Not an ounce of credit to Reagan

Europe's Wall Of Ingratitude

Liberation: "Gorby! Gorby!" was Berliners' curious chant as the head of the defunct Soviet Union took part in the 20th anniversary of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. Liberated Europe has walled itself off from reality.
'You made this possible," gushed East German-born Chancellor Angela Merkel to ex-Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev on Monday, as the two shared an umbrella in the drizzle where the wall separating East and West Berlin once stood.
"You courageously let things happen, and that was much more than we could expect."
There is another umbrella that Europeans share — have shared for more than six decades, in fact — and that is America's defense umbrella. NATO's protection of Europe from Gorbachev's now-defeated regime is what led to the liberation of Merkel's homeland, not Gorby's "Glasnost" or "Perestroika."
Did Gorbachev even want the wall to come down?
"Many now forget," the former Communist Party general secretary recently wrote in Britain's Guardian, that the wall's fall was "to a great extent the consequence of deep, popular reform movements that started in the east, and the Soviet Union in particular."
But many also forget, including those chanting "Gorby!" and, conveniently, Gorby himself, that "deep, popular reform" is not the kind of change he was interested in back then. Perestroika was not, as Gorbachev claims, "a strong impulse for democratic reform."
As economist Marshall Goldman of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian Studies has noted, "the exact meaning of Gorbachev's perestroika changed from year to year" and "other than an experiment or two, he proposed no concrete measures to advance the use of markets. In fact, it sometimes looked as if the opposite was happening."
Goldman illustrated his point: "While Gorbachev closed down a large number of economic ministries, for example, he created superministries in their place."
So Glasnost and Perestroika were in large part public relations efforts aimed at salvaging the Soviet Union as it was losing the final stage of the Cold War.
As early as 1987, future Russian president Boris Yeltsin was pushing Gorbachev for more reform. The response he got was an accusations of "political immaturity" and a demotion within the Politburo.
Merkel praises Gorbachev because he supposedly "let things happen," but Yeltsin made things happen, at risk to himself. It happened not just in the waning days of the Soviet Union, but two years later in its final days when he stood atop a tank in Red Square opposing a hardline coup attempt.
The U.S. made things happen too, and "Ronnie! Ronnie!" would be a more appropriate cry now from Berliners.
As Kenneth T. Walsh, chief White House correspondent for U.S. News and Reagan biographer, has pointed out, both Ronald Reagan's White House chief of staff Howard Baker and then-deputy national security adviser Colin Powell tried to stop Reagan from delivering his famous challenge, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in the summer of 1987.
According to Walsh, much of the internal U.S. opposition was based on the belief that "it would put Gorbachev on the spot and perhaps increase pressure on him."
And as George H.W. Bush's White House aide Daniel McGroarty noted in Monday's edition of IBD, Gorbachev even issued a threat to the first President Bush of "unforeseen consequences" if the falling of the wall was celebrated too much for what it was — the end of communist tyranny.
Eurocentric Europeans have built a mental wall that blinds them from seeing who they should thank for their high-priced freedom.
The Russians were not and are still not their friends.
As Charles Krauthammer put it in his Wriston Lecture to the Manhattan Institute last month, "Europe can eat, drink, and be merry for America protects her."
Think of it as a new wall — a wall of ingratitude.
The chants at the Berlin Wall on Monday should have been, "America! America!" in thanks to the U.S. taxpayer, who for so long has footed the bill for Europe's defense against Russia, and our own.