http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/07/think_again_ronald_reagan?page=full
I sort of disagree with the last part about Obama, because it is just too early to even think of a comparison. But, that said, I still largely am a fan of Reagan. He is the best President since Ike. I just think he gets blown way out of proportion.
One section:
"Reagan Frightened the Soviet Union into Submission."
Hardly. Reagan's role in winning the Cold War lies at the core of the American right's mythology. The legend goes like this: Reagan came into office, dramatically hiked defense spending, unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative (his "Star Wars" missile shield), and aided anti-communist rebels in the Third World. Unable to keep pace, the Kremlin chose Gorbachev, who threw in the towel.
The problem with this story is that Reagan began abandoning his hard-line anti-Soviet stance in late 1983, 18 months before Gorbachev took power. One reason was domestic politics. Today, commentators tend to believe that Reagan's hawkish reputation was always a political asset. But in 1983, after more than two years of epic defense spending, virulent Cold War rhetoric, and no arms-control talks, Americans were demanding détente. Public support for defense spending fell, and the U.S. House of Representatives endorsed a freeze on the production of nuclear weapons. Fearful that these dovish trends could threaten Reagan's re-election, White House chief of staff James Baker pushed Reagan to make an overture to the Soviets, a suggestion backed by Shultz, who was eager to restart arms talks.
Their effort coincided with a change in Reagan, who had long harbored a genuine terror of nuclear war reflected in his decades-old belief -- often ignored by backers on the right -- that nuclear weapons should eventually be abolished. The terror had its roots, as did many of Reagan's inclinations, in movies. According to Colin Powell, national security advisor from 1987 to 1989, Reagan had been deeply affected by the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which space aliens warn earthlings that unless they stop settling their conflicts through war, the powers that be in the galaxy will destroy their planet. (During his presidency, Reagan repeatedly invoked the prospect of an alien invasion as a reason for the United States and the Soviet Union to overcome their differences. Whenever he did, Powell would mutter, "Here come the little green men.")
In 1983, two movies triggered Reagan's latent anti-nuclear views: Matthew Broderick's WarGames, which portrays a young computer hacker who almost starts a nuclear war, and ABC's The Day After, which depicts Lawrence, Kansas, in the aftermath of one. For Reagan, who didn't draw a sharp contrast between reality and celluloid (he once told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he had visited Nazi concentration camps when in reality he had only seen them on film), the movies were chilling. Soon after viewing The Day After, Reagan attended a briefing on U.S. military procedure in the event of a Soviet attack, as if the doomsday movies were playing out before him in real life. His dread only grew by year's end when he learned that his nuclear buildup and anti-Soviet speeches had so terrified Kremlin leaders that they interpreted a nato war game as preparation for a real attack and put their military on high alert.
This combination of electoral and psychological anxiety led Reagan, late in his first term, to begin a dramatic rhetorical shift. Declaring that "nuclear arsenals are far too high," in January 1984 he told the country that "my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth." By summer, he had largely scrapped preconditions on meeting Soviet leaders, and in September TIME magazine reported that he told Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko the United States "respects the Soviet Union's status as a superpower and has no wish to change its social system."
Reagan's sudden infatuation with arms control didn't initially bear fruit, mostly because Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko had one foot in the grave. But in March 1985, within hours of Gorbachev's selection, Reagan invited him to a summit without preconditions. The same year, he overruled administration hard-liners and quietly scrapped some older submarines so the United States would not violate the never-ratified SALT II Treaty and thus anger the Kremlin. When Soviet troops in East Germany killed a U.S. soldier, giving Reagan a perfect excuse to avoid meeting his Soviet counterpart, he instead told journalists that such incidents just made him want to meet Gorbachev more.
When they did meet in Geneva, in November, Reagan whispered to Gorbachev, "I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands." An initial meeting scheduled for 15 minutes lasted five hours. The following year, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Reagan and Gorbachev came within a whisker of agreeing to destroy all their nuclear weapons (a deal Reagan scuttled because he would not limit "Star Wars"). But in 1987, the two men signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Cold War's most far-reaching arms-reduction agreement.
By 1988, though the Soviet Union had not yet released Eastern Europe from its grip, Reagan was explicitly denying that the Soviet Union still constituted an "evil empire" and had begun calling Gorbachev "my friend." And contrary to the conservative fable, it was this second-term dovishness that played the crucial role in enabling Gorbachev's reforms. From virtually the moment he took office, Gorbachev was desperate to cut military spending, which by the mid-1980s constituted a mind-bending 40 percent of the Soviet budget. But within the Politburo, vast unilateral cuts would have been politically impossible; Gorbachev needed an American partner. And once he found that partner in the less-menacing second-term Reagan, Gorbachev was able to convince his Kremlin colleagues that the Soviet Union could risk losing its Eastern European security belt without fearing Western attack. In the words of longtime Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin, "If Reagan had stuck to his hard-line policies in 1985 and 1986 ... Gorbachev would have been accused by the rest of the Politburo of giving everything away to a fellow who does not want to negotiate. We would have been forced to tighten our belts and spend even more on defense."
