0.6 The end of the west  (Page 8/19)

Settlement of these conflicts and South Africa’s own passage to inclusive democracy had to wait for a more significant development: The decision by Reagan to take the fight to the Soviets in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola, and Gorbachev’s decision to encourage political settlement of such conflicts.

Soviet Implosion and a new world

The two Reagan terms and that part of the Bush presidency that preceded the fracture of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union’s implosion saw a remarkable conjunction of circumstances. Reagan’s intuitive understanding of the disquiet of the US electorate at the self-doubt into which the nation had been plunged since Vietnam, his literalist characterization of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’ and his desire to eliminate the spectre of nuclear confrontation, led him to take initiatives that scandalized intellectuals, outflanked Soviet hardliners, delighted many US citizens and increased the pressure on a fragile Soviet system. His instincts were enduring, but the actions they promoted would not have had the same effects in a different time.

Reagan’s determination to check Soviet advances into Africa, Afghanistan, Central America and Cambodia was cloaked in a crusade in support of democratic struggles against communist tyranny. His intention to ensure that the US did not fall behind the Soviets in military terms led him to restore the B-1 bomber, rebuild the US Navy, deploy the MX missile system, introduce US intermediate-range missiles into Europe and launch the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Wholly convinced that the United States, was “the last best hope of man on earth”, Reagan did not doubt that American freedoms would triumph over Soviet communism. He dreaded the prospect of nuclear war, lauded the SDI programme as a means of “rendering…nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete” and dreamed of persuading Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, even before he sat down with Gorbachev, that nuclear arms reductions were essential. In his memoir, he says: “My dream…became a world free of nuclear weapons…”

Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, aware of the fragility of the Soviet Union and the risks of confrontation with the United States. Through an awkward admixture of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), which he hoped would revitalise the Soviet system by purging Party hardliners and balancing central planning with market economics, Gorbachev succeeded in six years in destroying the Party, fragmenting the Russian empire and losing power. To gain time for his reforms, he used the 27th CPSU Congress in 1986 to repudiate the imperative of class struggle and proclaim peaceful coexistence as a necessary condition for human well-being. Almost echoing a speech by Reagan in the British House of Lords in 1982 – Reagan had called for a world “which allows people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means” – Gorbachev said of the future:

“To be sure, distinctions will remain. But should we duel because of them?... People are tired of tension and confrontation. They prefer a search for a more secure and reliable world…in which everyone would preserve their own philosophic, political and ideological views and their way of life.”