Max Boot: The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

 

Max Boot counts 180 landings U.S. Marine landings between 1800 and 1934, with “the army and navy add[ing] a few small-scale engagements of their own.” In victory or defeat, “most of these campaigns were fought by a relatively small number of professional soldiers pursuing limited objectives with limited means,” sometimes punitive, sometimes protective, sometimes pacifying, sometimes profiteering, and at times a combination of two or more of these objectives. In America’s first century, in its overseas conflicts the United States often worked as “a junior constable” for Britain, “the world’s policeman,” defending “freedom of the seas and open markets in China, Japan, and elsewhere,” occasionally targeting the slave trade. In the next half-century, up to the Second World War, America began to rival Britain for its dominance of the seas, remaining active in Asia but also “establish[ing] itself as a hegemon” in Latin America—as effectively announced by President Theodore Roosevelt, when he issued his “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting a right to foreclose any European intervention in the New World if a country proved delinquent in its debt payments to Old World governments or banks. America made that policy credible in the Spanish-American War, in which it acquired Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, the Philippines, and the Virgin Islands and turned Cuba into an American protectorate. This policy included regime change in Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic during the Wilson Administration. During and after the Second World War, America’s status as the world’s preeminent military power gave it responsibilities throughout the world, typically in opposition to the predominant tyrannies of the time—first, the Axis Powers, then the several Communist regimes, including the members of the Warsaw Pact. The World War was of course no small one, the Cold War no short one, but most of the wars during that time were short and, except for the war in Vietnam, not prolonged.

The first hundred years after the Constitution was ratified saw small overseas wars aimed, typically, at protecting the commercial interests of the new commercial republic. That is, these wars derived primarily from the character of the regime. Boot begins with the Barbary Wars, fought between 1801 and 1805, then again in 1815. The enemies were Morocco, ruled by the Alawite Dynasty, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis, which were largely self-governing entities within the Ottoman Empire. These governments preferred not to tax their merchants, seeking revenues by capturing ships sailing in the Mediterranean, taking the cargo and selling the captives into slavery or ransoming them. Initially, the United States preferred to bribe the Barbary states into leaving its ships alone (John Adams calculated that this was cheaper than building a navy, inasmuch as “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever”). Congress inclined to agree with Adams, but “this policy of appeasement, far from sating the demands of the North African rulers, only whetted their appetite for more.” Thomas Jefferson took the bellicose view, asserting “that nothing will stop the eternal increase of demands from these pirates but the presence of an armed force, and it will be more economical and more honorable to use the same means at once for suppressing the insolencies.” Although Congress refused to declare war, it did authorize the president to “use all necessary force to protect American shipping overseas.” 

Army officer and Consul General to Tunis William Eaton had come to the same conclusion. The pasha had come to power by murdering his predecessor, his older brother; Eaton met with a younger brother of the despot, planning a coup d’état. This made Eaton unwelcome to the Tunisian government, but upon his return to Washington the Jefferson Administration backed his strategy—the “first of many times that an American president would plot to overthrow a foreign government.” As Jefferson explained to his Secretary of State, James Madison, “although it does not accord with the general sentiments of views of the United States to intermeddle in the domestic contests of other countries, it cannot be unfair, in the prosecution of a just war, or the accomplishment of a reasonable peace, to turn to their advantage, the enmity and pretensions of others against a common foe.”

Eaton set up a joint base of operations in Egypt, from which he led an expeditionary force of about 600. They took the city of Derna, only to learn that Jefferson’s special envoy, Tobias Lear, had negotiated a peace treaty with the regnant pasha, who had been alarmed at American battlefield success. “Eaton boiled over with anger at what he viewed as a sellout of his men and America’s allies,” but could do nothing. 

Hostilities resumed in 1815, as Algiers sided with Britain in the War of 1812. This time, Commodore Stephen Decatur won favorable terms from the Barbary states after several successful naval skirmishes. “The naval operations had established an important principle—freedom of the seas—and helped end for all time the threat to commercial shipping from the [Barbary] corsairs,” although the decisive act occurred when France finally took control of Algiers, adding it to its empire in 1830. “Tripoli would not become a threat to international order again until the 1970s,” when it was ruled by the notorious and now late Muammar Gadhafi.

