Washington • Scholars have already debated for decades, and will debate for centuries, the role U.S. policies — military, diplomatic, economic — played in bringing the Cold War to endgame and the Soviet Union to extinction. One milestone was Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative proposal, a technological challenge that could not be met by a Soviet economy already buckling under the combined weight of military spending and socialism’s ignorance. But before SDI there was Ocean Venture ’81, initiated by Reagan as president-elect.
The protracted strategy, of which this enormous operation — 15 nations' navies, 250 ships, more than 1,000 aircraft — was a harbinger, came to be referred to by some Soviets as the "Lehman strategy.