Ronald Reagan and the defeat of the Soviet empire.

Busch, Andrew E.

American policy in the 1980s was a catalyst for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin(1)

In 1980, the Soviet Union threatened the survival of the United States, her allies, and the very principle of self-government. In 1990, the Berlin Wall was gone, the Warsaw Pact had disintegrated in all but name, and the Soviet Union was only months away from ceasing to exist as a nation. The United States won what was, for all practical purposes, the "third world war." Far from being accidental or, conversely, inevitable, this foreign policy triumph arguably resulted from a coherent strategic vision forged and implemented by American policy makers against much opposition and great odds; a triumph of the West, and a triumph for the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan.

From the Communist victory in Vietnam until the invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet empire absorbed ten countries: an average of one every six months. By mid-1979, commentators across party lines were calling this sequence of events "America in Retreat."(2) This burst of Soviet expansion, fed by America's failure in Vietnam, was undergirded by an enormous and offensive-oriented military buildup. By 1979, Soviet military spending was estimated at 12-14 percent of their GNP; up 70 percent more in dollar terms than U.S. defense spending.(3) By the beginning of the 1980s, "Soviet leaders stated with growing confidence that the correlation of forces had shifted in their favor."(4)

In response, American defense spending stopped its downward slide in 1978. Public opinion began favoring a firmer line toward the Soviets, a trend that accelerated through 1979 and 1980.(5) In November 1979, the Iranian hostage crisis began, which proved a catalyst for the reassertion of American strength. And in December, the Soviets drove the final nail into the coffin of "detente" when they took Kabul. Jimmy Carter responded with further defense spending increases, the removal of SALT II from Senate consideration, the grain embargo, the Olympic boycott, and the "Carter Doctrine." The post-Afghanistan Carter, however, would only be a transitional figure, serving as a bridge between the accommodationist pre-Afghanistan Carter and Ronald Reagan.

The Restoration of Containment and Deterrence

The first task facing Reagan was to prevent further erosion of America's position in the world, and to restore the vigor of the policy of containment and the military strength needed to deter further Soviet expansionism. A month before taking office, Reagan was warned by Alexandre de Marenches, France's intelligence director, that in the absence of significant American stiffening even France and other close allies might begin to waver between East and West.(6) Vital as this task was, it remained defensive and reactive in character. This defensive track consisted of three major components: the military buildup, the re-establishment of containment, and the solidification of America's alliances.

Defense Buildup

Reagan expanded on Carter's defense spending proposal, and U.S. defense spending increased from $134 billion in 1980 to $253 billion in 1985 before levelling off This was an increase of 42 percent in real terms. The three most important aspects of this defense buildup were: strategic modernization, conventional force buildup, and improvements in readiness and mobility. The strategic buildup had several objectives: to maintain the strategic balance threatened by Soviet strategic modernization; to make possible a "counterforce" targeting strategy; and to restore American negotiating leverage. Despite the considerable influence of the nuclear freeze movement in 1981-83, the Reagan administration and Congress put most of the strategic modernization program into effect. The, administration increased conventional forces by adding to the number of men and divisions under arms, the number of tactical fighter wings, and the number of ships in the Navy. It also built up special operations forces. Finally, tied to the conventional buildup was the effort to improve readiness and mobility. By 1983, news analysts declared that "Rarely in peacetime have U.S. military forces been better prepared to defend the nation ... few experts doubt that the U.S. armed forces have stepped back from the brink of the disaster they faced not long ago."(7)

Restoring Containment

The Vietnam War had shattered the policy of containment. Only in the vacuum of American neo-isolationism was the string of Soviet advances from 1975 to 1980 possible. Thus, in the 1980s it was imperative for the United States to re-establish the credibility of containment. Reagan faced the most crucial test in Central America. The Soviets explicitly referred to Central America and the Caribbean as America's "strategic rear"; if America could be challenged near its own borders, it would be severely hampered to respond effectively to a Soviet thrust in Europe or the Middle East. Soviet control of Central. America--and perhaps of Mexico--could tilt the strategic balance so heavily against the United States that its allies would find neutralism increasingly attractive. In short, according to Ashley Tellis, "Soviet goals ... include nothing less than an elaborate encampment designed to effect `hemispheric denial' via a flanking movement" as "part of a broader design of global hegemony."(8)

In 1979, the Leninist Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua. In El Salvador, the new reformist government came under assault by the Sandinista-assisted Communist Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) with several thousand guerrillas in the field. In the face of the FMLN's "final offensive" days before Reagan's inauguration, Jimmy Carter had resumed military aid to the Salvadoran government. Reagan promptly expanded that aid and sent fifty-five military advisers to train the Salvadoran forces. Critics of the policy charged throughout that it would lead to "another Vietnam," and that the Salvadoran government was unworthy of support.

Despite consistent congressional challenges and the objections of a well-organized political movement, the administration succeeded in gaining acceptance of its policy of arming the Salvadoran government while urging it to continue reforms. El Salvador survived, against the expectations of many,(9) and smaller Sandinista-backed insurgencies and terrorist groups were unsuccessful elsewhere in Central America. Central America, whatever its other complexities, was the acid test of containment in the 1980s. Ultimately, Reagan was able to boast that his had been the first administration since World War II that had not given up an inch of territory to the Communists.

