Cold War Triumphalism and the Reagan Factor

Abstract

Three decades after Gorbachev’s 1986 Glasnost campaign, the sudden death of the Soviet Union still continues to keep diplomatic historians busy with its momentous implications. The mutually excluding political realms of the Cold War forged a conservative American historical discourse, which perceived the Soviet Union as an evil empire. Existing biases against Moscow continued after the Soviet collapse and were conjured up in a new scholarly genre that might properly be termed as “the Reagan Victory School”. The adherents of this school suggest that President Reagan’s resolve and unsophisticated yet faithfully pragmatic foreign policy designs – the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in particular – became the major factor behind the Soviet Union’s demise and America’s “triumph” after the Cold War. Looking at several influential monographs on the subject, this paper seeks to demonstrate the well nuanced yet often mono-causal notions vocalized by American scholars of Cold War triumphalism.