How did the Cold War end?

As we are approaching the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, historians are starting to revisit the issue of how the Cold War ended. Most conservatives still insist that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War single-handed and therefore deserves to be considered one of our greatest presidents.

The Washington Post had an interesting article about how the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the key symbolic events of the end of the Cold War, actually came about by accident.

Other historians point out that Reagan just built upon what other presidents had done in containing the Soviet Union until it fell apart from its own corruption. I asked my Dad, who was living during the Cold War, and he speculates that Ronald Reagan while doing a good job in the end in negotiating the end of the cold war, may have initially almost caused world war III.

Ronald Reagan's initial idea was to build up the American military with massive spending. Conservatives say that this caused the Russians to go bankrupt trying to compete with the American military buildup. They forget that Russia's other answer could have been to attack western Europe to try and win a conventional war before they fell too far behind in military spending. Andropov who took over the soviet union after an earlier leader died after a few months in office, had been the former head of the KGB and was a really bad guy. Some speculate that he may have been proposing an attack on Europe as a response to our build up. However, the soviet military was so scared at the possibility of a nuclear war, resulting from a conventional attack against western Europe, they staged a secret coup against Andropov which explains why he died mysteriously after also being in power for only three months like the leader before him. Andropov was replaced by Gorbachev, who up to that time was an unknown minister of agriculture. Gorbachev then started reforms over which he lost control and which also led to accidents, such as the fall of the Berlin wall.

In the end, it all turned out well. Reagan, like other presidents before him, negotiated new treaties with the Soviet union which allowed a more peaceful collapse. Reagan did well by negotiating which a lot of conservatives at that time said he should not do. But what Reagan had done was to build on what other presidents - republican and democrat - had done before him.