Reagan's Victory in the Cold War

``What is history but a fable agreed upon?'' — Napoleon Bonaparte.

Although there is a portion of history rooted in objective reality and truth, Napoleon expressed the conviction that the rewriting of history can control our perceptions of it. Memories grow dim, people die, and we come to rely on the reporting and interpretation of history. If you can control history, you can direct the future. Hence, there is an effort to suggest that Reagan did not win the Cold War.

In some sense, the question is, as mathematicians say, ``ill-posed.'' No one person can be totally responsible for winning a conflict. It is impossible to go back in time and substitute in a different president with different policies and test the hypothesis. The real question is: Did President Reagan's foreign policy and political leadership cause or hasten the demise of the Soviet Union?

Use the mind's eye to return to 1980. When Reagan was elected in 1980, the Soviets were occupying Afghanistan and Cuba was sponsoring armed Communist revolts in South and Central America. At the same time, Reagan was criticized by the Left for moving from the policy of Detente and returning to the Cold War. We, from the perspective of the 1990's, realize that Detente was merely a truce masquerading as a peace for those convinced we need to reach an accommodation with a permanent regime in the Soviet Union.

In the early 1980's, virtually no member of the Western intelligentsia argued that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. As usual, the intelligentsia was not too intelligent.

In fairness, even some of the staunchest opponents of the Soviet Union were convinced of the regime's robustness and longevity. Dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Mortal Danger asserted that the West should not hope that Afghanistan would burden the Soviet Union. He believed that the Soviet Union would swallow the Afghans with as much ease at it dominated Eastern Europe.

By comparison, Reagan was chided by many, especially the Left, for hopeless naivete in traveling to the British House of Commons in 1982, abandoning diplomatic euphemisms, explicitly noting the current and predicting the future ``decay of the Soviet Union.'' Smug academics ridiculed Reagan for referring to the Soviet Union as the ``Evil Empire'' and for asserting that the Soviet philosophy was condemned to the ``ash-heap of history.''

By the time Reagan left office in January 1989, the Soviet Union was in free-fall and Marxism was retreating from the forces of democracy across the Americas.