Reagan Didn’t Win the Cold War --- PRESSURE DOESN’T MAKE PEACE

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/reagan-didnt-win-cold-war
"When Republicans strategize about how to deal with China today, many of
them point to President Ronald Reagan’s confrontational approach toward
the Soviet Union as a model to emulate. H. R. McMaster, who served as
national security adviser under President Donald Trump, argued: “Reagan
had a clear strategy for victory in the global contest with the Soviet
Union. Reagan’s approach—applying intensive economic and military
pressure to a superpower adversary—became foundational to American
strategic thinking. It hastened the end of Soviet power and promoted a
peaceful conclusion to the multi-decade Cold War.” A trio of
conservative foreign policy experts—Randy Schriver, Dan Blumenthal, and
Josh Young—made the case that the next president “should draw upon the
example of former President Ronald Reagan in taking hold of China
policy,” citing “the intent to win the Cold War against the Soviet
Union” that “permeated” Reagan-era national security documents.
..
To be sure, there is a superficial allure to the thesis that Reagan
brought down the Soviet Union and won the Cold War, because Reagan
sometimes spoke of doing just that. ...
Reality, however, is a lot messier than this simplistic story line. ...
PRESSURE DOESN’T MAKE PEACE
There is little evidence that pressure on the Soviet Union in Reagan’s
first term made the Soviets more willing to negotiate, but there is a
good deal of evidence that his pivot toward cooperation with Gorbachev
in his second term allowed the new Soviet leader to transform his
country and end the Cold War. Yet many conservatives conflate Reagan’s
second-term success with his first-term failures, applying the wrong
policy lessons to relations with communist China today.
Ramping up confrontation with Beijing regardless of the consequences
risks a repeat of the war scares that brought the world to the brink of
catastrophe in 1983, and such a strategy has even less of a chance of
success today. Even if it was not on the verge of bankruptcy, the Soviet
Union’s economy was weak in the 1980s, thanks to communist central
planning and a fall in world oil prices. China, on the other hand, has
successfully combined free-market economics and political repression to
become the world’s second largest economy. As the journalist Fareed
Zakaria has noted, the Soviet economy accounted for roughly 7.5 percent
of global GDP at its peak; China today makes up about 20 percent of
global GDP. There are no policies that the United States can plausibly
implement that will “defeat” China—it is hard to know what “defeating
China” even means. It is easy, however, to imagine that unrelentingly
hard-line policies from both the United States and China could raise the
risk of a nuclear war."