Strengthening America's Alliances

To achieve global equilibrium in the 1980s, the Reagan administration--contrary to its earliest pro-Taiwan inclinations--maintained a solid relationship with mainland China by strengthening economic, diplomatic, and military ties. Failure to have secured this cooperation would have seriously complicated the American task of containing Soviet power.

In Europe, NATO stood at the intersection of deterrence and containment. By 1980, many of America's closest European allies doubted America's strength and constancy of purpose. Only a few years before, Jimmy Carter had succumbed to the pressures of the peace movement and cancelled the neutron bomb after numerous European statesmen had publicly endorsed its deployment. In the early 1980s, the United States and Europe faced a test of even greater consequence. Failure to navigate this dilemma could have destroyed NATO.

In 1977, the Soviets began the deployment of the SS-20, an intermediate-range ballistic missile aimed above all at the will of Western Europe to maintain its independence and its alliance with America.(10) By 1979, the allies had agreed that if negotiations did not produce results by 1983, nuclear Pershing II IRBMs and cruise missiles would be deployed to counter the SS-20s. Starting in 1980, however, an anti-nuclear movement greater than the one that had stopped the neutron bomb coalesced in Europe, bringing enormous pressures to bear on European governments.(11) Instead of buckling as Carter had done, Reagan remained steady. As the NATO deployment deadline of November 1983 approached, the pressure to retreat grew, but the United States held firm, and so did the allies. The deployment proceeded on schedule, and NATO was preserved.

In the words of Margaret Thatcher, "President Reagan strengthened not only America's defenses, but also the win of America's allies."(12) Former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone similarly praised Reagan for having "put the tumble-down house called the Free World back in shape again, shoring up the pillars and tightening the bolts."(13)

America Goes on the Offensive

The restoration of America's military strength, its commitment to containment, and the vigor of its alliances restored the strategic balance. Yet as long as containment was the sole objective of policy, the West would be permanently on the defensive, and "A policy that was strictly defensive and that had to endure in perpetuity was indeed doomed to failure."(14) The great strategic innovation of the 1980s was the combination of containment with an attempt to break the stalemate of the Cold War with a complementary policy of offense. Previous figures like James Burnham, Douglas McArthur, John Foster Dulles, and Barry Goldwater had long suggested such an offensive, but it had never been deemed practical.(15) In 1982 and early 1983, three secret National Security Decision Directives (NSDDs) and a secret Defense Department five-year planning directive established the intellectual framework for a non-nuclear offensive policy. NSDD-32 proclaimed that it was U.S. policy to "neutralize" Soviet control of Eastern Europe by supporting underground movements against the Communist regimes; NSDD-66 outlined a strategy of economic warfare against the Soviet regime, while NSDD-75 declared roll-back of Soviet influence around the world, and ultimately a change in the Soviet system itself, to be a key U.S. policy objective. The Defense Department guidance led to a National Security Decision Memorandum focusing defense policy on exploiting Soviet economic vulnerabilities.(16) By 1983 the United States had taken the strategic offensive for the first time in the Cold War. This policy radically changed the complexion of the East-West struggle, both tangibly and psychologically.

The Ideological Counteroffensive

At the height of detente, the Ford White House refused to entertain Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian exile and author of The Gulag Archipelago, for fear of offending the Kremlin. When Ronald Reagan entered the White House, this American passivity ended and an ideological counteroffensive was launched. According to Fitzhugh Green, "No longer would the U.S. stand mute in the face of communist vilification. No longer would the nation compete shyly in the idea marts of the world."(17) From his first press conference, when he accused the Soviets of willingness to "commit any crime, to lie, to cheat" in order to advance world communism, Reagan heavily engaged in an ideological counteroffensive.(18) The most notable of these instances came in March 1983, when Reagan told a convention of religious broadcasters that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" and "the focus of evil in the modem world."(19) An effort was made to strengthen the United States Information Agency (USIA), Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe; new outlets were also created, like Radio Marti and TV Marti directed at Cuba, and "Worldnet," a USIA satellite television network.

At the time, much of the Western press and intelligentsia viewed this offensive with embarrassment and as a menace to peace. Columnist Anthony Lewis, for example, called the evil empire speech "illegitimate," "outrageous," "primitive," "simplistic," and "terribly dangerous."(20) In the view of Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, intellectuals "worried that if we talked too explicitly about these kinds of things, we might wind up sounding like John Foster Dulles, or, for a more recent generation, Ronald Reagan." Yet he concluded in 1994: "Now that they are free to speak--and act--the people of the former Soviet Union appear to have associated themselves more closely with President Reagan's famous indictment of that state as an `evil empire' than with more balanced academic assessments."(21) Soviet officials themselves later admitted that the "evil empire" speech had led them to consider the possibility that "the motherland was indeed evil."(22) And in 1992, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev also vindicated the "evil empire" speech: the Soviet Union, Kozyrev said, had been an evil empire that was "despotic and repressive, trampling upon the freedom and the very existence of human beings," guided by a state ideology of communism that had been "the main breeding ground for the Cold War."(22)

