GySgt said:
Yes....the Soviet Union has stood the tests of time thanks to the "wisdom" of Gorbachov and his reforms. The Berlin Wall came down thanks to the "intellect" of Gorbachov.:roll:
Aren't you the same individual that said that the victory in Europe in WWII wasn't as a result of America getting involved? Something like, it would have been won anyway? Same story, different war, same old bashing. You're hate is glaring through your posts. Careful...that leads to the Dark side.
"Aren't you the same individual that said that the victory in Europe in WWII wasn't as a result of America getting involved?" No.
America didn't bring about the end of the cold war. US didn't win the cold war. It still has the absurdly high level of arms dept & spending as before, thanks to arms companies lobbying in the Pentagon for excessive spending on defense & in favour of the Iraq war, so US hasn't reaped the rewards it could have from the end of cold war. In fact you lost an ally against Islam.
The victor is supposed to reap rewards aren't they ?
All you got out of it was your old anti Soviet allys, the Taliban, turning on you instead.
Why... because Bush Snr or Reagan, ignored Gorbi's suggestion that Afganistan be jointly policed by Russia & USA because Gorbi could see the area as a future source of trouble.
"His economy could no longer keep pace with US military build up"
I don't think that's the case is it ?
More like it couldn't feed itself because of centralisation & loss of incentives due to communism. Thus the incentive for Gorbi's reforms were there, regardless of Reagan. So stop harping on about reagan bringing all this wonderful change & ending the cold war.
Still there was no way the USA could ever make itself safe from the USSR. If you read on you will see the USSR was hardly crumpling at the knees militarily as reagan saw for himself........
"Reagan noted the depth of Soviet economic stagnation. "The dimensions of this failure are astounding," he said. "A country which employs one-fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to feed its own people. . . . Overcentralized, with little or no incentives, year after year the Soviet system pours its best resources into the making of instruments of destruction."
The Westminster speech, one of the most important of Reagan's presidency, was denounced by the Soviet authorities. But what Reagan had described was no secret to some Communist Party officials. One of them was Gorbachev, then a high-ranking party official, who recalled in his memoir that he was familiar with the "disastrous picture" of Soviet agriculture -- millions of acres wasted, villages abandoned, soils ruined by pollution.
Gorbachev's swift ascension on March 11, 1985, was a critical moment on the road to the end of the Cold War. Accounts of the Politburo deliberations suggest that the chief reasons Gorbachev was chosen were a desire for generational change and the press of Soviet internal problems. But the choice was also made at a time when some Politburo members were worried about the country's stagnation, especially in comparison to the West. A CIA analysis concluded that the Soviets did not have a single scientific supercomputer, that their technology lagged the United States by 10 years and that the best Soviet scientific computers were slower than their Western counterparts by a factor of 20.
As Gorbachev's ally Eduard Shevardnadze said, "Everything had gone rotten."
The Soviet Union was still, however, a nuclear-armed superpower, and it was in nuclear weapons that Reagan and Gorbachev then took important steps toward ending the Cold War.
Events accelerated when Gorbachev took office. In 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev met at Reykjavik, Iceland, for a summit at which they discussed eliminating all nuclear weapons. The goal eluded them as Reagan refused to slow research on the ballistic missile defense system. But the summit paved the way for the 1987 treaty on intermediate-range nuclear force missiles, the first to actually eliminate a class of nuclear weapons, and a later treaty that limited strategic arms.
In his first term, Reagan took part in a secret exercise that may have influenced his later pursuit of arms reductions with Gorbachev. The exercise, said former aide Thomas C. Reed, simulated a nuclear attack and how the president would make decisions. Reagan watched a screen in the White House situation room showing red dots where Soviet missiles would strike. The first one annihilated Washington.
"Before the president could sip his coffee, the map was a sea of red," Reed recalled. "In less than an hour, President Reagan had seen the United States of America disappear."
Now tell me Reagan ended the cold war... Utter nonsense. The end of the cold war came about because of a whole complex set of circumstances. Not least of all the need for reforms, regardless of the USA.
Makes me laugh the way Reagan went on at Reykjavic about.. 'If there are less & less missiles then star wars isn't needed.' Yet he scuppered the talks by his insistance on keeping them !
The title of this topic... "How did the USA end the cold war" serves as testament to the arrogance of the kind of American that thinks it was America that ended the cold war.
