Reagan is an enormously underestimated president for the very reason that made him both popular and successful, his instinct. Neither he nor Thatcher were ideologues, rather they were instinctive small-c conservatives, who were sufficiently intelligent to articulate their policies in terms of the free market conservative ideas that emerged as a critique of the postwar social and economic failures of western social democracy and corporatism, but always made policy on the basis of practicability and efficacy rather than ideological purity (the Poll Tax being the exception that proves the rule).
Reagan, elected as a fiscal conservative, ran up huge federal deficits in order to fund his military buildup, not because he believed in deficit spending per se, but because it was the only way to fund his Cold War policy while maintaining his political pledge to cut taxes and provide enough ‘pork’ to satisfy Congress (look what happened to the less politically adept George H.W. Bush). Similarly, he never tried to reform Medicare or Social Security because they were popular with a large part of his constituency, the Reagan Democrats.
And it was Reagan’s (and Thatcher’s ‘a man we can do business with’) instinct that Gorbachev was genuinely seeking both reform of the USSR and to de-escalate superpower tensions that led him to ditch his ‘evil empire’ rhetoric for a constructive negotiating policy, while continuing to enhance US military strength, thereby keeping in reserve Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Big Stick’.
No US president since Reagan has had such an instinct for what is both practical and popular. Clinton came closest, but would often descend into wonkery and triangulation, while Trump, although predominantly instinctive was totally incapable of building the political coalitions Reagan formed that are necessary to get things done within the Beltway (regularly playing poker with Tip O’Neill, for example, to help ease passage of his policies through a Democratic Congress).
Reagan, like Thatcher, was a rarity, and it may be both were products of their time, but they stand as giants compared to their successors, who are either ideological, technocratic, or untrusting of instinct, or a veritable mishmash of all three, such as Johnson, who has turned into a model-dependent, autocratic technocrat since 2020 in complete opposition to the political persona he presented before. Reagan had an instinctive ‘feel’ that most politicians lack, and, along with his brilliant communications strategy and star power, that is why he was so successful in his primary aims of rebuilding American self-confidence after Vietnam and Watergate and in winning the Cold War. He didn’t just, like all good conservatives, ‘trust the people’, he also trusted his own instincts.
The book “Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended” by Jack Matlock, is very good on Reagan’s policy towards the Soviets. Reagan never thought there was a big difference between his policy during his first and second terms. He was always willing to negotiate with the Soviets, but he had to wait until Gorbachev before he had a man in the Kremlin he could negotiate with.
There’s a very funny Bill Hicks routine about that
J Bryant
3 years ago
You had me all the way up to “quoting the new British Prime Minister, Neil Kinnock.” Great piece of alternative history. The modern media is full of “experts” making predictions about politics, business, whatever, but it’s all a giant lottery.
G Harris
3 years ago
Without Reagan, and to a lesser extent for obvious reasons Thatcher who solidly cheerled for him, particularly vitally in Western Europe, it seems pretty safe to assume that the world might well be a very different place today.
Whether it would have been materially ‘worse’ it’s impossible to say given how there was a certain global stability, albeit uneasy, offered by the presence of two ideologically opposed, apparently evenly matched superpowers that carved up the globe and kept a kind of order in their own way.
Reagan, implacably opposed to the idea of ‘communism’ anywhere in the world basically took up where the immediate post war US President Truman and his vehemently anti-communist Doctrine left off, resolving to take the fight to it wherever and whenever possible, but, in his case, avoiding a full on, face to face ‘hot’ war at all costs.
His, ultimately successful in terms of setting out what he intended to achieve, strategy basically amounted to a game of high risk, ever higher stakes poker whereby he knowingly lured the relatively politically dysfunctional, technologically and economically backward and far poorer USSR into a seemingly neverending arms race which it couldn’t afford.
Something eventually had to give, and aided in no small part by the world’s most effective propaganda machine at the time, Hollywood and various laughable, but not totally incredible ruses like the supposedly game changing Star Wars project, the Soviet state basically bankrupted itself trying to keep up, spending decades chucking most of its valuable resources on arms at the continuing expense of its social stability.
