A. Wess Mitchell: Great Power Diplomacy: The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Henry Kissinger. Chapter 8-Epilogue. 

 

In the first years of the 1970s, President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger essayed a two-part geopolitical strategy: detente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China. Mitchell understands the United States as a greater Great Britain in the sense that its home territory extended across a continent. As a commercial republic, it always maintained strong ties with foreign countries: “A policy of true isolationism was never a viable option for a country dependent on outside trade.” And, as he also remarks, this was an imperial republic from the founding until 1890; its “energies were directed primarily inward, to the conquest of [its] own hinterland,” partly thanks to its early enemy, Great Britain, whose powerful navy “kept other powers from dominating Europe and turning their full attention to North America.” As a result of this commercial prosperity and mostly uninterrupted empire-building, “by the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, America was capable of holding her own against the great powers”—very much including the British, about whom Roosevelt said he had no fear of any encroachments because he could counter any such attempt by seizing Canada. 

From 1890 to the First World War, America’s economic, political, and military heft increased materially, as its population became half again as big, its steel production increased nearly two-and-a-half times, its warship tonnage more than threefold. “In 1914, U.S. GDP was already four times that of Imperial Germany; by the eve of World War II, it was larger than all the other major powers combined.” That hardly meant that it faced no dangers by the time the young Nixon began his political career in the years after that war. Having allied with the Soviets against the Nazis, the United States confronted a rival empire that extended its reach into Eastern and Central Europe, hoping for much more. And by 1949, Communists allied with Stalin had seized control of mainland China. Recognizing that “Soviet Russia was a mortal enemy with whom there could be ‘no permanent modus vivendi,'” State Department Russia expert George F. Kennan proposed a policy of “containment” whereby diplomatic initiatives to countries not yet under Communist rule would establish alliances against that threat. President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson set about forming such alliances in Western Europe and East Asia. “Standing U.S. military commitments would replace Britain’s guardianship of the balance of power, backed by U.S. financial aid to thwart Communist subversion and a new international monetary system, brokered at Bretton Woods, that established a gold-backed U.S. dollar as the paramount global currency and created mechanism to prevent currency wars between the United States and her allies.” In Europe, the military alliance was formalized in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, while the Marshall Plan provided financial aid “to rebuild foreign economies shattered by the war” and, not incidentally, to lessen socialist and Communist temptations among the allied nations. Paul Nitze, heading the State Department Policy Planning Staff, put more teeth into containment than Kennan had wanted by writing NSC-68, which recommended a military buildup backing a diplomatic strategy that amounted more or less to a public opinion campaign to reassure American citizens and the citizens in allied countries that war was not imminent and to maintain communications with the Kremlin to prevent war from erupting accidentally, as it had done in 1914 Europe.

During these years, the capital military fact became the acquisition of nuclear weapons arsenals by the Soviet Union, which could now threaten the United States with destruction as readily as the United States could do the same to it. Nuclear weapons “made diplomacy more necessary than ever” but also “more difficult.” Whereas “for millennia, the task of diplomats had been to convert the potential for violence into political outcomes without bloodshed,” the threat of which gave negotiations urgency and often led to compromises that avoided war, against a nuclear-armed state “this logic broke down.” “If negotiation failed, nuclear weapons made war less likely than before, which in turn weakened the necessity to compromise.” Given the sharp regime differences between the Allied and Soviet blocs, including their fundamental disputes over moral principles, the prospects for diplomatic relations worsened. 

As a Harvard political science professor in the 1950s, Henry Kissinger published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, arguing that the existence of nuclear weapons “made it harder to harness war to political ends in the way Carl von Clausewitz had envisioned.” He recommended American attempts to identify “limited objectives against the Soviets,” objectives that did not raise the all-or-nothing threat of nuclear war—a way of devising,” as he put it, “a framework in which the question of national survival is not involved in every issue.” As an émigré from Germany, Kissinger had studied not only Clausewitz but Kant, whose hope for a League of Nations he also deprecated. And he published a careful study of Metternich’s balance-of-power diplomacy, which he judged more realistic than either Clausewitz’s maxims (now in need of revision) and Kant’s (always in need of revision). Independently, as a practicing politician—a United States senator, then Eisenhower’s vice president—Nixon had arrived “at the same conclusion.” Under conditions of the late 1960s, when they arrived at the White House, the containment policy seemed to them unsustainable. Nixon regarded it as politically and financially unsustainable, especially given the ongoing war in Vietnam and America’s “deteriorating balance of payments position”; Kissinger regarded it as too rigid, leaving too little room for bargaining. 

Mitchell remarks the resemblance between America’s circumstance as understood by Nixon and Kissinger and the British circumstance as understood by Lord Salisbury in 1900. “Like the Edwardians, Nixon wanted to bring his nation’s commitments in line with the new realities not in order to abnegate its global position but to preserve it.” The Pentagon’s attempt to sustain the capacity to fight two major enemies and “a minor contingency in a third theater” was neither practicable nor necessary, given the success of the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the alliance with erstwhile enemy, Japan; those countries could now pay for a more substantial portion of their own defense. The United States devoted eight percent of its GDP to military spending, with 1.1 million troops, most of them in Asia, most of those in and around Vietnam. Victory there would require still more troops, still more expenditures, for which political support was doubtful. Nixon moved quickly, shifting to military policy of financing a war against one major enemy, not two, and cutting the military budget. By the time of his resignation from office in 1974, military spending and force levels had been reduced “to levels not seen since before the Korean War.” The two principles of the “Nixon Doctrine” were continued military commitment to allies with the proviso that “they would be expected to handle internal threats to their security”—a reprise of Westphalia, at least regarding allies. Nixon needed to be careful when insisting that allies increase their military spending; in previous years, France’s president de Gaulle and others had warned that Americans wanted nothing more than to abandon them, and such an insistence might look like a first step toward doing so. 

“Also like the Edwardians, Nixon wanted to reduce tensions with U.S. rivals.” Détente had actually started under the woebegone Johnson administration, which intended to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Overtures to China, however, were all his own. Mao Zedong hadn’t mellowed with age. His brutal ‘Cultural Revolution,’ initiated in 1966, continuing until the tyrant’s death ten years later, was in the process of claiming something along the lines of one to two million lives of a variety of the regime’s ‘class enemies.’ At this point, the old Stalinist was more dangerous to his own people than the Kremlin oligarchs were to theirs. Further, Nixon “had long advocated a policy of maximum pressure against the Red Chinese state.” In his estimation, the time had nonetheless come to reverse course; “engaging with Beijing in some fashion was necessary for U.S. interests,” an important potential component of a rebalance of power in the world. Never at a loss for words of praise for his proposals, Kissinger called this strategy “a subtle triangle” designed to “improve our relations” with both enemy powers. While initially he considered Nixon’s overture to China premature if conceptually sound, he quickly warmed to it.

“For all of Nixon and Kissinger’s creativity, their policy might have miscarried had it not been for the unwisdom of Soviet Russia”—a phenomenon surely not unknown in its history, but not sufficiently prevalent to be depended upon. The Soviets had already worsened their relations with China unilaterally, without any American initiatives. Not only had the Soviets diluted their Stalinism, much to Mao’s contempt; an eager imitator of his beau ideal of a butcher, Mao was “probably” the “biggest mass murderer in history,” his estimated 65 million kills surpassing the numbers racked up by the master himself. More, the Chinese “feared Soviet aggression and wanted to expand their own influence in the Communist world.” (It will be recalled that the American ‘New Left,’ for example, had lionized ‘Chairman Mao’ and his ‘Little Red Book’ of pithy aphorisms.) Just as Nixon had his foreign policy ‘doctrine,’ Soviet Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev had his. The Brezhnev Doctrine upheld the Soviet Union’s prerogative of intervening in any Communist country whose regime was threatened, and its words were not idle; Soviet tanks had rolled into Czechoslovakia a year before Nixon’s inauguration, quelling republican partisans. Sino-Soviet tensions heightened in March 1969 in a series of border clashes, “which the Chinese almost certainly initiated,” and there were even signs that the Soviets might retaliate by striking Beijing with nuclear weapons. That is, statesmen in all three of the major powers needed to worry about a two-front war. 

Mao’s chief diplomat was Zhou En-lai, whose “quiet manner and philosophic bent belied a hardened core of the kind that one finds in people accustomed to having to survive under a brutal and arbitrary regime”—in his case, as “the committed lieutenant of one of history’s most ruthless killers,” having himself “ordered the deaths of many innocent people.” “True to the revolutionary ethos of the Maoist state, Zhou saw diplomacy as an arm of warfare against China’s enemies,” a dialectical “war of words” complementing the “war of swords,” as he put it. “Diplomacy falls within the province of the war of words,” he explained, and “as sure as day turns into night, there will be a constant war of words, every day of the year.”

Nixon and Kissinger wanted Communist Chinese help in getting out of Vietnam on the terms of a ‘peace with honor,’ as the slogan went. Unbeknownst to the Americans but well known to both the Chinese and the Vietnamese, China had little leverage with its fellow Communists in Hanoi, Vietnam being a centuries-long enemy of the Empire of Heaven. For its part, China wanted the U.S. out of Taiwan. In exchange for empty promises of influencing the Vietnamese, Zhou did extract some concessions from the U.S. regarding Taiwan: a drawdown of American troops in the country and, just as crucially, the adoption of Beijing’s ‘One China’ claim, which enables Beijing to claim that any American military defense of the Republic of Taiwan would amount to ‘outside interference in Chinese affairs.’ The two countries agreed to oppose—exactly how was unstated—hegemony in Asia by “any other country,” meaning the Soviet Union. They also agreed to the usual increase in trade, intergovernmental communication, and “people-to-people contacts”—the benefit of the latter to the United States chiefly being the infliction of Shirley MacLaine upon Mao’s personally blameless subjects. The main benefit to the Americans was that all of this made the Kremlin nervous. 

