National defense is not a threat to peace; it is the guarantee of peace with freedom.
—Reagan, in Cannon, President Reagan
By contemporary standards, Ted Kaczynski is a really smart guy. He graduated from Harvard at age twenty, earned a PhD in mathematics at twenty-four, and became a professor at Berkeley. His “Industrial Society and Its Future” is more sophisticated than anything Reagan ever wrote. The work blends elements of Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche in order to critique modern industrial and technological society. He is an insightful social critic. Kaczynski is also popularly known as the Unabomber; his mail bombs killed several people and wounded many more. His ideas will never be studied like Reagan’s because they have had little social and political influence. His ideas have not shaped the American political landscape or events. Kaczynski posited some interesting ideas, but historians have no interest in him because he has no historical importance.
How, and if, Reagan’s ideas transformed the world continues to be debated. For example, some scholars contend that Reagan’s ideas and subsequent policies had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. George Kennan, the architect of the containment policy Reagan refuted, asserted that Reagan’s policies played no role in ending the Soviet Union: “The claim heard in campaign rhetoric that the United States under Republican Party leadership ‘won the cold war’ is intrinsically silly. The suggestion that any administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish. No great country has that sort of influence on the internal developments of any other one.”1 Kennan’s biases need to be acknowledged: he actively opposed many of Reagan’s cold war policies. The communist historian Hobsbawm contended, “Since the USSR was to collapse just after the end of the Reagan era, American publicists were naturally to claim that it had been overthrown by a militant campaign to break and destroy it. The USA had waged the Cold War and utterly defeated the enemy. We need not take the crusaders’ version of the USA too seriously.”2 Hobsbawm reasoned that no one in the United States foresaw the fall of the Soviet Union, and the CIA naïvely believed that the Soviet economy was strong. Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, wrote, “With regard to the Soviet Union, there is little credible evidence that Reagan’s massive military buildup of the early 80s did anything to persuade the Soviet leaders to come to the bargaining table.”3 The Soviet Union was inherently doomed, and its fall was inevitable. Had Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale won the 1980 and 1984 elections, the events of 1989 would still have occurred in roughly the same manner.
On the other hand, conservatives like the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher declared that Reagan “won the Cold War without firing a shot.”4 Her biases need to be recognized too. Naturally conservatives tout Reagan’s foreign policy as a central force in the ending of the cold war. Like Kennan and Hobsbawm, conservatives have ideological biases.
Before examining the ways Reagan’s ideas contributed to bringing down the Soviet system, however, some philosophy of history must be kept in mind. As the notable Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume pointed out, cause and effect transcend human capabilities to grasp and understand them. Hume’s famous example uses billiard balls: We see billiard ball A smash into ball B. Ball B moves, so we assume the motion of ball A caused this. But although event A may seem to cause event B, Hume argued, the assertion of cause and effect is still speculative. These ideas may be applied to history. Proving cause and effect can be really hard for historians. After all, World War I may have broken out without the assassination of the archduke; the French Revolution might have occurred if Rousseau had never lived; and America might have won World War II even if FDR had been defeated in the 1940 presidential election. What historians use in order to understand cause and effect is evidence. Is there proof that Rousseau contributed to the French Revolution? No. Is there evidence? Yes. As one example, Robespierre, one of the leading figures of the Revolution, carried copies of Rousseau’s books with him. This suggests to most historians, at least to some degree, that Robespierre was influenced by Rousseau. The term “general will,” a concept coined by Rousseau, also appears in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, again suggesting (not proving) some sort of influence. Would the French Revolution have occurred if Rousseau had never lived? This is a tricky question, but evidence suggests that his ideas played a role.
