Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
All this meta-discussion -- y'know, talking about talking -- beats the hell out of discussing anything IRL.
Club, since you've read so much about the fall of the USSR, tell me this: If you could recommend only one book about the subject, one that makes the case that Reagan made a big difference, which would it be?
Anyone else can answer that question, too.
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That's a tough question, mainly because I haven't reread any of them in a while. Most of the ones I've read are written by former Reaganites, so they aren't appropriate for a guy like you. Morris' book is the most critical of Reagan that I've read, but if my memory serves me, he does give Reagan a fair amount of credit. And if you can get over the fictional style of the book (he writes it from the first person, lifelong aquaintence point of view, but he made up the fact that he was an aquaintance), it is not a bad read.
Dsouza's (sp?) book is more on the academic side and I don't believe he worked in the administration, so that's not a bad choice either, especially when read in conjunction with Reagan's own writings which have been published over the last few years, because these writings dispell the notion that Reagan's supporters are creating conveniently backfilling strategy for a political purposes.
Let me state for the record that I am not of the view that Reagan single handedly brought down the USSR. That's just not the case. It was a long, cold war, and many other presidents (and others) had a hand in it's ultimate demise (Truman, Ike, Kennedy, etc.). The more important question, on which I have not reached a definitive decision, is whether the fall of communism in the USSR was inevitable. Many, even many Reagan supporters, believe it was inevitable. That certainly wasn't the conventional wisdom in 1980, including John Kenneth Galbraith, who suggested that in many respects the USSR's economy was superior to ours because it had more natural resources and made better use of its manpower, but I can see the reasoning that goes into that view.
In evaluating that inevitability view, there are two questions that stick out in my mind: (1) why hasn't China fallen yet? Yes, they are SLOWLY "reforming," but the Communist still have a strong, and at times brutal hand, over the country; (2) saying it was inevitable is one thing, but how long would it have taken? 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years? It seems that the longer it would have taken, the greater the risk would have been of an intervening act that could have set off WWIII.
So given all this, I think it can be said with a great deal of certainty that, at a minimum, Reagan greatly sped up the inevitable.
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