“Without doubt, the world was brought into greater balance, in the sense that Chinese and American power redirected toward the shared Soviet threat.” The three countries nonetheless persisted in “bleed[ing] and harass[ing] one another wherever possible” in what Mitchell calls “a period of strategic rest” intended “to regain strength before resuming the contest on more favorable terms,” which all three expected to find. Mitchell rightly criticizes Kissinger for claiming that Mao was animated by “a motive of order-building.” On the contrary, contemporary documents show that the old tyrant’s intention aimed at “aggravat[ing] the contradictions” between the Americans and the Soviets in order to “divid[e] up enemies and enhance[e] ourselves.” This is Marxist dialectic at work, equally consistent with the traditional Chinese policy of “ally[ing] with the Wu to oppose the Wei.” “All under heaven is in great chaos,” Mao exulted, anticipating the delights of ever-increasing worldwide power, which his regime has continued to accrue, decades after his death. 

These long-term deficiencies aren’t the whole story, however, inasmuch as to get to the next century in good condition one must first survive the current century. “The goal of Nixon’s grand strategy was to alleviate the military and fiscal burdens on the United States without forfeiting the overall U.S. position.” Reduced American expenditures of blood and treasure in Asia enabled Nixon to return America’s foreign-policy focus to “the place that was most important to U.S. national security, which was Europe.” Kissinger’s diplomacy “made the shift from a 2.5 to a 1.5 war standard possible,” in part by putting pressure on America’s Asian allies to put more effort into defending themselves. “Nixon’ pivot was not an end in itself; it was meant to give America an edge against her main opponent, the Soviet Union” by “forc[ing] the Soviets to bear the full brunt of their own two-front dilemma.” America went from a 70-30 ratio of forces in Asia and Europe to a 30-70 ratio, while the Chinese could transfer some of its forces away from its border with Korea to its border with the Soviet Union. His policy of détente with the Soviets, meanwhile, enabled Nixon to reduce military spending overall, as did his policy of ‘Vietnamizing’ the war in Indochina. “His policies allowed America to get her second wind spiritually,” to recover from the intense factionalism attendant to that war, “as well as strategically, at a moment when it might have turned inward,” as de Gaulle had expected. In the longer term, the United States could now put more resources into military research and development, which “resulted in a range of breakthrough technologies that the Soviets could not match.” While the Ford and Carter administrations didn’t take these advantages, they didn’t block the research, and President Reagan “was able to capitalize” both on “Nixon’s early reconcentration of effort to Europe” and on the technological advances Nixon had initiated and Reagan substantially augmented. Reagan also continued to use the Chinese Communists as a counterbalance to the Soviets. “The consequences of his administration’s deepening of ties with China, for good and for ill, remain with us to this day.” [1]

Mitchell draws some lessons for American statesmen. The character of the American regime makes diplomatic maneuvering more cumbersome than it was (for example) in the monarchic Austria of Metternich or the Prussia of Bismarck. It takes more effort to effect a change of course “because the complexity of the U.S. federal system,” to say nothing of its democratic republicanism, “rewards consensuses that, once locked in, are difficult to alter.” Such a regime will exhibit “long periods of inertia that can only be broken by a big jolt.” (It might be ventured that the Trump administration has specialized in such big jolts, initiated by the president himself.) “As Nixon and Kissinger showed, ‘bursts’ of innovation in policy require highly focuses leadership that is willing to devote primary attention to foreign policy and able to rewire aspects of the U.S. system to chart a new course.” 

America’s regime has forged “more alliances than any previous great power,” involving “much deeper commitments” which include “binding treaties that are approved by the Senate and considered to have the force of law.” These alliances “enhance U.S. diplomatic leverage by positioning the country to act as a kind of spokesperson for a large grouping of states,” sometimes even including ever-balky France. This does have the deficiency of setting up “a perverse incentive to free-ride”—another Trumpian concern. “A perpetual dynamic in U.S. diplomacy of trying to both reassure and motivate allies…would have been familiar to Bismarck from his dealings with Austria, but on a much bigger scale.” But “then as now,” America’s allies “lack viable alternatives to the U.S. market and security umbrella,” as President Trump evidently has concluded. 

“Nixon’s successes demonstrate that realist precepts are compatible with republican government.” Roosevelt’s alliance with Stalin against Hitler, Nixon’s simultaneous détente with Brezhnev and his rapprochement with Mao against Brezhnev, Reagan’s sometime support of anti-Communist tyrants against the Soviets, were all “short-lived affairs,” given the regime differences between republicanism and Communist oligarchy and Communist tyranny alike—modi vivendi “that allowed American to tread water and regain her strength.” Despite the fact that “the 20th century is strewn with many U.S. diplomatic tombstones,” notably Wilsonian and Rooseveltian internationalism, “it also saw the triumph of a uniquely American variety of hard-nosed diplomacy that blended aspects of British maritime strategy, continental realism, and homegrown meritocratic pragmatism,” with the use of diplomacy “as a tool of strategy to outlast powerful enemies that would have been recognizable not only to the not only to the classical European statesmen whom Kissinger so admired but also to the descendants of the Chinese emperors who would now succeed the Soviet Union to become the American Republic’s greatest adversary.”

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Mitchell concludes his discussion of great power diplomacy with observations drawn from all of his examples, across centuries, regimes, and civilizations. He has invited readers to consider circumstances in which great powers faced the prospect of a war “beyond the state’s immediate ability to win by force alone,” although its military officers might imagine otherwise. Appeals to the law of nations were futile. But “the diplomat offered a service that neither the soldier nor the jurist could provide: the possibility of rearranging power in space and time to the state’s advantage, s that it did not face tests of strength beyond its ability to bear,” usually “either by augmenting the resources at the state’s disposal externally”—gathering allies—or “by reducing the number of enemies requiring immediate attention, or both.”

Such work entails three strategies: conciliation, enmeshment, and isolation/containment. Conciliating an enemy might involve bribing him, appeasing him (i.e., giving him what he wants), or détente (persuading him that he needs to back off as much as you do). Enmeshment means pulling the enemy closer through trade or identifying shared political priorities. “Most of the examples of enmeshment in this book involved a relatively weak power looking for ways to lighten the load of defense expenditure and maintain empire on the cheap,” as in the cases of Vienna, Nineteenth-century Austria, and Britain after the Treaty of Versailles. Isolation means building coalitions that are militarily, politically, and economically strong enough to deter the enemy because attacking the coalition would be too costly. Mitchell hastens to note that “none of these strategies offers any assurance of success” and that they “are not a first choice but rather a necessity…foisted upon a great power by geopolitical and financial exigencies.” 

To increase his chances of success, a diplomat will need to study history. Admittedly, “diplomatic history does not provide pat lessons for the present any more than military history does.” Such study is rather an extended exercise in prudential reasoning in which errors are instructive instead of ruinous. Nonetheless, Mitchell does offer fourteen “basic principles” drawn from his own study—fourteen in number, perhaps as a counterweight to President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which turned out to be less than prudent.

1. Diplomacy concentrates power.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Diplomacy concentrates power and dilutes the enemy’s power by reducing your “exertions in one place” and “increas[ing] them in another.” You may be weaker or stronger than your enemy, but you must select the more immediate threat for your primary attention, as the Byzantine emperor did when he and his chief diplomat “conciliated Persians to focus on Huns” and when “Americans and Chinese both sought détente with one another to concentrate against Soviets.”

2. Effective diplomacy constrains the enemy.

This requires understanding of the enemy’s geography, his fear of nations other than your own, economic weaknesses, military weaknesses (especially weakness of military technology). Very often, your enemy will know his weaknesses better than you do, so these are points of leverage in negotiation. “Effective negotiation works with the grain of these constraints to narrow the options for profitable aggression and stack the deck in favor of stability.” Do not expect to discover good intentions; do not assume that diplomacy can “transform opponents internally,” making their regime compatible with yours. Regime change is an overly ambitious task for diplomats to undertake. It typically results from harsher methods, overt and covert.

3. Conciliate to constrain, not to appease.

You are unlikely to change your enemy’s motives. Whereas Theodosius the Younger correctly attended to the weaknesses of the Huns, negotiating with them on that basis, Neville Chamberlain “tried to remove the sources of conflict by giving Hitler what he wanted,” namely, the territory which strengthened the tyrant’s military position, enabling him to demand, and seize, still more. 

4. Use enmeshment to restrain your opponent, not you.

“There is a fashionable modern notion,” propounded by the prominent academic, John G. Ikenberry, “that enlightened states use diplomacy to wrap themselves in layers of commitments that restrict their own freedom of maneuver and thereby win the trust of other states” by rendering themselves harmless. Bad idea. You want “to foster economic dependencies”—your enemy’s dependence on you. “Communist China has used the economic enmeshment occasioned by Nixon’s opening and confirmed by post-Cold War U.S. presidents to created dependencies that translate into constraints on the United States in wartime, while the U.S. side has been much less adept, until recently, at using these arrangements to its advantage.”

5. Isolate your enemy to prevent war.

The Communist Chinese rail against ‘encirclement’ and ‘containment’ strategies deployed against them, even as they take every opportunity to push into Latin America. But in fact, containment strategies usually “make war less likely, for the simple reason that it forces a would-be aggressor to diffuse its military attention in multiple directions, therefore reducing its chances of success through conquest.” This puts the enemy on the diplomatic path rather than the military one. “The sine qua non of strategic diplomacy is to foist the multifront burden back onto an opponent in order, as Richelieu put it, to ‘keep your enemies so busy everywhere that they could not win anywhere.'” One suspects that the Chinese Communist Party understands this quite well, happily watching the United States embroiling itself in ‘long wars’ against Muslim terrorists and others. The Party is likely to be less than pleased with America’s successful brief, sharp strikes against its enemies.