Evidence—specifically Soviet leaders—suggests that Reagan’s ideas and subsequent policies impacted the Soviets. Soviet leaders are better sources of evidence than most others, due to their proximity to the events. They are closer to primary sources than figures like Kennan, Hobsbawm, Wilentz, and Thatcher. Soviet leaders contend that for the first time in cold war history, the Soviets had trouble keeping up their end of the arms race. General Secretary Yuri Andropov stated in 1983, “The Soviet Union feels the burden of the arms race into which we are being pulled, more than anybody else does. . . . It is not a problem for Reagan to shift tens of billions of dollars of appropriations from social needs to the military industrial complex.”5 The United States could win the arms race because of its material wealth. Nothing could be more disconcerting during the cold war. Always a key component in determining cold war success and failure in the minds of leaders, arms spending was a zero-sum game. The more the Americans spent, the further the Soviets fell behind. The further they fell behind, the weaker their system seemed, igniting a need for reform.
The arms race was taken to another level in 1983, when Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Lou Cannon asserted, “More than any other specific program of the administration, SDI was a product of Reagan’s imagination and Reagan’s priorities. Another president might well have proposed an income tax reduction or a rebuilding of the defense budget, but no other prominent American politician was even talking about construction of a public space shield that would protect civilians from a nuclear holocaust.”6 SDI epitomized Reagan’s originality. He pondered in a nationally televised address:
What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies? I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of the century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it’s reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of efforts on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war?7
SDI was a defensive measure, aimed at preventing nuclear attack. An antiballistic missile system that would destroy nuclear missiles using lasers in outer space, it caused a firestorm because many, if not most, physicists argued SDI was not feasible, at least not any time soon. (The physicist Edward Teller was the most notable exception.) To many, it seemed like the latest wasteful manifestation of the American military-industrial complex.
Whether SDI can ever be feasible matters little for historians because the fact is, the Soviets took SDI very seriously. Reagan’s most significant military expenditure psychologically weakened the Soviets and contributed to the need for reform by demonstrating Soviet inferiority in the realm of technology. Gorbachev wondered, “Maybe we shouldn’t be so afraid of SDI? Of course we cannot disregard this dangerous program. But we should overcome our obsession with it.”8 KGB General Nikolai Leonov conceded that SDI played a powerful “psychological role” by demonstrating the weakness of Soviet technology: “It underlined the need for an immediate review of our place in world technological progress.”9 It underlined a need for reform by showing Soviet technological inferiority. Another Soviet official described the Soviet reaction as “highly emotional . . . in a tone approaching hysteria.”10 The Sovietologist Martin Malia wrote, “More important is the geopolitical point that SDI posed a technological and economic challenge the Soviets could neither ignore nor match. Hence, the only way to diffuse the challenge was through negotiation, and so Gorbachev made winding down the Cold War his first priority. Many in the West would undoubtedly dispute this version of the turn towards ending the conflict, but former Soviet military personnel and political analysts agree that the Soviet Union’s inability to keep up its half of the arms race, in particular with regard to SDI, was a principle factor in triggering perestroika.”11 It was a trigger for liberal reform because SDI and Reagan’s military buildup showed the Soviets how far they lagged behind the United States in key cold war categories. Their system had never seemed so weak. The only way to strengthen it was through reform.
SDI’s psychological impact on Soviet leadership resembled Sputnik’s impact on American leadership in the late 1950s. Like Sputnik, SDI is significant for what it suggested—in this case, that the American system had surged ahead of its Soviet antagonist in the fields of science and technology. Sputnik was just a satellite that orbited the Earth, but it was an important victory for the Soviets in the cold war because it meant Soviet missiles potentially could quickly reach the United States. It had a profound psychological impact on Americans that can be described as hysterical. Sputnik and SDI showed that one side potentially had gained a significant advantage in the arms race. SDI potentially meant all Soviet missiles were meaningless. Yes, this is in the abstract, but the cold war was often fought in the abstract, in the minds of men. The difference between SDI and Sputnik was that whereas the United States eventually exceeded Sputnik by putting a man on the moon, the Soviets could never match SDI. Gorbachev knew this. Much of the negotiation between the Soviets and the Americans during the summit meetings revolved around SDI, so much so that Gorbachev even proposed a complete elimination of nuclear weapons on both sides—as long as the Americans limited SDI research. American technological and military strength proved to the Soviets that they were losing the technological side of the arms race, and therefore were losing the cold war. By roughly 1985 the advantage had swung to the Americans. If the Soviet Union wanted to continue, something had to change.