In subsequent decades, “even if the U.S. eschewed overseas colonialism” during the Europeans’ ‘scramble for empire,’ “that hardly means the country was isolationist, as the popular myth has it”; “where commercial interests advanced, armed forces were seldom far behind,” as “the flag usually follows trade, not the other way around.” Indeed, “throughout the nineteenth century, American influence kept expanding abroad, especially in the Pacific and Caribbean.” While the army fought the Indians in North America, the navy and the very small Marine Corps defended the commercial shipping. The composition of the navy was sharply divided between the officers, culled from the gentry class—many of them “imperious, hot-blooded, quick to take offense, and above all brave, sometimes suicidally so”—and the enlisted men—for the most part uneducated and impoverished, “the dregs of the waterfront,” usually foreign-born and non-citizens, fighting alongside black freemen. The enlisted men “would not be missed overmuch if a few died in action.” The Marines acted as guards to protect the aristocrats on the upper deck from an incursion from “the lower deck rabble.” 

Their missions included chasing pirates in the Caribbean in the 1820s and off Sumatra in the early 1830s. Under orders from the Jackson Administration, the navy also bombarded Argentinian forces on the Falkland Islands, where American seal-hunting vessels had been seized. After Congress outlawed slave importation in 1807, the navy played a relatively minor role in assisting the British Royal Navy in its interception of slavers who operated out of west Africa, although the Southerners who often ran the Department of the Navy kept such activities to a minimum. The navy also gave minor assistance to Britain in its successful opening of Chinese ports to trade. “No matter how tiny, the navy had little trouble overawing various pirates and tribesmen with its vastly superior technology and training.” As a result, U. S. exports multiplied more than sixteen-fold between 1789 and 1860. This “empire of the seas,” as Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Henry Seward called it, was not the overseas empire of Britain, and so could be maintained at vastly smaller cost.

Americans rolled back that empire after the Civil War, preferring to have their manufactures and farm produce shipped under foreign flags. The second half of the century saw a small and futile action intended to open Korea to American trade and nearly twenty expeditions in Central and South America, usually as a response to a revolution that threatened U.S. diplomats and merchants. The year 1885 saw a more serious conflict, when President Cleveland sent troops to Panama in order to defend the Panama Railroad from a local strongman. In general, by the 1880s, the U.S. navy was “a joke” compared to the Europeans, ranking twelfth in the world in number of ships—behind the likes of Turkey (the ‘Sick Man of Europe’) and Sweden. But in 1890, Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, “a work that would define the age.” Mahan urged his fellow countrymen to build a real navy, one that could match the European powers. Theodore Roosevelt built his career in national politics on that, and he had no shortage of allies in Congress. “The result was the first major peacetime arms buildup in the nation’s history, a buildup that gave America a navy capable of sinking the Spanish fleet in 1898.” And, given the steam-powered ships’ need for fuel, America needed to acquire not an overseas empire but secure overseas coaling stations. Many attempts to purchase land for that purpose failed, but the mid-1890s Hawaii had been taken, after American residents overthrew the native ruler, and by 1899 the United States had secured a portion of Samoa in an agreement reached with Britain and Germany. 

Boot marks America’s ascendency to “great power” status by its response to the 1900 Boxer Uprising in China. The so-called Boxers (called that in recognition of their knowledge of martial arts), more properly called the I-ho ch’üan or “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” detested the incursions of modernizing Western influences, which included Christian missionaries. They made the mistake of threatening foreign embassies, attracting the military attention of Britain, the United States, Germany, Russia, and Japan. For their part, the invading forces behaved badly, looting Beijing extensively and, in some cases raping and murdering Chinese women. The Germans were especially ruthless, having been ordered by Kaiser Wilhelm II to act “just as the Huns a thousand years ago” had done. By 1912, the monarchic regime collapsed and China became a republic. America had had cooperated in an important overseas land operation with other major powers for the first time. 

