Jun. 10th, 2004 02:26 pm
RIP Ronald Reagan
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muckefuckI'm still keeping my exposure to news (particularly television news) low, so I haven't seen anything of the "flood" of eulogies that many on my Friends list are complaining about. I did do a Google search on "Reagan achievements", hoping to jog my memory with a solid, concise list. Out of the first twenty hits, only three seem positive enough to be considered encomia and one of these is over six years old. (The author laments the lack of a true successor and the eclipse of the Reaganite legacy among conservatives; it left me truly curious how he would evaluate Shrub, whose few good qualities--chief among them hawkish moral conviction--are among those he most admired in Reagan.) Most speak, at best, of a "mixed legacy". I'm guessing that this eulogy deluge is mostly a televised thing.
Some of you have mentioned that you hope there's this much of a fuss when Carter kicks it. Now, by contrast to the last four presidents, there's someone with an unmixed legacy: I can't name a single good thing he did while in office. Admittedly, I was very young at the time, but I'm hardly alone in conceiving of the late 70's as a time of stagnation and malaise. He's a good man and all, but, then, so was Neville Chamberlain, I'm sure. Should he also have a motorway named for him?
I've also heard several people deny that Reagan won us the Cold War. Or they grudgingly admit that he did only to point out that the USSR would've collapsed anyway. Yes, but when? In two years? In fifty? At what additional cost in suffering? Again, to reach for a WWII analogy, the Nazi regime in Germany was unsustainable in the long term and would've collapsed eventually, too. Does that mean that FDR's offensive in Europe wasn't necessary? And does anyone--even paleolithic bedrock conservatives--deny that he won WWII for the Allies? (Not in the sense that he did it alone, of course, but in the sense that victory wouldn't have occurred without his leadership.)
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princeofcairo has mentioned to me how he's forced to grit his teeth and admit that a president whose social policies he abhors was the only candidate who would've made the morally correct choices and saved the world from barbarism. He's hoping for the day when American liberals will come to view Reagan in the same way he views FDR. After a decade of resistence, I'm willing to. I won't be shedding any tears for the Gipper, but I'm not about to join in the singing and dancing on his grave either.
Some of you have mentioned that you hope there's this much of a fuss when Carter kicks it. Now, by contrast to the last four presidents, there's someone with an unmixed legacy: I can't name a single good thing he did while in office. Admittedly, I was very young at the time, but I'm hardly alone in conceiving of the late 70's as a time of stagnation and malaise. He's a good man and all, but, then, so was Neville Chamberlain, I'm sure. Should he also have a motorway named for him?
I've also heard several people deny that Reagan won us the Cold War. Or they grudgingly admit that he did only to point out that the USSR would've collapsed anyway. Yes, but when? In two years? In fifty? At what additional cost in suffering? Again, to reach for a WWII analogy, the Nazi regime in Germany was unsustainable in the long term and would've collapsed eventually, too. Does that mean that FDR's offensive in Europe wasn't necessary? And does anyone--even paleolithic bedrock conservatives--deny that he won WWII for the Allies? (Not in the sense that he did it alone, of course, but in the sense that victory wouldn't have occurred without his leadership.)
princeofcairo has mentioned to me how he's forced to grit his teeth and admit that a president whose social policies he abhors was the only candidate who would've made the morally correct choices and saved the world from barbarism. He's hoping for the day when American liberals will come to view Reagan in the same way he views FDR. After a decade of resistence, I'm willing to. I won't be shedding any tears for the Gipper, but I'm not about to join in the singing and dancing on his grave either.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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I can.
How about negotiating a still-lasting peace accord between Egypt and Israel, who'd gone to war four times in the previous thirty years?
Also: Created the Cabinet-level Departments of Education and Energy. Expanded the National Parks designations, including hundreds of millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness (the same acreage that is a bone of contention between Bush/oil companies and environmentalists today) and passed other major environmental legislations. Created millions of jobs, reduced the national debt, restructured National Civil Service. Got the Panama Canal treaties signed to insure the ongiong neutrality of the canal after its return to Panama. Established full diplomatic relations with China.
Just off the top of my head.
