AmericanHeritage.com / Reagan His Place In History -
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Published on: 4/8/2006
Last Visited: 4/8/2006
But the threat worried the Soviets; Gorbachev's foreign minister, Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, told a 1993 conference of Cold Warriors at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs that SDI caused a tug of war inside the Soviet bureaucracy that was reflected in the divided purposes of the Gorbachev regime.
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On the other hand, the Cold War postmortem at which Bessmertnykh and Carlucci spoke was hosted by the victors, in Princeton, New Jersey, not Leningrad.
No one thing wins a war by itself.But Reagan's appearance at the end of the Cold War was crucial.When he came into office, the Soviet Union was an aggressive hard-line state; when he left, it was a reforming, improvising one partly in response to his pressures.Less than a year after he retired, the Berlin Wall was torn down; two years after that, the Soviet Union was no more.