6. Generally speaking, interests outweigh moral, religious, and political doctrines.

That is, “the law of self-preservation” usually prevails, inasmuch as a regime cannot advance whatever moral and political principles if reduced to a puff of smoke. This has been true throughout diplomatic history, as seen when states propounded religious principles, risking “the wrath of God” and “their own souls.” “The force that repeatedly led bitter enemies to find common cause was fear of a shared enemy,” a sentiment “that has consistently trumped the dictates of conscience, faith, or creed,” or perhaps consistently informing such dictates with the prudence of serpents. This notwithstanding:

7. Effective diplomacy is imbued with a higher mission than “the science of fear.”

Ideology is one thing, identity another. A nation’s identity depends in large measure on its regime: its purposes, its way of life, the kind of people who rule it, the institutions within which they rule. Byzantium had gold to offer, but it also had Roman law, the Christian Church, and the beauty of its capital city; during the Cold War, American diplomats “had at their back a great democratic republic grounded in the humanizing ideals of the U.S. Constitution.” If foreign countries see that a regime consistently upholds an ethos, a character, that benefits others along with themselves, trust increases. “Many of history’s most disastrous breakdowns of order occurred when a leading state discarded time-proven missions in favor of the power principle,” as when Wilhelm II sacked Bismarck and replaced the alliance system Bismarck had built with Weltpolitik.” Foreign policy realism isn’t necessarily as realistic as its proponents suppose. In contrast, Austria’s Kaunitz and America’s Kissinger “were both able to engineer radical reorientations in their nations’ foreign policies without sacrificing long-standing alliances with smaller states because the great powers they represented were understood to be committed to a mission that was preferable to those of other great powers.”

8. Smaller powers matter.

Sweden was no France, but it forced the Habsburgs to “divert attention and resources away” from France, as did Albania for Venice, menaced by the Ottomans. These kinds of alliances occur when the great power’s interest in fending off another great power coincides with a smaller power’s interest in not getting squashed by that other great power. If, however, the great power aims at detente with its great-power enemy, the smaller ally needs reassurance that it won’t be abandoned, as President Nixon appreciated in attempting “to allay Taiwanese and Japanese fears about rapprochement with China.” 

9. In negotiation, culture counts.

Know your enemy’s ethos. “The Byzantines used conventional treaty diplomacy with the Persians, a literate cosmopolitan civilization like themselves, but used methods of barter and intrigue hen dealing with a nomadic, ego-driven culture like the Huns.” Mitchell’s contrasts here are Wilhelmine Germany, which attempted to terrify the British, who hadn’t built their empire on cowardice, and both Chamberlain and FDR, who imagined “that their autocratic interlocutors” (Hitler and Stalin, respectively) “would negotiate on the basis of consensual give-and-take of the kind that characterized their democratic systems at home.”

10. Superior diplomacy fosters superior technology.

The delays diplomacy arranges gain time for technological innovation, including the development of better weapons systems. Commercial relations generate wealth, and wealth can be used for research, development, and manufacture; alliances can enable their members to “specialize in and therefore get better at, a certain range of technologies that are the most vital for its unique geographic situation.” Resources expended in Vietnam were turned toward the development of computers, missile guidance systems, and an array of other technologies that proved useful in outpacing the Soviet Union, the power the war in Vietnam had been intended to contain.

11. Money is more effective at attraction than deterrence or compulsion.

By this, Mitchell means that financial sanctions work less well than incentives. States have successfully used money “to get someone to do something helpful for them,” but have enjoyed less success in using money “to prevent someone from doing something harmful to them.” The Byzantines and Venetians deployed bribes “to succor the enemies of their enemies.” Britain used its powerful banking system to prop up small states on continental Europe whose interests happened to align with theirs.

12. Effective diplomacy depends on disciplined institutions.

Foreign policy bureaucracies arise in response to the need to keep good records and to gather and assess information on foreign countries, whether they are friendly or hostile. But any bureaucracy can become too big for its own, and its government’s good: “states developed bureaucracy to gain an edge in competition, yet the larger the bureaucracy became, the more it took a life of its own and stifled diplomatic creativity.” A too-large bureaucracy also tends to separate itself from the executive branch of government that it is intended to serve, becoming a government-within-the-government. “Almost every leader in this book wrangled the bureaucracy into alignment with his or her will at moments of international danger, either by creating parallel structures or by radically overhauling the bureaucracy, or both.” More recent American examples include presidents Reagan and Trump.

13. Democracy doesn’t guarantee success.

Better at trade and coalition-building than other regimes, more stable internally and more attractive internationally (partly because they are more inclined to keep faith with treaty partners), democratic and commercial republics enjoy “credibility, which is the foundation of effective diplomacy.” That doesn’t mean that they guarantee progress from one triumph to another, that ‘History’ is ‘on their side.’ “Some of the greatest disasters in this book came about when elected leaders tried to conduct diplomacy on the basis of progressive notions about the way the world should work”: Wilson at Versailles, Chamberlain at Munich, Roosevelt at Yalta. A democratic regime “does not allow great power to transcend power realities or exempt it from the tradeoff that lie at the heart of effective diplomacy.” Susceptible to “mood swings,” democracies need statesmen who are “deliberate about sustaining a focus on the national interest and nurturing the classical repertoire of skills that comprise diplomacy’s professional core, lest these be subsumed by fashionable causes.”

14. Expect no gratitude.

“There are plenty of statues of the West’s most famous generals and admirals, but very few of its great diplomats,” first of all because a Dwight Eisenhower cuts a more esthetically pleasing figure than a Henry Kissinger. The sword will always prove a more dashing accessory than an attaché case. On a more sober level, diplomatic triumphs are less spectacular than military ones. They often inspire “the messy anguish of compromise” rather than the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. 

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Kissinger titled one of his books The Necessity of Choice. In all, Mitchell impresses upon his readers the necessity of diplomacy. Liberalism in its progressivist form “did not expunge geopolitics from human history.” Statesmen still need ways to close “gaps between national-security means and ends” and of “keeping war’s costs and aims subordinate to politics.” The end of national security has become more complex, not simpler to reach “in an age of military balances, mutual nuclear vulnerability, and proliferating conventional military technologies.” Even AI technology cannot replace diplomacy, “cannot formulate preferences or provide the finesse and interpersonal skill that have always constituted the X factor of success in negotiations.” Twenty-first century Chinese Communists have become “adept at using diplomacy to win friends and influence people,” exhibiting “the mixture of political acumen, ideological flexibility, and patience that typically characterize successful great powers.” To counter such an impressive enemy, the United States and its allies will need to jettison the illusions of historical progress that have characterized the modern West for at least two centuries. 

 

 

Note

1. For an extensive discussion of Reagan’s foreign policy, see “Reagan Geopolitics: The First Term” and “Reagan Geopolitics: The Second Term” on this website under the category, “American Politics.” See also “The China Strategy” on this website under the category, “Nations.”

William Imboden: The Peacemaker. Chapters 10-Epilogue. New York: Dutton, 2025.

 

“We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that’s not innocent,” Reagan told a joint session of Congress in his January 1985 State of the Union address. He thus explained his departure from the Nixon-Kissinger policy of “linkage,” whereby progress in one area of U.S.-Soviet relations “depended on advances in other areas.” In the 1970s, with America in the weaker position, intending to withdraw from Vietnam and to slow a nuclear arms race in which it had fallen behind, there was an argument for that. By the 1980s, however, with the Soviet regime beginning to lose momentum, linkage had become a useful tactic for the Kremlin, which could “hold American priorities hostage” to U.S. concessions. The address advanced what later became known as the “Reagan Doctrine,” the centerpiece of which was explicit support for regime change in Communist countries. This countered the Kremlin strategy, enunciated by Party Chairman Nikita Khruschev in 1962: “Communism will win, not by nuclear war which might destroy the world, not by conventional war which could lead to nuclear war, but by national wars of liberation”—proxy wars aimed at bringing regimes founded upon Marxist-Leninist principles into power. This policy had worked on every continent, but now the regimes so founded were themselves under pressure from anti-Communist revolutionaries. It was time to assist them, as Reagan had been doing all along, but without formally saying so.

The policy would bring even more substantial results than most of those who agreed with it imagined. It nonetheless had “liabilities,” as most policies do: “some of the anti-communist insurgents [America] supported were corrupt and barbarous,” and although the United States could not control their actions it did get blamed for them; “it caused frictions with important allies”; it “depended on public support and congressional backing in a divided nation,” leaving the administration with the “hard choice” of either “allow[ing] more communist advances” or “break[ing] the law.” Afghanistan proved a noteworthy illustration of both the advantages and liabilities of the Reagan Doctrine.  

1985

By now, the Soviets had escalated their attacks on the mujahideen, “signal[ing] to the Reagan team that the previous policy of providing the mujahideen with large amounts of low-grade weapons would only result in more dead Afghans.” That escalation included the use of chemical weapon and napalm on civilians, land mines that also killed and mangled them (including children, who picked up booby-trapped toys), and poison dumped into water supplies and food stocks; the international revulsion against such tactics translated into firmer support for efforts to support the insurgents. But now, America wasn’t Afghanistan’s only ally. Neighboring Pakistan, allied with China against Russia and its nemesis, India, began to support mujahideen raids across the Soviet border. The Paks judged that it was riskier to have the Soviets and their puppet government in Afghanistan to than take actions which might provoke Soviet retaliation against their country. They were also developing nuclear weapons capability, primarily as a counter to India’s arsenal but not incidentally as a signal for the Soviets to proceed with caution. As for Reagan himself, “the affable president could be ruthless in inflicting pain on the Kremlin,” not only in Afghanistan but throughout the world.

