Cold War to Star Wars | The Nation   Cold War to Star Wars    •
Share   • Decrease text size Increase text size  Perhaps the
most important question--for present policy-makers as well as
historians--posed by the presidency of Ronald Reagan is what
role he played in ending the cold war. And perhaps the most
illuminating recent article on this question is one written by
Wesley Clark for Washington Monthly just before Reagan died. A
mistaken belief that the Soviet Union was brought down chiefly
by US military pressure, Clark believes, has led the group of
neoconservatives now in charge of American policy to think
military action can now bring democracy to the Middle East. The
result is the fiasco under way in Iraq. Clark acknowledges that
the Reagan military buildup played a role in the Soviet
turnaround under Mikhail Gorbachev. Soviet military backwardness
was perhaps the most sharply painful aspect of the Soviet
Union's growing technical lag behind the United States, and the
Reagan military buildup intensified