Simultaneously, America fought against guerrillas in the Philippines, where the people were no more delighted with American rule than they had been under the rule of Spain. Americans didn’t actually want to rule the country, preferring to establish a naval base at Manila as a counterpart to the British base at Hong Kong. A base at Manila would deter German and Japanese ambitions there. This policy was opposed by a distinguished group of American anti-imperialists which included former president Cleveland, frequent presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, labor union leader Samuel Gompers, the philosopher William James, the social worker Jane Addams, and Mark Twain. In the war itself, the disorganized and poorly-armed Filipinos were no match for American troops, but disease and heat exhaustion often overmatched the Americans. If Napoleon’s army had foundered against Russia’s ‘General Winter,’ Americans faced ‘General Tropics.’ Nonetheless, Americans rallied behind the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket and the United States Supreme Court’s decision in the Insular Cases, holding that the United States need not grant citizenship to conquered peoples reassured those who feared economic competition from low-wage workers. Colonial governor William Howard Taft and General Arthur McArthur oversaw the construction of schools, vaccination programs, sanitation, and worked to stand Filipinos up for eventual self-government by establishing courts with Filipino judges, and introducing municipal elections. Along with these policies of “attraction,” McArthur did not neglect to pursue military action, called “chastisement,” against the insurgents, some of them harsh—notably, the concentration camps in southern Luzon, where 11,000 Filipinos died of disease and malnutrition. By July 1902, President Roosevelt could declare victory, although the Muslim Moros on the islands of Mindanao and Jolo held out and indeed continue to menace foreigners and non-Muslim Filipinos alike, to this day. In 1907, Filipinos established the first national legislature in Asia; in 1935, the Philippines achieved full control of its domestic policies, and in 1946 it was granted full independence. “Among the institutions bequeathed to the Filipinos by the Americans were public schools, a free press, an independent judiciary, a modern bureaucracy, democratic government, and separation of church and state. Unlike the Dutch in the East Indies, the British in Malaya, or the French in Indochina, the Americans left virtually no legacy of economic exploitation; Congress was so concerned about protecting the Filipinos that it barred large landholdings by American individuals or corporations.” Pacification at the turn of the century had come at the expense of more than 4,200 Americans and 16,000 Filipinos killed, along with 200,000 civilian dead, “victims of disease and famine and the cruelties of both sides.” But the policy of attraction and chastisement worked, the Philippines eventually achieved independence, and America retained its naval base at Manila Bay. One key element of strategy, forgotten by the time America intervened in the war against the Vietnamese Communists, was the practice of placing army garrisons in the countryside, where they could live among the people, reduce civilian assistance to the guerrillas, and become fully familiar with the lay of the land. Boot observes that “the army’s success may be ascribed in some degree to the invaluable experience its top commanders had gained in fighting Indians” in the American West—the “finest irregular warriors in the world.” Twenty-six of the thirty American generals who sought in the Philippines from 1898 to 1902 had previous fought in the Indian Wars. And finally, the U. S. Navy blockaded the Philippines, preventing the insurgents from receiving foreign assistance and from moving men and supplies easily along the extensive coastline. And, it might be added, there was no equivalent of North Vietnam, backed by the equivalent of the Soviet Union.

In the years between the Spanish-American War and World War One, the United States established a true Pax Americana in the New World. “No longer would U.S. sailors and marines land for a few days at a tie to quell a riot” that threatened American lives and property; “now they would stay longer to manage the internal politics of nations.” In Cuba, the American military occupation was brief, with the stipulation that Americans would enjoy long-term leases on naval bases and cede to Americans the right “to intervene at any time to protect life, liberty, and property.” “Havana went along because it had no choice” in becoming an American protectorate. In Panama, the United States formally recognized the Republic of Panama, which regime it had helped Panamanian revolutionaries to install; in return, the new regime granted America sovereignty over the Panama Canal, then under construction, and lands surrounding it. The Canal Zone was potentially vulnerable to foreign attack, but only potentially, since “by 1906 the U.S. Navy was big enough to ensure that no other power would contest control of its own backyard”—second only to Britain, which by now was itself a commercial republic moving into alignment with America against Wilhelmine Germany. Such power was indeed necessary, as German naval officers, commanding a fleet as big as America’s had war plans for “seizing either Puerto Rico or Cuba as a staging area for an attack on the East Coast of the United States.” And of course, during the world war German submarines attacked American shipping in the Atlantic and schemed to ally with Mexico. When the Panamanian tyrant José Santos Zelaya allied with Germany and Japan, hoping to get support for the construction of a rival Central American canal, and schemed to bring the five Central American republics under his rule (he succeeded in overthrowing the government of Honduras), the United States pressured him out of the country in 1909, having found a friendlier replacement. 