In Nicaragua, for example, where American aid to the contras had weak support on Capitol Hill, the visit of President Daniel Ortega to Moscow, during which he received guarantees of increased oil supplies and more technologically advanced weapons, revealed the geopolitical stance underlying his rhetorical pose. “Burned by Ortega’s pilgrimage,” moderate and conservative Democrats tipped the balance toward humanitarian aid to the contras, if not arms supplies. Dollars being fungible, this provided the insurgents with a military boost, reducing costs in one area and enabling more spending in another. Regime change in Brazil, which moved from military rule to republicanism, also received “quiet but instrumental support from the Reagan administration.” In Africa, Reagan targeted the Communist-leaning (and quite corrupt) regime that had come to power in the previous decade, a regime supported by 40,000 Cuban troops and substantial Soviet arms and economic aid. Once again, the magnitude of international Communist support for the regime persuaded Congress to permit aid to UNITA, the insurgent force led by Jonas Savimbi, despite support for them from “South Africa’s odious apartheid regime.” “Though Reagan detested apartheid, he considered his efforts to end it a lower priority than eradicating communism and restoring peace to the entire region.” He did soon call for voting rights for black South Africans, however, after a meeting with Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, an Anglican archbishop who served as a leader of anti-apartheid South Africans. Tutu persuaded him that South Africa was on the cusp of reform, and that such reforms would not bring the country into the Soviet camp.

“Virtue was in short supply in southern Africa.” It was in short supply in a lot of places. Reagan kept his eye on his overall strategic aim—bringing the Soviet regime to a “negotiated surrender” in the Cold War—in part by means of “tactical partnerships with communist regimes in China, Yugoslavia, and Mozambique, and anticommunist authoritarians elsewhere.” He well remembered the American alliance not only with Great Britain but with Stalin’s Soviet Union itself against the Axis.

In March, the “dedicated Leninist” Konstantin Chernenko became the latest Soviet gerontocrat to die. The Politburo saw that “problems festered in every direction”: restiveness among the captive nations of Eastern and Central Europe; the American arms buildup; sacrifice of blood and treasure in Afghanistan; China’s continued flirtations with Washington; “an emboldened Japan” that maneuvered its navy against the Soviet Pacific fleet; and, finally, Reagan himself, “presiding over a growing economy and modernized military.” The new Party chairman, Mikhail Gorbachev, “felt the urgent need to reform the party, the state, and the economy,” not least because the Russian people had become listless and resentful, no longer believing in the shining, glorious tomorrow the old Bolsheviks had promised them. Reform of the Soviet regime “would prove an impossible task,” an attempt to “restore legitimacy to a system that by its nature was illegitimate.” One cannot be “both a genuine communist and a genuine reformer”; “Reagan would seize and exploit this contradiction.” Beginning with Comrade Marx himself, Communist propagandists had predicted, with an air of pretended science, that the ‘internal contradictions of capitalism’ would ruin ‘the rule of the bourgeoisie.’ As it happened, the fatal contradictions were on their side, seen especially in the need for a bureaucratic oligarchy to impose social and political equality on—well, everyone else.

Gorbachev agreed to a summit meeting with Reagan in Geneva. In the two years prior to that meeting, the KGB had purged “the small cohort of agents the CIA had recruited inside the Soviet government,” leaving the United States with no ‘inside’ information of what their negotiating partner might be planning. It was a turncoat CIA officer, Aldrich Ames, who had turned over the names of the agents that were still in place at the beginning of the year. Ames had been tasked with overseeing CIA counterintelligence vis-à-vis the Soviets; still another turncoat, this one in the FBI, “betrayed even more American sources.” Neither would be detected until years after the Soviet regime had collapsed. 

At the summit, Gorbachev tried to get Reagan to abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative, which “continued to terrify the Kremlin because Moscow, bedazzled by American technology, believed it could work” and assumed that the Americans would then do what they would have done: blackmail and/or strike the enemy. He threatened Reagan and his team with putting his nuclear warning and triggering system on computers, which would, he intoned, “unleash an uncontrollable process.” Reagan calmly countered with an offer to share SDI technology with the Soviets, a promise which the Gorbachev team could scarcely believe. Gorbachev also tried to put the best possible face on dissent in Russia, dismissing religiosity as the province of the elderly, soon to die. But it turned out that Solzhenitsyn was not alone; there had been “a turn to faith among many young Soviets.” Somewhat contradictorily, Gorbachev plied Reagan with occasional references to God, which Reagan seems to have taken with sufficient seriousness to pressure him to ease off on religious persecution.

1986

“The CIA remained skeptical of the new Soviet leader”—and rightly so. Gorbachev proposed a plan to eliminate “all nuclear weapons in the world by the year 2020,” beginning with a fifty percent reduction of intermediate-range missiles in Europe. The catch was that SDI, too, would be banned and that such an agreement would preserve the Soviet advantage in intercontinental ballistic missiles for fifteen years. Reagan could hardly reject Gorbachev’s offer outright, since he too had called for a worldwide reduction and eventual abolition of nuclear weapons. He concentrated on the steps needed to get there. There was also the matter of the allies, worried that the United States would sell them out; Thatcher, especially, raised questions about Gorbachev, calling him “the same brand of dedicated Soviet communist that we have known in the past,” albeit “under the veneer” of sweet reasonableness. “The search for a world without nuclear weapons holds far more problems for the West than for the Soviet Union,” inasmuch as the Soviets enjoyed a substantial advantage in non-nuclear forces in Europe, Thatcher’s main concern. Reagan accepted the offer of Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone to join in research on SDI, “further rattling a Kremlin already fearful of the American and Japanese edge in technology.” 

Gorbachev did not transform Reagan into an innocent abroad. The president expelled more than a hundred KGB officers from the United States, where they had used their mission to the United Nations as a base of operations for many years. He also increased navy exercises in the Northern Hemisphere and increased aid to the mujahideen in Afghanistan and the contras in Nicaragua. More spectacularly, he ordered an air raid on Libya, terrifying Soviet ally Muhammar Quaddafy, who wisely “curtailed planning for over thirty terrorist plots against American targets in Europe.” As for Gorbachev himself, Reagan told his friend Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney that he would like “to get the General Secretary alone without translators,” to find out if he believed in God and to attempt convert him if he did not. There is no record that he ever made that attempt at any meeting subsequently arranged.

Gorbachev had a more worldly problem before him: the explosion of the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in April. Not only did this forcefully call attention to Soviet technological deficiencies, not least to Gorbachev himself, it also “displayed the Soviet edifice of deceit.” The local officials didn’t tell Moscow about the disaster; when the Kremlin eventually heard about it, the Soviet people were not told; and “the Politburo lied to the world.” “KBG operatives followed up with an extensive ‘active measures’ campaign to deceive and harass Western journalists while planting false stories and using credulous front groups to deflect Kremlin responsibility.” All of which tended to confirm CIA and Thatcher skepticism about the General Secretary and his associates. As the British prime minister did not fail to note, “Gorbachev has been a public relations star, but this accident has shown his true Soviet colors.” In fact, Imboden writes, following the work of Gorbachev biographer William Taubman, Chernobyl struck Gorbachev as revelatory of his regime’s “rampant incompetence, coverups at all levels, and self-destructive secrecy at the top”; it also made him more mindful of the danger of nuclear weapons, since each missile carried “a hundred Chernobyls.”

Weary of Soviet violations of the SALT II provisions, Reagan suspended U.S. compliance, further pressuring his counterpart. On the arms reduction front, he proposed joint research on SDI. Whereas Gorbachev wanted to end SDI research first and then get rid of offensive weapons, Reagan “flipped this to a new position,” indeed the reverse position: “first embrace SDI and at the same time eliminate offensive weapons,” which would amount to a new kind of arms race, a race “in which both sides competed to protect themselves” and to share their research findings. At the summit meeting in Reykjavik in October, Gorbachev went in fearing amplification of the arms race. This gave Reagan an edge, especially now that he had the rhetorical armament of “Trust, but verify” with which to express skepticism over Soviet arms control bona fides in a diplomatic manner. He also intended to inform Gorbachev that he would “assess the Kremlin’s trustworthiness based in part on its treatment of political and religious dissidents.” Gorbachev, however, understandably did not believe that the U.S. would share research on SDI. The “fierce argument” that followed “masked a fundamental difference” between the two men, namely, that “Gorbachev sought to slash nuclear arms in order to preserve Soviet communism” while “Reagan sought to slash nuclear arms on the way to ending Soviet communism,” inasmuch as “a Soviet Union without its nuclear weapons would be a hollow shell.” When Gorbachev pointed that out, citing Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, Reagan presented him with an instance of its evil, namely, its one-party rule—rule not only over its own people but over the nations it had captured. And indeed, Gorbachev “knew [that] acquiescing to SDI could mean getting ousted by the Kremlin.” He also knew that a continued arms race might well ‘oust’ the Kremlin itself, wreck the regime. And so, he “consigned his country to at least another year of running an arms race that it could not win.” Reagan hadn’t quite checkmated the Soviet grandmasters. He had put them in a losing position, needing to make the right moves to set up the checkmate. 

