Did the Reagan doctrine cause the fall of the Soviet Union?

Did the Reagan doctrine cause the fall of the Soviet Union?

Insight on the News , Jan 26, 1998 by Margaret Thatcher


Thatcher, former prime minister of Great Britain who also served as a member of Britain's House of Lords and was a copartner in the struggle against Soviet domination.

Yes: Ronald Reagan showed the courage to break the world free of a monstrous creed.

President Reagan is one of the greatest men of our time and one of the greatest American presidents of all time. If that is not fully appreciated today, and sadly it is not, it isn't really surprising. After all, so many people have been proved wrong by Reagan that they simply daren't acknowledge his achievement. Forests already have been pulped to print the revisionist analyses of the eighties. Those who once were so confident of the superiority of the Soviet system that they advocated appeasement of it now pretend to believe that it was doomed to inevitable collapse. Tell that to the Russians! The former Soviet ministers didn't -- and don't -- doubt the seriousness of the struggle, even if Western liberal commentators do.

Today we are particularly conscious of the courage of Ronald Reagan. He set out to challenge everything the liberal political elite of America accepted and sought to propagate. They believed that America was doomed to decline. He believed it was destined for further greatness. They imagined that sooner or later there would be a convergence between the free Western system and the socialist Eastern system, and that some kind of social democratic outcome was inevitable. He, by contrast, considered that socialism was a patent failure which should be cast onto the trash heap of history.

It is, however, for fighting and winning the Cold War that Ronald Reagan deserves the most credit -- and credit not just from Americans but from the rest of what we called in those days the Free World and from those in the former communist states who now can breathe the air of liberty.

Of course, there always were some honest men struggling to arrest the decline, or at least to ameliorate its consequences. The doctrine of"containment" was envisaged as a way of conducting a strategic resistance to communist incursion. Similarly, the doctrine of "detente" also had its honorable Western advocates, but the fact remains that it meant different things to different sides.

For the West, detente signified -- as the word itself literally means -- an easing in tension between two superpowers and two blocs. This made a certain sense at the time because it reduced the risk of a nuclear confrontation, which Western unpreparedness had brought closer because we had allowed our conventional defenses to run down. But it also threatened to lead us into a fatal trap for, to the Soviets, detente signified merely the promotion of their goal of world domination while minimizing the risk of direct military confrontation. So under the cloak of wordy communiques about peace and understanding the Soviet Union expanded its nuclear arsenal and its navy, engaged in continual doctrinal warfare and subverted states around the globe by means of its own advisers and the armed forces of its surrogates. There was only one destination to which this path could lead -- that of Western defeat. And that's where we were heading.

The Soviet Union was dangerous -- deadly dangerous -- but the danger was that from a wounded predator, not some proud beast of the jungle.

The more intelligent Soviet apparatchiks had grasped that the economic and social system of the USSR was crumbling.... It would have to rely for its survival on the ability to terrify its opponents with the same success as it had terrified its own citizens.

A totally planned society and economy has the ability to concentrate productive capacity on some fixed objective with a reasonable degree of success and do it better than liberal democracies. But totalitarianism can only work like this for a relatively short time, after which the waste, distortions and corruption increase intolerably. So the Soviet Union had to aim at global dominance and achieve it quickly because, given a free-competition between systems, no one would wish to choose that of the Soviets. Their problem was that even though they diverted the best of their talent and a huge share of their gross domestic product to the military complex, they lacked the moral and material resources to achieve superiority. That would be apparent as soon as the West found leaders determined to face them down.

This was what Reagan, with my enthusiastic support and that of a number of other leaders, set out to do as president. And he did it on the basis of a well-considered and elaborate doctrine.

The world has, of course, seen many international doctrines -- Monroe, Truman and Brezhnev all have made their contributions, some more positive than others. But for my money it is the Reagan Doctrine . . . that has had the best and the greatest impact. This was a rejection of both containment and detente ... the struggle with communism was over. The West henceforth would regard no area of the world as destined to forego its liberty simply because the Soviets claimed it to be within their sphere of influence. We would fight a battle of ideas against communism and we would give material support to those who fought to recover their nations from tyranny.

Today's international policymakers have succumbed to a liberal contagion whose most alarming symptom is to view any new and artificial structure as preferable to a traditional and tested one. So they forget that it was powerful nation-states, drawing on national loyalties and national armies, that enforced U.N. Security Council resolutions and defeated Iraq in 1991. Their short-term goal is to subordinate American and other national sovereignties to multilateral authorities; their long-term goal, one suspects, is to establish the United Nations as a kind of embryo world government.

International relations today are in a kind of limbo. Few politicians and diplomats really believe that any power other than the United States can guarantee the peace or punish aggression. But neither is there sufficient cohesion in the West to give America the moral and material support she must have to fulfill that role.

This has to change. America's duty is to lead. The other Western countries' duty is to support its leadership. Provided Western countries unite under American leadership, the West will remain the dominant global influence; if we do not, the opportunity for rogue states and new tyrannical powers to exploit our divisions will increase, and so will the danger to all.

These are as much tasks of today as they were of yesterday, as much the duty of conservative believers now as they were when Reagan and I refused to accept the decline of the West as our ineluctable destiny. As the poet said: "That which the fathers bequeathed thee, earn it anew if thou would'st possess it."

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