THERE THEY GO AGAIN
Back to the President Reagan Page
Back to the Historical Revisionism Page
By DINESH D'SOUZAJune 8, 2004 -- WRITING on Ronald Reagan's achievements in Newsweek, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. notes, "Reagan's admirers contend that his costly re-armament program caused the Soviet collapse. Maybe so; but surely the thing that did in the Russians was that time had proved communism an economic, political and moral disaster."
Funny: Here's Schlesinger in 1982, observing that "Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse" are "wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves."
Many historians and pundits have refused to credit Ronald Reagan's policies for helping to bring about the Cold War victory, blaming communism's chronic economic problems. Yet, like Scheslinger, they failed to describe it as inevitable while Reagan was actually in office.
In 1982, the learned Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs: "The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability."
But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, an MIT economist and well-known author who, as late as 1989, wrote: "Can economic command significantly . . . accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can. . . . Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States."
Throughout the 1980s, most of these pundits derisively condemned Reagan's policies. Strobe Talbott of Time magazine faulted the Reagan administration for espousing "the early '50s goal of rolling back Soviet domination of Eastern Europe," an objective he considered misguided and unrealistic.
"Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end," Talbott scoffed, adding that if the Soviet economy was in a crisis of any kind, "it is a permanent, institutionalized crisis with which the USSR has learned to live."
Talbott, later an official in the Clinton State Department, would eventually insist that the Soviet Union had failed "not because of anything the outside world has done or not done . . . but because of defects and inadequacies at its core."
Perhaps one should not be too hard on the wise men. After all, explained Schlesinger in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse: "History has an abiding capacity to outwit our certitudes. No one foresaw these changes."
Wrong again, professor: Ronald Reagan foresaw them. In 1981, Reagan told the students and faculty at the University of Notre Dame: "The West won't contain communism. It will transcend communism. We will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
In 1982, Reagan told the British Parliament in London: "In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis. . . . But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union."
Reagan added that "it is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying freedom and human dignity to its citizens" and he predicted that if the Western alliance remained strong it would produce a "march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."
In 1987, Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. "In the communist world," he said, "we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards. . . . Even today, the Soviet Union cannot feed itself." Thus the "inescapable conclusion" in his view was that "freedom is the victor." Then Reagan said: "General Secretary Gorbachev . . . Come here to this gate. Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
Not long after this, the wall did come tumbling down, and Reagan's prophecies all came true. These were not just results Reagan predicted. He intended the outcome. He implemented policies that were aimed at producing it. He was denounced for those policies. Still, in the end his objective was achieved.
Margaret Thatcher remarked a few years ago that Reagan would go down in history as the man who "won the Cold War without firing a shot." Perhaps it is too much to ask the wise to admit their errors. But it's only right that we who have enjoyed the benefits of the post-Cold War boom should give Reagan due credit during his lifetime for his prescient statesmanship.
Dinesh D'Souza, is a scholar at the Hoover Institution and author of "Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader."
E-mail:thedsouzas@aol.com
NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc.
NYPOST.COM, NYPOSTONLINE.COM, and NEWYORKPOST.COM
are trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc. Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc.