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Okay, I'd give a guy a highway for that.
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Of course, for that one to count, you'd have to find a single thing that those cabinet departments have accomplished that is worthwhile. At best, they do the same thing that the component agencies that were fused (or in several cases, just replicated) to create them, only with far more people and at a far higher cost. At worst, they are costly boondoggles, of which Carter's synthetic fuels fiasco -- about $70 billion tossed in a hole if I remember correctly -- is the most notorious.
I'm open to giving Carter a good share of the credit for the Camp David accords, even if the Nobel Committee didn't. I think, however, that the incredible damage done by his complete screw-up in Iran more than offsets any Middle East triumphs.
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Certainly bad - but it's not like subsequent Presidents have a stellar track record of avoiding similarly massive screw-ups with regards to Iran either..
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Or how the Reagan administration then promptly turned around and gave Iran's enemy (Iraq) even more weapons, intel and loans so they could better wage war on Iran. Clinton flip-flopped on issues of sanctioning Iran over supplying arms to the Bosnian conflict and supporting terror groups, sometimes pushing for sanctions and sometimes vetoing them, which isn't as big of a screw-up IMO.
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I was thinking more of mistakes that were actually bad enough to substantially change our position in the country as Carter's did, and to me the only thing that comes close is the CIA-backed coup (under Truman) of Mossedegh.
I thought the policy to encourage and support Iraq in waging the Iran-Iraq War began with Carter? I cringe at the prospect of searching for a detailed objective history by Googling however. Anybody know for sure offhand?
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Why does Carter deserve credit for creating those jobs?
As for establishing diplomatic ties with China, I'm not sure why this counts as a major accomplishment. Just because it was novel? I also don't see why it counts as his, since it was China that sought our hand because it was desperate for foreign capital to rebuild its freshly-ruined economy. I know less about the Panamanian treaty situation. Was there a serious risk of losing their neutrality through less-than-perfect negotiations?
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As far as Panama: it wasn't a matter of things might not be neutral, it was a matter of giving the Canal back to Panama instead of as a US-owned thing.
I didn't say the China thing was _major_, nor any of this - merely a 'good' thing as you asked for. It counts as 'his' because previous presidents had refused to do so; seeking some diplomatic ties to China was a Nixon thing, but we were still fresh out of viewing them as a Communist Foe from the Vietnam war.
The jobs bit was deliberately spurious. :) Since every president tries to claim job creation as being due to them, when it happens.
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Why was that a good thing?
Also, why "back to Panama"? They never owned it, prior to our giving it to them in Carter's treaty, and it's not as if there was any significant history of Panama controlling the Canal Zone prior to its construction. (It could certainly be argued that we owed Colombia something for essentially taking Panama from it, so that we could build our canal. But I don't really see that anything Panama had ever had was taken from it, or needed to be returned.)
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The 'need' to return, resolve or otherwise change the state of affairs was mainly an issue that Panama (and other Latin American countries supporting them) was getting increasingly contentious and angry about it - for some odd reason they didn't appreciate having US military bases physically splitting their country in half, I guess. Anyway, it had been a big enough problem that the US was having to veto UN resolutions against them, fatal incidents of mob violence between US and Panamanian citizens had occurred, and the three presidents prior to Carter had unsuccessfully been seeking solutions (including failed attempts to negotiate similar treaties) to the issue for over a decade.
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While I can't see that the treaty generated any tangible benefits, even to Panama, it clearly has not had any negative effects on the U.S. So if the rest of the world feels better with one fewer example of U.S. dominance staring them in the face, God bless 'em.
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But generally, I'm a big fan of having the open hostility level between us and foreign countries be sufficiently low where we can exchange embassies and ambassadors and are willing to negotiate whatever comes up, instead of refuse to talk about anything.
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If sheer size was all that mattered when it came to trade, then only China scholars would ever have heard of a 1,000 sq. km. speck on the map called "Hong Kong". How recently was it that our bilateral trade with all the rest of China exceeded that of our trade with this one little port? Getting back to the point, did Carter actually establish trade relations with China or just "make it possible"?