Though in his younger days Reagan had been more left-wing , when he was married to Jane Wyman , before changing political direction. He basically called Soviet Union’s bluff , assessing that they weren’t as powerful as was claimed. The problem is the military industrial complex love an enemy ( and its profitable) so they are busy re-creating the cold war with the new Russia supposedly the evil villain of the world.
Precisely, you must have an enemy, and if there isn’t one, ‘produce’ one.
After all how much of the US Economy is tied up in ‘Defence’? What would they be doing otherwise?
JR Stoker
3 years ago
Point of order: Trump was a Democrat at that time
William MacDougall
3 years ago
Reagan was a great President, but you credit him too much for the collapse of Communism. It fell in Russia mainly due to internal factors, not external.
Regan forced Russia to overspend on the Cold War, that was how it fell. Industrial Military Complex spending in USA is strength, in Russia it is a strength, but at that level it meant no toilet paper and other life needs, so was too much for the country to bear, and so gave up.
Robert Forde
3 years ago
Contrary to the headline, this article postulates a great many other changes beside that of Reagan’s death, all of which would have had their own effects. As it states in a later paragraph: “Speculations of this kind, though, are pointless.”
I kept wondering throughout, ‘But What if Regan had been a woman, and Thatcher a Man? Surely that was the real debate of that time, the great ‘What If’, because of that that lack I found the entire article pointless and silly.
Simon Melville
3 years ago
Enjoyed the reference to the Biden plagiarism of Kinnock as part of an inauguration speech
Also Kinnock as PM would mean his hereditary position left to his useless children would not just be the EU Mandarins they became, but likely be Leader of the Opposition instead of Corbyn, and so led Labour to win the majority, and rather than May wandering, Dead Man Walking, about, have taken UK to a Blair Mark II direction, importing of 10 million Somali immigrants to empower Britain through even greater diversity. I love playing the ‘What If’ game.
Charles Stanhope
3 years ago
“The sheer longevity of the Soviet Union, which celebrates its official centenary next year, proves that it was never likely to disappear overnight.”
In otherwise interesting piece that is too far fetched.
It was patently obvious to those who needed to know that from 1960 the Soviet Union was a basket case. In that year the US CORONA Satellite System became operational revealing the the USSR as a naked, moribund corpse, devoid of infrastructure, barely capable of even feeding itself.
Reagan only needed to give it a very gentle push for it to dissolve.
0924: BST
Last edited 3 years ago by Charles Stanhope
William Gladstone
3 years ago
Nixon had gone to China, its embrace of capitalism had doomed the soviet union, yes there was an attempt to assassinate Reagan but there was also 3 suspiciously quickly in succession dead soviet leaders straight after that.
Leading to a “moderate”, leading to super rich oligarchs, everywhere!!! Would the world be much different without Reagan? no, or without Thatcher, or without Gorbachev, no, come to that Clinton, Blair etc etc as all of them played a part but its the nature of geopolitics and our world order that they are pretty much interchangeable.
mark taha
3 years ago
Don’t think Bush would have been much different from Reagan in practice. Certainly don’t think he’d have backed Galtieri or that SU would have lasted that long.
Mark Preston
3 years ago
I find these articles interesting and lead to lots of interesting speculation. In my own musings I speculation on how the UK would have looked if we hadn’t elected someone with the IQ of a cabbage (yes, I mean you Boris) into number 10.
It would be good to know, although unfortunately the other option had the IQ of a cucumber (Corbyn)
lewisjclark25
3 years ago
As you may know already, the attempt to assassinate Reagan was life imitating art imitating art.
John Hinckley was inspired by the plot of Taxi Driver, in which Robert De Niro’s character tries to kill a presidential hopeful, and then goes to try and ‘liberate’ a teenage prostitute played by Jodie Foster.
And that plotline was inspired by the attempted assassination of Presidential candidate George Wallace (of ‘segregation forever’ fame) in 1972.
Jacques René Giguère
3 years ago
Fun read. Apart there was no way the US would have supported Argentina against his biggest ally.
