Let the revisionists begin to rewrite the events of the end of the cold war. Script if you will Reagan out of the hero's part, but, some of us are wise enough to know better and can readily discern the bias of the deceitful liberal press. One day when America's greatness sits on the ash heap of of history, it will be understood that her fall was not that she was conquered from without by greater ideas, but destroyed from within by those who despised her good.

Communism failed in Russia because of it's own lack of merit. Not by the deeds of any one person.

I was an undergrad in 1993 at USF in Tampa, and a visiting scholar from Moscow came and gave a speech there. In the Q and A after the speech, he was asked about the role of Reagan in bringing down the Berlin Wall. He scoffed derisively and said You Americans think everything is always all about you. He said that South Korea had more to do with the fall of the Wall than Reagan did. Why South Korea, he was asked? Because every educated Russian knew that that little dinky country had a larger GDP than the USSR did at that point in time, and it galled them to no end.

The term revisionist history is a tautology. All history is revisionist. The more significant and interesting an issue is, the more it will get researched and studied, and the more information will be learned and made available about it. Some people understand history for what it is, a living dialectic. Others want to consider it as something frozen and immutable. So they will stick their head in the sand, ignore any new research, and cry revisionist at any new narratives that come to light as the past is examined.

Should we find ourselves one day gazing upon America's greatness as it sits on the ash heap of history, the decline would more likely have been caused by those who chose to remain in ignorance than by those who were not afraid to confront new realities.

I will never forget what I was watching on TV as the Berlin wall was falling. I may have been very young but understood that this could mean the fall of communism in Europe and the world. Fast forward to 2009 and just knowing that in my country, The great USA, communism is now quietly celebrated and certainly supported is a sad fact of our way of American life. If it wasn't for communism we wouldn???t have anything on the shelves of Home Depot, Target, Kmart, Wal-Mart, etc., etc., etc. Just knowing that a communist county, China, is our #2 trading partner in the world is extremely saddening to my heart.

Funny that you would believe that South Korea played a greater role in the Soviet Union's collapse than the United States did. That certainly is confronting "new realities". I personally prefer the "old ignorance" of the conservative to the "new realities" of the leftist revisionist.

I have to agree with the fact that books are finally being written that direct the reason for the fall of the Berlin Wall away from the Western leaders, i.e., Bush, Sr. and Margaret Thatcher in particular, who slept through all the marches in Dresden and Leipzig.

I personally sat in front of my TV set in Germany, and watched history being made before my eyes. The brave people of East Germany who assembled at the churches and organized the marches night after night chanting "Wir sind ein Volk," are the real reasons why the communists lost their grip.

Credit has to be given also to the Solidarity movement in Poland and Lech Walesa in particular for paving the way. The "open door" in Hungary was another "escape valve" for the frustrated East Germans.

For the sake of history, let's tell the tale as it actually happened???.in the streets of Leipzig and Dresden ???.not in the "West's political corridors."

I am a independent who voted for both Bush and Obama and believe I made the right vote each time but I am sure I will be called some names regardless. I am definitely troubled as the U.S. Media always undermines anything good that the U.S. has done in foreign policy. I must admit too that this sentiment is particularly powerful when the President was a Republican. If you myopically view (as this author has) the few days in which the Berlin wall fell, I admit that the U.S. Government had little to do over those few days but to sit and watch. The article is correct on that point. However, the decades on strident defense of Berlin and Western Europe as well as a demonstration of the benefits of capitalism in raising the standard of living for everyone was a powerful contributor to moving Eastern Europe to this tipping point.

Even if this article is correct in suggestiong that South Korea has a bigger impact, than let's remember that our U.S. soldiers died and continue to protect South Korea from its communist brother. However, that would require that this article compliment U.S. foreign policy so we would not see it.

Here are some future articles that I expect to see from Andrew Bast and NewsWeek
- Nazi Germany was going to collapse without the U.S. intervention. D-Day was only a waste of U.S. soldiers lives.
- The Golden Age of Iraq -- The Saddam Hussein Years or Lost Genius of Iraq - A story of Saddam's Sons

Finally, this was the same magazine that praised Obama for sitting on his hands during the Iran Green Revolution as he traded helping that democracy movment for such great progress on stopping Iran's nuclear program.

Good article. Being a native speaker of Hungarian, however, and at the risk of sounding like a pedant, I want to point out that throughout the article the name of the Hungarian prime minister in 1989 occurs with a spelling error. It is not Miklós Neméth but Miklós Németh (the latter is the slightly archaic form of "német," meaning "German," and is a very common last name. "Nemét" doesn't exist either as a word or a name). Misplaced accents in foreign names are a common enough sign of carelessness in the English-language media. So, in case journalists are reading this: those accents are not just arbitrary ornaments, they are actually there to distinguish different vowels from one another.

