Monday, June 07, 2004
First thoughts on Reagan
Don't have time to write much on Reagan now, but here are some articles that capture a few relevant views. Here's Gorbachev on Reagan's big accomplishment---leaving behind the bellicose Cold War policies of his first term to talk with Soviet reformers, ultimately ensuring that that collapse of the Soviet Union and its buffer zone in East Europe was a peaceful, manageable process. This success should not be minimized; lots of things could have gone wrong---imagine if the coup against Gorbachev had come two years earlier, or if a crumbling Soviet Union remained on hair-trigger nuclear alert.
But almost everything else about the Reagan administration is bad, often comically so. Here's Juan Cole's assessment. He notes that Reagan made friends---and gave arms to---the precusors of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Saddam, and various Latin American death squads. There is a real question whether we would be faced with a "War on Terror" had there been no Reagan administration. In other areas, the myth of Reagan has superceded the reality. Defense spending didn't significantly hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union, SDI was a total failure, Reagan remade the Republicans into the fiscally irresponsible party they are today, created massive deficits, dramatically increased economic inequality, and lowered the bar for presidential intelligence, with long term effects evident only today. And of course, many wonder whether Reagan had a foot in reality, and a foot in the moview all the way through. If you really want to dip into the madness of Reagan's fictional worldview, check out this article.
There's a lot more to think about---the lingering insanity of supply-side economics, the environmental and public health legacies of Reagan, the Iran-Contra scandal, the Reagan tax bill, etc. Maybe later
But almost everything else about the Reagan administration is bad, often comically so. Here's Juan Cole's assessment. He notes that Reagan made friends---and gave arms to---the precusors of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Saddam, and various Latin American death squads. There is a real question whether we would be faced with a "War on Terror" had there been no Reagan administration. In other areas, the myth of Reagan has superceded the reality. Defense spending didn't significantly hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union, SDI was a total failure, Reagan remade the Republicans into the fiscally irresponsible party they are today, created massive deficits, dramatically increased economic inequality, and lowered the bar for presidential intelligence, with long term effects evident only today. And of course, many wonder whether Reagan had a foot in reality, and a foot in the moview all the way through. If you really want to dip into the madness of Reagan's fictional worldview, check out this article.
There's a lot more to think about---the lingering insanity of supply-side economics, the environmental and public health legacies of Reagan, the Iran-Contra scandal, the Reagan tax bill, etc. Maybe later