The Strategic Defense Initiative

Not content with restoring deterrence, Reagan announced in March 1983 that the United States would seek to develop a ballistic missile defense system that could end the standoff of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). This research program became the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or "Star Wars"). Though it did not produce a functioning ballistic missile defense during the 1980s, SDI fundamentally altered the strategic context in favor of the United States. Leaving aside the ongoing debate over the feasibility of ballistic missile defense, the political consequences of the Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s were considerable. First, it contributed to the dispersion of the anti-nuclear movement and, hence, to saving the strategic modernization program. Anti-nuclear activists concede that SDI, by promising a technological means of transforming deterrence, reduced the power of their public appeal.(23) Second, it threw the Soviet leadership into a state of despair. The Soviets well understood the ramifications of a successful U.S. missile defense system: the massive Soviet investment in heavy ICBMs would be wasted, the United States would achieve strategic superiority, and the Soviets would be forced into a crash program to attempt to replicate the American defense and to negate it with countermeasures. The economic and technological weaknesses of the Soviet system meant that there was no guarantee that such a crash program could be made to work at an affordable cost, or indeed that it could be made to work at all.(24)

SDI quickly became an obsession of the Soviet leadership. Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Mikhail Gorbachev all tried to derail SDI through propaganda and arms control. Reagan refused to put SDI on the table, however, leading four well-known national security analysts to argue that he had to choose between SDI and arms control.(25) Having failed to win elimination of the program, the Soviets were prodded by SDI into seeking greater modernization of their own society--which could only be achieved by liberalization. The threat of having to compete with SDI led to greater toleration of reform by the military.(26) Indeed, former Soviet officials have indicated that in many respects, perestroika was a military initiative, aimed at redressing the military implications of Soviet technological weakness. Gorbachev's two foreign ministers, Eduard Shevardnadze and Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, have both attested to the catalytic impact of SDI on Soviet internal reform.(27)

SDI changed the strategic environment, threatening the Soviets with the choice of an unacceptable strategic defeat or an unacceptable technological and economic burden. In the end, the pressures produced by SDI contributed as much as any single factor to the successful termination of the Cold War.

Arms Control

Intertwined with SDI, the strategic modernization, and the Euromissile deployment was the question of arms control. The Reagan administration saw arms control as the means to an end of enhanced national security; arms control that failed to secure that end was considered worse than no arms control at all. Furthermore, since the administration saw the Cold War not as a misunderstanding between "superpowers," but as a conflict between totalitarianism and freedom, the arms race was considered a symptom rather than the problem. The real problem was Leninism and Soviet aggression.

The corrollary to this view was that good anus control could only be attained from a position of strength. As mentioned, President Reagan refused to bargain with SDI. The administration also accused the Soviets of violating existing arms control agreements, thus dampening public expectations and raising questions about Soviet trustworthiness as negotiating partners. Most notably it charged that the large radar at Krasnoyarsk in Siberia was an illegal ABM radar. Critics attacked these accusations as paranoid propaganda, until Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze announced in 1989 that the Krasnoyarsk radar was a "clear violation" of the ABM Treaty and would be dismantled.(28) This American change in attitude toward arms control clearly enhanced diplomatic leverage of the United States. Second, the administration took the political initiative in arms control by replacing the goal of limits with one of reductions. In Europe, the allies adopted the "zero option." Many at the time argued that this negotiating strategy was doomed to failure; to Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), it was "voodoo arms control."(29) Instead of retreating, however, Reagan and NATO ultimately won Soviet acceptance of the 1987 treaty on Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) in Europe--on basically the same terms as the West had offered in 1981.

On strategic weapons, the United States under Reagan repeated a call for substantial reductions. Again, critics attacked this approach as a public relations ploy doomed by the continuing U.S. nuclear buildup. Nevertheless, the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) was signed in 1991. Events at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s proved that Reagan had been right about the arms race--it was the symptom, not the cause, of U.S.-Soviet conflict. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, so did the bipolar arms race.

The Reagan Doctrine and Roll-back

In the same way as SDI was the aggressive complement to deterrence, the Reagan administration developed an offensive complement to the policy of containment. This complement consisted of a policy of attempting to roll back the periphery of the Soviet empire by assisting anti-Communist guerrillas in many of the countries that had recently fallen. The American offensive also reached Eastern Europe and ultimately Soviet soil itself, in highly secret operations not revealed until 1994.

