Coming to terms with an essay topic – 49
Well, there is a wealth of possibilities here, made available merely by
a bit of general knowledge and a few hours of reading. There may
already be too much to deal with, depending on the word limit of
our essay. So this is going to have to be disciplined, at least a little
bit.
The only way to discipline such musings is to try to write a
draft paragraph in sentences that somehow have to start connecting
with one another. This paragraph will probably be largely scrapped
or re-written by the time the essay is finished; but it will give your
later thinking and reading a guide. It is only one proposal for the shape
of an answer out of the many that are possible. (As an exercise, if you
are at all interested in this topic, you might try to use what we have
done to draft a proposed shape of your own, before reading the one
offered below.)
In matters of substance, as opposed to rhetoric designed for public
consumption, President Reagan’s policies towards the Soviet Union were
at their most ‘hawkish’ in his first term of office from 1981 to 1985. In
his second term, which was when progress really started to be made, as
the State Department steadily eroded the influence of the hawkish
Department of Defense, and as the influence of others such as the British
prime minister Margaret Thatcher grew, Reagan became much more
conciliatory and diplomatic in his approach. This was an approach which
was to be continued by Reagan’s successor George Bush, who had been
president for almost a year when the Berlin Wall actually came down in
November 1989. Moreover, as many historians think, Reagan was
‘pushing at an open door’ – nothing much would have happened if
Mikhail Gorbachev had not been in power in Moscow from 1985. It was
Gorbachev, not the Americans, who realised that the USSR was
economically and militarily over-extended. It was Gorbachev who realised
that the USSR could not forever prop up the internal security and the
economies of client states in eastern Europe, a few of which (Hungary
and Poland) were already developing closer economic ties with a
prosperous and welcoming western Europe. We can add to all this a
growing disenchantment in the Soviet Union itself with Communist
ideology and an increasing receptivity towards the European ‘social
Well, there is a wealth of possibilities here, made available merely by
a bit of general knowledge and a few hours of reading. There may
already be too much to deal with, depending on the word limit of
our essay. So this is going to have to be disciplined, at least a little
bit.
The only way to discipline such musings is to try to write a
draft paragraph in sentences that somehow have to start connecting
with one another. This paragraph will probably be largely scrapped
or re-written by the time the essay is finished; but it will give your
later thinking and reading a guide. It is only one proposal for the shape
of an answer out of the many that are possible. (As an exercise, if you
are at all interested in this topic, you might try to use what we have
done to draft a proposed shape of your own, before reading the one
offered below.)
In matters of substance, as opposed to rhetoric designed for public
consumption, President Reagan’s policies towards the Soviet Union were
at their most ‘hawkish’ in his first term of office from 1981 to 1985. In
his second term, which was when progress really started to be made, as
the State Department steadily eroded the influence of the hawkish
Department of Defense, and as the influence of others such as the British
prime minister Margaret Thatcher grew, Reagan became much more
conciliatory and diplomatic in his approach. This was an approach which
was to be continued by Reagan’s successor George Bush, who had been
president for almost a year when the Berlin Wall actually came down in
November 1989. Moreover, as many historians think, Reagan was
‘pushing at an open door’ – nothing much would have happened if
Mikhail Gorbachev had not been in power in Moscow from 1985. It was
Gorbachev, not the Americans, who realised that the USSR was
economically and militarily over-extended. It was Gorbachev who realised
that the USSR could not forever prop up the internal security and the
economies of client states in eastern Europe, a few of which (Hungary
and Poland) were already developing closer economic ties with a
prosperous and welcoming western Europe. We can add to all this a
growing disenchantment in the Soviet Union itself with Communist
ideology and an increasing receptivity towards the European ‘social