During and after the First World War, Haiti became a problem for Washington. Between 1843 and 1915, the island had seen 102 civil wars, coups d’état, and other revolts. Haiti was ruled by a small, educated minority of mulattos; Catholic and French-speaking, “they regarded themselves as a race apart from, and superior to, the Creole-speaking, voodoo-practicing, darker-skinned Haitian masses.” If this ruling class split, one side would select a presidential candidate, give him a payroll supplied by resident German merchants (who controlled 80% of foreign trade), who would then watch as their man recruited soldiers of fortune and bandits, who would march to the capital and seize control, driving the sitting president into exile. Everyone profited: the merchants would be repaid, with interest; the soldiers would be paid for their trouble, in part with the loot they seized on the way to Port-au-Prince; the exiled president would “tak[e] a portion of the treasury with him,” easing the indignity of his ouster. That is, coups served more or less the same function as elections do in less tumultuous regimes. None of this worried Americans.

What made the revolution of July 1915 different was the sitting president’s refusal to leave quietly, as per custom, the subsequent bloodletting (200 members of the mulatto elite were arrested, most of them murdered by the police chief), and the concern that Germany might intervene and establish a naval base from which they could prosecute their war aims and interfere with ship traffic to and from the Panama Canal. The Wilson Administration’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, wrote that the Marines were ordered to seize control of the island “to terminate the appalling conditions of anarchy, savagery, and oppression which had been prevalent in Haiti for decades” and “to forestall any attempt by a foreign power to obtain a foothold on the territory of an American nation.” The policy had nothing to do with ‘Dollar Diplomacy,’ as Leftist writers often allege, because the minor U.S. business interests in Haiti were never threatened. No general rebellion followed the American occupation because American rule was better for Haitians than mulatto rule had been. Boot notes that Napoleon had failed in his attempt to quell the Haitian revolt of 1802 because he “had been trying to reimpose slavery and had fought a campaign of extermination, whereas, by Haitian standards at least, U.S. tactics were restrained and U.S. rule quite mild” and also because the French had not understood how to counter yellow fever, which “decimated” their troops. The Marines withdrew nine years later, with an elected government in place; the Roosevelt Administration ended U.S. political control ten years after that. The occupation had succeeded: it prevented German military occupation, and U.S. administrators oversaw the construction of 1,000 miles of roads, 210 major bridges, nine major airfields, 82 miles of irrigation canals, a substantial telephone network and a network of medical care. Americans did not succeed in “plant[ing] constitutional government” there, finding that “it would not take root.” FDR nonetheless listened to hand-wringing complaints about American ‘imperialism” and began his “Good Neighbor” policy of refusing to intervene, which meant that Haiti was misruled by tyrants for the next thirty years. “The only thing more unsavory than U.S. intervention, it turned out, was U.S. nonintervention.” In 1994, the Clinton Administration ended the FDR policy by sending in the Marines to reinstall a duly elected Haitian president who had been ousted by a coup that that had imposed a tyranny. Since then, Haiti has seen constitutional government.

Also during the First World War, the Wilson Administration undertook an invasion of Mexico. The wealthy Francisco Madero had organized revolutionary forces against the tyrant Porfirio Diaz in 1910; a Durango bandit, whose nom de guerre was Pancho Villa, was recruited to lead his forces. Three years later, Madero was in turn overthrown, replaced by General Victoriano Huerta; U.S. President William Howard Taft backed Huerta but his successor, Woodrow Wilson, did not, deeming it “a government of butchers.” Huerta fled to Spain in 1914. Boot identifies three major forces who rebelled against Huerta: “dispossessed peasants in southern Mexico led by Emiliano Zapata”; middle- and upper-class “progressives,” moderates who wanted to end oligarchic rule and to establish a constitutional republic; and Villa’s forces in northern Mexico, which consisted of “poor farmers, miners, cowboys, and Indians” who wanted land reform. Pancho allied with a “new leader of the revolution, Venustiano Carranza, governor of a northern state, Coahuila and founder of the Constitutionalist Party. Villa defeated the Huerta forces in the state of Chihuahua and ran it himself, expropriating big landowners and giving the proceeds to his followers. He left middle-class property owners unmolested. After Huerta departed, “the revolutionaries fell out among themselves setting the stage for the greatest bloodletting of the entire civil war, with Zapata and Villa allying against Carranza. Villa’s side was crushed. During the struggle, Wilson had ordered an American military intervention on the Constitutionalist side, occupying Veracruz. Wilson, who wanted stability in the country, embargoed arms shipments to the anti-Carrancista forces and “extended de facto recognition to the Carranza government” in October 1915. In response, Villa ordered a series of cross-border raids, most of them in Texas. This provoked Wilson to launch the Punitive Expedition in northern Mexico, with strict orders to the soldiers to refrain from looting; officers paid Mexicans for provisions, much to the amazement of the Mexicans. The Americans failed to capture Villa, succeeding only in temporarily scattering his forces. Eventually, it was the Constitutionalist forces that defeated him, in 1920; he was assassinated by government operatives in 1923. In ten years of civil war, some one million Mexicans had died. General John Pershing’s expeditionary force had gain military experience that proved valuable when the United States fought in the First World War, but while the Veracruz seizure had helped the Constitutionalists, the later Punitive Expedition had accomplished nothing lasting.

