Precious Roy wrote:
I am not so sure we actually won the Cold War in the long run. Gorbachev was way ahead of Reagan on what he was willing to do in terms of disarmament, including a plan to completely eliminate nuclear weapons. By contrast, Reagan did everything he could to keep the US population in a state of fear of the big bad Soviets even as it became clear that the USSR was not so big or bad anymore. Reagan was very beholden to his West Coast defense contractor backers and needed to keep the USSR as a threat to the US to justify massive defense spending and radical deficit spending. This kept Gorbachev from being able to advance his agenda of peacefully unwinding the Soviet empire through a radically new democratic process and caused hardliners to attempt a coup in 1989. The result was a very chaotic unwinding of the Soviet Union. The chaos in Russia allowed the rise of the oligarchs who picked Putin as their protector. Putin has predictably turned to his KGB roots and has renewed conflict with the West in order to keep the domestic population from turning against him for his failures on the economy. Had Reagan embraced Gorbachev and moved quickly to de-escalate tensions between the West and the USSR, we could have had a lasting peace and a successful transition from the old Soviet system to the current Republic. Instead, Reagan rebuffed the majority of Gorbachev's bold initiatives, forcing the USSR into a clash between Gorbachev's moderate reformers and the old guard. Now we are quickly going back to square one as there was never a true resolution of all the security issues between Russia and the West. Reagan made sure that there was no true and lasting peace and blew the best opportunity to truly end the conflict.
I love President Reagan but grudgingly admit you are probably right on that, if I am cynical about his motives. I want to believe otherwise.
The US and NATO may have won a conventional Cold War in the '80s BUT there was an issue--the Soviets would have bypassed Fulda, and attacked through the Northern German Plain. At that point, it may have gone nuclear.
Clancy's RSR is the best book on this topic for a NATO win; the best book where the Russians win is Ralph Peters's "Red Army." Peters himself was a U.S. Army intelligence specialist and wrote it as a warning to a fractured NATO in the '80s to get their act together against a stronger USSR.