The Reagan administration ultimately supported covert operations aimed at overthrowing Soviet clients in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, and Cambodia. What came to be known in 1985 as the "Reagan Doctrine" was enunciated in the 1985 State of the Union address when the president said:

We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that's not innocent; nor can we

be passive when freedom is under seige we must not break faith with

those who are risking their lives--on every continent, from Afghanistan to

Nicaragua--to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which

have been ours from birth. . . . Support for freedom fighters is

self-defense.(30)

Two weeks later, Secretary of State George Shultz amplified this theme, arguing that the Soviet empire was "weakening under the strain of its own internal problems and external entanglements. . . . When the United States supports those resisting totalitarianism, we do so not only out of our historical sympathy for democracy and freedom but also, in many cases, in the interests of our national security."(31)

The Reagan Doctrine had three objectives. In the short term, aid to resistance forces could blunt Soviet advances by forcing the Soviets and their allies onto the defensive, and could deter future Soviet adventurism by making it clear that they would incur heavy resistance. In the medium term, the key objective was to prevail in one or more of the countries. Such a victory would demonstrate that "communism is not, as the Soviets propagate, the `wave of the future,' and that communist rule, once installed, is reversible."(32) Finally, the long-term objective was to use a series of such successes to achieve a secure peace by ultimately prevailing over the Soviet empire. Originally enunciated in January 1983 in NSDD-75, Reagan reiterated this vision in 1987 when he said: "Our goal has been to break the deadlock of the past, to seek a forward strategy--a forward strategy for world peace, a forward strategy for world freedom ... the forces of freedom grow steadily in strength, and they put ever greater pressure on the forces of totalitarianism."(33)

Some critics pointed out that the policy could not be implemented without impinging on traditional notions of state sovereignty. Others focused on the real or perceived shortcomings of the guerrillas we were aiding. Finally, critics feared that the Reagan Doctrine would either prove too little or too much. If inadequate support was given to the rebels, the policy would fall and lead only to more bloodshed; if enough support was given to threaten the targeted regimes, the policy might provoke a dangerous confrontation with the Soviet Union.(34) In the final analysis, however, the Reagan Doctrine has to be judged a success. By 1988, the Kremlin had agreed to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. Two key policy decisions contributed to this victory. One was the decision made by Reagan in 1986, over the objections of many advisers, to supply the Stinger anti-aircraft missile to the resistance. According to a later Army report, the Stinger decision "tipped the balance" against the Soviets.(35) The second key decision was even riskier, but raised the price to the Soviets--which was already considerable--beyond their willingness to pay by secretly aiding mujahedeen military and political operations across the Soviet border in Soviet Central Asia starting in 1986.(36)

Similarly, the pressure put on in Angola by the U.S.-backed UNITA forced the Cubans to the negotiating table. By 1991 the last Cuban soldier left Angola, and the Marxist regime was left to its own devices, finally agreeing to elections. In Cambodia, the resistance forced the Vietnamese government to withdraw its troops in a U.N.-brokered plan that also led to elections. Despite the fits and starts of the Contra aid program, the Sandinistas were forced as the price of peace to agree to free elections held in 1990, which they lost to the democratic opposition in a landslide.

According to Robert Huber, the effects on the Soviet Union of the assertive new U.S. policy in the Third World were substantial: "over the course of the early 1980s Soviet foreign policy specialists had become increasingly doubtful that political upheavals in the developing world served Soviet foreign policy interests. Instead, arguments about the likelihood of military confrontation with the United States as a result of such upheavals were occurring more frequently, while rising costs strained an increasingly burdened Soviet economy."(37) Other observers noted as early as 1986 that "The Kremlin under Mikhail Gorbachev is finding it more and more difficult and expensive to hold on to gains already made in the third world," as anti-Soviet rebellions "have punched holes in the Soviet assertion that it is riding a tide of history."(38)

Finally, aside from the publicly-pronounced Third World counteroffensive and the secret attacks on Soviet Central Asia, the U.S. offensive reached into the heart of the Soviet empire in Europe. Through an intricate supply network and with the secret support of the Vatican, the United States covertly supplied Solidarity with up to $8 million a year in cash, communications equipment, and other assistance necessary to help it survive under martial law. Having survived, Solidarity ultimately recovered and was able to force the Communists to the negotiating table, and in 1989 Poland became the first Soviet satellite to move toward freedom.(39)

Once the American counterattack began to succeed, most notably with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the victory of Solidarity in Poland, Soviet subjects became emboldened and the Soviet imperial position rapidly disintegrated. As CIA Director William Casey correctly predicted: "When we win one, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. It will set off a chain reaction throughout the empire."(40)

Direct Military Action

The most important direct offensive use of military power by the United States under Reagan was the invasion of Grenada on October 25, 1983. After the Communist takeover of Grenada in 1979, Grenada had begun construction of a 10,000-foot runway that it insisted was destined for tourist purposes but that military analysts considered a strategic threat.(41) More generally, Grenada threatened to serve as the third point of a triangle consisting of itself, Cuba, and Nicaragua enveloping the Caribbean.

