Politics As Usual

[Tyrone Slothrop]

How Reagan Won The Cold War, Part XVII:

• ...although he was no liberal nor even a moderate, Reagan did repeatedly abandon conservative dogma. That he is nonetheless remembered as an unyielding conservative says less about Reagan than it does about the contemporary Republicans who lay claim to his cause. Consider, first, Reagan's contribution to the demise of the Eastern bloc. Reagan's decision to rebuild the debilitated post-Vietnam military supposedly compelled the Soviets to reform themselves by forcing them into a costly arms race that put even more pressure on their teetering economy. "In the end, Reagan won the Cold War not by defeating the Soviets militarily, but by showing them that we had economic resources they could never hope to match," wrote Bruce Bartlett last year in National Review Online. "They simply couldn't afford to keep up."
  
  Whatever you think of that explanation, it's hard to square with Reagan's 1987 agreement with the Soviets to ban medium- and short-range nuclear missiles. After all, if forcing the Soviets to deploy more weapons caused them to produce fewer consumer goods and weakened their leader's will, then letting them deploy fewer weapons, and divert the savings into the consumer economy, would have had the opposite effect. At the time, the right viewed the treaty as a betrayal. conservatives campaigning against missile treaty, read a New York Times headline; most candidates for the 1988 GOP presidential nomination opposed the treaty. Today conservatives simply gloss over that decision. This week's page-length Wall Street Journal editorial mourning Reagan made no mention at all of that highly significant treaty. Instead it praised his "willingness to walk away from Reykjavik and at other times from an arms control process that had become an article of blind faith among U.S. elites."
  
  The missile treaty was no fluke. Alongside Reagan's (justly) celebrated steely revulsion toward communism sat a wooly-headed, almost peacenik, sensibility. Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon's 1991 biography of Reagan--celebrated for its fairness by left and right alike--revealed Reagan's attachment to anti-cold war movies like The Day After and War Games, which inveighed against the horrors of nuclear war in the most syrupy way. He had a particular affinity for the 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien arrived and forced the United States and Soviet Union to make peace. Reagan invoked this trope so frequently that Colin Powell, his national security adviser, would tell his staff, "Here come the little green men again." Reagan even brought up the movie in his 1988 summit with Gorbachev--who, understandably, didn't know quite what to make of it--in the course of proposing a deal by which both sides would destroy their entire nuclear arsenals. All in all, his view toward the cold war was far different than the "moral clarity" that is currently ascribed to him.

Jonathan Chait in TNR