Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Thursday, June 10, 2004

These powerful words were not crafted at the height of his presidency, but in 1972, when the cauldron that was Ronald Reagan was already forging its steel.

Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the seminal “Reagan’s War,” gets impatient with those who still harbor the notion that Ronald Reagan was merely the incidental occupant of the White House when the former Soviet Union imploded of its own weight.

The fact is, argues the scholar and author, Ronald Reagan is credited with the victory in the Cold War not just by many armchair analysts – but also by the enemy. And who else would know better than those bitten by the Reagan steel?

There was a grave reason, Schweizer maintains, why at arms summits, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev frantically offered increasingly gigantic cuts in strategic missiles – first 50 percent, then all of them – if Reagan would just abandon his Strategic Defense Initiative, as “Star Wars” was formally known.

Genrikh Grofimenko, a former adviser to Leonid Brezhnev, has noted for the historic record: “Ninety-nine percent of the Russian people believe that you won the Cold War because of your president’s insistence on SDI.”

SDI “played a powerful psychological role,” acknowledged KGB Gen. Nikolai Leonev. “It underlined still more our technological backwardness.”

Gen. Sergei Kondrashey admitted that the initiative “influenced the situation in the country to such an extent that it made the necessity of seeking an understanding with the West very acute.”

From the beginning, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko figured exactly what the wily Reagan was up to: “Behind all this lies the clear calculation that the USSR will exhaust its material resources before the U.S.A. and therefore be forced to surrender.”

Lech Walesa, former president of Poland, spoke for most of Eastern Europe when he said: “Ronald Reagan played an invaluable role in bringing about the fall of communism and ending the Cold War without resorting to military solutions. Without his great political sense and prudence, instead of the popping of champagne corks, the world would have heard real artillery shots. We [in the Solidarity movement] sensed President Reagan’s support and understanding and never had to ask for or demand it. This is not something easily found in the world of politics.”

But Star Wars was certainly not the only arrow in the Reagan quiver.

Confounding the Enemy

Reagan further confounded the enemy by boosting production of conventional arms and relentlessly backing anti-communist insurgencies in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Reagan put the squeeze on from all directions, convincing the Saudis to open their oil spigots and depress the value of Soviet petroleum exports. This device alone took an onerous toll – the Soviet economy began shrinking in 1982 and never recovered.

Schweizer calculates in “Reagan’s War” that the various Reagan initiatives were costing Moscow as much as $45 billion a year – a crippling sum for a nation with only $32 billion a year in hard-currency earnings.

Even the powerful Reagan rhetoric was in the mix, notes Schweizer. The "Evil Empire” and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speeches in particular gave heart to opposition movements in Eastern Europe.

Just how desperate was the Soviet Union in the face of Reagan’s onslaught?

Schweizer says that most tellingly of all, the East German-backed terrorist group known as the Red Army Faction began systematically murdering executives of West German companies doing SDI research.

But was this masterstroke strategy the brainchild of Reagan?

The proof is in the history, maintains the author, who points out that Reagan had no easy road in pushing through his unstinting stand against communism:

“Reagan is impossible to understand outside of his forty-year battle against communism. It was a struggle that consumed more of his attention than any other endeavor and touched the very center of his life. It cost him his first marriage and brought him his second wife; it damaged his relationship with his children; death threats while waging it left him sitting up at night, guarding his kids with a .32-caliber pistol; and it brought him three assassination attempts.”

“When he declared in 1981 that martial law in Poland was unacceptable, he was largely alone in the world, save for Britain’s Margaret Thatcher,” notes the author. “When he pushed for expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan, the European allies were skeptical.”

“Reagan would not allow the lack of allied commitment to deter him from doing what he believed was right.

“At critical junctures he even had to buck his own Cabinet. In both 1981 and 1982, when he wanted a big boost in the defense budget to put the Soviets on notice and to force them into an arms race they could not win, a majority of his Cabinet opposed him.

“In 1983 he ran into similar problems over the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). On the eve of his planned speech outlining his vision for a missile defense shield, he received urgent word that some senior advisors at the Pentagon were adamantly opposed to the idea. But again, Reagan ignored the advice and went on his instincts.”

Schweizer records that Reagan was even prepared to go against public opinion, if necessary. In 1984, pollsters came to Reagan with grim news: A solid majority of the American people were opposed to his foreign policy.

Would Rather Lose the Election Than Relent

“Several advisors suggested that he tone things down, be less fervent about Central America and more open to arms talks with Moscow. Reagan said he was willing to change the tone a little bit. But as he told his aide Robert McFarlane, he would rather lose the 1984 election than change the substance of his policy toward the Soviet Union.

“How remarkable it is to contemplate that if Reagan had paid too much attention to the polls, his advisers, or the allies, many of his most critical cold war-winning policies never would have been enacted. Indeed, the Cold War might not have ended when it did, or at all.

“As president he pushed for the Reagan Doctrine and launched a political and ideological offensive against Communism. If you wanted to win, fight to win, he said. It was a strategy he adopted early on, even before he entered the Oval Office.”

How early on?

Schweizer chronicles Reagan’s disgust at the harsh Soviet suppression of the 1956 uprising in Hungary, his avowed desire to see citizens of communist regimes liberated, and his admiration for Pope John Paul II’s evoking the need for spirituality in Russia and behind the Iron Curtain.

As early as 1963, Reagan was arguing forcefully that the arms race should be not reined in but accelerated:

“If we truly believe that our way of life is best, aren’t the Russians more likely to recognize that fact and modify their stand if we let their economy come unhinged, so the contrast is apparent?” he asked in a speech that year. “In an all-out race our system is strong,” said Reagan, “and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause.”

The Soviets knew they had a whirlwind on their hands – and well before Reagan’s election.

Schweizer notes that a report from the KGB predating the president’s inauguration anticipated that “Reagan, who tackles all problems in an absolute pragmatic way, will pursue a foreign policy of a hard, but at the same time an essentially consistent line.”

By the mid-1980s, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would reaffirm the KGB s assessment: “Comrades, this man has a nice smile, but he has teeth of iron.”

Schweizer drew on private diaries dating from Reagan’s days as an actor and extending through his presidency to illustrate that his fervent anti-communism marked every era of his life and was the driving force behind his policies as president.

The author recounts Reagan’s involvement with anti-communist liberals in Hollywood and his role as a secret informer for the FBI. Reagan’s outspoken criticism of détente in the late 1960s and his forceful advocacy for the overthrow of the USSR drew the attention of Soviet officials, who began a KGB file on him when he was still governor of California.

Those who cling to the image of an innocuous Reagan should ask why it was that the Soviets endeavored to tarnish his candidacy in 1976 with a vicious, albeit surreptitious, propaganda campaign – the only one apparently ever waged by the Soviets in an American primary.

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