In the aftermath of the Great War, Wilson joined with allies Britain and France to intervene against the newly formed Soviet Union. Wilson had been buoyed by reports of the March 1917 Russian Revolution against the czarist regime (Russia has “always been in fact democratic at heart,” he exulted, without evidence), then dismayed by the Bolshevik Revolution of November. The Allies were incensed with the separate peace the Bolsheviks signed with Germany, ceding the Baltics, Ukraine, and southern Russia to Germany, enabling the enemy to “transfer a million soldiers to throw against their exhausted amies on the Western Front.” This prompted the British to intervene, sending a small group of Royal Marines to the port city of Murmansk. Wilson hesitated to comply with the British request for reinforcements but finally agreed in order to protect the Czechoslovak Legion, some 70,000 defectors from Austria-Hungary who had volunteered to fight with the Allies when the czarist regime was still in power. Now that the Soviets had taken Russia out of the war, the legionnaires intended to get over to the Western Front; they couldn’t use any of the blockaded western ports, so they began to march across Siberia to Vladivostok on the Pacific, from which port they would sail for France. The Bolsheviks initially approved this mission but, fearing an alliance between the legionnaires and the pro-czarist elements in the Russian army, demanded that they disarm. When the Czechs refused to do so, fighting broke out and “the Allies, including the U.S., felt a moral responsibility to safeguard the legion.” 

The American forces were led by Major General William S. Graves, who “interpreted his vague orders to mean that his men should remain neutral in the Russian Civil War” and “refused to engage in an offensive against the Bolsheviks, or event to confiscate weapons from suspected Communists.” Disgusted by atrocities committed by the anti-Communist “Whites,” he evidently knew nothing of worse atrocities committed by the “Reds.” Meanwhile, another segment of the U.S. Army did fight the Communists, although its efforts were soon curtailed by the characteristically brutal Russian winter. At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, President Wilson and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George agreed to withdraw the troops, as “they did not think foreigners could suppress a revolution, even though Britain and American had successfully suppressed revolutions from India to the Philippines.” They assumed, without much warrant, that the Bolsheviks must be enjoying the support of the Russian people. “It did not occur to them that the Communists’ success might be due, as it largely was, to purely military factors—the Reds had better and more unified leadership, more materiel and men, and greater willingness to brutalize the population into acquiescence than the Whites did,” and that, moreover, “although many of the White leaders were hardly democrats, the Reds were imposing upon the Russian people a regime that would make Ivan the Terrible’s look almost benign by comparison.” Despite Winston Churchill’s vehement protestations to the contrary, Lloyd George imagined that “Bolsheviks would not wish to maintain an army, as their creed was fundamentally anti-militarist.” In the United States, the Senate nearly passed a resolution to recall the troops; the Wilson Administration finally gave in, in the early weeks of 1920. Boot estimates that with two or three divisions (i.e., 24,000 to 36,000 troops), the Allies would have tipped the scales against the Bolsheviks, likely saving the millions of lives lost to Communist in the subsequent decades of the twentieth century.

A few years later, the Coolidge and Hoover administrations fought a small war closer to home. Nicaragua was still occupied by a 100-man contingent of Marines. In 1924, a coalition government of Liberal and Conservative party members was elected, only to be overthrown by the Conservative Emiliano Chamorro. The United States didn’t recognize the new regime, and civil war broke out in May 1926. Mexico backed the rebels, while the United States successfully supported the election of Adolfo Diaz, that November. As a U.S.-brokered peace treaty between the new government and the Liberal Party rebels was not accepted by one Liberal commander: Augusto Sandinò, an anti-American nationalist backed by Mexico and the Soviet Union. Sandinò demanded a new election; Washington demurred. Although he accepted Communist support, he was not himself a Communist; he knew what he wanted—American withdrawal from Nicaragua and from Latin America generally—but “he lacked a well-thought-out political agenda” beyond that. The war ended when newly-elected President Roosevelt withdrew American troops in 1933; Sandinò was arrested and executed and the Sandinistas crushed in the following year. Although Communists and their dupes ever after charged the Roosevelt Administration with complicity in these actions, Boot reports that “the evidence does not support this contention.” The coup organized by a former war minister, Anastasio Somoza, who established a tyranny, found his opportunity only after the Marines left. “Dictatorship was indigenous; democracy was a foreign transplant that did not take, in part because America would not stick around long enough to cultivate it.”

