“Shutting the Cold War Down (Review of “Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended,” by Jack F. Matlock, Jr.) by Strobe Talbott, The New York Times Book Review, 1 Aug, p. 7.
Great review of a great book. Matlock’s point on Reagan “winning” the Cold War is more that Reagan was smart enough to realize just how desperate a radical Gorby really was, and that the key thing he did was simply make sure the U.S. did nothing to stop him. Reagan, therefore, didn’t win the Cold War game so much as he let Gorby slap the winning goal into his own net.
The real way to understand the Cold War was that we survived it just fine while the Sovs came apart. Our system won the Cold War, not any one man and sure as hell not our military industrial complex, much less the 80s build-up, much less that idiotic sink hole called Star Wars. Wall Street won the Cold War. The Soviets lost because they didn’t have a Wall Street, meaning a financial market that could rationally determine macro-level value. Their economy built tons of crap that was worthless, and eventually it all had to end.
One Russian expert, Sergey Rogov, head of the Institute of USA and Canada in Moscow, likes to compare the Russian economic collapse of the early 1990s with the U.S.’s Great Depression, saying Russia’s breakdown was far worse. But in reality all that really happened was that their economy was exposed as being built on almost nothing of value—or the so-called Big Lie. Their economy didn’t collapse so much as the curtain was finally drawn back to reveal that the emperor had no clothes.
Read the Russian histories on how the Soviet Union really lost the Cold War. What you will find in them is virtually no mention of Reagan and Star Wars. Gorby may go around selling that nonsense because he knows it helps him garner speaking fees and friends in the U.S., but it is a Little Lie (harmless but completely false).
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