Tear Down This Myth

Imagine that I have a bowl of fruit on my kitchen table. I walk into the kitchen and proclaim, "Bowl of fruit - I command you to rot!". Lo and behold, a week later the fruit is brown and rotten. Clearly, my strongly worded imperative resulted in the fruit's decomposition.

Sound specious? Try this one. Twenty years ago today, Ronald Reagan gave a speech in Berlin in which he exhorted Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall". A couple years later, the Berlin Wall indeed came down. Therefore, Reagan's uncompromising rhetoric and hard-line policies caused the fall of the Berlin Wall and led to our ultimate victory in the Cold War.

These two stories are textbook examples of the logical fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc - 'after this, therefore because of this'. Such a fallacy asserts that because A occured before B, A must have caused B. This is a fallacy because the simple fact that A happened before B is not sufficient evidence to conclude that A actually caused B. Many other factors could have been at work.

In the story of the fruit bowl, my command had nothing to do with the organic processes that would lead to the fruit's decomposition. And the case of Reagan's speech is similar: although he was in the right place at the right time to make it look like his leadership hastened the end of the Cold War, his efforts had little to do with the developments that would lead to the opening of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR.

The popular argument for Reagan’s cold-war legacy, which is embraced by American conservatives as gospel truth, usually goes like this: Reagan won the Cold War for the USA and the Free World. He defeated the Soviet Union peacefully and brought freedom and democracy to the citizens of the Soviet Bloc. He accomplished all this by drawing a hard anti-communist line in foreign policy, fueling the arms race to exacerbate Soviet economic problems, and making stringent, no-nonsense demands for arms reductions and for freedom for citizens under communist rule. A true hero and visionary, he made the world a safer place.

But in reality, Reagan’s hard-line, anti-communist policies didn’t accomplish all that much; in fact, they may have even prolonged the Cold War. For the entire first term of Reagan’s presidency, despite the staunch ideological stances of Reagan and Thatcher, no progress whatsoever was made in ‘winning’ the Cold War for the West. There were no talks or agreements between the superpowers, and Reagan’s harebrained SDI program (Star Wars), intended to scare the Soviets into overspending on the arms race, did not have the desired effect (the only significant changes in the Soviet military budget during the 80s were reductions). In addition, Reagan’s penchant for flexing nuclear muscles alienated the USSR, and once again made our sudden extinction as a species a distinct possibility (and it didn’t help that Reagan’s Soviet counterparts were equally wizened, cantankerous and obstinate).

In 1985, however, things took a turn for the better – not because of Reagan, but because of Mikhail Sergeyevic Gorbachev. Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union and, on his initiative, the leaders of both countries met for the first time since before Reagan came to office. At the summit meetings, Gorbachev advocated arms reduction, an unheard-of step in the Cold War peace process. Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader since Krushchev to realize that the arms race had been harming the Soviet economy, and he sought peace with the West in the interest of mutual survival and progress. Progressive change was not limited to foreign policy; behind the Iron Curtain, Gorbachev strengthened civil liberties (such as freedom of speech), and allowed the Eastern Bloc more leeway in self-governance. These developments, intended to strengthen the USSR, ironically ended up destroying it, but it would be wrong to attribute such effects to Reagan.

So if you want to award credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall, blame glasnost and perestroika. Blame Soviet bureaucratic incompetance. Blame a long-standing popular yearning east of the Iron Curtain for the freedoms enjoyed by the Western world. Blame the Soviet imbroglio in Afghanistan. Blame Mikhail Gorbachev. But don't give the credit to Ronald Reagan. Actor that he was, he just happened to be on stage at the right time to steal the limelight.