Informal Logic said:
As usual what you claim as fact is just your own personal opinion. The USSR was collapsing before Reagan was president. Did he talk hard rhetoric, etc.? Yes, but it was really timing. Who cares what hair you want to split--it does not make it fact just because you say so.
Kettle:kettle Informal_Logic - you just claimed the USSR was collapsing before Reagan was President. But what does that even mean? Heck, with similar logic, you could claim it was all part of a long, slow decline starting they day after the revolution ended (which, frankly, I believe). So really, you didn't address the key issue there at all: if not for Reagan,
how long would it have taken for the USSR to finally collapse?
So you didn't really say anything to contradict what I said (other than - again, pot:kettle - just making an essentially meaningless counter-claim). No, I didn't provide substantiation, but my claim is the only possible conclusion of a set of pretty basic, self evident, common knowledge facts. There is little to no debate among historians and economists about it. A quick Google will verify the facts of the USSR's economic situation. Here's the first reasonable link I found: http://wais.stanford.edu/History/history_ussrandreagan.htm
By whatever means he arrived at his views regarding the Soviet Union, he drew from them policy directions that were devastatingly effective in undermining the rotten Soviet edifice. Because of the high oil prices of the 1970s the Soviet leadership avoided serious economic reforms, such as those that saved Deng Xiaoping’s China. Instead, it relied on oil revenues as a means of keeping its decrepit economy going. By the early 1980s the Soviet Union was becoming a hollow shell, with an unreformed and increasingly backward industrial base producing outmoded pre-computer armaments. Thus it was highly vulnerable to the pressures that the Reagan administration was planning...
A central instrument for putting pressure on the Soviet Union was Reagan’s massive defense build-up, which raised defense spending from $134 billion in 1980 to $253 billion in 1989. This raised American defense spending to 7 percent of GDP, dramatically increasing the federal deficit. Yet in its efforts to keep up with the American defense build-up, the Soviet Union was compelled in the first half of the 1980s to raise the share of its defense spending from 22 percent to 27 percent of GDP, while it froze the production of civilian goods at 1980 levels.
See all the economic numbers? Those are
facts, Informal_Logic.
Perhaps the opinion of a top Russian diplomat at the time is relevant:
But years later, in 1991, Vladimir Lukhin -- once a top diplomat for the USSR, then the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Russian Duma -- told me how Reagan's SDI speech was received on the other side. In '83, upon hearing of Reagan's SDI speech, then-leader Yuri Andropov ordered two different studies -- one from the Red Army, one from the Soviet academy of sciences -- to analyze the new American initiative. Two years later, in 1985, the reports came back to the Kremlin, both bearing the same basic message: "We don't know if the USA can succeed with this missile-defense plan, but we know that the USSR cannot." This forced the Politburo into an agonizing reassessment: something, Lukhin recalled, had to change. And that change, the Russian gerontocrats hoped, would come in the form of a young new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who took power in 1985. Gorbachev had no intention of unhitching the communist system in Russia, but in the course of trying to compete with the Americans, that's exactly what happened; "Gorby" was an accidental liberator. As Lukhin told me, "Reagan accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union by five to ten years" -- which was fine with Lukhin. And if that single step shaved so many years off the lifetime of the evil empire, that's pretty good in my book.
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002166.html
Personally, I consider 5-10 years an unreasonably short estimate on how long the USSR would have lasted without Reagan, but that
is an opinion. It is, however, based on, again, historical facts. Specifically, North Korea shows us just how well such a communist dictator can retain power even in the face of truly catastrophic conditions in the country.
Summary of relevant facts:
-The USSR collapsed while Reagan was President.
-The USSR established economic policies in response to Reagan's policies.
-----These policies worstened the economic situation in the USSR.
The only possible conclusion from these facts is that Reagan helped accelerate the collapse of the USSR.
Inherrently unprovable and essentially meaningless assertion you are making:
-The USSR would have collapsed (when?) without him.
While it is
probably true that the USSR would have collapsed without Reagan (ehh, heck: its definitely true - I mean, the Sun is eventually going to burn out...), since that's not what happened, your assertion is inherrently unprovable. Your assertion also doesn't address the question of
when, which makes it a pretty empty assertion.
edit: http://brian.carnell.com/5656 are some interesting quotes from liberal pundits in the early 80s that highlight the flip-flop liberals have done on Reagan's policies: in the 80s, many liberals said the USSR was strong and Reagan's policies couldn't hurt it. Today they say the USSR was on the verge of collapse already.
