When it comes to how the Cold War ended, Scott Walker believes a pretty strange version of history.
Wisconsin’s Republican governor, and current top tier contender for the White House, was recently giving a speech at the conservative policy group the Club for Growth. He was asked about foreign policy and first announced, “I think foreign policy is something that’s not just about having a PhD or talking to PhD’s… it’s about leadership.” And went on to elaborate his own theory for how the Cold War ended. As The Washington Post’s Phillip Rucker summarized:
Walker contended that “the most significant foreign policy decision of my lifetime” was then-President Ronald Reagan’s move to bust a 1981 strike of air traffic controllers, firing some 11,000 of them.
“It sent a message not only across America, it sent a message around the world,” Walker said. America’s allies and foes alike became convinced that Reagan was serious enough to take action and that “we weren’t to be messed with,” he said.
This is hardly the first time Walker has discussed these sorts of views. Indeed he’s said something quite similar back in January. But the reality of course is a lot more complicated than that. Indeed politifact gave this reading of the end of the Cold War the dubious honor of it’s “Pants on Fire” rating.
There are all sorts of ways of thinking about the end of the Cold War. In one reading, the collapse of the USSR was simply a vindication of Harry Truman’s policy of, containment that every president followed to some degree after World War II. In other readings the USSR collapsed because communism just doesn’t work very well. Or as Jonathan Chait put it in another context, communism failed because, “it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence.”
But no serious person can contend that the Soviet Union collapsed because Ronald Reagan decided to fire some air traffic controllers, even if one agrees with that decision.
Reagan was of course pretty notorious for making things up, like claiming for eight years that he never dyed his hair. Or his claims that the US never traded arms for hostages, when that’s exactly what we did. So who knows, perhaps Walker is just channeling the Gipper.
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Photo by Doug Mills/AP