Reagan's War

[Broadsword2004]

Good book on how battling Communism/Socialism was a lifelong quest for Reagan, going all the way back to his Hollywood days, when his resisting the Communist takeover of Hollywood got him threats that a gang would jump him and throw acid into his face. It talks about the strategy he used for defeating the Soviet Union, and how he was spot-on about how to defeat the Soviets as far back as the 1960s.

Prior to Reagan, the common belief was that a strong, healthy Soviet Union was important to maintain the peace, and working to establish peace with the Soviet Union was very important, not trying to destroy them; Reagan said that the Soviet system was weak, and that America could eventually cause the Soviet Union to collapse if it went into a full-on arms race with them, as the Soviets would never be able to keep up. He also concluded that "peace" could never be established with the Soviet Union because the whole Soviet system was built on oppression. It was a built-in feature for the Soviet Union to always look to conquer.

Reagan also knew that fear was the primary tool used by the Soviets, and that people had to hold strong against such fear. The book shows how the Warsaw Pact was even shocked that the West believed Krushev when he talked about using nuclear weapons in various ways, as it was just for show. The West was in general very frightened of the Kremlin.

The Soviets were spot-on about Reagan too, having recognized him as a threat even before he became President, and fully understanding his strategy to defeat the Soviet Union as he was implementing it; they understood him better than the elites in the Western world did it seems.

Also shown is how the Soviet Union took advantage of detente to build up their own military to match America's, as they themselves knew they couldn't match America in a full-on arms race, and how the Soviets were planning to eventually go and try to take over Western Europe.

And America helped somewhat with this as well, by sending the Soviets lots of Western technology and giving them really cheap grain!

It also talks about some of the various plans to assassinate Reagan.

A neat thing also pointed out is how Gorbachev likely would never have even come on the scene had it not been for Reagan.

Apparently there were two groups in the Soviet Union: the hardliners and the reformists. Hardliners were what had ruled the Soviet Union since the beginning; they believed in constant aggression, force, conquest, etc...reformers believed that this policy could bankrupt the Soviet Union and lead it to disaster.

The hardliners had ruled the Soviet Union for so long because the strategy worked so well, as the West was terrified of the Soviet Union and believed it to be invincible.

But with Reagan's arms race, along with numerous other things Reagan did, which severely began to strain the Soviet economy, the Kremlin realized a new type of leader was required, one who wasn't a hardliner, and Gorbachev came to power.

It also talks about the psychological war, via radio broadcasting into Eastern Europe, done under Reagan.

What's also neat is Reagan was a C student in economics from Eureka College, but he had more common sense about economics and foreign policy than all those Ph.D's. Reagan knew the Soviet system was weak and unworkable all the way back in the 1960s when it was widely accepted among economists that life in the Soviet Union was pretty good and so was socialism.

The Chicago School of Economics was ridiculed back in those days, and they were economists; Reagan was widely thought to be a dunce and a fool.

The book shows how Reagan constantly broke conventional wisdom, using strong and very blunt language about the Soviet Union, not listening to his advisors on various occasions, etc...this resulted in some of his greatest triumphs, but also his big blunder, the Iran-Contra incident.

In the end though, Reagan held firm to his beliefs, never surrendering to the Soviets constant pleas for arms negotiations and so forth, leading the Kremlin to eventually run short of the funds needed to hold the satellites in place, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Definitely recommend it.