But one thing was to imagine this happy state, another realization. When Reagan went to the White House, the Soviet bear was still arrogant and angry. Between 1974 and 1980 had succeeded, by the direct invasion or victory of his puppet, to incorporate ten countries into the Communist orbit: South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South Yemen, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Grenada, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Moreover, he built the most formidable nuclear arsenal in the world, with thousands of multiple-warhead missiles aimed against the United States. In the context of conventional forces, the Warsaw Pact had an overwhelming superiority over NATO. Finally, Moscow had recently deployed a new generation medium-range missiles, the giant SS-20, focused on European cities. Reagan simply did not respond to these alarming events, but worked out a comprehensive strategy to counter. Started a project reset to 1.5 trillion dollars, with the aim of attracting the Soviets in an arms race from which he strongly believed that the Russians could not come out winners. It was also decided to convince the Western alliance to accept the deployment of 108 Pershing-2 missiles and 464 cruise missiles to counter Soviet SS-20. At the same time, it gave up the negotiations for the reduction of armaments.
Indeed, proposed for the first time the two superpowers were to drastically reduce their nuclear arsenals. If the Soviets had withdrawn their SS-20, said the U.S. would have put the Pershing and Cruise. This was called the "zero option".
Then there was the so-called "Reagan Doctrine", which provided military support and material for indigenous movements fighting to overthrow the tyranny-Soviet. The Administration supported the insurgency in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola and Nicaragua. In addition, he collaborated with the Vatican and the international section of American trade unions to support the Polish trade union Solidarnosc, despite the ruthless repression of the regime of General Jaruzelski. In 1983, U.S. troops invaded and liberated Grenada, Hunting the Marxist government and hold free elections. Finally, in March 1983, Reagan announced the "Strategic Defense Initiative," a new program of research and construction of missile defenses that, in the words of the same Reagan, promised to "render nuclear weapons obsolete." The strategy to counter Reagan was constantly denounced by the doves, who exploited the fear of public opinion, namely the fear that rearmament would be Reagan was taking the world to the brink of nuclear war. The zero option was branded by Strobe Talbott as "completely unrealistic. "With the exception of support for the Afghan mujahedin, every effort to help the rebels was hindered by anti-doves in Congress and the media. The Strategic Defense Initiative was adopted by the New York Times as" a transposition of the imagination in politics ".
The Soviet Union are equally hostile to the Reagan counteroffensive, but he understood very best of American doves its true objectives. The newspaper Izvestiya protested:" The Americans want to force us to a race arms even more costly and disastrous. "The Secretary General Yuri Andropov asserted that the Reagan defense program was" an attempt to disarm the Soviet Union. "The expert diplomat Andrei Gromyko said that" behind all these lies, lies the clear calculation that the USSR will exhaust its material resources and will therefore be forced to surrender. "
These statements are important because they define the context under which the rise to power of Gorbachev in early 1985. Gorbachev was indeed a new type of Soviet leader, but few have asked why he was elected by the old guard. The main reason is that the Politburo had realized that the old policies had failed. Reagan, in other words, seems to have had the substance to cause a nervous breakdown that prompted Moscow to seek a new approach. The appointment of Gorbachev is not only to find a new way to solve the country's economic problems but also to address the setbacks from the USSR and abroad.
For this Ilya Zaslavsky, a member of the Soviet People's Congress, said that the real creator of perestroika and glasnost was not Gorbachev but Reagan. Gorbachev aroused extraordinary enthusiasm in the left and the media in the West. Mary McGrory, the Washington Post, was convinced that "he had in his pocket instructions to save the planet." Gail Sheehy was dazzled by her "luminous presence." In 1990 Time magazine proclaimed him "a man of the decade" and compared him to Franklin Roosevelt. Just as Roosevelt had turned to save capitalism, socialism, as Gorbachev had reinvented to make it survive. The reason for this embarrassing infatuation is that Gorbachev was just the kind of leader that Western intellectuals admire more: a top reformer who presented himself as a liberal, a technocrat who spoke three hours of speeches describing the results of agricultural planning . Above all, the new Soviet leader was trying to realize the great hope of Western intelligentsia: Communism with a human face! A socialism that works! However, as Gorbachev discovered the same, and as we all now know, was not a viable hope. The defects that Gorbachev sought to eradicate from the system proved to be integral features of the system. If Reagan was the Great Communicator, Gorbachev has finally proved, said Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Great Fraintenditore. Gorbachev should not be compared to FDR but Jimmy Carter. Tough Guys of the Kremlin who warned that his reforms would cause the collapse of the entire system were right. Indeed, even the hawks in the West have had their triumph of Communism was indeed unchangeable and irreversible in the sense that the system could be reformed only with its destruction. Gorbachev, like Jimmy Carter, had a positive quality: it was an honest and open minded. It 'was the first Soviet leader from the post-Stalin generation, the first to admit openly that the promises of Lenin were not realized.
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