Andrew Baldwin
3 years ago
A lot of this is speculative, but I do think it is true that George H.W. Bush would not have been as successful in ending the Cold War as Ronald Reagan was. If you read the great American historian of Russia Richard Pipes’ memoirs, he was a huge admirer of Reagan, but not a big fan of his successor.
Reagan is an enormously underestimated president for the very reason that made him both popular and successful, his instinct. Neither he nor Thatcher were ideologues, rather they were instinctive small-c conservatives, who were sufficiently intelligent to articulate their policies in terms of the free market conservative ideas that emerged as a critique of the postwar social and economic failures of western social democracy and corporatism, but always made policy on the basis of practicability and efficacy rather than ideological purity (the Poll Tax being the exception that proves the rule).
Reagan, elected as a fiscal conservative, ran up huge federal deficits in order to fund his military buildup, not because he believed in deficit spending per se, but because it was the only way to fund his Cold War policy while maintaining his political pledge to cut taxes and provide enough ‘pork’ to satisfy Congress (look what happened to the less politically adept George H.W. Bush). Similarly, he never tried to reform Medicare or Social Security because they were popular with a large part of his constituency, the Reagan Democrats.
And it was Reagan’s (and Thatcher’s ‘a man we can do business with’) instinct that Gorbachev was genuinely seeking both reform of the USSR and to de-escalate superpower tensions that led him to ditch his ‘evil empire’ rhetoric for a constructive negotiating policy, while continuing to enhance US military strength, thereby keeping in reserve Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Big Stick’.
No US president since Reagan has had such an instinct for what is both practical and popular. Clinton came closest, but would often descend into wonkery and triangulation, while Trump, although predominantly instinctive was totally incapable of building the political coalitions Reagan formed that are necessary to get things done within the Beltway (regularly playing poker with Tip O’Neill, for example, to help ease passage of his policies through a Democratic Congress).
Reagan, like Thatcher, was a rarity, and it may be both were products of their time, but they stand as giants compared to their successors, who are either ideological, technocratic, or untrusting of instinct, or a veritable mishmash of all three, such as Johnson, who has turned into a model-dependent, autocratic technocrat since 2020 in complete opposition to the political persona he presented before. Reagan had an instinctive ‘feel’ that most politicians lack, and, along with his brilliant communications strategy and star power, that is why he was so successful in his primary aims of rebuilding American self-confidence after Vietnam and Watergate and in winning the Cold War. He didn’t just, like all good conservatives, ‘trust the people’, he also trusted his own instincts.
The book “Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended” by Jack Matlock, is very good on Reagan’s policy towards the Soviets. Reagan never thought there was a big difference between his policy during his first and second terms. He was always willing to negotiate with the Soviets, but he had to wait until Gorbachev before he had a man in the Kremlin he could negotiate with.
Hinckley obviously didn’t do his homework.
Jodie Foster is a lesbian.
There’s a very funny Bill Hicks routine about that
You had me all the way up to “quoting the new British Prime Minister, Neil Kinnock.”
Great piece of alternative history. The modern media is full of “experts” making predictions about politics, business, whatever, but it’s all a giant lottery.
Without Reagan, and to a lesser extent for obvious reasons Thatcher who solidly cheerled for him, particularly vitally in Western Europe, it seems pretty safe to assume that the world might well be a very different place today.
Whether it would have been materially ‘worse’ it’s impossible to say given how there was a certain global stability, albeit uneasy, offered by the presence of two ideologically opposed, apparently evenly matched superpowers that carved up the globe and kept a kind of order in their own way.
Reagan, implacably opposed to the idea of ‘communism’ anywhere in the world basically took up where the immediate post war US President Truman and his vehemently anti-communist Doctrine left off, resolving to take the fight to it wherever and whenever possible, but, in his case, avoiding a full on, face to face ‘hot’ war at all costs.
His, ultimately successful in terms of setting out what he intended to achieve, strategy basically amounted to a game of high risk, ever higher stakes poker whereby he knowingly lured the relatively politically dysfunctional, technologically and economically backward and far poorer USSR into a seemingly neverending arms race which it couldn’t afford.
