Max Boot
speaker
527 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Max Boot’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think Gorbachev's ascension in 1985, that was really the key turning point towards the end of the Cold War because during Reagan's first term while he was increasing defense spending, there was one crisis after another with the Soviets.
In 1983, we actually came...
uh alarmingly close to nuclear war with the soviet union and at the same time as he was confronting the soviets reagan also wanted to deal with them but as he complained i wanted to meet with the soviet leader but they all kept dying on me they were all these old-timers uh who were you know in the hospital instead of meeting with reagan all of a sudden in 1985 you got gorbachev who was this much more vigorous reformist guy in his 50s who wants to transform the soviet system and i think it was very much to reagan's credit
that after he met with Gorbachev in Geneva in November of 1985, he concluded that Margaret Thatcher had been right to say, this is somebody you can work with.
This is somebody we can do business with.
And at the time, there was a lot of suspicion of Gorbachev in conservative circles.
A lot of people said, oh, you know, he's just another typical communist hoodwinker.
He's trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
He just wants to make the Soviet Union more menacing than ever.
But in fact,
Gorbachev, as we now know, was a true reformer.
He was somebody who had risen up within the communist system, but lost faith in it.
He really wanted to create a democratic socialist system of the kind that he had seen in Western Europe.
And so he launched his great reforms of glasnost and perestroika.
And the consequence of that, which he had not intended, was to destroy the Soviet Union.
Because basically, the Soviet Union had all these captive nationalities, including Ukrainians, including Balts, including
Kazakhstan, so many other nationalities, and all of Eastern Europe, of course, was part of the Soviet Empire.
And all these people were basically held captive by force.
And once Gorbachev said, I am not going to use force to keep the Soviet Union together anymore, the whole thing disintegrated.
And so that's what led to the end of the Cold War.
Showing 381–400 of 527 · page 20 of 27
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