We haven't ever had diplomatic relations with North Korea. I guess that means we never negotiate with them about anything. If only we could get them accept one of our ambassadors, all this lingering tension from the Korean War would just melt away!
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Credit where credit is due:
"On March 1, 1979, the United States and China formally established embassies in Beijing and Washington, DC. During 1979, outstanding private claims were resolved, and a bilateral trade agreement was concluded."
State Department Background Note: China
This was a bipartisan effort, started with Nixon and continuing into the Reagan years, but the Carter administration did AFAICT conclude the first trade agreement with China.
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That wasn't the liberal line at the time... they were busy insisting that the USSR was strong and here-to-stay and we needed to accommodate them instead of antagonize them.
Nice reminder in this review:
http://www.reason.com/0311/cr.gg.the.shtml
Long quote from same: "In retrospect, Reagan’s point that the Soviet economy was on life support seems obvious to the point of banality. In fact, that’s one of the arguments his critics use against him: that the Soviet economy would have imploded anyway, even without Reagan’s defense buildup. But that’s not the way foreign policy intellectuals saw it in 1982.
"'It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable,' declared economist Lester Thurow, adding that the Soviet Union was 'a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States." (I wonder if Thurow had ever flown on a Soviet airliner?) John Kenneth Galbraith went further, insisting that in many respects the Soviet economy was superior to ours: 'In contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.'
"Arthur Schlesinger, just back from a trip to Moscow in 1982, said Reagan was delusional. 'I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street -- more of almost everything,' he said, adding his contempt for 'those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink.'"
(end quote)
I personally remember the derision handed down by liberals like NPR's Daniel Shorr when Reagan stood before the Brandenburg gate and urged Gorbachev to tear down the wall. What a dinosaur, they said, too stupid to realize that history had already spoken and communism was a durable reality that wiser heads had learned to accept.
Legacies
I read an article on Marketwatch before he died wherein one economist said, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." I remain unconvinced. And how long was it before Reagan used the word "AIDS" in public? Etc. etc. etc., and the same arguments you've heard elsewhere, I'm sure. (Although I would argue that Mikhail Gorbachev is probably more to be praised for the fall of the Soviet Union than Reagan.)
But at the same time, he is more than the sum effect of his policies. He's an icon. Carter won't get the love because he committed the gravest of American sins: he lost. Reagan vs. Mondale in '84 made Barry Goldwater look like William the Conqueror. Liberals gnashed their teeth, but couldn't articulate an alternative until Iran/Contra started to go down.
Which is what makes me sigh now, twenty years later -- the lack of a concrete alternative. That "hawkish moral conviction" is more catchy to many voters than the decline of governmental transparency.
But if you believe the market is always efficient, this, then, is the way it should be.
Re: Legacies
Reagan's record on AIDS would be an example of one of those "social policies I abhor".
I don't see how Gorbachev deserves credit for the fall of the Soviet Union. He introduced glasnost and perestroika in order to preserve it, not dismantle it. I give him a lot of credit for managing its demise so well--I'm still amazed it was such a relatively bloodless affair--but I don't think he ever would've been pushed to do that without Reagan. (Would he even have come to power if the USSR hadn't been in the crisis it was?) In fact, I think Reagan deserves a great deal of credit for recongising Gorbachev as someone we could work with (back in the early years when many old-line anti-communists considered him another slick deceiver) and changing his tack in order to do just that.
Shackled markets aren't especially efficient and the political one strikes me as particularly unfree. There are all kinds of barriers to entry and restrictions on competition, not to mention perverse incentives and lack of transparency.
Re: Legacies
I do not want to give the impression that I believe Reagan was neutral about communism , only that -- I'm a lib'ral, I ain't dumb -- just to say there's another key player who deserves to be named.
I was talking with a Russian friend a while back, and Gorby's legacy in Russia is not very positive. He is believed to have torn down an oppressive system without anything to replace it. This from a girl who is now a huge capitalist, and spent her sixteenth birthday in a mob of people in Moscow standing in the way of the abortive military coup once Gorbachev began making plans for the demise of the USSR.
