THERE THEY GO AGAIN
By DINESH D'SOUZA
June 8, 2004 -- WRITING on Ronald Reagan's achievements in Newsweek, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. notes, <font color=blue>"Reagan's admirers contend that his costly re-armament program caused the Soviet collapse. Maybe so; but surely the thing that did in the Russians was that time had proved communism an economic, political and moral disaster." <font color=black>
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Funny: Here's Schlesinger in 1982, observing that<font size=3> <font color=blue>"Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse" are "wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves." <font color=black>
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Many historians and pundits have refused to credit Ronald Reagan's policies for helping to bring about the Cold War victory, blaming communism's chronic economic problems. Yet, like Scheslinger, they failed to describe it as inevitable while Reagan was actually in office.
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In 1982, the learned Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs:<font size=3> <font color=blue>"The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability."<font color=black>
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But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, an MIT economist and well-known author who, as late as 1989, wrote: <font size=3><font color=blue>"Can economic command significantly . . . accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can. . . . Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States." <font color=black>
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Throughout the 1980s, most of these pundits derisively condemned Reagan's policies. Strobe Talbott of Time magazine faulted the Reagan administration for espousing<font size=3> <font color=blue>"the early '50s goal of rolling back Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,"<font color=black> <font size=4>an objective he considered misguided and unrealistic.
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"Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end,"<font color=black> Talbott scoffed, adding that if the Soviet economy was in a crisis of any kind, <font color=blue>"it is a permanent, institutionalized crisis with which the USSR has learned to live." <font color=black>
Talbott, later an official in the Clinton State Department, would eventually insist that the Soviet Union had failed <font color=blue>"not because of anything the outside world has done or not done . . . but because of defects and inadequacies at its core."<font color=black>
Perhaps one should not be too hard on the wise men. After all, explained Schlesinger in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse: <font color=blue>"History has an abiding capacity to outwit our certitudes. No one foresaw these changes." <font color=black>
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Wrong again, professor: Ronald Reagan foresaw them. In 1981, Reagan told the students and faculty at the University of Notre Dame: <font color=blue>"The West won't contain communism. It will transcend communism. We will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."<font color=black>
In 1982, Reagan told the British Parliament in London: <font color=blue>"In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis. . . . But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union." <font color=black>
Reagan added that <font color=blue>"it is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying freedom and human dignity to its citizens"<font color=black> and he predicted that if the Western alliance remained strong it would produce a <font color=blue>"march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."<font color=black>
In 1987, Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. <font color=blue>"In the communist world," he said, "we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards. . . . Even today, the Soviet Union cannot feed itself." Thus the "inescapable conclusion" in his view was that "freedom is the victor." Then Reagan said: "General Secretary Gorbachev . . . Come here to this gate. Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall." <font color=black>
Not long after this, the wall did come tumbling down, and Reagan's prophecies all came true. These were not just results Reagan predicted. He intended the outcome. He implemented policies that were aimed at producing it. He was denounced for those policies. Still, in the end his objective was achieved.
Margaret Thatcher remarked a few years ago that Reagan would go down in history as the man who <font color=blue>"won the Cold War without firing a shot."<font color=black> Perhaps it is too much to ask the wise to admit their errors. But it's only right that we who have enjoyed the benefits of the post-Cold War boom should give Reagan due credit during his lifetime for his prescient statesmanship. <font size=3>
Dinesh D'Souza, is a scholar at the Hoover Institution and author of "Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader."
E-mail:thedsouzas@aol.com
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