Those moves were complicated by events elsewhere on the chessboard. In Nicaragua, a Sandinista soldier shot down a cargo plane carrying a CIA agent, who confessed that he was on a mission to resupply the contras in violation of Congressional prohibitions. a few weeks later, a Lebanese magazine published information (“almost certainly leaked by the Iranian government”) that U.S. envoys had proposed to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Iranians took the weapons, Hezbollah released the hostages and then seized another set of Americans for ransom. The Ayatollah Khomeini had no intention of thawing relations with the Great Satan, America, but rather intended to defeat Iraq in the ongoing war, thereby advancing the cause of Shi’a Islam against the Sunnis. “Transformed from ill-advised policy to scandal,” the arms-hostages deal “threatened to destroy Reagan’s presidency.” Reagan initially made things worse by reacting a bit like the Kremlin did when confronted with Chernobyl: deny, deny, deny. On top of all that, the Administrator discovered that the executors of the deal, National Security Advisor John Poindexter and NSC staffer Oliver North, had taken profits the arms sales to fund the Contras. Reagan saw to it that both men left office, while refusing to acknowledge, evidently even to himself, that he knew nothing about the original deal. It was indeed “perhaps the only major scandal in presidential history motivated solely by policy goals—and noble ones at that.” This made it all the harder for Reagan to admit error or wrongdoing; “his motives were right, so how could his actions be wrong?” The former were, the latter were not.

1987

Faced with the findings of the commission he had appointed, headed by former Texas senator John Tower, Reagan finally admitted to himself that he had failed. He replaced Poindexter and North with Frank Carlucci, his former deputy secretary of defense, and General Colin Powell. He also got rid of Donald Regan, his chief of staff (who “had sealed his demise by hanging upon on Nancy Reagan during a heated phone call over the president’s schedule,” never the sort of thing to do), replacing him with another former senator, Howard Baker. As importantly, he made a nationally televised address, issuing his first public apology. Americans liked the guy and forgave him. 

After this political recovery, Reagan pressed ahead, ordering that SDI be advanced to the testing stage, ramping up other research on military technology, threatening to increase aid to the mujahideen once again, also increasing the flow of anti-Soviet books, cassettes, and pamphlets to the Soviet bloc. Gorbachev and his colleagues “blinked,” signaling a willingness to abandon their demand to stop SDI. Secretary of State Schultz took the opportunity to advise the General Secretary, whom he knew “still held fast to Marxist dogma,” that Marx’s labor-capital dichotomy “is becoming obsolete because we have entered a world in which the truly important capital is human capital, what people know, how freely they exchange information and knowledge, and the intellectually creative product that emerges.” Your regime, General Secretary, doesn’t allow that. 

For its part, the Iranians chose to apply their own means of pressure on the United States, advancing troops closer to the oil fields in Iraq, mining the Persian Gulf, and attacking the Kuwaiti oil tankers that carried Saudi oil outside the region. Uncowed, Reagan told his NSC staff, “Our Naval Strategy since World War I”—actually before that, during the Theodore Roosevelt administration—has been “to base elements of the fleet all over the world where our national interests are involved,” and that U.S. ships and planes have guarded the international shipping lanes Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea since the mid-1950s. Schultz persuaded the Kuwaiti rulers to put their tankers under U.S., not Soviet protection. 

Reagan also took a tough stand with the Japanese. By guaranteeing safe passage for oil tankers from the Middle East to Japan, he had helped America’s ally. Japan had long been unhelpful, however, when it came to its practice of selling semiconductors in the United States at prices below production cost, thereby expanding its share of the American market. The Japanese had signed an agreement not to do so, then never got round to complying. Reagan put a 100 percent tariff on Japanese consumer electronics, and Americans applauded. He also pressured the South Korean rulers to democratize their regime, emboldening the regime-change protestors there. The protestors could point to the successful regime change in the Philippines, when the Marcos dictatorship finally gave up its rule and the country became a republic. “In many ways,” Imboden remarks, “pushing an autocratic ally to democratize is even harder than promoting democracy in an adversary state,” since the United States depends upon the alliance for assistance in countering even worse regimes. “There is more at stake, and more to be lost, if the ally resists American efforts to support human rights and political reform, or if those efforts so destabilize the country that rival states exploit it from without or violent revolution ensues within. Reagan and Schulz took no small risks in supporting these democratic transitions.” In the event, “the United States-Korea alliance held firm even as the dictatorship crumbled,” showing that a nation did not necessarily need strongman rule to stay secure against enemies foreign and domestic—in this case, the grim reapers of North Korea. And Taiwan also moved toward republicanism. In supporting these predominantly peaceful revolutions, Reagan “sought to expand the perimeters of the free world and display the benefits of accountable governments as a positive alternative to communist despotism,” especially since regime compatibility, when it can be achieved, strengthens alliances. “In contrast, the United States-China-Taiwan triangle would see increased tension as Taiwan’s democracy belied Beijing’s claim that Chines people could not govern themselves,” a claim the Chinese Communist Party had stuck to, to this day. The Chinese also worried—rightfully, from the Communist oligarchy’s point of view—that, as CCP Secretary Deng Xiaoping told Schultz, “Gorbachev may be moving too fast” to sustain the USSR. It was a mistake the Chinese Communists would take care not to commit.

Despite the Iran-Contra scandal, the prospects for Nicaragua improved. When a Sandinista defector “revealed Managua’s plan to grow its army to six hundred thousand troops, funded by a new five-year agreement with the Kremlin that included advanced weapons such as surface-to-air missiles, helicopter gunships, and MiG-21 fighter jets,” Reagan pounced, calling Gorbachev to account at their next meeting held in December at the White House. It transpired that Gorbachev himself hadn’t pushed for the aid, that Kremlin hardliners (the Poindexters and Norths of Bolshevism), had pushed it through over his complaints that it would further deplete “the Kremlin’s coffers.” Later, when the accused Oliver North testified to Congress, admitting his legal wrongdoing, he counterattacked, saying “Congress is to blame because of the fickle, vacillating, unpredictable, on-again off-again policy toward the Nicarguan Democratic Resistance,” inviting “our adversaries [to] laugh at us” and “our friends [to] recoil in horror.” Polling showed that more Americans “now blamed Congress more than Reagan for the scandal.” By the next year, the two Nicaraguan factions entered into a cease-fire agreement. By then, “The Cold War…was beginning to leave Nicaragua behind.”

Gorbachev had been touting reform of the Soviet regime: perestroika or restructuring, somewhat easing the centralization of the state, and glasnost or openness, permitting more criticism of state officials. Very well then, Reagan would follow this logic, saying in a June speech at the Berlin Wall that if “Mr. Gorbachev” really wanted to liberalize, “Tear down this wall.” The U.S. State Department cringed; General Powell wrung his hands; the Washington Post sneered; yet Reagan intended “to test the Soviet leader’s sincerity and credibility,” and would continue to do so, repeating his demand “at least fourteen times over the duration of his presidency.” Adding spiritual insult to political injury, he went on to notice that “decades of state-enforced atheism had not quenched the religious faith of multitudes in the Soviet bloc,” and America was on their side. Within the Kremlin, Gorbachev faced a challenge from rival Boris Yeltsin, who resigned from the Central Committee “while denouncing Gorbachev’s reforms as anemic and ineffective.” Reagan ended the year more assured than ever that the Soviet Union didn’t have much life left in it. The two countries reached agreement on intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe, while reassuring “nervous NATO allies that the United States maintained some four thousand tactical and short-range nuclear weapons in Europe to deter the Red Army.” 

1988

Reagan’s last year in office saw the Soviets’ withdrawal from Afghanistan and South Africa, in the latter case inducing the Cubans to leave, also. Iran was in better shape, continuing to mine the Persian Gulf. One mine severely damaged a U.S. naval frigate; Reagan returned the favor by destroying two Iranian naval bases and sinking six of its ships—a serious blow, since the ayatollah’s fleet had consisted of only a dozen vessels to begin with. 

Despite signs of Soviet weakness, Thatcher remained vigilant, telling her NATO colleagues, “the Soviets are the more dangerous the more sweetly they talk,” continuing their efforts “at undermining and dividing NATO [and] maintaining military superiority for themselves.” Very well then, Reagan responded in a conversation with his national security operatives, we should “convince our Allies to keep up their defense expenditures,” a bill America was mostly paying for. 

“Few people living under communism believed in it anymore.” The USSR suffered from “financial bankruptcy” along with this “ideological exhaustion.” In a speech at the next summit, in Moscow, Reagan recalled that “we fought two world wars in my lifetime against Germany and one with Japan, but now the Federal Republic of Germany and Japan are two of [America’s] closest allies and friends.” As reported by American diplomat Eric Edelman, the point was not lost on Muscovites, the oligarchy’s officials and the commoners alike. A month after Vice President George H. W. Bush won the election that determined Reagan’s successor, Gorbachev announced substantial troop and materiel reductions in Europe. A few years later, the Soviet empire collapsed, validating Deng’s warning and vindicating Reagan’s longtime prediction. In one last public speech as a private man, Reagan issued a warning of his own. He told those gathered at the Oxford Union, “With the Soviet empire defeated will we fall into petty, self-absorbed economic rivalries? Will we squander the moral capital of half a century? Will we turn inward, lulled by a dangerous complacency and the short-sighted view that the end of one Evil Empire means the permanent banishment of evil in all its forms?” As a serious Christian, Reagan knew that evil never foes away. As a statesman, he knew that victory in the First World War did not stop fascists and communists from seizing power; he knew that victory in the Second World War led to the advance of Soviet troops in Europe. Speaking to young men and women who would long outlive him, he concluded, “The work of freedom is never done and the task of the peacemaker is never complete.”

 

 

William Imboden: The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. Chapters 1-9. New York: Dutton, 2022.

