Did Reagan Really Win the Cold War or Did the Soviets Just Collapse

You have heard the sentence. It gets said at dinner parties, in college seminars and on late-night panels, always with the same little smile: "The Soviet Union was going to collapse anyway. Reagan just happened to be in the chair when it did."

It is a clever line, and it carries a real insult. It says that the men and women who spent the 1980s rebuilding the military, standing up to Moscow and pressing for the end of the Iron Curtain were passengers on a train that was already headed over the cliff. Let me tell you something. A claim that sweeping deserves a serious answer, not a bumper sticker, and I intend to give it one.

I'm going to do what a good debater does. First I'll state the other side's case at its strongest, in terms its own defenders would accept. Then I'll answer it in numbered points, using dates, treaties and speeches that anyone can look up. Where the critics are right I will say so. And then we'll ask what the answer means for a Republican voter now.

The strongest version of the other side

Here is the case that the Soviet Union fell from its own weight, regardless of who was president.

1. The Soviet economy was failing. By the 1970s growth was slowing. Central planning could build steel mills but could not feed people well, make consumer goods people wanted or innovate. Soviet leaders were aging and the system was brittle.
2. Oil prices fell. The Soviet Union earned much of its hard currency from selling oil and gas. When oil prices dropped sharply in the mid-1980s, a major source of money dried up.
3. Afghanistan drained the country. The Soviet invasion of December 1979 turned into a long and costly war, with no clear path to victory.
4. Chernobyl and the credibility gap. The nuclear disaster in April 1986 and the cover-up that followed showed ordinary Soviet citizens how little the system could be trusted.
5. Gorbachev reformed because he had to. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985 convinced the country needed change. Glasnost, meaning openness, and perestroika, meaning restructuring, were his own ideas. Once he loosened the lid, the pressure behind it blew the system apart.
6. The buildup started before Reagan. President Carter increased defense spending in his last years in office, and the decision to deploy new missiles in Europe was made in December 1979, while Carter was president.
7. Reagan's tone might have prolonged the Cold War. A tougher line could have strengthened Soviet hardliners and delayed reform. Some historians argue that Gorbachev's openness and Reagan's later willingness to talk, not the earlier confrontation, produced the thaw.

That is a respectable argument. Several of its premises are true. The Soviet economy was in trouble. Oil prices did fall. Afghanistan did drain the country. Gorbachev did start the reforms. If you walk away thinking Reagan alone defeated the Soviet Union, you have been sold a cartoon, and I'd rather you hear that from me.

But the conclusion, that Reagan's policies made no difference, does not follow. Here is why.

Answer one: a weak system does not set its own date of death

The first and biggest error in the collapse-anyway argument is the idea that economic weakness determines the timing. It does not. Plenty of regimes have lasted decades in a condition of decline. Cuba and North Korea have lived on for generations with economies that cannot feed their people. Weakness tells you that a regime is vulnerable. It does not tell you when it will fall, how it will fall or whether the fall is peaceful.

Everything that matters about 1989 and 1991, that the Berlin Wall came down without a war, that the Soviet empire dissolved without a nuclear exchange, that the republics became independent, depended on choices. Those choices were made by people in Washington and Moscow, and the pressure in between affected them. To say the system was doomed is to say nothing about whether it ended in a peaceful negotiation or a catastrophe.

There is also a second point inside the first. In the late 1970s the Soviet Union was not retreating. It was advancing. Soviet-aligned governments and movements gained ground in Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Afghanistan during the decade. Observers at the time, in both parties, worried that the balance of power was moving Moscow's way. That trend was reversed in the 1980s, and it was reversed by a deliberate policy that Reagan's supporters called peace through strength. Our post Peace Through Strength Is Older Than Reagan and It Still Works shows that the idea has deep roots, and How the Reagan Doctrine Turned Containment Into Rollback describes how it was applied.

Answer two: the moral clarity of March 1983

On March 8, 1983, Reagan spoke to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando. He called the Soviet Union "the focus of evil in the modern world" and described it as an evil empire. The press mocked him. Many foreign policy experts said it was reckless and ended any hope of talks.

Consider what that speech was aiming at. For about a decade the official policy had been détente, a relationship that treated the two superpowers as roughly equal powers managing their rivalry. Reagan rejected the idea that a system that jailed dissidents and walled in its own citizens was morally equal to a free country. He said so in public, at the top of his voice.

Did it matter? Some of the people on the receiving end say it did. The Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, who spent years in the Gulag, has said that word of the speech spread among political prisoners and lifted their morale, because it told them the leader of the free world saw the system for what it was. You can weigh that testimony as you like. But the critics who said the speech would make negotiation impossible were wrong: within five years Reagan was signing a treaty with Moscow.

Answer three: the Strategic Defense Initiative

Weeks later, on March 23, 1983, Reagan announced a long-term program to develop defenses against ballistic missiles, which became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. Critics nicknamed it Star Wars and said it could never work.

They may have been right about the technology. They were wrong about the politics. By most accounts Soviet leaders took SDI seriously, in part because they could not be sure what American science could do and in part because answering it would have meant spending money they did not have. At the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev came within sight of an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons. The meeting broke down over Reagan's refusal to give up SDI research. He ended the meeting rather than trade it away.