On October 13, 1983, hard-line elements of the New jewel Movement seized power in a bloody coup. On Saturday, October 22, Reagan gave the approval for an invasion. The next day, he was awakened to news that the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, had been attacked by terrorists, killing more than 240 Marines. Reagan was urged by numerous advisers to cancel the Grenada invasion. Reagan, however, said that "if it was right yesterday, it is right today," and ordered the invasion to proceed.(42) The invasion restored democracy, rescued almost 1,000 American medical students, and revealed the close relationship between Grenada and the Soviet/Cuban axis, including documents signed secretly in Moscow in May 1980, granting the Soviets landing rights at the new airport for Tu-95 Bear-D long-range reconnaissance aircraft.(43)

The invasion of Grenada represented the first time that a Communist country was liberated by U.S. troops and the first major use of force by the U.S. since Vietnam. The strategic and psychological balance in the Caribbean was altered favorably, and for the first time in recent memory, it was more dangerous to be America's enemy than her friend. Never again would the Soviet Empire control as much territory as it did before Army Rangers parachuted onto the Point Salinas airfield.

The Campaign for Democracy

The international offensive undertaken by the United States in the 1980s was undergirded by a broad effort to expand democracy worldwide. Reagan announced this "campaign for democracy" in his British Parliament address in 1982. The campaign took form in the 1983 creation of the National Endowment for Democracy.(44) Through the 1980s, the NED assisted with poll-watching in several emerging democracies, aided free labor union movements, including Solidarity when it was still banned in Poland, and trained Third World political figures in the techniques of democracy. The NED was an important part of the overall administration policy for the global advancement of democracy. The Reagan administration also more directly encouraged the movement of authoritarian regimes to democracy throughout the 1980s. Even some long-time American allies like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and "Baby Doc" Duvalier of Haiti were ushered out by their subjects with political help from the United States.

Overall, by 1990 observers were noting that "A tide of democratic change is sweeping the world."(45) In 1981, there were fifty-four democracies in the world; in 1992, there were ninety-nine, with thirty-five more countries experiencing democratic transitions.(46) As The New York Times editorialized in December 1989, "The cause of human rights came triumphantly of age in the liberating 1980s."(47) Thus, the human rights record of Ronald Reagan was actually far more impressive than that of Jimmy Carter.

Reagan understood that the Soviet empire could be isolated without direct assault by a growing trend toward democracy. The democracy initiative was thus, in part, an effort to change the "correlation of forces" ideologically, not merely through an anti-Soviet counterattack but through a growth in democratic power gained in non-aligned and U.S.-allied countries.

Economic Warfare

Finally, the American strategic offensive against Soviet power was in no small part held together by an understanding of Soviet economic, weakness and a determination to exploit that weakness. NSDD-66 in 1982 outlined this policy, and represented, in the words of its principal author, "a secret declaration of economic war on the Soviet Union."(48) Numerous policies flowed from this economic war. The technological emphasis of the military buildup and the threat of SDI were part of the war. Economic sanctions imposed over Polish martial law gave the United States important leverage that it used to help Solidarity survive. An attempt to stop a Soviet natural gas pipeline to Western Europe was not completely successful, but did result in two years' delay and scaling the project back by half, costing the Soviets tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue. COCOM, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, became much more aggressive in stopping Western technology transfers to the USSR. The CIA even devised elaborate disinformation programs to feed the Soviets faulty technology.

Perhaps the most sensitive element of the economic war was a long-term diplomatic strategy to drive down world energy prices. Most importantly, it is now known that the close security relationship forged by the Reagan administration with Saudi Arabia gave the United States influence over Saudi production decisions. The consequent reduction in oil prices in the 1980s not only helped the American economy, but was part of the administration's strategy for undermining the Soviet economy, which was highly reliant on hard currency earnings from oil sales.(49) In the words of Soviet foreign ministry official Yevgenny Novikov, "The drop in oil prices was devastating, just devastating. It was a catastrophic event. Tens of billions were wiped away."(50)

Foreign Policy in the 1980s

The policies that the United States developed to meet the dangers it faced at the beginning of the decade were innovative and highly effective. Ronald Reagan combined idealism and hard-headedness; America's policy was grounded in its principles, yet did not neglect the role of force when dealing with tyrants. It avoided the counterproductive moralism that had undermined the Carter policy, without abandoning the ultimate goal of expanding the sphere of freedom. It restored a sense of national purpose that gave meaning to America's role in the world. And, recognizing the futility of a purely defensive policy toward the Soviets, American policy in the 1980s sought to end the deadlock of Cold War by taking the initiative and by taking advantage of Western strengths and Communist weaknesses to prevail. American policy was characterized by a far-sighted and coherent strategic vision.

There were failures, such as Beirut and Iran-Contra, but the foreign policy failures of the 1980s were far outweighed by the successes. At the beginning of the 1980s, the outcome of the Cold War was in doubt; even America's friends were on the verge of wavering. By 1991, the Soviet Union reached the "ash heap of history" that Reagan had predicted in 1982, sooner than even the most hopeful would have dared to guess. By the early 1990s, the United States found itself in a position of security and preeminence among nations unparallelled in its history as the world's sole "superpower." Only a handful of American administrations could plausibly claim to have achieved or left in their wake foreign policy successes that match these.

