(CNSNews.com) – Edwin Meese III, former U.S. attorney general and adviser to President Ronald Reagan, says he disagrees with President Barack Obama's recent explanation of the way the Cold War ended.

In his address at the New Economic School in Moscow earlier this month, Obama
told students that the war had not been won by either side.

“Make no mistake: this change did not come from any one nation alone,” he said. “The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.” 

In his comments to students in Moscow, Obama seemed to be heeding Mikhail Gorbachev’s words to Stanford University students in 1990 that, “The Cold Was is now behind us. And let us not wrangle over who won it.” 

But Meese, who advised President Reagan on foreign affairs as part of the National Security Council, said Obama's explanation is “simply not true.” 

Meese told CNSNews.com, “I think it was the leadership of the United States, without any question, that brought an end to the Cold War and that leadership [was] exemplified by the actions of Ronald Reagan.”
 
Meese agreed that Eastern European nations were “very important" in bringing about an end to the Cold War. He mentioned Polish leader Lech Walesa, who helped form Solidarity, an eastern bloc trade union that defied Communist leadership.
 
Meese pointed to five actions of the United States under President Reagan that were key to the change Obama described as “the world as it was ceas(ing) to be.”
 
The first, Meese said, was “contending against the Soviet Union on a moral plane.”
 
Reagan famously referred to the USSR as an “evil empire,” and he made comments such as this one at Notre Dame University in May 1981: “The West won't contain Communism. It will transcend Communism. It will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”
 
The second important U.S. action, said Meese, was “resisting any future aggression.”
 
“Thirdly,” he said, was “turning back previous aggression as we did by supporting freedom fighters in Poland, Nicaragua, in Angola, in Afghanistan.”
 
The fourth U.S. tactic was “building up our military and improving our alliances -- NATO and other alliances around the world --so that the Soviets could no longer claim that military superiority,” said Meese.
 
“And then, of course, the fifth thing,” he said, “is the development of the SDI.”
 
SDI stands for Strategic Defense Initiative, a plan Reagan proposed to operate a strategic missile shield using ground and air forces that would guard against incoming ballistic missiles which could carry nuclear weaponry.
 
“Meese said that “the Soviets had been cheating on the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty for 15 years,” but that “they really realized within a few years of our getting into the game that we would eclipse them both technologically and with the will to deploy it.”
 
The former attorney general similarly took issue with the current president’s comments in Cairo.
 
There, Obama told the crowd, “I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not. No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons. That is why I strongly reaffirmed America's commitment to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons.”
 
“And any nation -- including Iran -- should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” said Obama.
 
Meese said, “[T]hat’s pure fantasy to think that if we reduce our nuclear weaponry and other free nations did the same, that somehow this would have a positive influence on either Iran or North Korea.”
 
“The only way you can really have a nuclear free world,” he told CNSNews.com, “is if we have a proven and fully effective and deployed anti-missile system. And the irony of it is that while Obama was making those statements, at the same time he was cutting SDI, the ballistic missile program, in the Defense budget.”
 
The Defense budget proposed by President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates would cut missile defense by $1.4 billion, or about 15 percent.
 
Meese describes Obama’s foreign policy as “part of the cult of personality that has characterized the Obama administration in which he goes around the world saying things that get a round of applause from his audience without him appreciating or recognizing the negative impact it has on the United States.”
 
Meese said that if this type of diplomacy persists over Obama’s first and potential second terms, “I see a continued deterioration of the overall standing of the United States in the world.”
 
“I think we hardly need any more apology tours by Obama,” said Meese.