Neoconservative writer Max Boot provides a preview of his new biography of Ronald Reagan by claiming in a Foreign Affairs essay that Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War. Boot characterizes as “myth” the notion that Reagan had a plan to defeat the Soviet empire and that Reagan’s policies led to the collapse of that empire. Boot instead writes that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev deserves the credit for ending the Cold War, even if he did not intend to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union. Reagan, Boot writes, only deserves credit for recognizing that Gorbachev was a communist leader who he could negotiate an end to what Boot describes as a “40-year conflict.”
Initially, one wonders why Boot describes the Cold War as lasting 40 years. Most historians would date the beginning of the Cold War at the year 1945. James Burnham, one of the greatest analysts of the Cold War, dated its beginning to the spring of 1944. It is generally agreed that the Cold War ended in the 1989–1991 time period. That is at least 44 years, if not 45. Does Boot believe the Cold War began in 1949–1950? Or does he believe that it ended in 1985 — as soon as Gorbachev took power in the Kremlin? It is not clear from his essay.
Boot’s error as to the length of the Cold War, however, is a minor point considering the major error of his main argument, i.e., that Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War. To arrive at this conclusion, Boot dismisses the importance of Reagan’s remark to Richard Allen in 1977 that his theory of the Cold War is “we win, they lose.” He further dismisses the importance of Reagan’s defense buildup, the Strategic Defense Initiative, aid to anti-communist forces in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, Reagan’s speeches predicting that communism would end up on the “ash heap of history,” and two national security directives that called for undermining Soviet economic and political power throughout its empire and within the Soviet Union itself. Boot also dismisses Paul Kengor’s compelling evidence that Reagan brought down the Soviet empire in his book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. And Boot doesn’t even mention the evidence of Reagan’s strategy to defeat the Soviet Union set forth in Peter Schweizer’s books Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union and Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism. Nor does Boot mention the verdict of John Patrick Diggins, who called Reagan one of the three great “liberating” presidents in U.S. history for his Cold War victory (Lincoln and FDR were the others, according to Diggins).
Nor does Boot mention Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, which forcibly liberated territory from communist rule. Although Grenada was a small island, its liberation was symbolic of the Reagan administration’s willingness to reverse the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine. Reagan’s policies put the Soviet Union and its empire on the defensive for the first time in the Cold War. Until Reagan, it was the Soviet Union and its allies that launched politico-military offensives in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, South Yemen, and other parts of the world. U.S. policy, as practiced by every administration prior to Reagan’s, was “containment.” Reagan shifted U.S. policy to “liberation” or “rollback.”
Boot will have none of this. Gorbachev ended the Cold War, he writes, not because of any U.S. pressure by the Reagan administration, but because of Gorbachev’s “humane instincts.” Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, Boot writes, were not reactions to U.S. pressure — both economic and military — but rather stemmed from Gorbachev’s concerns about nuclear war, his opposition to the Soviet military-industrial complex, and his realization that the Soviet Union was “morally bankrupt.” Boot, in fact, judges Reagan’s military buildup, economic coercion, and other anti-Soviet policies as first-term failures. “[M]any conservatives,” Boot claims, “conflate Reagan’s second-term success with his first-term failures,” and he worries that they will apply the “wrong lessons to relations with communist China today.”
Boot’s essay is therefore designed to persuade policymakers that any effort to emulate Reagan’s hardline first-term policies toward the Soviet Union in our current relations with China will not defeat China and may “make the world a more dangerous place.” The U.S., according to Boot, should not attempt political–economic warfare against the Chinese Communist regime. “Ramping up confrontation with Beijing regardless of the consequences,” he writes, “risks a repeat of the war scares” of Reagan’s first term.
One might have a little more confidence in Boot’s advice had he not been so horribly wrong about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader global war on terror, for which he was one of our country’s leading cheerleaders. His reticence about applying pressure on the Chinese Communist Party is at odds with his hawkish views about the necessity of a U.S.-backed Ukrainian victory in the war against Russia. Apparently, the risks of a wider war between NATO and Russia don’t concern him as much as an American hardline policy toward China does.
Back to Reagan and the Cold War. John Lewis Gaddis, perhaps the best historian of that conflict, summed up Reagan’s role best in his Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War: “Reagan saw Soviet weaknesses sooner than most of his contemporaries did; … he understood the extent to which detente was perpetuating the Cold War rather than hastening its end; … his hard line strained the Soviet system at the moment of its maximum weakness; … he combined reassurance, persuasion, and pressure in dealing with [Gorbachev].” Gaddis characterized Reagan’s role in ending the Cold War as “critical.”
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