It has long been fashionable (30 years) to dismiss Ronald Reagan as a joke,

A hell of a lot longer than that, did you never see one of his films?

That’s fine – you can argue that Thatcher was being prudent in trying to prevent the reunification of Germany, but you can’t simultaneously praise her for bringing about the reunification of Germany.

A paraphrased line from a book from that era that remains with me: “Parents would come home, check their wills were in order, kiss their children and head out to continue the protests. These were not organised anarchists but ordinary people who simply wanted to be free”

I doubt I have done the line justice but it still gives me goosebumps.

A good deal of the credit for the end of the Cold War does reside with him.

He also stood up to some of his people such as Alexander Haig and Jeane Fitzpatrick, who wanted sell out Britain during the Falklands war. The maligned Caspar Weinberger was a help, too.

yech

But the horse still had to drink, and Gorbachev takes a good deal of the credit for pushing the required changes through.

“Trade unionists, dissidents, intellectuals and ordinary people [of the Warsaw Pact countries] drove the events that led to the wall opening.”

Reagan spoke in solidarity with these people, calling their oppressors oppressive.

Russell Brown is half wrong:

A great many “trade unionists, dissidents and intellectuals” of the NATO Alliance called Reagan an idiot, an imperialist.

For Eastern Europe and the majority of the free world Reagan didn’t need rehabilitation. Leftist academics simply couldn’t accept that conservatives like the Pope, Reagan and Thatcher could bring about such a peaceful change.. it didn’t fit the narrative.

JC

It’s correct that “Soviet attempts to match the West had caused the system to collapse from within”. Fundamentally the Russian economy couldn’t keep up with the West, particularly with the costs of the arms race and the costs of enforcing the Iron Curtain. The Warsaw Pact economies just drove themselves into the ground trying to maintain the geopolitical status quo.

I couldn’t put it better than this:

It was the KGB that realized first that the Soviet Union was failing, which made sense because only the KGB had a comprehensive sense of the state of the Soviet Union. Andropov’s strategy was to shift from technology transfer through espionage — apparently Putin’s mission as a junior intelligence officer in Dresden in the former East Germany — to a more formal process of technology transfer. To induce the West to transfer technology and to invest in the Soviet Union, Moscow had to make substantial concessions in the area in which the West cared the most: geopolitics. To get what it needed, the Soviets had to dial back on the Cold War.

Glasnost, or openness, had as its price reducing the threat to the West. But the greater part of the puzzle was perestroika, or the restructuring of the Soviet economy. This was where the greatest risk came, since the entire social and political structure of the Soviet Union was built around a command economy. But that economy was no longer functioning, and without perestroika, all of the investment and technology transfer would be meaningless. The Soviet Union could not metabolize it.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a communist, as we seem to forget, and a follower of Andropov. He was not a liberalizer because he saw liberalization as a virtue; rather, he saw it as a means to an end. And that end was saving the Communist Party, and with it the Soviet state. Gorbachev also understood that the twin challenge of concessions to the West geopolitically and a top-down revolution in Russia economically — simultaneously–risked massive destabilization. This is what Reagan was counting on, and what Gorbachev was trying to prevent. Gorbachev lost Andropov’s gamble. The Soviet Union collapsed, and with it the Communist Party.

This is still the case today, and the American strategy remains the same … hence Joe Biden’s comments earlier this year that “[Russia has] a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.” American strategy is still to use the relative strengths of the American and Russian economies to enforce political outcomes on Russia.

The interesting thing though is that To my mind the really interesting bit is that this is just reflects the Russian reality. Russia’s economy has always been a basket case compared to other European economies. In the days of the Tsars, in the days of Stalin, in the days of Gorbachev … Russia’s economy is a basket case. But Russian economic might is only loosely connected with Russia’s military might. Stalin drove the Russian economy into the ground, but could still win a war against Germany and capture most of Eastern Europe.

Why is Bush 2 the only one of the two castigated for accumulating collosal debt levels, whereas Reagan (without reading the desciptions of these rankings) isn’t?

They gain huge popularity after their death.

In 20 years, the academic class that has until now slaughtered Bush II, will refer to him in a positive light.