Reagan Intelligence

[Plane]

  I wouldn't doubt that your favorite haunts had few Thatcher fans, if there were many Thatcher fans in a place it would not become a favorite haunt for you.

    Everyone is insular , at least a little.

    Do you really regret the fall of the evil empire?

[Xavier_Onassis]

What does that to do with it?

The USSR simply collapsed of its own incompetence. Thatcher and Reagan had zilch to do with it.
I certainly welcomed the end of the Cold War. As a child I had to put up with the stupid mass hysteria and hide under my desk so the Russian bombs would not vaporize me. i did not believe the bullshit them and do not believe it now.

Livinf conditions in much of the USSR are worse now than they were back in the 1960's. I don;t see Putin as a great improvement.

[Plane]

  Competence is relative.

    Reagan and Thatcher and John Paul were much more competent than the other team.

    Also more competent than the alternatives.

     The Cold war ended when we won it, part of Putin's problem is wanting a rematch.

[Christians4LessGvt]

Gorbachev speaking at a session of the Politburo in October 1986, days before he traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland to offer Reagan a groundbreaking disarmament plan, including a 50 percent reduction in nuclear arsenals. If he didn't propose these cuts, Gorbachev told his colleagues:

"We will be pulled into an arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose it because we are at the limit of our capabilities. If the new round [of an arms race] begins, the pressures on our economy will be unbelievable."

[sirs]

Yea....but Reagan had nothing to do with that.  It was.......his speech writers.....yea, that's it     

[Xavier_Onassis]

So somehow Gorbachev NOT spending more money on weapons wrecked the USSR?  Bzzt! wrong answer try again.
The problem was that to compete the Soviets needed to build a computer network, but they knew that this would mean the end of their control over the news and events.
The typewriter and the Xerox capable of shrinking text to very small size and then blowing it up made samizdats a real threat, but computer disks and files on tape would have made it even worse.

Reagan was a minor actor in bringing down the USSR. It was mostly the USSR that brought itself down.

[Plane]

So somehow Gorbachev NOT spending more money on weapons wrecked the USSR?  ......

  Yes , this is known as throwing in the towel.

   After admitting that there was not a need to defend against the USA , there was a difficult sell to the people for a reason for the Soviet Union to exist.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Actually, there is a need for the Russians to defend themselves from the US.
The US has turned many, if not most, of the non-Russian republics against the Russians, and not just in ideology, but economically.
The US spent $5 billion to destabilize Ukraine. 
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/19/facebook-posts/united-states-spent-5-billion-ukraine-anti-governm/

I know that I did not vote for my government to piss away any $5 billion to mess with Ukraine and its people.

The US did not threaten the military takeover of the USSR, nor was it likely to bomb them into oblivion, but it is not true that the USSR was not threatened by the US.

I am no fan of Vladimir Putin, he is a nondemocratic semi-dictator and a ruthless manipulator. But that does not mean that Crimea was ever really an integral part of Ukraine.

It is also not really an integral part of Russia, either. I am all for Crimeans deciding for themselves what they want to be. Not that this will ever happen.

I see the concern for ethnic Russians being mistreated by vindictive locals to be a subject worthy of attention by Russia, just as the US was concerned for the Americans who lived in Panama when Noriega was harassing them.

I admire Gorbachev a LOT MORE than I admire Reagan.