For those who are still skeptical that Reagan’s ideas had anything to do with the Soviet demise, placing Gorbachev’s reforms in the broader context of Russian history illuminates how Soviet failure in key aspects of the cold war led to reform, and ultimately collapse. Gorbachev was merely the most recent example of a long line of Russian rulers who attempted reforms following defeat in war. Peter the Great, Russia’s first reformer, was partly inspired by Russian attempts at war against Sweden in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Russia’s next round of reforms, led by Tsar Alexander II, were provoked by the Russian debacle in the Crimean War in the 1850s. While Russian forces were able to defeat the mighty Napoleon, several decades later they were victims of the new French military technology inspired by the Industrial Revolution. In the most significant Russian reforms of the nineteenth century, Alexander II, called Tsar Liberator, subsequently freed tens of millions of Russian serfs from the land. Some transitory reforms and liberalizations followed the Russian defeat by Japan in 1905. It would take Russian failures in World War I to lead to the most radical reform, led by Lenin. Although it may seem contradictory to our twenty-first-century Western position, Lenin genuinely believed his version of communism liberated Russia, and without Russian failure in the war, communism never would have been established there. Gorbachev’s policies that led to the end of the cold war were in no small part a response to the Soviets’ inability to match America technological and military strength. By roughly 1986 the cold war was over and Gorbachev, following in the footsteps of Peter, Alexander II, and Lenin, demanded change.
The arms acceleration also made Reagan the stronger party when he met with Soviet leadership. Reagan, thanks to his time as SAG president, was the most experienced negotiator in presidential history. No one who studies the history of Hollywood can deny the contentious nature of the negotiation between SAG and entertainment executives during the 1950s, partly because TV stars first emerged during this period. He learned during his time as SAG president the advantages of negotiating from a position of power. And this is what he achieved as president from 1981 to 1985. Now he could negotiate. He had more chips. Some writers have credited these meetings with Gorbachev as an impetus for the end of the cold war.12 This may lead one to see an inconsistency between the Reagan who deemed the Soviet Union an evil empire, the Reagan who sought to roll back communism, the Reagan who pointed missiles at Eastern Europe, the Reagan who invested heavily in offensive and defensive weapons, and the Reagan who befriended Gorbachev. The first Reagan was a hawk; the last, a dove. Reagan used the carrot-and-stick approach to provoke positive change. Reagan initially used threats, until the Soviets were ready to negotiate, then used rewards in order to induce change. He talked loudly and carried a big stick.
Would the Soviet Union have collapsed if Reagan never became president? Probably. But numerous primary sources suggest Reagan’s ideas and policies contributed to provoking Soviet reform by demonstrating the inferiority of the Soviet system. Reagan deserves as much credit for winning the cold war as FDR does for winning World War II. A critic of Roosevelt’s can plausibly declare that America still would have won World War II had Wendell Willkie won the 1940 presidential election. This is probably true, but that doesn’t mean present-day historians deny Roosevelt any credit. Historians prefer to grant agency rather than contend “That would have happened anyway.” It is the nature of the field.
