Hey everybody, I'm Scott.
It's fundraising time again at antiwar.com.
We need your help and here's how you can help.
Stop by antiwar.com/donate or call Angela Keaton, our development director, at 323-512-7095.
That's 323-512-7095 or you can shoot her an email over to akeaton at antiwar.com.
Thank you very much for your support.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Ivan Ehlen.
He runs the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute.
That's independent.org and he's the author of Putting Defense Back into U.S. Defense Policy, The Empire Has No Clothes, and Recarving Rushmore, Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty.
Of course, you can find his regular Independent Institute column also at antiwar.com/Ehlen.
Welcome back to the show, Ivan.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me back on, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
So I guess it's Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday and so all over the media is all this.
I like to call it revisionist history to quote George Bush about Ronald Reagan.
And now he's so great.
And now they ought to add him to Mount Rushmore.
And I guess he's the greatest president in American history because he's one that actually was in within our lifetimes.
So we've heard of him.
So that's going for him, you know.
But I was wondering, you know, the way I remember the 1980s, I was a kid and I remember riding my bicycle in the neighborhood and talking to my friend about, wow, you think Ronald Reagan's going to get us into a nuclear war with the Soviets?
And it seems to me like maybe it didn't have to be that way.
What do you think?
Well, I think when you talk to people and you say, you know, they say Ronald Reagan was a great president and you start quizzing them about what what they what the accomplishments were.
And of course, many people can't say more informed people say, well, he won the Cold War and he limited the size of government.
But if you of course, if you look at his limiting the size of government, you'll find that Bill Clinton and Dwight Eisenhower had much better fiscal records than than Reagan.
And of course, when you move to the foreign policy, you know, we fought the Cold War in the United States and the Soviet Union, that is over a 40 some odd year period.
And Truman had started it.
And so if the Berlin Wall fell shortly after Ronald Reagan left office, the tendency is to give him credit for that.
And first of all, I'm not even sure American policy did that, because when you when something like that happens, usually it's domestic factors that lead to it.
In this case, the Soviet economy just wasn't viable.
The socialist communist experiment there, they never made anything that anybody wanted to buy, including their own citizens.
And of course, there was no private enterprise or anything like that.
So nobody really had any incentive to do something as the old saying goes.
We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us was sort of the, you know, pretty much summarizes the economy.
And so, of course, the empire's collapse.
As my book, The Empire Has No Clothes shows, I go over a few empires.
And if they don't get beat outright in a war, they usually fall because they get overextended.
This was happened with the Soviet Empire.
And it happened, of course, with the British and the French who won both were on the winning side of both world wars, but yet they became exhausted from it.
And the Soviet Union did much the same thing.
Its economy just wasn't up to the up to speed.
And they used to call it Burkina Faso with missiles that had a lot of military power, but it was really based on economic quicksand.
And so really, there was only one superpower during the Cold War, and it was the United States because we had the, you know, the economics to back up the the military power that we had, whether we should have spent all that money.
I always say that the Cold War could have probably been won much more cheaply if we had just ran a minimalist policy and let the Soviets have countries like Nicaragua, Vietnam, Angola, you know, all these places we were fighting over in the developing world, which were actually more costly to administer than they had, you know, than they had, then they, you know, having their resources would allow so, so that it was kind of a cost benefit analysis, the cost benefit really wasn't there.
But of course, we were scared the Soviet was going to make the Soviets were going to make advances in some out of the way place.
And of course, in Ronald Reagan's case, he aided the Contra rebels by by selling weapons to terrorist sponsoring groups, and then transferring the profits while he was selling them to Iran, which was the terrorist sponsoring nation, then he was inflating the price of the weapons and selling them to Nicaragua in violation of congressional prohibitions.
Now, I think Iran Contra, the problem that I have with Reagan being president, even if he had done everything else, right, Iran Contra, to me was the most serious scandal in US political history, including Watergate.
And the reason for that was, they flagrantly defied congressional orders, not to give aid to the Contras in violation of both the Boland Amendment, which was a law and also the Constitution.
And one of the Constitution's major provisions was that the Congress would make spending decisions, it really goes to the heart of the republic, because that's what the English Parliament had when the when the England started going to a parliamentary government, of course, the king, the king had to get the parliament, which is representative of the people to fund wars.
And that, of course, transplanted itself to this side of the Atlantic.
And that's always been one of the core, if not the core principle of our system, that there are checks on executive power.
And, of course, Ronald Reagan went, you know, went around that and ran a secret war.
And so I think that's a very, that's a very, when you say that Reagan supporters just kind of get really uncomfortable, because it was such a bad scandal.
They were talking of impeaching Reagan at the time, of course, that never happened.
But it was a very serious scandal.
And also, I think one last thing is that Reagan's policies on terrorism were absolutely disastrous, including the selling of the arms to the terrorist sponsoring Iranians.