 

To call President Ronald Reagan a “Peacemaker” during his terms in office would have surprised, indeed outraged, many Americans on the Left, who called him a dangerous warmonger. One of their reasons for doing so was his deployment of the “Peacekeeper,” his name for the MX nuclear missile, a land-based missile equipped with multiple warheads, capable of striking the Soviet Union from the continental United States. Imboden shows how the “Peacekeeper,” along with other weapons built during Reagan’s tenure, served the purposes of a sincere and effective “Peacemaker”—one who actually abhorred the prospect of nuclear war and made every effort to prevent it from happening. He pursued “peace through strength.”

Imboden gives a chronological account of the last decade of the Cold War. Reagan had a knack for making things look easy. To the extent possible, he actually made surviving a murder attempt look easy. But neither that nor anything else about those years came easily, and a narration of the sequence of events proves an excellent way to show how difficult it all was, how much practical intelligence it took to implement Reagan’s strategy, which he famously described as “We win, they lose.” American victory “was not geopolitically foreordained.”

He begins with an overall account of that strategy, which consisted of “eight pillars”: “restoring the American economy as a foundation of national strength and morale”; “delegitimizing Communism as a system of government”; “building up and modernizing America’s military”; “supporting anticommunist insurgencies around the world”; “making ‘mutual assured destruction’ (MAD) obsolete through the Strategic Defense Initiative”; “promoting human rights and freedom around the world, especially in the Soviet bloc”; “pressuring the Soviet system into producing a reformist leader with whom Reagan could negotiate”; “reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world—with the hope of abolishing nuclear weapons entirely.” In building these pillars, he sought the assistance of allies, who were not always easy to bring along, although in the end their voluntary if often reluctant cooperation proved more useful than the coerced conformity of the nations within the Soviet empire. Throughout, as Imboden emphasizes, “no options were free of the taint of risk,” which is a “perpetual challenge of statecraft.” And these risks were not only physical but moral, since Reagan often needed to ally with “authoritarian regimes” in order to defeat the main enemy. This was especially difficult because the Cold War was a regime struggle and Reagan presented it that way, “promot[ing] the better of model of free societies” against Soviet oligarchy. 

Announcing his presidential candidacy in November 1979 (his third attempt at gaining the Republican Party nomination), Reagan emphasized not the Cold War but the need for a “North American accord”—free trade among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. He did this because economic weakness was the principal concern of Americans, their lives bedeviled by high unemployment and inflation, called ‘stagflation.’ He also “believed that a free and prosperous North American held the key to the United States’ power projection in the world.” That is, he thought of American foreign policy from the inside out. Internationally, circumstances were not auspicious. In Iran, revolutionary Shi’a clergy had ousted the Shah, a longtime American ally against the Soviets and taken U.S. embassy staff hostage. Almost simultaneously, the Soviet army had invaded Afghanistan. Throughout the decade of the 1970s, the Soviets had advanced their interests by subverting the regimes of American allies and installing their own proxy rulers, adding to their existing empire in Eastern and Central Europe. 

Reagan did not formulate his interest in economic strength as his foreign policy’s foundation on his own. In a conversation in the mid-1960s, ex-president Dwight Eisenhower had recalled to him the indispensable character of U.S. industrial power during the Second World War. Eisenhower also told him that the best use of military strength consists of winning without fighting a war at all. Surprisingly to those who never watched Eisenhower very carefully, he preferred Reagan to his former vice-president, Richard Nixon, whom he had used mostly as a rhetorical attack dog and intra-Party fixer in the 1950s. He may also have trusted Reagan more, sensing greater strength of character in a man many dismissed as an intellectually superficial and somewhat frivolous former Hollywood actor. Nixon and Reagan did take noticeably different approaches to foreign policy. While Reagan considered free trade as “a fundamental principle in its own right and a key pillar of the free societies he sought to promote,” Nixon regarded “international economic policy as a mere instrument subordinate to geopolitics.” More or less in line with that, Nixon regarded communist China as “the strategic key” to Asia, whereas Reagan made Japan “the strategic cornerstone” of his policy there. As a devotee of Realpolitik, Nixon “disdained the promotion of human rights and democracy,” while Reagan “put political and religious liberty at the center of his strategic priorities.” Finally, while Nixon made detente with the Soviets the centerpiece of his foreign policy, Reagan was detente’s “most prominent critic.” Nixon and his National Security Advisor, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, assumed that the Soviet rulers had abandoned Marxist-Leninist ideology; they had not. They assumed that the Soviet economy was viable; it was not. They believed that “moderated American policies could change Moscow’s’ international conduct”; they did not. And they assessed the Soviet regime to be stable, durable: not necessarily so. Nixon, along with his successors in the presidency, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, imagined that the treaties limiting the construction of nuclear weapons would work; this, too, was an illusion. Reagan did want arms control treaties, but only on the basis of a Russian saying he learned from an American student of Russian culture: ‘Trust, but verify.’ And the treaty conditions he wanted to verify were not those merely controlling the rate in which both countries were building their stockpiles of nuclear weapons but treaties that would require the reduction of those stockpiles and eventually eliminated nuclear weapons entirely. The prospect of retaliating against a Soviet nuclear attack with a counterattack that would kill millions of innocents sickened Reagan. At the same time, he understood that the Soviet rulers felt no such compunction. And so he concentrated on “building up American power to exploit Soviet weaknesses and force Moscow” to come to terms. Unlike his critics in America and among America’s allies, he had no illusions that the Soviets wanted peace, except on their own terms, which were antithetical to moral and political liberty.

President Carter exemplified the complacency of American Left-liberals, who had often inclined to excessive confidence in the good intentions of those farther to the Left than they. In Nicaragua, the Marxist ‘Sandinista’ regime had overthrown a right-wing thug named Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Carter and his advisers imagined that the Sandinistas were well-intentioned reformers. Reagan and his advisers correctly recognized them “as the vanguard of Marxism coopting Nicaragua and menacing the region,” allied with Castro’s Cuba and therefore with the Soviets. As it happened, the regime “would soon give up the pretense of pluralism” and “begin supporting communist insurgencies” in Central America, as predicted by Reagan campaign adviser Roger Fontaine. To this hard-headed analysis, Reagan would add support for regional governments “that answered to their citizens rather than abusing them”—abuse of citizens being what the Somoza regime had done, and what had made him vulnerable to removal. Carter’s misjudgments exasperated members of his own party; such Democrats as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, Eugen Rostow, Paul Wolfowitz, and Paul Nitze eventually served in the Reagan Administration, indispensably. 

“In fairness to Carter,” Inboden cites his belated efforts to reverse course. Carter did in fact withdraw from the second strategic arms limitation treaty from Senate consideration, increase military spending, including funding for such new missile systems as the MX. He also signed off on “numerous covert actions to counter Soviet advances in the Third World,” including not only Nicaragua but Grenada, Jamaica, El Salvador, Yemen, and Afghanistan, where he sent arms to the Islamists who were fighting against the Soviet invaders. These measures came too late to help him politically, but they did give Reagan “some policies and programs on which to build” upon taking office in January 1980. 

1981

Reagan’s accession to the White House perturbed the Kremlin. The KGB assessment described the new president as representative of “the most conservative, chauvinist, and bellicose part of American politics,” a man who had the nerve to press “for the restoration of American world leadership after the defeat in Vietnam.” As for themselves, the Soviets “had begun saying that the USSR could absorb millions of casualties and still win a nuclear war, especially as its larger arsenal could survive an American retaliatory strike”—an unspoken acknowledgment of the fact that the Soviets had indeed survived the loss of millions inflicted upon Russia by the Leninist and Stalinist mass murders of the Twenties and Thirties, and millions more inflicted by the Nazis in World War II. More modestly, “Moscow hoped to use its growing military superiority to gain diplomatic advantage over Washington and induce further American retreat in the face of communist advances around the world.” That hope proved unfounded because the Soviets weren’t so strong, Americans not so weak and, crucially, because Reagan knew both of those things. Andrew Marshall, who headed the Office of Net Assessment at the Defense Department, estimated the USSR’s GNP as twenty-five percent of America’s, with its military absorbing thirty to forty percent of that. The problem was that “even if over the long term the Soviet system appeared unsustainable, in the near term the Kremlin was ahead.” The solution was to “impose disproportionate costs on the USSR,” starting immediately. So, for example, although the Soviets enjoyed a three-to-one superiority in the number of submarines, the U.S. advantage in “quieting technologies and sensory capabilities…enabled them to both detect and evade” the Soviet forces undersea. The Soviets’ vast superiority in tank numbers, threatening Europe, could not translate into superiority in tank warfare because the United States developed tank-killing aircraft. The qualitative power of technology could counter quantitative power of industrial production.

The Politburo did not yet see that, however. KGB director and future Communist Party Secretary Yuri Andropov understood that detente “had been advantageous to the Kremlin.” Now that Reagan was president, those halcyon days were gone, and it might even be that he would launch a first strike at the Soviet Union; “this misperception made the Soviets prone to misinterpret other American actions” and “more inclined to order a preemptive strike of their own.” They probably ordered a ‘first strike’ on Pope John Paul II, who was targeted for assassination by “a Turkish gunman…likely sponsored by the KGB.” The pope had committed the sin of opposing Soviet domination of his native Poland and of other countries in that region. Reagan himself had nearly died at the hands of a would-be assassin who was, however, merely deranged, no agent of a foreign power. “That they both survived bonded them in a sort of providential kinship,” which very much included plans for accelerating their campaigns against the Soviet Union.

By mid-year, Reagan confronted “three urgent questions”: What would he do about the Soviet deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles aimed at America’s European allies? What would he do about the plans of some of those allies to collaborate with the Soviets on a pipeline designed to supply Western Europe with Soviet oil and gas? And how far would he go to support the Polish independence movement, Solidarity? 