I'll be careful here. Whether SDI itself was a good investment is a fair debate, and a defense budget worksheet like A Worksheet for Reading Any Defense Budget Number Without Being Fooled can help you form your own view. What the record shows is that the Soviets treated it as a serious matter, and that Reagan used it as leverage and not as a throwaway.

Answer four: Pershing IIs and the zero option

In December 1979, under President Carter, NATO decided on a two-track approach to a new problem. The Soviet Union had begun deploying SS-20 missiles aimed at Western Europe. NATO would offer to negotiate limits, and if talks failed it would deploy American Pershing II missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe.

Reagan took office, kept the plan and added a bold offer. In November 1981 he proposed the zero option: if the Soviets removed their SS-20s, the United States would not deploy its new missiles. Moscow said no. Large protests in Western Europe urged NATO to back down. The deployments began in late 1983 anyway. The Soviets walked out of the arms talks in protest.

Think about what that took. Reagan and the NATO governments of that time, including Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, held firm against huge public demonstrations. If they had blinked, the Soviets would have learned that pressure from the streets could break the alliance. They did not blink. And in the end the Soviets returned to the table.

Answer five: the INF Treaty, December 1987

On December 8, 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty at the White House. It eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles, ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers, and it provided for on-site inspections. Reagan used a Russian proverb at the signing, "trust but verify." The Senate ratified the treaty in May 1988 by a vote of 93 to 5.

Look at the terms, since the terms are the evidence. The Soviet Union agreed to destroy 1,846 missiles. The United States agreed to destroy 846. Add them up and the treaty eliminated 2,692 missiles, and the Soviets gave up more than twice as many as we did. The zero option that Moscow had rejected in 1981 became, in substance, the treaty of 1987. If strength did nothing, why did the Soviet Union accept the very terms it had refused six years earlier?

One more fact belongs here. Reagan did not only press. He talked. He met Gorbachev repeatedly, and at their first summit in Geneva in November 1985 the two men issued a statement that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. That blend of firmness and talks is the subject of How Reagan built strength first and then sat down with Gorbachev, and it answers the critic who says toughness and diplomacy are opposites.

Answer six: the Berlin Wall speech and the Soviets' own words

On June 12, 1987, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan called on Gorbachev to tear down the wall. Some of his own advisers urged him to cut the line, thinking it was too provocative. He kept it. The Wall fell on November 9, 1989, and the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991.

Reagan's critics will say that the speech did not knock down anything, and that is true. A speech is not a siege engine. But the test of a policy is whether it moved events in the direction it aimed, and the record of the late 1980s runs that way.

What about the testimony from the other side? Gorbachev has said in interviews and in his memoirs that the burden of military competition was one reason he wanted arms control, and Soviet records published after the collapse show Politburo discussions in which leaders worried about being drawn into an arms race they could not afford. I would encourage you to read these sources for yourself, as I am summarizing and not quoting: the memoirs, the Reykjavik transcripts and the Politburo records published by research institutions such as the Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project. That is the best evidence, because it comes from the people who made the decision.

Where the critics are right

I promised honesty, so here it is. The collapse was not Reagan's alone. Truman's containment policy, Kennan's strategy, the Marshall Plan, NATO, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon's opening to China, Carter's human rights push and the buildup that began in his last years all mattered, as did Pope John Paul II, the Solidarity movement in Poland, Lech Walesa, Thatcher, Kohl and a generation of dissidents. Our post on George Kennan's Long Telegram and the Strategy That Won the Cold War describes the long game, and George H. W. Bush managed the end of the Cold War without a victory lap describes how the next president handled the finish.

Also, American intelligence in those years overestimated the size and strength of the Soviet economy, a fact that cuts both ways. If the Soviet system was weaker than we thought, then the arms competition may have bitten harder than we knew. But it also means that no one in Washington was sure the system would fall, and that the policies of the 1980s were made under uncertainty.

What it means now

A voter has a right to ask what this history is for. It is not for nostalgia. It is for a rule: bad regimes do not mellow when you flatter them. They mellow when the price of aggression goes up and the price of cooperation comes down. The rule applies to Russia, which holds one of the world's two largest nuclear arsenals, and it applies to Ukraine, whose security promises are discussed in What America Promised Ukraine in 1994 and What It Did Not.

The bottom line

• The critics are right that the Soviet system was failing, and that Gorbachev, Afghanistan and low oil prices mattered. They are wrong that Reagan's policies made no difference.
• A weak regime does not set its own date of death. How and when the Cold War ended, and that it ended peacefully, depended on choices: the Pershing deployments, the SDI program, the INF Treaty and the willingness to talk after building strength.
• The INF Treaty is the best single piece of evidence. The Soviets destroyed 1,846 missiles to our 846 under terms they had rejected in 1981.
• Teach your kids the full record, including the many presidents and allies who played a part. A story with only one hero is not as strong as the truth.
• When you hear that strength and diplomacy are opposites, point to 1983 and 1987, and ask which one came first.