Posted by
Andrews on Friday, March 20, 2009 9:52:37 AM
A recent event has convinced me that our president has been learning his history from the left's revisionist history books. Obama's recent olive branch to Iran seems to indicate he has bought into the left's rewriting of history and thinks that the USSR really fell because of glasnost and not the cold war coupled with internal collapse.
The USSR was never an economic powerhouse. Under the czars it was mismanaged but did still supply most of Europe with grain. Under the communists, a on time grain exporter began to suffer starvation. Granted, the first famines were intentional and orchestrated, but after that, Russia really did find itself unable to meet its own agricultural needs. Yes, it maintained a huge military, sent aid to foreign nations, and kept thousands of missiles aimed at the US, but it did so by keeping its citizens in a state of privation worse than many third world nations. Well, deprivation and the spending up of capital accumulated during the czarist era.
And it was this economic weakness upon which Reagan played. Rather than working for "understanding" or sending "assistance" to the Soviet Union, he engaged them in a spending war, threatening missile build ups, SDI, and every other expensive military competition he could think up, to strain their system to the breaking point. Where past presidents had seen grain shipments as a chance to make Nixon-like grand gestures of "detente" and "opening" of Russia, Reagan saw them as propping up the evil empire.
But the left does not credit Reagan with this brilliant strategy of bankrupting the already weakened Soviet system. Instead they credit glasnost. What they fail to see was that glasnost was a last gasp by the hard-liners. Though he now has a reputation as a reformer, Gorbachev was nothing of the kind. He was an old time communist, and glasnost was nothing but a final effort to prop up the soviet system. Essentially it amounted to a partial surrender to stave off complete failure, an offer to introduce some reforms if the west would then agree to allow in aid and investment. Doubtless, had it worked, the soviets would have rolled back such reforms and nationalized such investments once their system had been propped up for another generation.
Fortunately, glasnost was largely ignored by the US, and when it was recognized, it was too late to save the soviet system from collapse. Still, that does not prevent the left from rewriting history and, rather than crediting Reagan's "cowboy" tactics, they credit Gorbachev and his "glasnost" with the end of the Soviet Union.
Which brings me back to Obama and his offer to Iran. In exchange for "an end to belligerent rhetoric" he is willing to normalize relations? Not only is it pointless, as an end to the rhetoric will not necessarily translate into any slowing in their plans to either dominate the region or support terrorism, but the normalization of relations will grant legitimacy and prestige to a nation we should be doing everything to undermine. In effect, we will be selling out our allies in the region in exchange for empty promises.
Of course it does have precedents, the disastrous Oslo accords, for example. Then again, both of those are based on the left's belief that it was glasnost that brought down the Soviet Union. And so a deception intended to deprive Reagan of credit for his successes does not only that, but leads to two decades of harmful international relations.
POSTSCRIPT
By the way, we can compare Reagan's strategy to that of the appeasers in terms of three regimes. The USSR, China and North Korea. Despite all of Clinton's "diplomatic initiatives" and understanding, North Korea not only remains a belligerent threat to regional stability and purveyor of weapons to rogue states, but has actually proceeded with developing a nuclear weapon and succeeded. China, despite superficial nods to the "free market" still remains a land of slave labor lorded over by thieving autocrats. They may have softened the explicitly communist rhetoric, but they have allowed nothing but the most superficial freedoms, probably fewer than Lenin allowed under his NEP. On the other hand, the USSR defied Kruschev's predictions and was buried by us on the ash heap of history.
I think history has vindicated the Reagan strategy something future presidents should recall in their dealings not just with explicit communist nations but any autocratic regime. Our great wealth and resilience is our strength, and we should play to that strength. (Of course, once we institute all the planned economic regimentation Obama has in mind, we may not be quite so resilient, but that can always be fixed in the future. Or so I hope.)