Because it is impossible to know with certainty what would have happened without Reagan's policies, it cannot be "proven" with certainty that they were decisive. Such caution need not be applied to the claims and predictions of Reagan's critics throughout the 1980s, most of which were flatly wrong. The arms buildup did not produce Armageddon or even arms control deadlock. The restoration of containment in Central America did not produce another Vietnam. SDI did not accelerate the arms race, and Reagan's refusal to negotiate it away did not bring disaster. The Reagan Doctrine led to neither war nor humiliation, but did drive the Soviets out of the Third World. The ideological offensive did not destroy NATO or prevent Soviet reform. Sending Stinger missiles to Afghanistan did not lead to a Soviet attack on Pakistan. The Soviets did violate the ABM Treaty, the New jewel Movement did promise the Soviets military use of the new airport on Grenada, the Sandinistas did arm the FMLN, and the Nicaraguan people did dispose of the Sandinistas as soon as they got a fair chance. Communism rather than great power rivalry or "misunderstanding" was the culprit; when the Soviet Union collapsed* relations between the U.S. and Russia warmed. In the aftermath of that collapse, Leninism was declared by its own former subjects to have produced an "evil empire."

And while it cannot be "proven" (or disproven) incontrovertibly that Ronald Reagan's policies were decisive in turning the tide of the Cold War, there is good reason to believe that they were. Eduard Shevardnadze discusses how the American initiatives of the 1980s created gloom for the Soviet leadership, where only a few years before there had been overwhelming confidence. To Shevardnadze, SDI, economic sanctions, elements of the ideological offensive, the Euromissile deployments, and accusations of Soviet treaty violations combined to create for the Soviets a "Gordian knot. . . . No matter where we turned, we came up against the fact that we would achieve nothing without normalization of Soviet-American relations. We did some hard thinking, at times sinking into despair over the impasse."(51) This Gordian knot led above all to a re-examination of the Leninist doctrine "that ideological struggle between the two social and political systems is inevitable," which had always served as an obstacle to the normalization of relations.(52) Others emphasize the domestic implications of this pressure, pointing out that it drove experiments with reform. Former Soviet parliament member Ilya Zaslavsky argues simply that "Ronald Reagan was the father of perestroika."(53) As early as 1981, a Soviet arms negotiator already had a sense of what lay in store; he was quoted as saying "Oh, you Americans! You are going to win the Cold War. You are going to make us spend and spend to keep up and our lousy standard of living will go down and down and in the end you will win."(54) In sum, Genrikh Trofimenko, former head of the Department for the Study of the U.S. Foreign Policy at the former Soviet Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada, said in 1993 that "99 percent of all Russians believe that Reagan won the Cold War."(55)

This outcome was not inevitable, for two reasons. First, the United States could have responded to the Soviet challenge of the 1970s by retreating in the 1980s, adopting a passive policy of isolationism, appeasement, and accommodation to the new realities. Indeed, there was a considerable chorus of Western voices urging just that, though usually covered with some rhetorical fig leaf It is possible to imagine another president not launching SDI, not deploying Euromissiles, not invading Grenada, not aiding El Salvador, not supporting anti-Communist guerrillas, not calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, and not launching an economic war against that empire; the presidential campaigns of the 1980s were filled with such men.

Second, it was not inevitable that internal Soviet difficulties would drive reforms rather than another, more dangerous, response. Declining empires have often tried to revive their fortunes by striking out. This possibility was discussed by veteran correspondent Harrison Salisbury at the death of Brezhnev in 1982: "What should concern Americans is that a new regime with less caution in foreign policy, conscious that the Soviet Union faces intractable domestic problems, may turn to adventures abroad to distract attention from internal failures."(56) The restoration of American strength, of deterrence and containment, channeled the Soviet response into reform by foreclosing the option of further aggression. If Gorbachev allowed peace, Reagan led to Gorbachev by fundamentally changing the international situation that the Soviet leadership faced.

It has become fashionable in the West for many to sidestep these conclusions by arguing that the Soviets were never really a threat, because their economy was much smaller than had been estimated.(57) Yet a nation's power can be defined not simply as its resources but as its resources multiplied by its will. American preponderance of resources unaccompanied by the will to use them vigorously could not have averted failure; history is not made by GNP statistics, but by human beings who make choices. In any event, it was the proponents of assertiveness in the 1980s who understood Soviet economic weakness and the opponents of assertiveness who overestimated Soviet economic strength. Reagan himself argued in his 1982 Westminster speech that the Soviet Union faced "a crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order."(58)

It was Reagan's opponents, who had greater faith in central planning, who considered such talk foolish. John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, held in 1984 that "The Soviet economy has made great national progress in recent years."(59) As late as 1989, Lester Thurow claimed that the USSR was "a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States" and Paul Samuelson argued that the Soviets had proved that "a centrally planned economy can function and prosper."(60) Thus, Reagan understood far better than his critics the economic vulnerability of the Soviet Union, but also understood that this weakness did not obviate the enormous dangers emanating from the intersection of the massive Soviet arsenal and Marxist-Leninist ideology.

