They renamed Washington's National Airport after Ronald Reagan even before he died. Now that he has gone, it will not be long before his face is on the US$10 bill, and there is already a campaign to carve his likeness on Mount Rushmore. It makes sense, in a way: nobody has ever played the role of US president as well as he did. In fact, he redefined it. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush exude the same folksy charm that made Reagan the best-loved of former American presidents. They all made the cold-blooded political calculations that are a necessary part of partisan politics, but somehow managed to seem as if they were not. Reagan did it best because he was a professional actor, and also because he was a genuinely nice man. A nice man with a mastery of doublethink, perhaps, but you really believed that he did not grasp the negative implications of his own political strategies. His claim to be a great president rests on three assertions: that he won the cold war; that he created the great economic boom of the 1980s; and that he made America (or at least white America) feel good about itself after the traumas of the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement and the Iran hostage crisis. His sunny disposition doubtless cheered up Americans, but the key factor in his success was the end of the oil crisis. The huge rise in oil prices caused by the 1973 Middle East war and the 1979 revolution in Iran ended with a steep fall in 1981, just as Reagan took office. That fuelled the economic boom and the good feeling - and it is also what ended the cold war. The old Soviet Union was finished long before Reagan became president. The Soviet economy had effectively ceased growing by the late 1960s. As a result, Soviet military spending, which tracked US spending through the 1970s, swelled in relative terms until it was absorbing 30 to 35 per cent of the economy. High oil prices plastered over the cracks for 10 years - the Soviet Union was the world's second-biggest producer - but when the price collapsed in 1981, communist rule was doomed. It was the moderate defence budgets of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter in the 1970s that dug the Soviet Union's grave; Reagan's big increases in defence spending were just flogging a horse that was already dead. Reagan knew one thing: a mutual suicide pact is a stupid idea. He probably did not realise that the old Soviet Union was going downhill fast until the end of his second term, in 1988, but he did know that a nuclear war would be very bad, and that you need to establish a relationship of openness and trust with your partner in the suicide pact. So we are all still here. The period of maximum danger is when empires collapse, but we all sailed through the end of the Soviet Union without so much as a torn fingernail. Reagan's genuine goodwill and common sense were what made the happy outcome possible. He did not destroy the Soviet Union, but he probably saved my children's lives. If they want to carve his face on Mount Rushmore, it is all right with me. Gwynne Dyer is a London-based freelance journalist
