(January 28, 2019 at 8:16 am)Nomad Wrote:(January 27, 2019 at 2:26 pm)Brian37 Wrote: Reagan was right in taking down the USSR. But that is about it.
Despite the mythology Reagan was only peripheral to the USSR's collapse. It fell because it could no longer keep its Eastern European satellites in line (in fact the rot started when Yugoslavia &China went their own ways in the 70s), and through implementing the right medicine (the Soviet part of USSR through Glasnost & Perestroika) too late to help.
Reagan's biggest achievement was making the US buget as lopsided as the USSRs towards weapons.
(January 27, 2019 at 7:26 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I dunno, dude. I'd say that both Reagan and Bush Jr. had a kind of charisma. Hillary, Gore-- not so much. I guess it's subjective.
Now to be straight, I'm a democrat by far. But even I wouldn't vote for a suit-pants-wearing lizard.
Reagan yes, Shrub no. If you need daddy's hand picked Supreme Court cronies to stage a coup on your behalf after losing an election, one thing is guaranteed; your charisma is lacking.
The proximal cause of Soviet Union’s inability to keep its European satellite in line was the fact that the soviet system had passed a certain threshold during the 1970s in the level of a type of corrupt that arises when a economically closed autarchic totalitarian regimes justifies its own excesses by the economic progress it alledgedly is making - the actual economic performance obfuscated by benchmarking to commodities produces rather than value added, and reporting is falsified at every level of the bureaucracy. So by mid 1980s even the politbureau didn’t have a clear understanding of the magnitude of the actual value produced by the soviet economy and material weaknesses of the soviet productivity. This combined with lack of emphasis on training in sound economic theory, and gorbachev’s Marxist idealism, let to short term policies that drastically reduced soviet union’s government revenue receipts in the late 1980s.
Rather than admitting this is a dangerous situatiion That must immediately be fixed, which may weaken Gorbachev politically by admitting mistake in his signature policies, Gorbachev sought to use the crisis to push through political reforms. He failed to anticipate the favorable reaction to his political reforms did not extend to willingness to make sacrifices for the soviet system he led.
Eventually he completely backed himself into a corner. Soviet Union can’t begin to reduce its fiscal bleeding without cutting aid to Warsaw pack states. Despite western propaganda to the effect that Warsaw pack is purely an extractive relation imposed by the USSR, most Warsaw pack states actually relied on Soviet Largess. So for many Warsaw pack regimes opening to the west is the only option of soviet largess is cut off. At the same time Gorbachev could not salvage soviet union’s own fiscal bankruptcy without heavy handed reversal of his political liberalization.