It Is supremely ironic that the same voices which in the 1980s held it futile to seek the rollback of Soviet power, which counseled that Reagan should give up his dangerous and hopeless dreams of victory in the Cold War, now proclaim that the collapse of Soviet power at the end of the 1980s was preordained, and proves that the Soviets were never really a threat. This argument is akin to arguing in 1946 that the Allied victory in World War II proved that the Axis powers were never really a threat. Nor is it plausible to treat the Soviet collapse as if the outside world did not exist; internal factors were intertwined with external.

In the words of Jean-Francois Revel, "Translating communism's economic disaster into political disaster required translators."(61) There were many such translators, from American scientists to steadfast allies to Afghan mujahedeen to Polish shipyard workers to those in the Soviet Union itself who kept alive the struggle for human dignity, even in the depths of the gulag. Yet it was the United States that rallied the West in the 1980s and apprehended to the fullest extent the very real weaknesses of the Soviet empire--the economic and social stagnation, the technology gap, the potential for political resistance, the nationalities problem, the imperial overreach, and the spiritual vacuity inherent in Communist ideology--and that possessed the resources and the political fortitude to exploit them systematically on a global scale. In the final analysis, if Communism's fall required translators, Ronald Reagan As the grand translator.

Notes

(1.) Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994), p. xi.

(2.) Ben J. Wattenberg, New York Times Magazine, July 22, 1979, pp. 14-16.

(3.) Soviet Military Power (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1981), p. 9.

(4.) Paul H. Nitze, "Strategy in the Decade of the 1980s," Foreign Affairs (Fall 1980): 86.

(5.) Daniel Yankelovich and Larry Kaagan, "Assertive America," in The Reagan Foreign Policy, ed. William Hyland (New York: New American Library, 1987), pp. 1-18.

(6.) Michael A. Ledeen, Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), p. 5.

(7.) "Ready for Action--Or Are They?," U.S. News & World Report, February 14, 1983, p. 23. For a detailed account of readiness improvements, see the whole report, pp. 23-7.

(8.) Ashley J. Tellis, "The Geopolitical Stakes in Central American Crisis," in Central America and the Reagan Doctrine, ed. Walter F. Hahn (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), p. 34; for elaboration, see pp. 34-48.

(9.) "A Turn for the Worse," Newsweek, December 12, 1983, pp. 54-7.

(10.) See Robbin F. Laird, "Soviet Nuclear Weapons in Europe," in Soviet Foreign Policy in a Changing World, eds. R. F. Laird and E. P. Hoffman (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1986). For the NATO perspective, see Hans-Dietrich Genscher, "Intermediate Range Missiles-Moscow Holds the Key to Disarmament," NATO Review, March/April 1983, pp. 1-8.

(11.) See Vladimir Bukovsky, The Peace Movement and the Soviet Union (New York: Orwell Press, 1982).

(12.) Margaret Thatcher, "Reagan's Leadership, America's Recovery," National Review, December 30, 1988, p. 23.

(13.) "The Pitcher and the Catcher," Newsweek, January 9, 1989, p. 20.

(14.) Joshua Muravchik in Christopher C. DeMuth, et al., The Reagan Doctrine and Beyond (Washington, D.C.: AEI, 1987), p. 3.

(15.) For example, see James Burnham, The Coming Defeat of Communism (New York: J. Day, 1950) and Containment or Liberation? (New York: J. Day, 1953); John Foster Dulles, "A Policy of Boldness," Life (May 19, 1952); and Barry Goldwater, Why Not Victory? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962).

(16.) See Schweizer, Victory, pp. 76-7; 81-2; 125-7; 130-2.

(17.) Fitzhugh Green, American Propaganda Abroad (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1988), p. 193.

(18.) "The President's News Conference, January 29, 1981," in Ronald Reagan, Public Papers of the President, 1981 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), p. 57.

(19.) "Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983," Public Papers of the President, Ronald Reagan 1983 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1984), pp. 359-64.

(20.) Anthony Lewis, "Onward, Christian Soldiers," The New, York Times, March 10, 1983, P. A27. Also see "The Lord and the Freeze," The New York Times, March 11, 1983, p. A30.

(21.) John Lewis Gaddis, "The Tragedy of Cold War History," Foreign Affairs, 73, no. 1 (1994): 148.

(22.) Edmund Morris, quoted in "Reagan and History," National Review, May 24, 1993, p. 20.

(23.) Pam Solo, From Protest to Policy (Cambridge, MA.: Ballinger Publishing, 1988), p. 148.

(24.) For an analysis of the strategic and economic implications of SDI to the Soviet Union, see Ilya Zemtsov and John Farrar, Gorbachev: The Man and the System (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989), pp. 181-3; and Schweizer, Victory.

(25.) McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, Robert S. McNamara, and Gerard Smith, "The President's Choice: Star Wars or Arms Control," in The Reagan Foreign Policy, ed. William G. Hyland (New York: New American Library, 1987), p. 165.

(26.) Zemtsov and Farrar, Gorbachev, p. 182-3.

