Word: sovietize
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...happened-as Hollywood would have seen fit to script it-the only people aside from Reagan who really believed in Star Wars were the military leadership of the Soviet Union. The Zap! Pow! Bam! comic-book defense strategy reinforced Moscow's growing despair about the future and hastened the end of the cold war. And that, finally, is what has proved most galling to the Gipper's ideological opponents: his glossy Hollywood optimism proved more supple than the professional pessimism of the intellectual left. Ultimately, Reagan's sloppy and often insensitive domestic governance will have little impact on his place...
...fact, I didn't understand how truly monumental, and morally important, Reagan's anticommunist vision was until I visited the Soviet Union in 1987. My first night there, I was escorted to the Bolshoi Ballet by two minders from the U.S.-Canada Institute. The Russians were thrilled that I had figured out the Cyrillic alphabet and was able to read the program. The young woman on my left rewarded me with a smile-a rare public act in that terrifying regime-and a whispered encouragement: reform was coming. Glasnost and perestroika, she assured me, were real. The minder...
...Reagan presidency began with an America in crisis. Inflation and recession choked the economy; humiliation in Vietnam and Iran had eroded its confidence in projecting power on the Cold War geopolitical stage even as the Soviets began expanding their empire into Afghanistan and a friendly dictatorship in Nicaragua fell to Leftist rebels. He shook up Washington with his simple faith in the free market and tax cuts to solve economic problems, and with the projection of military power, directly or via proxies, as the means of taking the fight to the Soviet Union, which he famously proclaimed an "Evil Empire...
...Department's original plans for attacking Nazi Germany envisioned a major cross-Channel invasion in mid-1943, with the possibility of a smaller-scale landing at an earlier date if the Soviets were on the point of collapse. That seemed perilously likely. By mid-1942, more than 150 German divisions had overrun the Soviet Union to a depth of 1,000 miles, wreaking mayhem on a scale that John F. Kennedy later compared to "the devastation of this country east of Chicago." The fate of Britain and the U.S. alike hung on the Soviets' survival. "The prize we seek," said...
Roosevelt accordingly assured Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in the spring of 1942 that he could "expect the formation of a second front this year." Stalin was momentarily mollified. But he was soon disappointed and then venomously embittered when it became clear that the U.S. would not open a second front in 1942 or even in 1943. As compensation, Roosevelt offered Stalin some Lend-Lease aid, vague assurances of a free hand in postwar Eastern Europe, and a pledge to accept nothing less than Germany's (and Japan's) unconditional surrender. The Russians fought on, but at horrendous cost. Stalin...