly bellicose moves toward the USSR.
The ability of regimes to justify their hold on power due to the threats they face from external enemies is well known; in this respect, the Bush Jr. and Reagan regime *copied* the Soviet Union, including their tendencies to spy on their own citizens and give the detained no rights to trial.
“The thing that makes me crazy about the “Reagan Beat the USSRâ€? line is that he and his administration based their entire foreign policy on the “factâ€? that the totalitarian regime of the USSR could never, ever reform from the inside.”
*Ding* That and the “fact” that the Soviets would never ever never never ever ever ever release its evil, icey grip on Afgahnistan – ever … all while the CIA and even Robert Gates were trying to convince the fundies inside the Reagan summer camp, that the Soviets were in the PROCESS of trying to get itself out of Afghanistan because they learned the hard way what it’s like to occupy a Muslim country in the middle of a jihad against it.
The post-Eisenhower GOP has never allowed reasonableness to get in the way of its blind ideology and fanaticism.
Agreed that the SU had a good base of natural resources — my point was that it didn’t have the same batshit insanely good resources that the US has, all of which, pretty much, is discretionary.
The USSR was in bad shape economically well before Lord Ronnie came along. Back in 1977 I picked up some day work at the docks in Houston loading sacks of wheat on Russian ships, sold at a discount by Pres Carter. And I seem to recall that the Saudis didn’t do us much of a favor with their little oil games.
Then, when the EXACT OPPOSITE THING HAPPENED, when the USSR reformed, which the Reaganites claimed COULD NEVER EVER HAPPEN, they want to take credit for it. It is absolutely insane.
And the neo-cons still get away this tactic today. Still insane, the lot of them.
When Reagan took office his first briefing from the CIA said that the USSR was bankrupt and collapsing but Reagan and the neocons wanted to build there star wars system so they did there best to carry the soviets for a couple more rounds in boxing lingo. So if the Soviets were finished when he took office Doesn’t that make my man Pres. Carter the Man ? Not really though no one man did it but 2 people who get a big chunk of the credit was the leader of solidarity Waleski? the strikes in Poland were the biggest nail in the USSR’s coffin, And the pope (John Paul II) for encouraging the Poles to throw off the communist yoke .
Of course Reagan and Bush I did play a part Like training and arming the Afgans including Bin Laden, Oh and they made sure we’d have this war buy trading arms to Iran then selling arms to Saddam to keep the 2 countries at war while their buddies made a nice profit and the American peop,s got cheap coke.
And Greg Palast says we went to war in Iraq to keep the price of oil up. Such crazy-talk!
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It drives me nuts that the “Reagan won the Cold War” myth has become conventional wisdom, even among Democrats. Were none of these people alive during the ’80s? I was only in elementary school at the time, but even I remember what those years were like, with all the fear mongering about how the Soviets would capture central America, then Mexico, then attack the USA, by God, unless we spent ourselves into a black hole and propped up oppressive regimes throughout the world. Nobody said “The USSR is collapsing. Let’s have a trillion-dollar defense buildup so they’ll destroy themselves trying to keep up.” Who would approve such an insane strategy? I mean just think about how insane that is.
Faced with declining world oil demand and increasing non-OPEC production, OPEC cut output significantly in the first half of the 1980s to defend its official price. Saudi Arabia, which played the role of swing producer in the cartel, bore most of the production cuts. Saudi Arabia crude oil product, which peaked at over 10 million barrels per day for the period October 1980 through August 1981, fell to just 2.3 million barrels per day by August 1985. In late 1985, Saudi Arabia abandoned its swing-producer role, increased production, and aggressively moved to increase market share.
The Saudi’s were acting in their own monetary interests. To increase market share the Saudi’s reduced the price of oil from 30$ to 9$ per barrel. This had the effect of cutting out higher priced oil producers and reducing the economic incentive for greater efficiency (the main reason for declining oil demand).
[…] Sadly, No! » Mythbusters Sadly, No! on why Ronald Reagan did not singlehandedly cause the Soviet Union to collapse. Rather, according to them, it was Saudi Arabia’s flooding of the market with their oil, thus causing oil prices to collapse and USSR revenues to fall. (tags: history reagan cold.war) […]
[…] (an apostacy that infuriated Richard Perle and Norman Podhoretz at the time), and the decline of the price of oil (more or less in that order) — the neocons were suddenly out of power. Those of us who lived […]
“Who won the Cold War’s last battle? Well, absolutely not the senile old Tele-Prompter reader who, had he gone to the ends that Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, etal., were prodding him toward, would have left the world inhabitable to only cockroaches and Keith Richards. Nope, the world’s more complicated than that. Saudi Arabia won it in a sort of subtle yet devastating geopolitical counterblow to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.”
That might embarrass some conservatives. Fortunately, Tom Clancy, never one to let the facts get in the way of his politics, released a novel this decade called “Red Rabbit” in which it comes out that the reason the Saudis manipulated the price of oil is that they were asked to do it by the Reagan administration (at the behest of American Superhero Jack Ryan himself). This is in the last pages, after Jack Ryan has spent most of the novel explaining to anyone who’ll listen that the Soviet Union is just a broken, dysfunctional system on the verge of collapse if only America gives it a little push in the right direction.
Which is freaking funny, because if you read the novels written by Tom Clancy himself just fifteen years earlier, when that stuff was actually going on, neither he nor his fictional hero were even close to that in their actions and beliefs. “Cardinal of the Kremlin,” written in 1988, features the beginning of a laser arms race with a USSR that’s not only militarily and scientifically capable but actually ahead of the U.S. in that respect. It also features the main characters worrying that if the Soviets liberalize their economy enough to make it work, they might become efficient enough to be a real threat again. The thing that really shines through in Clancy’s Cold War books, though, is that NO ONE at the time had a clue that the Soviet Union was coming down, and certainly no one had any kind of an active plan to help it along the way. In his universe, the world was still a dark grim place in which the Cold War was pretty much destined to go on forever.
Might seem like a silly thing to focus on, but popular fiction says a lot about the beliefs and the outlooks of different nations and movements. It’s even more true with Tom Clancy, who’s routinely portrayed through the media as some kind of foreign policy czar – hilarious to anyone who’s actually tried to fact-check him, this “Reagan won the Cold War” shit is just the tip of the iceberg.