HOW WAS THE COLD WAR WON?

Abstract

Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster, by Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson. Crown Publishers, 2009. 464 pages, $32.50.

The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War, by James Mann. Viking, 2009. 410 pages, $27.95.

Keywords:

• Ronald Reagan
• nuclear weapons
• Cold War
• United States
• Soviet Union

Notes

1. For examples of academic studies, see G. John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney, “Who Won The Cold War?” Foreign Policy, No. 87 (Summer 1992), pp. 123–38; Richard K. Hermann and Richard Ned Lebow, eds., Ending the Cold War: Interpretations, Causation, and the Study of International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); William C. Wohlforth, ed., Cold War Endgame: Oral History, Analysis, Debates (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003); and Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2001 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

2. George F. Kennan, “The G.O.P Won the Cold War? Ridiculous,” New York Times, October 28, 1992, p. A21.

3. Strobe Talbott, “Rethinking The Red Menace,” Time, January 1, 1990, p. 66.

4. Quoted in Edwin Meese, “The Man Who Won the Cold War: Ronald Reagan's Strategy for Freedom,” Policy Review 61 (Summer 1992), p. 39.

5. Meese, “The Man Who Won the Cold War,” pp. 36–39. For an excellent review and critique of the pro-Reagan arguments, see Jeffrey W. Knopf, “Did Reagan Win the Cold War?” Strategic Insights, August 2004, <www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2004/aug/knopfAUG04.asp>.

6. Meese, “The Man Who Won the Cold War,” p. 37.

7. Charles Krauthammer, “Reagan Revisionism,” Washington Post, June 11, 2004, p. A25.

8. John Ydstie, “Reagan's Policies Transformed Economic Debate,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, June 9, 2004. Ydstie's guest, former Reagan economic advisor William Niskanen, added that the deficit was acceptable if it was the necessary price to end the Cold War.

9. Jack Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004); Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1991 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

10. Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended, p. 6.

11. For example, the Andersons claim in regard to the Iranian arms sales that “Ostensibly, the United States was not trading arms for hostages, but others saw it as doing just that” (p. 318). Reagan is portrayed as having been duped largely by CIA Director William Casey, and, regardless, the “Iran-Contra scandal eventually faded away into a footnote in history” (p. 322).