The pipeline would provide the Kremlin with revenues and make the allies dependent upon it for their energy supplies. With an eye on the other two matters, Reagan chose to object to the pipeline without doing anything about it, for now. He sent emergency relief to Poland, combating the Kremlin’s economic squeeze on the country, where the Soviets’ puppet regime had declared martial law. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, now remembered as a loyal Reagan ally, dismissed the Polish crisis as “simply an internal situation,” conceivably not knowing any better. He did advise the pope that he intended to build up America’s nuclear stockpile in order to force them to negotiate nuclear arms reductions later on—the logic being that the Soviets knew that they couldn’t keep pace with any serious American effort. As for the Allies, he demanded “an absolute quarantine of all trade as President Roosevelt had proposed in 1938” against Nazi Germany. This was the first serious challenge by an American president to the legitimacy of the Soviet regime and its empire since the Coolidge Administration. 

In the Western Hemisphere, Reagan chose El Salvador as the place “to stop communism’s advance and restore American credibility in the region.” El Salvador’s politically centrist president, José Napoleon Duarte, faced insurrections from communists and neo-fascists alike, the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) had the predictable Soviet backing; a “former military officer and sadistic killer,” Roberto d’Aubuisson, headed a coalition of rightists. D’Aubuisson had no important international support, but “Communist regimes around the world had chosen Central Ameria as a priority front,” calling it the “soft underbelly” of the United States. Sensitive to Latin American suspicions of American intervention in the region, Reagan sent a modest amount of aid to Duarte’s regime, including a handful of military trainers. “The symbolism mattered more than the size.” Reagan had taken “the first step in what would become not just a larger aid program for El Salvador but an eight-year immersion in Central America’s Cold War.” Here, too, he had the pope’s backing, and useful it was in that predominantly Roman Catholic landscape. For their part, the KGB targeted such liberal American religious bodies as the National Council of Churches, which dutifully (or perhaps dupefully) organized demonstrations against U.S. aid to El Salvador in front of the White House. 

In Asia, Japanese politicians had long resisted building up their own military, having reacted to the militarism which led to Japan’s crushing defeat in the war. Reagan continued the Nixon-Ford-Carter policy of selling arms to Communist China, so long as “the weapons did not threaten Taiwan and could not be used against the United States.” He considered both the PRC and the ROC as “partners” in achieving “his main priority: defeating the Soviet Union and bringing the Cold War to a peaceful end.” And in the Middle East, Israel struck a nuclear reactor in Iraq, then a Soviet ally, while Reagan mollified the Saudis by selling arms to them; the Saudis were no friends of Israel, but they were anti-Iraqi, anti-Communist, and an important oil supplier to the United States and Western Europe. “I didn’t want Saudi Arabia to become another Iran,” Reagan explained—that is, another rightist monarchy vulnerable to overthrow by anti-American fanatics, whether Communist or Muslim. He “wanted to send a signal to our allies and to Moscow that the United States supported its friends and intended to exert an influence in the Middle East not just limited to our support for Israel.”

1982

The year began with an important appointment: Reagan replaced the ineffectual Richard Allen with a capable man he trusted, William Clark, at the National Security Agency. “In short order [Clark] would become the most influential of Reagan’s national security advisors and one of the most important—albeit least remembered—national security advisers in history.” Later, he replaced mercurial and none-too-loyal Alexander Haig with steady George Schultz as Secretary of State. After a shaky first year, his foreign policy team was shaping up. For its part, the CIA issued reports indicating that Soviet economic growth had fallen substantially in the first years of the decade while subsidies to Warsaw Pact countries had increased more than fivefold since 1975. More, Kremlin cash reserves were dropping, as Saudi production lowered the worldwide price of oil, one of the most important Soviet commodities, and the inefficiencies of Soviet agriculture forced increasing grain purchases from foreign countries. “While Reagan’s national security team believed the Soviet regime was brittle, they differed on just how brittle it was.” Yet all of them diverged from the dominant view, which “saw the Soviet Union as stable and resilient.” Nonetheless, it was “militarily more powerful than ever,” even as its rulers continued to fear any American buildup as an unanswerable threat to that power. Reagan’s Director of East European and Soviet Affairs at the NSC, historian Richard Pipes, prepared a report for the president emphasizing the inherently expansionist character of Communism while remarking the crisis in the Soviet Union itself brought on by that expansion and the regime’s ever-increasing inability to pay the expenses incurred by it. Although no one in the Soviet ruling class intended to change the regime, the somewhat more reform-minded persons within it might be strengthened if the United States and its allies increased “the costs of [Soviet] imperialism.” Reagan concurred. He also endorsed Pipes’s intention not merely to influence Soviet behavior (as State Department officials usually tried to do) but to change the regime that produced Soviet behavior. “Reagan’s strategy of targeting the Soviet system itself may seem obvious in hindsight. But at the time it was risky, controversial, ridiculed by many, seen as revolutionary by others. No previous president had tried it.” Unnoticed at the time, Reagan sought not to achieve the unconditional surrender FDR and the Allies had won from the Axis powers in World War II but a “negotiated surrender,” whereby the Soviets would relinquish their empire, end its support for communist revolutions in the Third World, halt the nuclear arms race, and liberalize internally. None of this would happen soon, of course, some of it never, really, in the long term. In November, Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev died, replaced by KGF war horse Andropov. 

In Europe, Reagan grew a bit closer to Prime Minister Thatcher, backing her military retaliation against Argentina, which had seized the Falkland Islands, then delivering a major speech at her invitation to the British Parliament in the summer. He also found a firm anti-communist ally in the newly elected Chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Kohl. These political friendships proved important because Reagan wanted to place intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe, so that NATO could counter the Soviet nuclear buildup, and the well-organized European Left would exert substantial pressure against that policy for the next two years. 

In Central America, Reagan lacked such reliable allies against the Communists. “Divided, plagued with ineptitude, and pocked with war criminals,” the El Salvador government was a weak reed. The Nicaraguan Contras “suffered similar maladies” and its insurgency against the Sandinistas had stalled. In Guatemala, a military government “became so barbaric in slaughtering its own people” in its ham-fisted resistance to Communist insurgents that Reagan could offer it “only token support.” Overall, he provided economic assistance, covert action, but no combat troops to America’s allies in the region. At Reagan’s insistence, El Salvador did hold national elections, which exposed the Communists to be “lacking in popular support.” Unfortunately, d’Aubuisson’s ARENA party won a majority of the vote; it took an energetic behind-the-scenes efforts by Americans to install a moderate as the new president. Rightist terrorism continued, but at least Duarte agreed to relinquish the presidency, “setting an important precedent for Salvadorean democracy.” For his part, Reagan increasingly saw that “right-wing authoritarians made bad partners,” and that “promoting democracy and human rights with friend and foe alike” was not only more consistent but quite possibly more practical.

He also learned something about Arab politics. The Palestine Liberation Organization had been active across the border from Israel in Lebanon. Reagan’s negotiator, Philip Habib, found that “his challenge was not just to persuade the PLO to leave Lebanon but also to persuade other countries to take them.” As it happened, despite “Arab leaders’ braying support for the PLO,” they well knew that the PLO and its Soviet-allied leader, Yasir Arafat were “troublemakers” whom they had no appetite to admit to their countries. Habib did manage to get the PLO out, encouraging Reagan to attempt a settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute. None of the parties involved liked the Reagan Plan, which would have required Israel to stop its settlement of Judea and Samaria and grant Palestinians “self-government” if not quite sovereignty over parts of the area (thereby angering the Israelis) without requiring Israel to withdraw to the borders it had prior to winning the Six-Day War, “anger[ing] many Arab leaders.” Ensuing negotiations went nowhere. “Reagan never built close personal ties with any Middle Eastern leaders”; there were no Communist regimes in the region, “except destitute South Yemen,” but neither were there any Arab states “receptive to appeals to democracy and free enterprise.” No one was ready to sign a treaty.

Domestically and in Western Europe, Reagan’s proposed arms buildup provoked the ‘nuclear freeze’ movement, which called for the United States and the Soviet Union to halt any additions to their nuclear stockpiles. Since the ‘freeze’ obviously advantaged the Soviets, who possessed a much newer set of nuclear weapons than the U.S. and its allies, the movement was self-defeating, but of course that made it quite appealing to the Soviet Union, which ordered the KGB into action with financial and organizational support of naive and frightened citizens in the democracies. A June demonstration turned out three quarters of a million protestors in New York city, the “largest gathering in the city’s history.” There could of course be nothing similar in the oligarchic regimes of the Soviet bloc. What the protestors “failed to appreciate is that Reagan feared and detested nuclear weapons as much as they did…. It is just that Reagan detested Soviet communism even more.”

Of even more substantial concern for Reagan was the U.S. economy, which was undergoing a major recession. His economic policies were in place, and they would work. But not yet. In the Congressional elections, the opposition Democratic Party gained 26 seats in the House of Representatives, one in the Senate. The Democrats also netted seven governorships. Wishful thinkers on the Left hoped to oust the president himself in the next election cycle, and that was not an unreasonable expectation at the time.