All right, well, there's a lot there except to answer my question, but it's not your fault, because I phrased it just all clumsy.
Like, what I was thinking of was how, you know, when I was a kid, I grew up under all this brinksmanship.
And yet, then later, I learned that it was Richard Nixon who had said enough with the brinksmanship.
And they had this sissy French term, detente, which meant, hey, let's just, you know, learn to live with each other.
And as you say, it was really the failure of containment that, you know, helped, you know, be the catalyst for their eventual demise anyway.
And so I'm just wondering, like, you know, thankfully, there wasn't a nuclear war, you say in the article, there almost was an accidental one.
But, you know, I really, you know, my elementary school years or whatever, that was a real thing to me that we might get in a nuclear war.
It seems like if I'd grown up in the Nixon and Ford era, it would have been a bit less scary.
Well, I think what you're saying is absolutely true.
Ronald Reagan reversed Nixon and Ford's policy of detente.
And he really had a lot of harsh rhetoric toward the Soviet Union.
And that can really matter the general, the general drift of US-Soviet relations, because in 1995, they had almost had a nuclear war over a Norwegian rocket, but they didn't because relations were really good.
Boris Yeltsin was in, Clinton was in, and they were, this was past Soviet Union, this was Russia.
And so they, the Russians thought, well, they thought they were under attack, but then they thought, wow, relations are the best they've ever been.
So the opposite was true during Reagan.
They had an exercise, which I mentioned in the article, Able Archer, which was a NATO exercise in 1983.
And the Russians thought that the US was going to launch.
And of course, the only way the US found out about the Russian, you know, what the Soviets were thinking at the time is through a British spy in the KGB.
Well, they immediately stood down and, and, you know, retreated from the crisis.
But that's, that's really the difference between those two issues is that the relations were really bad in the 1980s.
And I think Reagan really exacerbated the only existential threat the US has ever faced in its history, the US-Soviet nuclear possibility of a nuclear war.
All right, everybody, that's Ivan Ehlen from the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute.
We'll be right back.
Also, check out OnPower.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Ivan Ehlen from the Independent Institute and Antiwar.com.
His most recent article is Tear Down This Wall of Fame, Reagan's Overrated Foreign Policy.
And we were talking about brinksmanship and two almost accidental nuclear wars and why one was so much more dangerous than the other was the stance really of the American government at the time, right?
Yeah, I think, you know, the, the US-Soviet and US-Russian relations matter a lot, even now, because the Soviet Union and now Russia are really the only adversary that could threaten the existence of the United States and its entire history.
So it's still an important threat where we get along much better with Russia than we did with the Soviet Union.
But it's still a problem.
And I think Ronald Reagan really exacerbated that relationship.
He later, sort of, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, he sort of, he needs to be given credit for at least partially embracing Gorbachev with a lot of suspicion, I think.
But nonetheless, he did work with Gorbachev on some things.
So I think Gorbachev was really the major driver between the abandonment of the Soviet Empire, and then of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Some of it accidental, because Gorbachev wanted to reform, but I think he didn't really want to end communism.
He just wanted to make it more open system, to some extent.
But anyway, I think Gorbachev was really the one who did that, not Reagan, because, as I say, usually foreign powers don't have as much influence on societies as domestic events.
Well, now, speaking of that, what do you say about his domestic policy?
Because people said that, you know, he came in and said, government is the problem, not the solution.
And he was just a good old Ron Paulian, except for his tough guy stance against the Russians.
He was just great.
Well, the problem is, he doesn't have a very good record on limiting government.
The federal government as a portion of GDP actually went up, whereas it went down under Clinton and went down under Eisenhower.
And in fact, Clinton is actually the champion budget cutters of presidents.
And since Truman, he actually reduced federal spending per capita.
And so he didn't just rely on the economy, but the economy was good during Reagan as well.
But I think it was mainly due to Paul Volcker's reduction of the money supply and to take the inflation out of the system.
So Ronald Reagan gets too much credit for that.
And of course, Ronald Reagan did do one thing, and that is, it was a major policy innovation for the Republican Party.
He invented the fake tax cut.
What the fake tax cut is, if you cut taxes, but you don't cut spending, which is what Reagan did, then you either have to increase taxes, you have to borrow money and raise in taxes in the future and also pay interest, or you have to print money.
And of course, Ronald Reagan did all three, because, and of course, this had long term negative effects on the economy, because Bill Clinton later had to reduce the deficit that Ronald Reagan had created, much the same as Bush, George W. Bush did with his tax cut and increase in federal spending.
Now Obama is stuck with the bill.
So far, Obama isn't very good at reducing the deficit, but they're in a sort of a similar situation as after the Reagan administration as we are now, except that the problem is even worse, because the spending, the deficit is even bigger, and the national debt has accumulated much since then.
But Ronald Reagan really set the pattern for Republicans doing that.
