Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
How Reagan Won The Cold War, Part XVII:
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Jonathan Chait in TNR[/url]
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God forbid the man might have had competing goals of defeating the Soviet Union by expanding the military at a pace with which they could not compete, and of taking measures to reduce the threat of immediate and/or inadvertent nuclear holocaust. Lord knows that the two could never sit in a presidency together.
Strangely, which of the two would the writer advocate as being more important? Given the second, can one explain how Reagan would have obtained the cooperation of the Soviets without the first?
If the writer's point was that Reagan's achievements weren't as simple as they are sometimes set out, then its a good point. If his point is that he doesn't understand the numerous and complex demands on the presidency, because he believes each president can only have one overriding objective in foreign policy (i.e., bankrupting the Soviet Union in Reagan's case), then he did a great job explaining the point.
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