1983

By now, Reagan’s Asia strategy had been set and serious diplomacy in the region could begin. The strategy consisted of five “strategic triangles”— groups of three countries allied on some well-defined basis, whether moral, political, economic, military, or some combination thereof. The first of these consisted of the U.S., Japan, and Australia—commercial republics. The second was primarily military: the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, which at that time was not a republic. It aimed at containing Soviet expansion into the Pacific Rim, the Soviets having been the principal ally of North Korean during the peninsular war. The third was military and to some extent diplomatic; the U.S., Communist China, and Japan needed to coordinate their efforts against the Soviets despite the acknowledged regime rivalry between China and the other partners. The fourth, “the triangle of the Taiwan Strait” (U.S., Communist China, Taiwan) “delivered more headaches than benefits,” as the United States navigated the tensions between Beijing and Taipei while trying to maintain stable relations with both. As assistant secretary of state for East Asia Paul Wolfowitz explained, “The best way to rebalance relations with China [was] to make them realize that Japan [was] number one and [we wouldn’t] give awa anything more on Taiwan.” Finally, “the strategic triangle” of the U.S., China, and the Soviet Union was intended to keep communications among the three rivals open, to prevent a world war and to manage the crises that would likely occur. 

Having survived the ‘nuclear freeze’ movement and the Congressional elections it was intended to influence, Reagan sharpened his critique of the Soviet regime and continued his military buildup. In one of his most famous speeches, delivered in March at the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals, Reagan called the Soviet Union an “empire of evil.” Predictably, that phrase “offended American liberals and outraged the Kremlin.” It also “inspired the victims of Soviet tyranny,” including the imprisoned dissident Anatoly Sharansky, who tapped out the phrase in code to his fellow inmates after reading it in a spluttering Pravda editorial. On the military front, Reagan pushed ahead with his Strategic Defense Initiative—a planned system of anti-missile missiles intended to provide a shield against nuclear attack. This was another instance of the Administration’s quality-over-quantity approach to the arms race, each element of which would “neutralize Soviet weapons capabilities, bedevil Soviet planners, impose costs on the Soviet economy, pressure the Soviet system, and strengthen Reagan and Schultz’s hands at diplomacy.” “Reagan sought to outsmart the Soviets as much as outspend them.” The Soviet shoot-down of a South Korean passenger airliner that had inadvertently violated Soviet air space reminded Americans and the citizens of allied countries that the Moscow regime tended to shoot first, ask questions later.

Resistance to Soviet inroads in Latin America also intensified. Suriname had become the first South American country to align itself with the Soviet Union, following a coup by the Marxist Dési Bouterse in 1980. Although small, Suriname was big enough to hold a base for Soviet surveillance aircraft and, in the words, of National Security Advisor Clark, “the potential to control the Southern Caribbean and endanger shipping lanes.” Wary of military intervention in view of the likelihood of “regional backlash,” Reagan persuaded Brazil to pressure Suriname to back away from the Soviets and their Cuban allies. 

Fears of Latin American reaction did not deter Reagan from ordering the invasion of Grenada, an island country off the Venezuelan coast, in October. Grenada had become independent from the British Empire nine years earlier, remaining in the Commonwealth. Its Marxist prime minister, Maurice Bishop, had formally maintained a non-aligned position in the Cold War, although in fact he allied with Cuba after his New Jewel Movement ousted a corrupt predecessor. Bishop resisted pressure from hardliners in his party to align openly with the Soviet bloc, earning him overthrow and murder. His government was building an airport capable of accommodating Soviet aircraft at the time of the intra-Communist coup. The American invasion left Queen Elizabeth II unamused and infuriated Prime Minister Thatcher, although she supported it publicly. “The invasion unearthed a hive of Soviet bloc personnel active on Grenada, including 800 Cuban troops, 49 Soviet advisors, 15 North Koreans, 10 East Germans, 17 Libyans (the tyrant Muhammar Quaddafy aligned with Moscow), and 3 Bulgarians. Captured documents confirmed that the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea “had embarked on major military assistance programs to Grenada.” Almost immediately following the invasion and removal of the Communist regime, the U.S. agreed to install a government headed by the British governor-general; “an election restored full democracy the next year.” This was “America’s first use of ground troops in combat since Vietnam and the first fighting by the all-volunteer force since the end of the draft in 1973.” Domestic critics of the American military took note. So did foreigners. The successful invasion also counterbalanced the shock of the terrorist attack on a Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon, which had occurred only a few days earlier. They had been inserted after the Israeli withdrawal and were intended to guard the country against renewed sectarian violence, a mission that obviously had proved too much for such a slender force. The perpetrators of that assault were members of a then-shadowy group called Islamic Jihad, later renamed Hezbollah.

1984

By this re-election year, the American economy had recovered from the recession without sparking any serious inflation. Reagan was heading for a landslide victory at the polls, the only lingering question being his mental status which, his enemies persisted in claiming, at best verged on senility. Both they and the foreign statesman with whom he dealt eventually discovered otherwise. 

Early in the year, Secretary of State Schultz met with his counterpart, the old Soviet war horse Andrei Gromyko, whom he described as “a man of dignity and intelligence” who “believed in Marxist dogma he preached,” including the assurance that world peace was achievable as soon as “all the world turned communist.” Schultz added, “That was clearly not happening.” Reagan followed up on this diplomatic outreach without deflecting his administration from the military buildup and political pressure that promised to make his diplomacy effective. Delay occurred when Andropov died his unregretted death, replaced by Konstantin Chernenko. When Vice President George H. W. Bush met with him, he came away with the false impression that the United States could make progress in arms negotiations. But Chernenko turned out to be still another Party hack. The CIA’s director, William Casey, had a more realistic assessment, predicting that Chernenko would be the last Stalinist-era Party Chairman, and that subsequent chairmen would be less hidebound. Meanwhile, the KGB did its best to interfere with the American elections and failed. False claims included the lie that the United States had developed the AIDs virus. 

While the Kremlin remained mired in its reality-skewing Marxist distortions, Reagan saw the enemy regime quite clearly. He told Chancellor Kohl, “The Soviets seem to have created an aristocracy such as the one they overthrew.” He elaborated in a conversation with British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe: “The Soviets have created their own aristocracy, and are primarily interested in maintaining the power of that aristocracy.” For a man often judged to be in his dotage, he remained unusually clear-headed.

Looking to the future, Howe’s boss, Prime Minister Thatcher, met with Mikhail Gorbachev, widely and rightly expected to be the Party Chairman in waiting. “I certainly found him a man one could do business with.” Gorbachev focused his diplomatic attack on the planned SDI system, which Thatcher also opposed, privately. Gorbachev “detected [this] as an alliance rift that he might exploit.” When she took her doubts to Reagan, however, he remained firm, insisting “that SDI would work and that it was central to his dream of escaping the insanity of mutual assured destruction.” As Schultz put it, “We may be moving from…mutually assured destruction to mutually assured defense.” A CIA analysis concluded that the Soviet Union simply could not afford to “compete successfully” with the United States in this are because they were a long way from developing the high-grade computers necessary to operate such a complex system.

Central America saw advances in El Salvador, setback in Nicaragua. Vice President Bush was detailed to deliver “a blunt message” to the military: “immediately cease terrorism, extrajudicial killing, and other death squad activity, or Reagan would terminate all American aid.” The officers capitulated. The administration successfully to pressure Congress, he delivered a televised address to the American people, reporting the $4.9 billion in aid to Cuba and Nicaragua from other members of the Soviet bloc. This would have worked, except that a CIA attempt to mine the harbor at Corinto and other port cities resulted in damage to ships from friendly countries. “Congress immediately passed a law forbidding any future mining operations, and House Majority [James] Wright led ten congressional Democrats in writing a fawning letter to Ortega” criticizing “those responsible for supporting violence against your government.” On top of that, Congress banned the use of U.S. funds to the Contras, and Reagan needed to abandon “any notions of overthrowing the Sandinista government.” He turned instead to a plan for a “negotiated settlement that would wean Managua from the Soviet and Cuban orbit,” enhancing an already existing lineup of Latin American countries which aimed at promoting democracy there. Some elements of his administration refused to relinquish efforts to arrange military aid. The new National Security Adviser Robert “Bud” McFarlane approached Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, to provide aid to the Contras—the “small first step toward what would become the biggest scandal of Reagan’s presidency,” the ‘Iran-Contra Affair,’ which was implemented and exposed in Reagan’s second term.

The main initiative in Asia was Reagan’s visit to China in April. By this time, both countries had “shed the illusory hopes each had cultivated in the previous decade, whether Beijing’s dream that the United States would jettison Taiwan entirely, or Washington’s ambition that a United States-China partnership would by itself transform the region.” While Chinese Party Chairman Deng Xiaoping had introduced some economic liberalization to the regime, this was nothing more ambitious than Lenin’s efforts in 1920s Russia: an attempt to bring in ‘capitalist’ investments to prop up the existing regime. Reagan remained focused on stepping on the paws of the Soviet bear, agreeing to increased “cooperation between the two governments on intelligence, arms sales, and trade” while remaining more closely allied with Japan. 

In the Middle East, Reagan cut America’s losses in Lebanon. Pope John Paul II regretted the withdrawal of the Marines to ships offshore Beirut, correctly expecting “an orgy of bloodletting” against Maronite Christians. The problem was that the American strategy had depended upon making the Lebanese army into a solid fighting force capable of protecting the country. But the army was hopelessly riven by the same factions that plagued the nation as a whole. Absent a massive influx of American and allied forces, nothing could be done; such an effort being out of the question, nothing was done and Lebanon descended into the misery it has suffered every decade since then.

In the ongoing war between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Iranian mullah regime, Reagan continued to back the tyrant Hussein—reluctantly, preferring a stalemate. His strategic purpose in the region was to keep “other hostile powers out of the region while preserving the stable energy supplies on which the United States and its allies depended.” This straightforward approach was complicated by the fact that “the gulf monarchies” that produced the oil wanted to keep U. S. aid secret, lest they inflame the passions of the more radical Muslims in the region, “while NATO members and Japan wanted the benefits of secure oil without paying the costs.” As elsewhere, “allies were hard to live with but harder to live without.”