Exactly, Win, over time, the USSR collapsed from within and the only thing Reagan could claim was it happened during the time he was president but not because of his presidency:
But the fact is, what he recommended was that we keep pressure on the Soviet Union so that they could not, by expansion, seem to justify an irrational system and thereby force them to confront the contradictions of that system. And that's exactly what happened. He predicted that if they were forced to confront the contradictions, the system would, in effect, collapse or moderate itself of its own accord. This happened. Now I think it happened a couple of decades after he had hoped it would, but that doesn't really matter. The time scales in this sort of thing are not important. The fact is, containment was our policy. It was successfully carried out, even when we were sometimes using methods that Kennan didn't approve of subsequently. The Soviet Union did collapse eventually, and certainly communist control of the Soviet Union collapsed as a result of having to confront these inner inconsistencies |