Reagan’s defense spending may have helped bring about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but this meant that although he preached limited government, the size of the U.S. government did not significantly shrink during his presidency. This explains the ballooning budget deficits. A dizzying array of statistics can be used by either side of the political spectrum in order to suit their political purposes when it comes to Reagan and spending. Writing history can be tricky. After reviewing all of the analysis of Reagan’s effect on government spending, it’s hard not to agree with the adage that “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” The conservative Mises Institute charges, “In 1980, Jimmy Carter’s last year as president, the federal government spent a whopping 27.9% of national income. . . . Reagan assaulted the free-spending Carter administration throughout his campaign in 1980. So how did the Reagan administration do? At the end of the first quarter of 1988, federal spending accounted for 28.7% of national income. Even Ford and Carter did a better job at cutting government. His budget cuts were actually cuts in projected spending, not absolute cuts in current spending levels.”13 Most of Reagan’s “cuts” were either cuts in projected spending or were later reversed. For example, welfare spending was cut early in Reagan’s presidency, so one can justly say that he cut welfare spending. However, these cuts were reversed, so by the end of his presidency, the United States was spending more on welfare per capita (in constant 1984 dollars) than it was in 1980.14 One biographer calls Reagan a “guns and butter president.”15
Another variable that must be introduced is that most of Reagan’s spending was for defense programs. Although it can be debated how much government grew mainly under Reagan, those who criticize him for expanding government build a straw man because they don’t realize that he wanted to shrink the size of every part of the government, save the military. Defense spending was never a budget issue for Reagan because the cold war raged, a war that had to be fought, and won. The fate of humanity lay in the balance. Spend whatever you need to win the cold war, Reagan maintained. The size of government grew under Reagan not because he increased the size of domestic programs but because he revamped the American military. There is an argument that Reagan wanted to reduce the size of government; government grew under Reagan; therefore Reagan failed. This is too simplistic. Reagan never wanted to reduce the size of government when it came to defense spending, because the military was needed to preserve liberty and, more specifically, to win the cold war. Reagan maintained, “National defense is not a threat to peace; it is the guarantee of peace with freedom.”16 Yes, Reagan argued, we need taxes to have a strong defense, but this was justified. By spending heavily on the military, we preserve liberty, and therefore justify this spending.
Do Reagan’s ideas about a strong military contradict Christian pacifism? A Christian who preaches war and violence is hypocritical, the argument goes. Jesus preached against violence, so any true Christian should oppose any war. Yet the Christian tradition is hardly a pacifist one. Much like in the Koran, one can find justification in the Bible for either peace or war, depending on which passages are cited. Although Jesus preaches peace in parts of Scripture, other parts are filled with violence. The Book of Jeremiah, for example, abounds with predictions and justifications of death. Jeremiah 20:4 reads, “For this is what the Lord says: ‘I will send terror upon you and all your friends, and you will watch as they are slaughtered by the swords of the enemy. I will hand the people of Judah over to the king of Babylon. He will take them captive to Babylon or run them through with the sword.’” Jeremiah 48:10 says, “Cursed are those who neglect doing the Lord’s work. Cursed are those who keep their swords from killing.” One of Christianity’s greatest icons and Jesus’s most important forefather, King David, was a warrior who killed. Moses too killed. By using King David as evidence, a Christian can justify death, even if it violates the Ten Commandments. Sometimes death and destruction make the world a better place, such as with King David’s slaying of Goliath. Christianity’s greatest philosopher, St. Augustine, believed that if war created peace in the world, it was justified. If killing one person saves two lives, is it worth it? Christians like Reagan can justify death, destruction, and war.
The Christian future is not one without violent conflict, because, according to biblical prophecy, violence is a necessary precondition for a better world, the Reign of Saints. Jesus says in Matthew 24:3–14:
As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and the end of the age?” Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Christ’ and will deceive many.
“You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.
“Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”
For Jesus, war and violence were necessary for the New Age, a better age for the righteous. Blessed are the peacemakers, but sometimes war is necessary. We do not want war, but we must be prepared, because sometimes God wills it.
For what it is worth, fewer American soldiers were killed in battle in the 1980s than in any other decade in the twentieth century, save the two decades between World War I and World War II, when Americans practiced a rigid isolationism. In fact, the number of Americans killed in war between 1981 and 2017 is approximately seven thousand (around 5,000 in Iraq, 2,000 in Afghanistan, plus some other skirmishes such as the first Gulf War of 1990–91), one of the lowest totals for a thirty-five-year epoch in modern American history. Reagan’s massive military buildup was followed not by war but by relative peace for America. World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War were far more deadly than any military involvement since 1980. Roughly ten times more Americans were killed in the Korean War than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The same statistics are true for Vietnam. America has fought wars since 1980, but they have been occurring with less frequency and with less social impact.