When I was in Santa Barbara last month for a conference on the Cold War, I was told that there is a memorial plaque in the mountains not far from the Reagan ranch that celebrates the role of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in bringing about the conclusion of the Cold War. The supposed role of SDI and the military buildup in the 1980s is part of the mythology for those who attribute the lion’s share of the glory for ending the Cold War to Ronald Reagan. Of course, Ronald Reagan played an important role in helping resolve the Cold War, but principally because he recognized early on that Mikhail Gorbachev was prepared to take Soviet domestic and foreign policies in very different directions from his predecessors, not because he encouraged spending billions of dollars to pursue a shield to make the United States invulnerable to a Soviet nuclear strike.
Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1800 K Street, NW, Washington DC, 20006 | Tel: 202-887-0200 | Fax: 202-775-3199
