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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it wasn't, I don't think it was directly Ronald Reagan's defense buildup.
I don't think it was the pressure that Reagan applied.
But I think Reagan
to his great credit, was able to put aside, you know, half a century of his own anti-communist ideology and realized that Gorbachev was somebody he could work with and support.
And he did form a friendship and did support Gorbachev.
And I think that was really the, that set the stage for the end of the Cold War.
Yeah, no, I think that's right.
I think Gorbachev himself talked about how when they first met in Geneva in 1985, they had these caricatures of each other where Reagan saw Gorbachev as the world's number one communist, Gorby saw Reagan as the number one capitalist, and they thought that they were doomed to be perpetual enemies.
But in fact, when they talked, they realized they actually had a lot in common.
Both of them were very scared of World War III.
Both of them
wanted to, in the arms race, even abolish nuclear weapons altogether.
And so they found that they actually had much more in common than they realized.
And again, I think that's very much to Reagan's credit, that after decades of vilifying Soviet leaders, he found a Soviet leader he could actually work with and realize that, no, Gorbachev was not just like all the other ones, as so many right-wingers were saying at the time.
Yeah, I think what I say about Iran-Contra, which was the worst scandal after Watergate in the first two decades after Watergate.
The reason why Reagan got into Iran-Contra was basically the same reason he got out of it, which was that he was a very hands-off manager.
He had very little involvement in the day-to-day running of the government.
And so you had aides like Ollie North or his boss, John Poindexter, who was the national security advisor, who came up with this crazy idea of we're going to trade arms for hostages to Iran.
And then in return, we're going to take the profits from selling weapons to the Iranian mullahs and funnel them to the Contras, these Nicaraguan rebels, even though Congress passed the bill saying you're not supposed to provide money to the Contras.
And so they did that.
Showing 401–420 of 527 · page 21 of 27
← Previous
Next →