To be sure, the man wasn't the antichrist (contrary to the views of hyperlefties) and his legacy has successes and failures as much as the modern liberal equivalent, Bill Clinton's. King George, for all we pinkoes despise him, unseated the Taliban and, for right or wrong, Saddam Hussein, and the people of those nations and much of the world will be better off for it.
I've said it before: I'd be much more likely to vote Republican if they'd get out of bed with the religious right.
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I think of Gorby as one of these men, but with much better international press. It's not surprising at all that most Russian despise him, more of a fluke that Americans think so highly of him. As with Reagan, I think this has a lot to do with his personal charisma.
Re: Legacies
I'd note that Gorbachev had no intention of presiding over the end of the USSR or the end of Communist monopoly rule thereof. He believed it was possible to moderate the regime and allow enough partial openness to let them continue forever. (He also seems to have hoped that the Warsaw Pact nations would remain in the USSR's sphere of influence voluntarily, and ditto the internal Soviet republics-- though in the event, he wasn't unwilling to send tanks into Lithuania, for example.) For whatever it's worth, Reagan's vision seems to have been clearer on this point than Gorbachev's, and the pressure he placed on the regime seems to be a major reason for this. (There were certainly forces in the US that wanted to help the Soviets keep things together, in the name of the perpetual State Department goal of "stability". Fortunately, by the time George H.W. Bush was in place to actively try to implement this-- sticking with Gorbachev even after it was clear that Yeltsin was the future and telling the Ukrainians to sit tight-- it was too late.)
Now, maybe it was sheer coincidence that we got what Reagan wanted (and was talking about at least as early as 1981), and not what Gorbachev wanted (right up to the day that it was explained to him that since he'd never had popular support, the 1991 coup's demonstration that he also lacked military and KGB support meant his services were no longer necessary). But when someone sets a grand strategic goal, pursues policies aimed at that goal, sees that goal achieved, and finds both participants in and victims of the defeated regime crediting/blaming him for it, I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Someone like Gorbachev was certainly necessary (though Reagan had to wait through more Russian leaders than any other President before Gorbachev showed up). But with a detente-minded US President willing to perpetuate the 70's military establishment indefinitely (or to cut it further, in line with our lessened horizons), I see no reason the Soviets couldn't have held on. With no expensive military challenges, no loud demands for freedom, no fierce condemnations of the system-- all those provocative things that only a crazed or simpleminded warmonger would resort to in international diplomacy-- and with a general expectation that things would remain more or less as they had been, the people and governments of the Iron Curtain alike might well have muddled through the 80s much as they did the 70s, secure in the knowledge that any loss of confidence and capability on their part was being matched on ours. 1989 might simply have been another 1981, 1968, or 1956.
I know that's what I was expecting, right up through 1989. After all, as a friend noted, "It's not as if they're dancing on the Berlin Wall." Except that on November 11, 1989, two and a half years after Reagan had issued a widely derided challenge to Gorbachev to "tear down this wall"-- with the only Soviet response being a complaint that he'd given "an openly provocative, war-mongering speech"-- they were.
I don't dispute that a Gorbachev was necessary. But it would be hard, given Gorbachev's own statements, strategies, and actions, to show that a Gorbachev without a Reagan would have been sufficient.
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i've heard people mention on the much-maligned NPR that Reagan accelerated the collapse of the USSR by increasing military spending in Europe and other areas, thereby straining on the USSR's economy to the breaking point.
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More importantly, though, I don't see how you can lay all the blame for it firmly at Reagan's feet when he was opposed by a Democratically-controlled Congress for both terms. Don't they have any control over the budget?
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Kaplan emphasizes Gorbachev's role, but I'd go further: Gorbachev, quite despite himself, destroyed the USSR. As Alexis de Toqueville pointed out, "The most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a long spell of oppression, he sets out to improve the lot of his subjects." The USSR was unreformable; attempting to do so only cracked it open.
What-if games are always tricky; but I don't see a strong case that a President Mondale would have been unable to give Gorbachev the external security he needed to encourage perestroika. On the other hand, if the Soviets had trotted out another leader of the vintage of Chernenko or Andropov, or if Yegor Ligachev were in power, it's unlikely that Reagan's arms buildup and nukes proposals would have had much effect.
