Let's end this nonsense: Reagan's military buildup did not cause the Soviet Union to collapse

Let's put this to rest now. The idea that Reagan caused the Soviet Union to collapse has been said so many times over the years but the facts just don't back it up.

The idea goes something like this:

Ronald Reagan increased US military spending. He introduced the "Star Wars" technology to protect the USA against enemy missiles. In response to this, the Soviet Union increased military spending dramatically which, in turn, caused the collapse of the Soviet Union.

No, Sorry. Wrong.

Of course Reagan DID spend up big, no doubt about that.

And he DID introduce the "Strategic Defense Initiative" (SDI) which created some huge problems for the Soviet military and the politburo

But did the Soviets increase military spending? The data says no.

The above graph comes from Arming America: Attention and Inertia in US National Security Spending by James L. True (1998). Link here. Graph is on page 17 of 42 of the pdf file. (Edited 2015-08-14)

. Things to note:

• This graph measures spending in comparative dollars. Since the US had a larger economy than the Soviets, we can assume that if a 1:1 comparison between the two was made in terms of percentage of GDP, the Soviet Union would have a higher result. If you compare 1985 levels, for example, the US is probably spending around 6-7% of GDP on defence while the Soviets were spending around 13-14% of GDP.
• The Soviets passed the United States in the early 70s and peaked  around 1982.
• The US increased spending dramatically under Reagan, with a peak around 1985 and greater than the USSR.
• Soviet defence spending plateaued between 1981 and 1988.
• Soviet defence spending collapsed from 1989 onwards.
• Much ink has been spilled over the years by economists and defence analysts in trying to determine reliable Soviet defence spending figures. If you want to complain about the standard of Soviet data, remember that experts have been dealing with this for decades. In short, if your argument against my position involves attacking the reliability of the statistics in question, please complain to the thousands of experts over the past few decades who have made it their business to work out reliable stats. Appeal to authority? You bet.

The graph clearly shows that, in real terms, the Soviets did not increase military spending much in response to Reagan. In fact the opposite appears to be the case: Reagan was responding to the Soviets. Soviet defence spending in the 1970s was pretty big and Reagan obviously did spend up big in response. But did the Soviets respond to Reagan's spending by increased spending? No they didn't.

Of course the idea that Reagan defeated the Soviets has been around for years. This 1994 article in The Atlantic - only three years after the collapse of the USSR - already contains the facts I am re-stating here:

The Soviet Union's defense spending did not rise or fall in response to American military expenditures. Revised estimates by the Central Intelligence Agency indicate that Soviet expenditures on defense remained more or less constant throughout the 1980s. Neither the military buildup under Jimmy Carter and Reagan nor SDI had any real impact on gross spending levels in the USSR. At most SDI shifted the marginal allocation of defense rubles as some funds were allotted for developing countermeasures to ballistic defense.

If American defense spending had bankrupted the Soviet economy, forcing an end to the Cold War, Soviet defense spending should have declined as East-West relations improved. CIA estimates show that it remained relatively constant as a proportion of the Soviet gross national product during the 1980s, including Gorbachev's first four years in office. Soviet defense spending was not reduced until 1989 and did not decline nearly as rapidly as the overall economy.

So what did cause the USSR to collapse? In short: the economic stupidity known as Perestroika, a policy so bereft of common sense that it caused factories to produce less and less industrial goods. From 1987 onwards, the economy of the Soviet Union began to collapse with severely reduced output and hyperinflation. The downturn was so severe that birthrates declined - an indication of the personal stresses that Russian households were being subjected to. The economy shrunk significantly for around 4 years before communism was abandoned and the economy collapsed even further. By the mid-90s GDP was probably half of what it had been in 1987. There are more details about this in a previous post I have written.