Today's Foreign Policy and Reagan
It struck me tonight as I was listening to Condoleeza Rice being bashed on the radio by moderate Iranians as an aggressive war mongerer that our current foreign policy is based less on current events and more upon the Republican view that it was Ronald Reagan's bluster against the Soviet Union that led to the demise of the Soviet system. To most Republicans, Reagan is a tremendous hero responsible for all that is good in America today.

It is definitely arguable that the downfall of the Soviet system was due more to economics than to anything else. The Soviet economy (and the Russian economy that followed it) is an extraction economy, deriving a great majority of it's income from oil and gas sales to other countries. They export relatively little else. Starting in the mid 1980's the price of oil took a calamitous fall, descending at one point to $10 a barrel. I actually remember paying 65 cents a gallon in New Jersey during that time.

This was a disaster for the oil producing regions of the world, including Texas, which suffered greatly from bankruptcies and as we all remember, failed banks. In order to stay in power, Gorbachev was forced to go begging around the world for aid for his people, and was only really successful with Helmut Kohl in Germany, for which he had to promise not to interfere in it's reunification.

These though are inconvenient facts for Republican true-believers, and the price we pay for it are a depleted military, loss of friends around the world, and people like Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Condoleeza Rice representing the United States to our global neighbors. While I think they are all well meaning to a point, I also believe that their strategy is based upon a false assumption, with possibly dangerous consequences that would be unnecessary and counterproductive to a better world for everyone.