Reagan and the Cold War

The author of There is no alternative; Why Margaret Thatcher matters (2008 Basic Books) our January book club selection writes on p. 272:

“From 1947, when the American diplomat George Kennan published his famous Foreign Policy article under the pseudonym X, to 1981, the year of Reagan’s inauguration, American policy toward the Soviet Union had been containment, not rollback.  Generally, American policymakers viewed communism as a kind of incurable cancer, one that with costly, painful, and permanent therapy might at best be prevented from metastasizing.

Obviously, the price of the Cold War had been extremely high.  Communism had claimed at least a hundred million lives.  But the doctrine of containment had been a success in the most critical sense:  There had not been a conventional war between the superpowers, nor had there been a nuclear exchange.  It is easy to see why Reagan’s insistence that it was time to move beyond containment and MAD—indeed, that it was time to win the Cold War—provoked, to put it mildly, dissent and alarm among American’s allies.”