REVISIONISM
Ironic that Charles Krauthammer titles this column "Reagan Revisionism," given that he himself is engaged in revisionism of the worst sort, in a column which perfectly exemplifies the ongoing mythologization of Reagan.
In the early '80s, the West experienced a nuclear hysteria -- a sudden panic about imminent nuclear destruction and a mindless demand to "freeze" nuclear weapons. What had changed to bring this on? Reagan had become president. Like George W. Bush today, the U.S. president was seen as a greater threat to peace than was the enemy he was confronting.
The nuclear freeze and the accompanying hysteria are an embarrassment that liberals prefer to forget today. Reagan's critics completely misunderstood the logic and the power of his nuclear posture. He took a very hard line on the Soviets, who had broken the nuclear status quo by placing missiles in Europe. Backed by Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, Reagan faced the Soviets down -- despite enormous "peace" demonstrations throughout the West, including the largest one to date in U.S. history (New York City, 1982) -- and ultimately forced the Soviets to dismantle the missiles and begin their overall retreat.
The old familiar line: Reagan stared 'em down, scared 'em into surrendering. Good grief. Krauthammer's routine dismissal here of the international peace movement is especially egregious, given that the exchange between Eastern and Western European peace activists and the solidarity that grew from the international nuclear freeze movement laid essential groundwork for the eventual revolutions of 1989.
From Mary Kaldor's essay Who Killed the Cold War:
The role of peace movements in shaking the status quo in Europe seems to have been more or less written out of accounts of the 1980s. In the early 1980s, the peace movement in the West was considerably larger than the movements that eventually toppled the East European regimes. Five million people demonstrated in the capitals of Western Europe in 1981 and 1983. The movement was unprecedented in scale and in its transnational character.
What made the peace movement of the 1980s different from earlier movements was the explicit link between peace, and democracy and human rights. E.P. Thompson, the eminent historian whose writings inspired the new movement, called for a transcontinental movement of citizens. The European Nuclear Disarmament (END) Appeal of 1980, signed by millions of people all over Europe, called on its signatories, who included Vaclav Havel, Olof Palme, and George Konrad, not to "be loyal to East or West, but to each other." From the beginning, this new movement sought links with individual dissidents and groups in Eastern Europe.
Something parallel was happening in Eastern Europe. The period of détente gave rise to new forms of opposition. The most important new movement was Solidarity in Poland. But other groups, like Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and the Democratic Opposition in Hungary, were also significant. The starting point for Charter 77 was the Helsinki Accords and the commitment to human rights contained in the Final Agreement.
It's important for a couple of reasons to recognize the role played by the peace movement during the Cold War. First as a corrective to the "Reagan defeated the Soviet Empire" myth, which discounts the invaluable work done by non-governmental organizations, and second because it offers something of a blueprint for cultivating reform in the Middle East. Real change won't come from Grand Plans announced Grandly by Grand Men, it will come from cultural and academic exchanges between societies, support for indigenous reform movements, and appeals to international human rights conventions.
Treating Reagan as "victor" in the Cold War both disrespects history and handicaps democratic efforts in the future, as Bush is clearly trying to cast himself as the New Reagan, intending to "win" the War in Terror in the way he imagines Reagan "won" the Cold War, by talking tough and having bigger guns than everyone else. That's not the way it went then, and it won't go that way now. When change does come to the Middle East, it will have been the result of work done and solidarity created by and between thousands of dedicated individuals, most of whose names we'll never know.
Years later, of course, conservatives will claim that George W. Bush should get the credit.
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