Prior to the Second World War, the Marines issued The Small Wars Manual, summarizing lessons learned in such conflicts. The Manual defined the American understanding of small wars as “operations undertaken under executive authority”—that it, without a declaration of war by Congress [1]—wherein “military force is combined with diplomatic pressure in the internal or external affairs of another state whose government is unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such interests as are determined by the foreign policy of our Nation.” The army is better adapted to fighting big wars, the Marines for small wars. Big wars aim at “the defeat and destruction of the hostile forces,” but American military forces in small wars aim “to establish and maintain law and order by supporting or replacing the civil government in countries or areas in which the interests of the United States have been placed in jeopardy.” For that reason, “hatred of the enemy,” encouraged during the Great War and soon to be revived during World War II, should be eschewed; “sympathy and kindness should be the keynote to our relationship with the mass of the population,” since the enemy is a much smaller group: either revolutionary insurgents or a bad regime. When undertaking such a war, the military must understand that “in small wars no defined battle front exists and the theater of operations may be the whole length and breadth of the land,” in which soldiers will face enemies who “will suddenly become innocent peasant workers when it suits their fancy and convenience.” They will know the countryside better than Americans do. “It will be difficult and hazardous to wage war successfully under such circumstances”; consequently, the war may be long and the outcome unclear. Perhaps in recognition of these difficulties, in the 1950s President Eisenhower downplayed the use of small wars in countering Communist military threats, preferring to follow a policy of escalation, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons, “an area,” Boot remarks, “in which the U.S. then had a preponderance of power.”

But this policy of escalation simply did not fit all military circumstances, as American strategists failed to see when they planned the war in Vietnam. From 1959 to 1963, American forces helped to defend non-Communist South Vietnam from the Communist regime in the north. These forces were called “advisers,” a term left over from American policy in the aftermath of previous small wars, when the Marines trained and reinforced police forces, emphasizing “internal defense.” “In Vietnam, by contrast, U.S. advisers organized a miniature version of their own armed forces complete with heavy armor, artillery, air force, navy, marines, rangers” in preparation for an invasion from the north, as had been seen in Korea. But instead of fighting such a conventional war, the North Vietnamese supported a guerrilla war. “American advisers did not prepare the South Vietnamese soldiers for this challenge.” Moreover, unlike Korea, the South Vietnamese military was not under the command of American officers. And again unlike Korea, the Johnson Administration refused to attack targets in North Vietnam, notably the capital city of Hanoi, the major harbor of Haiphong, supply routes from China, and the Red River dikes; “U.S. warplanes in the Korean War had destroyed North Korea’s dike system, with devastating results.” The Communists “rightly” regarded the frequent pauses in the limited bombing campaign as “a sign of the Johnson administration’s weakness and irresolution.” Johnson wanted no escalation of the war because he feared Chinese intervention (again, as in Korea), preferring to invest in his domestic ‘War on Poverty.’ And so, the problem was that Americans stuck themselves in between a big-war strategy and a small-war strategy. “Thus the really hard, vital work of keeping the Vietcong out of the South’s population centers was left for the most part to the ill-equipped, ill-trained South Vietnamese militia, who did not even have access to modern rifles.”

No better strategy could have been conceived to hand the advantage to the enemy. Rather than meet American military strength, North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap took up Chairman Mao’s strategy of a “people’s war”; propagandize the peasants in order to establish “a protective belt of sympathizers willing to supply food, recruits, and information”; fight “a protracted guerrilla struggle” aiming in part to kill not just the foreigners but as many pro-American, anti-Communist Vietnamese as possible; and finally, having weakened the enemy, form conventional armies “that, in conjunction with a general popular uprising, will finish off the enemy” and change the regime into a ‘people’s republic.’ The Vietcong—the South Vietnamese Communist guerrillas—needed only minimal supplies from the North, simply taking supplies and manpower from the peasants, whether the peasants were collaborators or not. Although North Vietnamese troops were infiltrating South Vietnam in the mid-1960s, they did not become the preponderant force there until 1968, and even then, they engaged in guerrilla-style “hit-and-run tactics.” 

