Rating: 
Summary: Masterstroke
Review: Tom Clancy dedicates Executive Orders "to Ronald Wilson Reagan -- The Man who won the War". Schweizer explains why Clancy is more correct than all the news media and intellectual elites who scorned Reagan when he was in office and have ignored his achievements ever since.Much of the news media and liberal academia would have you believe that Gorbachev was the hero who modernized the Soviet Union and liberated it from the past. Schweizer outlines in detail the long strategic effort to defeat the Soviet Union through a multiplicity of specific strategies. From delaying and minimizing the natural gas pipeline to western Europe, to working with the Saudis to bring down the price of oil (the number one source of hard currency for the Soviet Union), to actively working to cut off technology from reaching the Soviet Union, to launching an arms race of high technology systems that would bloc obsolesce the old systems and force the Soviets into an exhausting effort to keep up, to financing opposition forces in Afghanistan, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Central America. Again and again Schweizer shows the methodical determined efforts of the Reagan team to undermine and roll back the Soviet Union. Trying to describe the end of the Soviet Empire without Reagan is like trying to describe the South losing the Civil War without mentioning Lincoln and Grant. This book should be read by every citizen interested in just how effective their country can be when it has a strategy and courageous disciplined leaders.
Rating:
Summary: Us vs. Them
Review: Victory by Peter Schweizer is the inside story of how the Reagan administration successfully orchestrated the downfall of the Soviet Union. It is also an excellent picture of how an administration is supposed to work: as a team. Schweizer brings together the stories of several key Reagan administration people, namely William Casey, and creates a whole picture that is a masterpiece of foreign diplomacy. Schweizer shows the combined efforts that were put into relations with such disparate regimes as the Papacy, the Saudi royal family, and the Apartheid government of South Africa which had the unified goal of constricting the Soviet Union. At the time these efforts were not able to be viewed as a complete picture because of the nature of the objective. Much criticism was brought down on President Reagan for certain aspects of his policy (like his refusal to place sanctions against South Africa), but in light of recent evidence as to why these things were done, history will acknowledge Reagan's diplomatic skill and the necessity of his decisions. The Reagan administration did hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union. It can be argued that the United States has bungled the opportunity it had after the end of the Cold War to shape policy in the former Soviet republics, but it cannot be argued that bringing down the USSR was not in America's best interests. The USSR was an "evil empire" determined to destroy the American way of life and replace it with a worldwide totalitarian regime that functioned as a communist superstate. This really was a case of us or them. Thanks largely to the efforts of the Reagan administration it was the United States that won out in the end.
Rating:
Summary: Us vs. Them
Review: Victory by Peter Schweizer is the inside story of how the Reagan administration successfully orchestrated the downfall of the Soviet Union. It is also an excellent picture of how an administration is supposed to work: as a team. Schweizer brings together the stories of several key Reagan administration people, namely William Casey, and creates a whole picture that is a masterpiece of foreign diplomacy. Schweizer shows the combined efforts that were put into relations with such disparate regimes as the Papacy, the Saudi royal family, and the Apartheid government of South Africa which had the unified goal of constricting the Soviet Union. At the time these efforts were not able to be viewed as a complete picture because of the nature of the objective. Much criticism was brought down on President Reagan for certain aspects of his policy (like his refusal to place sanctions against South Africa), but in light of recent evidence as to why these things were done, history will acknowledge Reagan's diplomatic skill and the necessity of his decisions. The Reagan administration did hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union. It can be argued that the United States has bungled the opportunity it had after the end of the Cold War to shape policy in the former Soviet republics, but it cannot be argued that bringing down the USSR was not in America's best interests. The USSR was an "evil empire" determined to destroy the American way of life and replace it with a worldwide totalitarian regime that functioned as a communist superstate. This really was a case of us or them. Thanks largely to the efforts of the Reagan administration it was the United States that won out in the end.
Rating:
Summary: Why the Soviet Union Collapsed - What TV hasn't told you
Review: VICTORY opens with a quote by former KGB general Oleg Kalugin: "American policy in the 1980s was a catalyst for the collapse of the Soviet Union." VICTORY REVEALS HOW. This is living history from over twenty major players, with those interviewed listed at the end of each chapter. Several including Caspar Weinberger, John Poindexter, Bill Clark and Roger Robinson also reviewed the manuscript. The introduction lists seven key elements of the plan initiated by Reagan in early 1981. It points out that Reagan unlike some other Presidents did not view arms control agreements and treaties as the measure of his success. VICTORY is an account of the secret offensive including economic and psychological fronts designed to win the Cold War. Reagan used our strengths to take advantage of Soviet weaknesses. After success, the task is often seen as easy. The details in the book showed that winning the Cold War was made much harder by some Americans and many Western Europeans, some of whom now say it was inevitable You will see how critical, for instance, the AWACS aircraft were to the outcome.
Rating:
Summary: Why the Soviet Union Collapsed - What TV hasn't told you
Review: VICTORY opens with a quote by former KGB general Oleg Kalugin: "American policy in the 1980s was a catalyst for the collapse of the Soviet Union." VICTORY REVEALS HOW. This is living history from over twenty major players, with those interviewed listed at the end of each chapter. Several including Caspar Weinberger, John Poindexter, Bill Clark and Roger Robinson also reviewed the manuscript. The introduction lists seven key elements of the plan initiated by Reagan in early 1981. It points out that Reagan unlike some other Presidents did not view arms control agreements and treaties as the measure of his success. VICTORY is an account of the secret offensive including economic and psychological fronts designed to win the Cold War. Reagan used our strengths to take advantage of Soviet weaknesses. After success, the task is often seen as easy. The details in the book showed that winning the Cold War was made much harder by some Americans and many Western Europeans, some of whom now say it was inevitable You will see how critical, for instance, the AWACS aircraft were to the outcome.
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