Thomas wrote:Setanta wrote:The credit the supporters of those two clowns claim for "winning" the cold war ignore so many factors, that it is hardly worth beginning the discussion. I've tried here before, and it just shoots right over the heads of those to whom one speaks.
Gorbachev himself is more responsible than anyone else for the fall of the Berlin Wall--and the steps he took which lead inevitably to that event were taken well before Reagan took that extended photo-op.
I'd say, in the immediate timing, the decision of the Hungarians to open their border with Austria had the most significant effect in causing the collapse of the DDR.
This may all well be. But in 1987, when Reagan held the speech, nobody knew this would happen. In 1987, the vast majority of Germans, including myself, found the speech incredibly naive for suggesting that any of these were realistic possibilities in the short term. It 1989 it turned out we were wrong, and Reagan's assessment had been much more realisitic than ours.
That's the point on which I underestimated him. I'm not saying his speech brought down the wall or caused the collapse of the Soviet Union; I don't think it did.
I was pointing out that inasmuch as no action of his lead to the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist version of communism as practiced in the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites, you did not underestimate him. He was calling for something which was inevitable based on the policies of Gorbachev, but which he no more knew would occur than did you at the time.
I'm pointing out that this was a sound bite opportunity--his audience was not Gorbachev, nor the Central Committee, nor the Politburo, nor the German people. His audience was American public opinion--in that regard it was, more or less, a success. You may have underestimated him in that regard. There was, however, no good reason to assume that you had underestimated his ability to affect events in the Soviet Union--because there is no good reason to assume that the did.
If you will stretch your memory back (or check online), you will recall (or discover) that Boris Yeltsin was in bad odor in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev removed him from his position as chairman of the Central Committee of the Moscow Soviet. He was in the political wilderness. Certainly he continued to have friends, and powerful friends, in the Moscow Soviet. He undoubtedly continued to have some influence among the members of the Central Committee of the Supreme Soviet--but i doubt if he had any friends in the Politburo, if only because that would not have done any member any political good. But Gorbachev was no Stalin, and Yeltsin would survive. No one in 1987 could have predicted that Yeltsin would stand up before the armored vehicles in Moscow, nor that decorated veterans of the Great Patriotic War would have stood up with him. No one in 1987 could have predicted the failed coup attempt in 1991, nor could anyone have predicted that not only would Yeltsin and ordinary Russians stare down the tanks, but that the tanks would then have turned and fired on the Moscow White House (for those who don't know, that is what the parliament building in Moscow was called).
Reagan certainly could not have known. Neither Central Intelligence nor the National Security Agency could have predicted the rise of Yeltsin, and the collapse of the Soviet system in under five years. When Kennedy spoke in Berlin, even German teenagers could remember the Berlin airlift, as did Americans (and in case we forgot, the "Big Three" news broadcasts were prepared to run the film and remind us). For a few years, we got news reports of people killed as they tried to cross the wall, we saw news "documentaries" on tunnels under the wall, and the efforts of people to cross the wall, or to cross the frontier elsewhere. But by 1987, that was just a symbol for Americans, and 25 years after Kennedy's speech, few Americans were likely to have placed Reagan's speech in a context of day to day reality--it was all an appeal to symbolism. The reality was surely immediate and present to Germans--the reality was nugatory to Americans, and it was only the symbolism which mattered.
Perhaps you think you underestimated Reagan--but i suspect that you are, in retrospect, according to him an influence in the matter which he did not possess, and accord to him a perception of percipience to which he was not entitled.
