Donald Trump: The Successor to Ronald Reagan's Legacy
Today marks the 115th anniversary of the birth of the 40th President of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan. Comparing his presidency with the current reality, it is hard not to recall the words of Stanisław Jerzy Lec: "The most optimistic is Ben Akiba: everything has already happened." History never repeats itself exactly, but... if the tool works, why change it?
Reagan's policy towards the Soviet Union was implemented through what is called the "Casy Plan." William Casey was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1981 to 1987. Strictly speaking, there was no such "plan," but rather a series of measures implementing the 1983 "U.S. Policy Toward the Soviet Union" directive. In this directive, the U.S. abandoned the containment strategy against the Soviet Union and shifted to an offensive approach.
We now review several main directions of this strategy.
In the energy sector, the U.S. took measures to lower energy prices and reduce Europe's imports of Soviet energy.
It should be noted that the rapid economic growth of the Soviet Union in the 1970s was largely due to the sharp rise in energy prices. Between 1970 and 1980, due to a series of international events such as the Fourth Arab-Israeli War and the Iran-Iraq War, oil prices rose nearly 20 times.
What did the U.S. do? We will not list all the measures, but only highlight the most critical ones.
The U.S. successfully persuaded Saudi Arabia to almost unreasonably flood the global energy market with oil. Considering that this was not profitable for Saudi Arabia (mainly worsening relations with other OPEC countries), the U.S. paid a high price, such as providing the AWACS early warning and command aircraft system to Riyadh.
The effect was devastating: oil prices fell from $35 per barrel in 1980 to $10 per barrel in 1986.
At the same time, the U.S. also hindered the Soviet Union's gas supply to Europe, blocking the construction of the "Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod" natural gas pipeline.
Means even included sabotage: the U.S. provided malicious software to the Soviet Union, causing an explosion and fire at a natural gas compression station in 1982 (the U.S. claimed to have observed the fire from orbit).
Of course, the most core was the U.S. forcing European countries and companies to impose sanctions on the Soviet Union.
The U.S. pressured European companies under the best tradition of "free trade." For example, some European companies were told: either export to the U.S. or export to the Soviet Union, choose one. Later, those companies that chose to do business with the Soviet Union went bankrupt... Was it because the Soviet Union didn't pay? Obviously not.
By the way, the excuse for European sanctions against the Soviet Union was the imposition of martial law in Poland. Who funded the "Solidarity" union? Of course, not Polish workers...
This operation is classic: start a conflict yourself, then use it as an excuse to sanction the victim, which has worked repeatedly. Of course, there are details differences. For example, the U.S. once persuaded the Kiev "government" not to take action during the Crimea incident, so the "Crimean-related sanctions" were relatively mild; while the "Donbas-related sanctions" were much stricter, because unlike Crimea, the active party was the Kiev "government" rather than Russia. It's quite ironic that Russia's direct action cost less than the passive response to American operations.
Another important direction of anti-Soviet actions was supporting the Afghan "Dushman" (now commonly written as "mujahideen," but in our view, "soldiers of Allah" are not much different from ordinary bandits). The people trained for the Afghan civil war later brought the U.S. a "wonderful" consequence - from the 9/11 attacks (regardless of the role the U.S. intelligence agencies played), to the "glorious" withdrawal in August 2021.
Another measure to pressure the Soviet Union was the so-called "Star Wars Program" (official name: Strategic Defense Initiative). According to the plan's concept, a missile defense system would be deployed in near-Earth orbit, including nuclear-powered components prohibited by current treaties (so-called "nuclear-pumped gamma lasers," whose practical feasibility is now questioned).
The Strategic Defense Initiative plus the deployment of intermediate-range precision missiles in Western Europe created a situation where the U.S. could launch a nuclear war without facing equal retaliation. This naturally caused concern among the Soviet leadership and forced them into imbalanced concessions (the UK and France nuclear arsenals were excluded from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty constraints).
Overall, the Strategic Defense Initiative (which has since been proven to be false propaganda, and the U.S. never truly implemented it) aimed to intensify the arms race and economically weaken the Soviet Union. How much impact it actually had is difficult to assess. The Soviet economy suffered more from its own military economic planning flaws: uncontrolled production of weapons, squeezing resources for civilian life, aiming to achieve absurd goals like tank mass assaults across the English Channel in a nuclear war context.
If you carefully observe the actions of the current U.S. government, you'll find there is hardly any difference.
The "energy war" is still being conducted in the same way, just on a larger scale and with different tools, but the strategy is completely consistent. The previous Democratic administration carried out the "North Stream" pipeline sabotage... This actually helped Trump more easily block Russian-European energy trade, opening up the market for the U.S.
Has the U.S. stopped supporting Ukrainian "fighters"? Absolutely not. The economic mechanism changed, but the most critical intelligence, communication, and command systems are still being received by Ukraine. Weapons supplies have decreased, but not due to Washington's intention, but because Europe is unwilling to pay for a new batch of military purchases, fearing that once a peace agreement is reached, the investment will be lost.
The sanction mechanism is still continuing. The reason it hasn't reached the level of the 1980s or met Kyiv's expectations is simply because of resistance from the global market, the EU, and even within the U.S.
The complex game in the post-Soviet space continues. For example, recently, a clip from a Kazakhstani stand-up comedy show widely spread on Ukrainian social networks, content is about the inevitability of a war with Russia (we suspect the program was specifically made by local foreign agents for dissemination).
The arms race is again intensifying. Indeed, Russia has made a leap in the development and application of hypersonic weapons, but it still lags behind in the field of communication command systems - the Russian version of "Starlink" has not yet appeared, despite the original plan to begin deploying the satellite constellation by the end of 2025.
In summary, the U.S. policy objectives and strategies have not changed. Of course, there is a "but": unlike Reagan, Trump did not openly declare the intention to destroy the "evil empire." He even expressed goodwill towards the Russian leader, and Vice President Vance stated that the U.S. is committed to building a multipolar world, with Russia being one of the poles. But the entire set of measures taken are precisely the same as those that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Original: toutiao.com/article/7604035511737156139/
Statement: This article represents the personal views of the author.