Reagan's domestic legacy is appalling, however. His presidency was the signal to the business class that it need no longer share with the middle class. So far as I can see, if Reagan helped destroy the world's nastiest economic system, he also helped destroy its best one.
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The destruction of the Soviet Union didn't depend on external security, though, but its opposite. External security was what it wanted, so that it could reform in peace while hanging on to its empire and its global influence. That this didn't happen depended in large part on external challenges. Controlled challenges, certainly, but the willingness to respond to each concession with "and what about this?" rather than praise for allowing semi-independent thought on alternate Tuesdays and not putting nuclear missiles on Mars, while negotiating a detente that left the Warsaw Pact and USSR in place. I don't see a Mondale administration demonstrating effectively unlimited willingness to match and overmatch the Soviets' military military capabilities, forcing them to bleed resources trying to maintain parity. (Whatever you may think of SDI, the Russians themselves by their own testimony considered it not a hole into which we were throwing money, but a technological and economic challenge that they found they couldn't hope to equal.) I don't see a Mondale administration engaging in the wholesale rejection of the idea that the Soviets had any rights in eastern Europe that didn't come out of the barrel of a gun. I don't see a Mondale administration putting missiles in Europe and then proposing a zero-zero option to get them out (which, we all knew, was a wholly unrealistic provocation, just as the demand to tear down the Berlin Wall was just posturing).
By the testimony of the very dissidents who wound up in the forefront of the change, the crisis of rising expectations wrt democracy came largely because of Reagan, not because of Gorbachev. (Lech Walesa certainly seems to give Reagan the lion's share of the credit. So, apparently, do many Russians.) Of course, they're less sentimental about Gorbachev, who was, after all, a dictator who resisted elections and multiparty democracy to the very end. He was the best of the Soviet leaders, but that's pretty much up there with the best infielder in Uzbekistan. (Heck, as far as I can tell Boris Yeltsin was the best Russian leader in the country's entire history, and I'd rather have our worst President running things than him.) Gorbachev's government was still doing military maneuvers in the Baltics and killing democracy activists right up to the point in 1991 where he was sidelined.
But perhaps Reagan just accidentally got everything he predicted in 1981, while Gorbachev achieved no goal that he set for himself or his country. Maybe those freed by the fall of the Soviet empire are wrong to credit the man who expended resources and planning to end that empire, rather than the one who scrambled to preserve it. If so, then may we be blessed by many such accidents in the future.
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And yes, the blowback on that was eventually pretty bad for us too.
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As for external security, Kaplan's point is that Gorbachev was emboldened to undertake reforms precisely because he figured that Reagan wasn't going to attack the USSR. If he didn't have that assurance, it would have been safer to keep with the Brezhnev program of maintaining the current system at all costs.
With all due respect to Lech Walesa, what is his opinion supposed to prove? Is it a big surprise that Eastern Europeans were more inspired by Reagan than by Gorbachev? You might as well credit Frank Zappa for the fall of the Czech Communists.
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Still, the economic disaster would have been there, and so would the military and political challenges posed by the US, and so would the military disaster in Afghanistan, and so would Chernobyl, and so would the restive satellites. Ligachev may not be Gorbachev, but he isn't Stalin-- he can't force a fundamentally broken system to function simply by terror and force of will. I don't know what happens to the USSR and its satellites in this scenario, but they're on the ropes and the other guy is pressing hard-- something has to give. (Though the results might well have been more violent, and the outcome less happy. I freely grant that Gorbachev's willingness to kill people retail, but not wholesale, to keep the empire together represents a dramatic improvement in Soviet leadership.)
As for external security, Kaplan's point is that Gorbachev was emboldened to undertake reforms precisely because he figured that Reagan wasn't going to attack the USSR.
Then why didn't he respond to our military buildup and SDI program with a shrug, massive military cutbacks, and an attempt to reroute those resources to the rest of his ailing economy? If Reagan's major contribution was to make the Soviets feel secure, they had an odd way of showing it.
Is it a big surprise that Eastern Europeans were more inspired by Reagan than by Gorbachev?
Not really. What surprises me is that anyone is more inspired by Gorbachev than by Reagan.