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25-Aug-2004

The Myth of Reagan and the End of the Cold War

by: Jess Orlik

North America: Reagan’s involvement in ending the Cold War was primarily ideological; the collapse of the Soviet regime began years before he came to power.

The arms race, posited by America as a means of defending itself against the threat of attack from the Soviets, served as a smokescreen behind which America could legitimately increase it’s nuclear capabilities, developing a more advanced offensive military system. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev called for the mutual reduction of offensive military forces, believing that America was using the arms race to destroy the far weaker Soviet economy. Incredibly, President Eisenhower declined.

America’s fight against communism continued in Vietnam, and their unsuccessful involvement resulted in deep divisions amongst the American people and a feeling of dissatisfaction with the government.

Under Reagan in the 1980’s the attention of the American people was directed away from the worsening economic situation at home on to the perceived threat posed by the Soviets. Reagan was keen to demonstrate US supremacy and did so by constructing an enemy who in reality posed little threat. The Soviet economy was weak, it could not recover from the massive military spend engendered by the arms race. By contrast America was economically and technologically powerful due in part to the rise of Information Technology and software.

In the end it was the actions of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachov, coupled with a failing economy and the non-violent protests of ordinary people that brought about the end of the Cold War and the Soviet regime, but “since the USSR was to collapse just after the end of the Reagan era, American publicists were naturally to claim that it had been overthrown by a militant campaign to break and destroy it.”

During the Cold War the Reagan administration found it useful to perpetuate a climate of fear, much as George Bush is doing today using the rhetoric of the ‘terrorist threat’, in order to drum up support for actions that do not serve the interests of ordinary people. Reagan was primarily interested in constructing an aura of American supremacy and in undermining an economic regime that was inherently incompatible with the American model of free market capitalism and was therefore a barrier to American economic domination.

Source: Eric Hobsbawm “The Age of Extremes”