(27.) See Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom (New York: The Free Press, 1991), pp. 80-1; Bessmertnykh made this point at a conference at Princeton University in February 1993, cited in National Review, March 29, 1993, p. 12. Gorbachev claimed in 1994 that SDI had no positive impact on Soviet reform; Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, "Reagan and the Russians," Atlantic Monthly, February 1994, pp. 35-7. However, Bessmertnyk not only disputes this interpretation but argues that Gorbachev privately admitted that SDI was important. One can hardly expect Gorbachev, after all, to admit that his "Man of the Decade" performance was driven by American pressure.

(28.) Michael Dobbs, "Soviets Acknowledge Breach of ABM Pact," The Washington Post, October 24, 1989, p.1.

(29.) The New York Times, January 26, 1983, p. A23. Also note Paul Warnke's comments in the same article.

(30.) Ronald Reagan, "State of the Union Address," February 6, 1985, Administration of Ronald Reagan, 1985 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1986), p. 146.

(31.) George Shultz, "America and the Struggle of Freedom," address to the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco, February 22, 1985, pp. 2-4.

(32.) William R. Bode, "The Reagan Doctrine," Strategic Review 14, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 26.

(33.) Ronald Reagan, "Remarks," Town Hall of California, August 26, 1987, Administration of Ronald Reagan, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1988), p. 966.

(34.) For this line of argument, see Stephen F. Rosenfeld, "The Guns of July," in The Reagan Foreign Policy, ed. William Hyland (New York: New American Library, 1987).

(35.) "What Goes Around," U.S. News & World Report, August 30/September 6, 1993, p. 48.

(36.) For a detailed discussion of the Reagan administration's secret strategies in Afghanistan, see Schweizer, Victory.

(37.) Robert T. Huber, "Perestroika and U.S.-Soviet Relations: The Five-Year Plan No One Devised," in Five Years That Shook the World, ed. Harley D. Balzer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), p. 162.

(38.) David K. Willis, "Rebels Deal Setback to USSR in Third World," Christian Science Monitor, February 19, 1986, p. 12.

(39.) Schweizer, Victory.

(40.) Ibid., p. 250.

(41.) This danger was highlighted by the fact that, even though the runway could accommodate 747s, the island only had 400 hotel beds and no apparent plans for more. See Dorothea Cypher, "Grenada: Indications, Warning, and U.S. Response," in American Intervention in Grenada, eds. Dunn and Watson (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), p. 48.

(42.) See Constantine Menges, Inside the National Security Council (New York,: Simon & Schuster, 1988), pp. 80-2; Robert J. Beck, "International Law and Urgent Fury," Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1989, pp. 239-42; Ralph Kinney Bennett, "Grenada: Anatomy of a `Go' Decision," Reader's Digest, February 1984, pp. 75-6.

(43.) See Grenada Documents: an Overview and Selection (Washington, D.C.: Departments of State and Defense, 1984), esp. Document 23.

(44.) "Committees Revamp `Project Democracy,'" CQ Weekly Report, June 4, 1983, p. 1113.

(45.) Dankwart A. Rustow, "Democracy: A Global Revolution?," Foreign Affairs, 69, no. 4 (1990): 75.

(46.) See R. Bruce McColm, "The Comparative Study of Freedom House, New York, 1992-1993: Our Crowded Hour," Freedom in the World (New York: Freedom House, 1993), pp. 3-5.

(47.) "Human Rights: Now the Hard Part," The New York Times, December 30, 1989, p. 124.

(48.) Schweizer, Victory, p. 126.

(49.) For a comprehensive description of the economic war against the Soviet Union, see Schweizer, Victory.

(50.) Schweizer, Victory, p. 243.

(51.) Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, pp. 80-1.

(52.) Ibid., p. 84.

(53.) Schweizer, Victory, p. 198.

(54.) Harrison Salisbury, "USSR: What's Ahead," Denver Post, November 1982, p. D3.

(55.) Trimofenko made this remark on April 22, 1993, at a panel on Ronald Reagan's foreign policy at the Ninth Presidential Conference at Hofstra University.

(56.) Harrison Salisbury, "USSR: What's Ahead," Denver Post, November 1982, p. 1D.

(57.) See William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 362-3; Richard Reeves, "Was the Cold War Necessary," The Record, August 5, 1990.

(58.) Ronald Reagan, "Address to Members of the British Parliament," Public Papers of the President, 1982 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983), p. 744.

(59) John Kenneth Galbraith, "A Visit to Russia," The New Yoker, September 3, 1984, p. 60.

(60.) See Jean-Francois Revel, Democracy Against Itself (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 14; Robert L. Heilbroner and John K. Galbraith, The Economic Problem, 9th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989). See also Seweryn Bialer, "Reagan and Russia," Foreign Affairs, 61, no. 2 (1982/1983): 249-71; Mary McGrory, "A Campaign that has ignored the impact of Japan and Russia," Denver Post, November 11, 1982, p. 2B. McGrory ridiculed Reagan, virtually guffawing that "He says they're [the Soviets] on the verge of economic collapse."

(61.) Revel, Democracy Against Itself, p. 70.