Gunslinger: Miko here's a good read. It doesnt prove my comment completly but a good either way... Thatks, Gunslinger.
That link explains how the "cult of Reagan" is being bulit attributing to him stuff he did not do and that was at best tangential to his primary goals. The information there does not seem to correspond to reality.
The USSR was a (mostly) socialist country - which means it was very inefficient economically. Inefficient does not mean that something is totaly missing - just that it's not as good or cheap as it could be. On the other hand USSR could dedicate much greater fraction of its GDP to the needs of the state. In US most of the GDP is "wasted" on such trivial things as comfort of the population - good food, housing, cars, leisure and entertainment, healthcare. Not so in USSR - population living in comfort would be less manageable, so they (government) probably would not want the wealth if they could have it.
Reagan Administration abandoned the established policy of pursuing dйtente with the Soviet Union and instead instituted a massive arms buildup Cold War was not a real war but an armed standoff. In real war one has to match the capabilities of the enemy, hence expenses. In standoff - especially when both sides have enough weapons for a massive overkill, such is not necessarily the case. The "massive arms buildup" on american side could have resulted in zero effect to soviet side. They could have regretted it come the real war, but nobody was planning on fighting for real. Nobody ever knew - or could know - how much USSR spent on arms. Even they did not know because under socialism the monertary economic calculation is not possible.
while denying the Soviets desperately needed oil equipment and technology Desperately? Soviets were pumping oil in 1920s. Surely they could reproduce the 50-year old pumping and pipeline technology. It is a fact that soviet energy sector was running on domestic equipment. Not as good as american but quite functional. Labor was free, talent was abundant - and that compensates for many mechanical deficiencies.
foreign exchange income with which to keep up in the arms race and prosecute its war in Afghanistan They needed foreign exchange income to support anti-american movements abroad, pay spies for the technology they stole from the west in massive amounts and to buy some equipment that they could not manufacture as well. Also for grain imports and such.
Why they heck would they need foreign currency to prosecute its war in Afghanistan? The soldiers were free, the equipment was domestic - and the workers making it also mostly free.
Two years after their oil production peaked, the economy of the USSR crumbled and its government collapsed. The economy of the USSR did not "collapse". I was there. And it is still there. The government did not collapse either. It was dissolved from above due to political reasons of the ruling elite.
Then the economy really got disrupted due to the break in many production links - after the Soviet Union seased to exist. Even at the lowest point of the post-soviet decline it woould be hard to call their economy as "collapsed".
It is totally silly to attribute the changes that happened to the Soviet Union to the insignificant effect the oil prices could have on its GDP - rather than M. Gorbachev coming to power.
It is also silly to attribute the drastic drop in oil prices to anything but the disarray and greediness of OPEC members cheating on their own quote agreements.
Sixpence: And I had to laugh, because one of the things I remember most was how reagan blackmailed the states to... Right, after
This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
what he did was totally opposite to what he professed.
He said one thing, did the opposite to gain some short-term compromise and discredited his views and their true supporters. That's why he is touted as the guy who "won the cold war" instead of the guy who set out to defeat his own government's tyrany and failed.
Robert P. Murphy: The legacy of Ronald Reagan was arguably worse than Bill Clinton's precisely because Reagan (allegedly) stood for small government. So when deficits and the number of crack addicts went through the roof during the '80s, liberal Democrats could plausibly blame "tax and budget cuts," even though the latter were nonexistent and the former were mostly shell games of fancy terminology (like "closing loopholes" and "revenue enhancement").
miko