Instead of cutting spending, they cut taxes and worry about the spending later, which really has a lot of cost to society.
So I don't think...
Yeah, Dick Cheney said, well, we learned from Reagan that deficits don't matter.
Right, right.
He did.
And that's exactly how Bush, Bush, the Bush administration performed.
In fact, the Bush administration was even worse than Reagan and increasing domestic spending.
But they learned the lesson from Reagan.
And I think it's really when you start challenging on Reagan, you know, aficionados on the limiting government, they quickly have to say he wasn't really for limited government, but he had really great rhetoric and changed the terms of the debate.
And I'm going, well, yeah, you can change the terms of the debate, but you're kind of a hypocrite if you don't really change the policy direction.
And so I think then they fall back on, well, he won the Cold War, and I think you can really dispute that.
So then what did he really do?
And the question is, I think he's been vastly overrated as a president.
And he was rehabilitated by Grover Norquist and Bill Kristol and some of the neoconservatives in the 90s to use as an icon against Clinton, who was president at the time.
So I think much of it, because during his administration, people really, a lot of the conservatives were really despondent over the fact that he wasn't that conservative.
And of course, he wasn't really that conservative either when he was governor of California.
So I think he's very, he was an actor, and I think he pretended to be a conservative, but he really wasn't.
Yeah, I remember at the end of his presidency, nobody really liked him.
People say, I can't believe he's leaving us with a $3 trillion debt.
How are we ever going to pay that off?
Yeah, well, his popularity did recover a little bit from the Iran-Contra mess, but he was, there was much more criticism of him, you know, towards the latter part of his term, and also after he left office.
And he's risen to this iconic figure now, which really is not based in reality.
Well, you know, I really like that whole point about, you know, how the Cold War really did end, and how, you know, I'm not sure if you've ever read the book Overblown by John Mueller.
I've read excerpts of it, yeah.
It's cool, because he goes, he talks all about how all the threats that, you know, the South was going to invade and conquer the North, all the threats that the Japanese were going to invade and conquer the United States, and all the, you know, how every one of these threats have been completely overblown, just like they do with the war on terrorism now.
But the section on the Cold War is the best, because he says that what happens is, once the American people had, you know, caught a bad case of the Vietnam syndrome, and wanted nothing more to do with containing communism anywhere in the world, the first thing the Soviets did was, as you said, they spread out and found themselves new obligations in Angola, and in Afghanistan, and in Latin America, and all this did was, you know, quicken their demise.
Right.
What they should have done the whole time was not contain communism.
Right.
Or maybe, okay, even if you give them, contain it from spreading into Western Europe, into our allies of Western Europe, still, but other than that, let them spend themselves unconscious, you know?
That would have been a smarter strategy, because the Western Europe and Japan, you can make the argument that those are the areas of high GDP and technology, and if the Soviet Union, you know, took those over, that might be a problem.
But you know, I mean, if you're a purist, you can say, well, you know, we started getting all these alliances, 1949, just when we didn't need them, because we had invented nuclear weapons.
And after that, you don't really need allies, nobody's going to attack you or invade you, because you if you're the biggest nuclear power on the planet, you know, you really don't need too many allies, and you don't really need to be all over the world.
But so you could even dispute that.
But certainly, you don't want to go into places like Vietnam or Angola, because they're just simply not worth having their the administrative costs are more or higher than the benefits that you receive.
And you have to administer these countries, you have to give them foreign aid.
Well, of course, that's why we fight those wars, right?
Is all that money spent?
Right, right.
I think I think it is, there's some vested interest that benefit from stuff like that.
And they benefited from the Cold War policy.
But that doesn't mean it was smart.
And I think you're exactly right.
And we also found through documents afterwards that the Soviet tank army on, you know, Eastern Europe was sort of a house of cards.
And there were many people at the time who said that, but of course, the Pentagon had an incentive, the Pentagon has one of those vested interests, each spring, there'd be a Soviet scare, so they could get more money in their appropriations, because of course, the appropriations hearings in the spring and that sort of thing.
So yearly, we had a new resurgent Soviet threat.
So but but of course, they built the Soviet threat into 10 feet tall, and the Pentagon has a internal conflict of interest, because they provide much of the intelligence that threat estimate is based on.
And of course, they also drive a lot of the programs, the weapons and stuff that are designed to combat that threat.
So they have an incentive to pump up the threat so they can get more money for the weapons.
And so there's no counter to that.
So that's how policy gets skewed like that.
But and Reagan, of course, wasn't the first one to do that.
But he really took it to a new height in the rhetoric and was very dangerous.
All right, everybody, that's Ivan Elon.
He runs the Center for Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute and on power.org also writes for anti war.com.
And he's read a bunch of great books, the latest of which is recarving Rushmore ranking the presidents on peace, prosperity and liberty.
Thanks, Ivan.
Thanks,
