Reagan created what Henry Kissinger calls "the most stunning diplomatic success of our time. "Or, as Margaret Thatcher said," Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a single shot. "Reagan had a vision of Soviet communism much more skeptical than that of the doves and hawks. In 1981 In a speech delivered at the University of Notre Dame, said, "The West will not only contain communism, it will transcend. If they get rid as a bizarre chapter in human history, even before they are written the last pages. "The next year, speaking before the British Parliament, Reagan said that if the Western alliance remained strong it would start" a march toward freedom and democracy that would leave Marxism-Leninism in the ashes of history. "
These prophetic statements (then branded as empty rhetoric) raise a question in mind: how did you know that Reagan Soviet communism was on the brink of the precipice where the finest minds of the time did not have the slightest idea what could happen? To answer this question, the best thing is to start with the same lines of Reagan. Throughout his life , Reagan had collected a large number of stories and jokes that he was referring to the Russian people. In one is an old man who enters in a shop in Moscow and asks for a kilo of meat, a pound of butter and half a pound of coffee. "We've sold out," replies the clerk of the store, the man leaves. Another person, who had witnessed the scene, the clerk says: "That old man must be crazy," "Yes," replies the salesman, "but that memory." In another there is a Russian who enters a car dealership to buy a car. He is told he must pay now, but it will take ten years before being able to pick up the car. After completing all modules and performed all the necessary formalities, and payment of the car, the officer tells him: "Come back in ten years to collect it." He then asks: "Morning or afternoon?" "That's ten years from now, who cares?" Replies the official. "In the morning I wait for the plumber."
Reagan could go on for hours and hours. What is striking, however, is that Reagan's jokes were not related to the evils of communism, but his incompetence. Reagan agreed with the hawks that the Soviet experiment to create a "new man" was immoral. At the same time, he was convinced that it was also basically stupid. Reagan did not need a PhD in economics to recognize that any economy based upon centralized planners who decide what the factories should produce, how much people should consume and how they should be assigned the social rewards is intended for a disastrous failure.
For Reagan the Soviet Union was a "bear ill" and the question was not if it were dropped, but when. However, if the Soviet Union had a shaky economy, but had a powerful military. No one doubted that the Soviet missiles, if launched against American targets, would have caused appalling destruction. But Reagan also knew that the Evil Empire was spending at least 20 percent of its GDP on defense. So Reagan elaborated the idea that the West could use its superior economic resources of a free society to force Moscow to make excessive spending in the arms race, resulting in unsustainable pressure on the Soviet regime.
Reagan formulated his theory of 'sick bear "as early as May 1982, in a speech to Eureka College, where he said:
" The Soviet empire is faltering because rigid centralized control has destroyed incentives for innovation, efficiency and individual ambition. Despite its social and economic problems, the Soviet dictatorship has built the largest army in the world. He did never mind the human needs of its people and in the end this choice scardinerà the foundations of the Soviet system. "
Bears sick, however, can be very dangerous because they tend to attack. For the Furthermore, as we are actually talking about men and not animals, there is also the matter of pride, the leader of an empire internally weak do not passively accept erosion of their power.
usually turn to the first source of their power: the military.
Reagan was convinced that the policy of appeasement would have only increased the appetite of the bear, pushing it to new aggressions. So he agreed with the anti-communist strategy, according to which they had to deal decisively with the Soviets. But he had much more confidence than they had the hawks in the ability of Americans to face the challenge. "We must realize," he said in his first inaugural address, "that no weapon in any arsenal in the world has the same strength of will and moral courage of men and women of a free country. "
The most revolutionary character of the thought of Reagan was that he did not accept the axiom of the immutability Soviet Union. In a time when no one else was able to do so, Reagan dared to imagine a world in which the communist regime of the Soviet Union there was no more
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