Something eventually had to give, and aided in no small part by the world’s most effective propaganda machine at the time, Hollywood and various laughable, but not totally incredible ruses like the supposedly game changing Star Wars project, the Soviet state basically bankrupted itself trying to keep up, spending decades chucking most of its valuable resources on arms at the continuing expense of its social stability.
Though in his younger days Reagan had been more left-wing , when he was married to Jane Wyman , before changing political direction. He basically called Soviet Union’s bluff , assessing that they weren’t as powerful as was claimed. The problem is the military industrial complex love an enemy ( and its profitable) so they are busy re-creating the cold war with the new Russia supposedly the evil villain of the world.
Precisely, you must have an enemy, and if there isn’t one, ‘produce’ one.
After all how much of the US Economy is tied up in ‘Defence’? What would they be doing otherwise?
Point of order: Trump was a Democrat at that time
Reagan was a great President, but you credit him too much for the collapse of Communism. It fell in Russia mainly due to internal factors, not external.
Regan forced Russia to overspend on the Cold War, that was how it fell. Industrial Military Complex spending in USA is strength, in Russia it is a strength, but at that level it meant no toilet paper and other life needs, so was too much for the country to bear, and so gave up.
Contrary to the headline, this article postulates a great many other changes beside that of Reagan’s death, all of which would have had their own effects. As it states in a later paragraph: “Speculations of this kind, though, are pointless.”
I kept wondering throughout, ‘But What if Regan had been a woman, and Thatcher a Man? Surely that was the real debate of that time, the great ‘What If’, because of that that lack I found the entire article pointless and silly.
Enjoyed the reference to the Biden plagiarism of Kinnock as part of an inauguration speech
Also Kinnock as PM would mean his hereditary position left to his useless children would not just be the EU Mandarins they became, but likely be Leader of the Opposition instead of Corbyn, and so led Labour to win the majority, and rather than May wandering, Dead Man Walking, about, have taken UK to a Blair Mark II direction, importing of 10 million Somali immigrants to empower Britain through even greater diversity. I love playing the ‘What If’ game.
“The sheer longevity of the Soviet Union, which celebrates its official centenary next year, proves that it was never likely to disappear overnight.”
In otherwise interesting piece that is too far fetched.
It was patently obvious to those who needed to know that from 1960 the Soviet Union was a basket case. In that year the US CORONA Satellite System became operational revealing the the USSR as a naked, moribund corpse, devoid of infrastructure, barely capable of even feeding itself.
Reagan only needed to give it a very gentle push for it to dissolve.
0924: BST
Nixon had gone to China, its embrace of capitalism had doomed the soviet union, yes there was an attempt to assassinate Reagan but there was also 3 suspiciously quickly in succession dead soviet leaders straight after that.
Leading to a “moderate”, leading to super rich oligarchs, everywhere!!! Would the world be much different without Reagan? no, or without Thatcher, or without Gorbachev, no, come to that Clinton, Blair etc etc as all of them played a part but its the nature of geopolitics and our world order that they are pretty much interchangeable.
Don’t think Bush would have been much different from Reagan in practice. Certainly don’t think he’d have backed Galtieri or that SU would have lasted that long.
I find these articles interesting and lead to lots of interesting speculation. In my own musings I speculation on how the UK would have looked if we hadn’t elected someone with the IQ of a cabbage (yes, I mean you Boris) into number 10.
It would be good to know, although unfortunately the other option had the IQ of a cucumber (Corbyn)
As you may know already, the attempt to assassinate Reagan was life imitating art imitating art.
John Hinckley was inspired by the plot of Taxi Driver, in which Robert De Niro’s character tries to kill a presidential hopeful, and then goes to try and ‘liberate’ a teenage prostitute played by Jodie Foster.
And that plotline was inspired by the attempted assassination of Presidential candidate George Wallace (of ‘segregation forever’ fame) in 1972.
Fun read. Apart there was no way the US would have supported Argentina against his biggest ally.
A lot of this is speculative, but I do think it is true that George H.W. Bush would not have been as successful in ending the Cold War as Ronald Reagan was. If you read the great American historian of Russia Richard Pipes’ memoirs, he was a huge admirer of Reagan, but not a big fan of his successor.
Now do “What if Eisenhower hadn’t knifed Eden?”