While an interesting article, it is typical of the current MSM oversimplification of the issues of the Cold War and their ability to overlook the obvious: underlying the economic, political, and moral strength of the West was the US, which provided the military and economic security necessary for openness. The writer seems to believe that it is very important that "most" Germans didn't 'like' Reagan. So what? He represented a challenge to the uneasy co-existence with communism that had prevailed for the previous 40 years. Does anyone seriously believe that Austria would have opened its border with Hungary without the pressure of the NATO alliance to ensure they didn't get attacked by the Warsaw pact? The point here is that the ladership of the West, over a 40-year period but personified in the unyielding rhetoric of Reagan and Thacther, was necessary to break down the Soviet autarky. The fact that the majority of Germans were annoyed by Reagan is simply a fact of human nature, and certainly not to their credit. While I agre to some extent with Niall Ferguson's assertion that 1979 was an even more critical year, what is really remarkable about the fall of Communism were the leaders of US (Bush), Germany (Kohl), and, of course, Gorbachev, who took advantage of the situation to ensure a peaceful end to the Cold War stand off. The West was so grateful to Gorbachev for not machine-gunning the protestors that they awarded h im a Nobel Prize for his restraint -- one of the strangest reasons for giving the odd prize, but probably well-desrved, since almost any other Soviet leader would have ended the protests with a blookbath (or for that matter, any other Chinese communist leader, as it happens). We were lucky in our leaders at that time, and if anyone doesn't believe we were, and that the Soviet monolith would collapse under its own weight due to its economic incompetence, history is rife with exampes: and we currently have several great examples of waliking-dead dictatorships: Myanmar, Cuba, Zimbobwe. There was nothing "inevitable" about the collapse of the Soviet Union or the re-unification of Germany. The leaders at the time made it happen.

Yes, you are correct. I would be willing to believe that South Korea played a larger role in the collapse of the USSR insofar as the position was nuanced in a particular way, and argued in a solid manner, and was supported by the facts. The major nuance of the argument in this case was that South Korea was being used as an example of an economy that, when compared to the economy of the USSR by the Soviets themselves, helped to ignite a sweeping realization of the failures of the Soviet economic model within the USSR. And that this internal dynamic in the USSR had more to do with the collapse of the USSR than anything Ronald Reagan said or did.

The most significant point in our little exchange seems to be that I would be willing to entertain ideas that are advanced by new scholarship of historic events, and you would not.

No, 1989 was not inevitable but Gorbachev deserves a lot more credit than Reagan and Bush sr. Gorbachev was more willing to liberalize Eastern European satellite states than were the communist leaders of those countries themselves (and notably Honecker). BTW, it was not Austria that opened the Austrian-Hungarian border; that notion makes little sense, as it was of course communist Hungary that had kept the border closed until 1989. Hungarian leaders' decision to dismantle border defenses and let East German refugees leave for Austria had less to do with NATO than with their judgment that Gorbachev's Soviet Union, having abandoned the Brezhnev doctrine, was not going to take military steps to restore the impermeability of the Iron Curtain. Western leaders had very little initiative in the developments of 1989. The Bush administration was confused, eager to avoid destabilization, and also (to some extent rightly) worried that a rapid disintegration of the Warsaw Pact might provoke a Brezhnevian backlash against Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. So they held back and went out of their way to assure Moscow that they didn't want the status quo to change. Much the same was true about Western European leaders. Thatcher was adamantly opposed to German reunification, and so were French leaders. Austrians were worried about the prospect of a flood of refugees from the East (as in 1956) and did nothing to hasten the opening of the border. In 1989, the West came across as a pretty reluctant winner of the Cold War.

Although I have a lot of fondness for Gorby, to say he derserves 'more' credit is just untrue, unless you believe that, say, Grand Admiral Doenitz derserves more credit than General Eisenhower for the end of WWII, since it was Doenitz who surrended. What Gorby did -- and it was important -- was loosen the USSRs gangser-like grip on Eastern Europe. But there can be no moral equivalence between him and Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, or Kohl, who not only won but were on the moral high ground.

It is certainly true that Thatcher was a reluctant midwife to the birth of a united Germany, but if the term 'Fall of the Berlin Wall' conveys the collapse of Soviet power, rather than simply the reunification of Germany (which took several more years of negotiation) then then she derserves as much or more credit than anyone. You also, I think, fail to give credit where it is due -- the restraint shown by the West was purposeful and did not included any Donald Rumsfelidian triumphalism. That was an important factor in allowing the Soviets to let go -- they were going to be allowed to retire in peace and dignity. So, while there were many causes of the collapse of Soviet communism, it is a little too glib to simply give all the credit to the guy who was in command of the sinking ship -- the iceberg derserves a lot of credit also!

The WW2 military analogy is misleading: the Cold War was not a war but a prolonged mutual effort to avoid one. Each time a possibility of armed confrontation in Europe presented itself (1953 Berlin, 56 Budapest, 68 Prague), the West opted for non-intervention. Which was probably the only sane thing to do, but it nonetheless means that the logic of the confrontation and its outcome cannot be framed in military terms. Precisely because, as you point out, economically bankrupt regimes can survive indefinitely, the bankrupcy into which the armament race ratcheted up by Reagan drove the USSR did not in itself spell the end of the regime. Rhetorical gambits, as Reagan's 1987 "tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev", would have been so much hot air, had it not been for the fact that the person in power in the USSR was Gorbachev. For the implosion to begin, Gorbachev's genuinely well-meaning but naive faith in reform was needed--which was naive because he mistakenly believed that reform on the scale he envisioned could still be kept within the confines of communism. 1989 was the unintended outcome of Gorbachev's perestroika+glasnost. As far as I know, the restraint shown by the West was partly a reflection of panicked cluelessness and partly a matter of pragmatic calculation, i.e. the wish not to undermine Gorbachev. But it is not as though NATO could have sent tanks rolling in the direction of Warsaw, Prague and Budapest, to be greeted as liberators. Of course I don't mean to imply that Gorbachev is the only person who deserves credit. Although in purely causal terms no other person's decisions had comparable impact on the processes of 1989, the eventual outcome was not what he intended. Credit should go to members of the opposition movements in Eastern European countries, as well as to all those who had shown in 53, 56, 68 and 79 how far people can go to stand up for their freedom (without any Western help!) and thereby indirectly contributed to the gradual moral bankrupcy of Soviet communism. As for Thatcher, he was not just a "reluctant midwife" to unified Germany, she was desperately scheming to prevent it.