[Psudo]

Kjorteo wrote:

Even assuming that you're right in that Reagan brilliantly foresaw that the best way to defeat the Soviet Union was to deliberately play chicken with both economies (and this isn't just, you know, historical revision on unsound policy because it happened to have a bonus side-effect,)...

For the record, Reagan spoke about this several times during his administration. For example, on May 9th, 1982, before Eureka College, Reagan said:

Quote:

"The Soviet empire is faltering because rigid centralized control has destroyed incentives for innovation, efficiency, and individual achievement. But in the midst of social and economic problems, the Soviet dictatorship has forged the largest armed force in the world. It has done so by preempting the human needs of it's people and, in the end, this course will undermine the foundations of the Soviet system."

He spoke similarly before the British Parliament a month later (June 8), and was semi-famous for telling jokes about Soviet economic hardship and incompetence. So it's not historical revisionism.

[hr]

Kjorteo wrote:

... he could have put the [Star Wars] money toward something practical. Better weapons/armor for the conventional troops, perhaps. New tanks/jets/etc., maybe. [. . .] all the Soviet Union would have had to do is simply not care, and they would have had the stronger economy. I guess it's lucky that they weren't especially bright either.

In the cold war era, each nation under the threat of the others' massive nuclear arsenal, such a system would hypothetically have made one nation the clear winner over the other. The Soviet Union did not have the advantage of hindsight. They were technologically behind the USA, and heard the US President declaring that a viable solution was at hand. And with the massive funding he was overtly giving the project, could they dare disbelieve? From a military strategy standpoint, mere idle hope that the program would fail was a radically risky gamble. Even if it was impossible, they'd see the necessity of funding studies that would affirm that.

[hr]

Kjorteo wrote:

Psudo wrote:

And, lastly, the same advocates of capitalism who believe it should be everywhere oppose military means to cause it.

Really. Explain Vietnam, then.

Vietnam tried to have a civil war. Communist nations were lending their support to one side, which ensured that side's victory. Vietnam's domestic will was already inherently thwarted by this foreign decision. So we decided to give the opposition a fighting chance. We didn't attack Vietnam's self-determination because there was already none left.

[hr]Everything in JJ's post is true. Reagan was not a pure or philosophical capitalist as such, but merely the obvious symbol of the Capital West, as was Gorbachev for the Communist East. If you prefer, you can think of it as the American vs. the Soviet systems rather than Capitalism vs. Communism per ce, since there are different implementations of capitalism and communism.