One Marine commander, Major General Victor H. Krulak, advocated a strategy based on the small-war lessons he had learned from his commanding officers as a young Marine in the 1930s. What he called a “spreading inkblot” strategy would have “expand[ed] American control slowly from the seacoast by pacifying one hamlet after another, as the U.S. had done in the Philippines six decades earlier.” Since eighty percent of South Vietnamese lived in ten percent of the country, the aim would have been to prevent the Vietcong from infiltrating the population centers by providing security for the villagers. There was no point in attempting to search for enemy forces in the jungles, where they could hide successfully, “but if the U.S. could cut them off from the civilian population, they would wither away,” separated from their sources of supply and recruitment. Krulak’s recommendation did not prevail, and while “U.S. soldiers never lost a battle…neither did they manage to pin down enough of the enemy so that a victory meant something.” They were reacting to enemy attacks, attacks launched when the enemy chose to attack. And the American soldiers had no training in counterinsurgency; once ‘in country,’ they learned soon enough, but in the conscript army of that time they were quickly rotated out and replaced by new and inexperienced men. Meanwhile, the famous “hearts and minds” campaign by a variety of nonmilitary American agencies lacked a serious military component. The military side of American operations—called “search-and-destroy”—and the civilian side—called “pacification”—were disjunct. The main exception to this policy was the Combined Action Program, in which Marine rifle squads were paired with South Vietnam Popular Forces militia (“about 30 men from the local community”) who successfully took and held villages, with much lower casualties than the search-and-destroy missions. But at its peak, fewer than 2,500 Marines participated in the program.

In terms of politics, General William Westmoreland did not understand the character of the Communist regime. Both the Soviet Union and Communist China had proved themselves capable of absorbing enormous losses, both in war and in peacetime ‘purges.’ Similarly, “North Vietnam was ruled by a dictatorship impervious to the pressure of popular opinion,” its leaders “tolerat[ing] staggering causalities with equanimity”: 1.1. million dead, 300,000 missing from a population of 20 million. That is, the Vietnamese civil war saw many more times the number of casualties than the Union did in the American civil war. And in Vietnam, American casualties of 58,000—comparable, Boot observes, to the annual number of traffic deaths, at that time—turned Americans against the war. By 1968, North Vietnam’s New Year offensive, violating a truce arranged for the holiday, resulted in 50,000 Communist dead against 2,000 Americans, was reported as a serious American setback in the American news media. President Johnson quickly announced that he would not seek re-election.

At this, the Army generals finally changed toward a pacification strategy, Operation Phoenix, which was highly effective. On the civilian side, South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu ordained land reform, giving farmers legal title to the fields they worked—a powerful incentive against Communist propaganda and a reason to defend local territories against would-be expropriators. After one last failed offensive in March 1972, the Communists came to the bargaining table with the Nixon administration. After the agreement, South Vietnam couldn’t defend itself any more than West Germany could have done after the Second World War or South Korea could have done after that war. In the latter two cases, however, American troops stayed in place. In 1975, Congress cut aid to South Vietnam. The North took that as a signal to strike, this time successfully. 

The lessons American politicians learned from the Vietnam War were, first, to replace conscripts with professional soldiers and, second, to prefer “sanitized, high-tech warfare” to the commitment of ground troops. This tends to miss the point: while Americans of course want no casualties of any kind, their main concern is victory—that soldiers “not die ‘in vain.'” The later interventions in Lebanon and Somalia confirm this. As to regime change, “the American track record of imposing liberal, democratic regimes by force is mixed”: successful in the Philippines, Japan, Germany, and Italy, not so in Russia, Nicaragua, Haiti, or (later) Afghanistan. Boot does not overlook the costs of non-intervention and short-term intervention, notably in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. He hopes that the United Nations might sanction international efforts to restore governance in failed states—typically, a wan hope. This notwithstanding, “American should not be afraid to fight ‘the savage wars of peace’ if necessary to enlarge the ’empire of liberty.’ It has done it before.”

 

Note

1. “Declarations of war—voted against Britain in 1812, Mexico in 1846, Spain in 1898, the Central Powers in 1917, the Axis in 1941—were the exception, not the norm” throughout American history.

 

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.”