William Imboden: The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. Chapters 1-9. New York: Dutton, 2022.
To call President Ronald Reagan a “Peacemaker” during his terms in office would have surprised, indeed outraged, many Americans on the Left, who called him a dangerous warmonger. One of their reasons for doing so was his deployment of the “Peacekeeper,” his name for the MX nuclear missile, a land-based missile equipped with multiple warheads, capable of striking the Soviet Union from the continental United States. Imboden shows how the “Peacekeeper,” along with other weapons built during Reagan’s tenure, served the purposes of a sincere and effective “Peacemaker”—one who actually abhorred the prospect of nuclear war and made every effort to prevent it from happening. He pursued “peace through strength.”
Imboden gives a chronological account of the last decade of the Cold War. Reagan had a knack for making things look easy. To the extent possible, he actually made surviving a murder attempt look easy. But neither that nor anything else about those years came easily, and a narration of the sequence of events proves an excellent way to show how difficult it all was, how much practical intelligence it took to implement Reagan’s strategy, which he famously described as “We win, they lose.” American victory “was not geopolitically foreordained.”
He begins with an overall account of that strategy, which consisted of “eight pillars”: “restoring the American economy as a foundation of national strength and morale”; “delegitimizing Communism as a system of government”; “building up and modernizing America’s military”; “supporting anticommunist insurgencies around the world”; “making ‘mutual assured destruction’ (MAD) obsolete through the Strategic Defense Initiative”; “promoting human rights and freedom around the world, especially in the Soviet bloc”; “pressuring the Soviet system into producing a reformist leader with whom Reagan could negotiate”; “reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world—with the hope of abolishing nuclear weapons entirely.” In building these pillars, he sought the assistance of allies, who were not always easy to bring along, although in the end their voluntary if often reluctant cooperation proved more useful than the coerced conformity of the nations within the Soviet empire. Throughout, as Imboden emphasizes, “no options were free of the taint of risk,” which is a “perpetual challenge of statecraft.” And these risks were not only physical but moral, since Reagan often needed to ally with “authoritarian regimes” in order to defeat the main enemy. This was especially difficult because the Cold War was a regime struggle and Reagan presented it that way, “promot[ing] the better of model of free societies” against Soviet oligarchy.
Announcing his presidential candidacy in November 1979 (his third attempt at gaining the Republican Party nomination), Reagan emphasized not the Cold War but the need for a “North American accord”—free trade among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. He did this because economic weakness was the principal concern of Americans, their lives bedeviled by high unemployment and inflation, called ‘stagflation.’ He also “believed that a free and prosperous North American held the key to the United States’ power projection in the world.” That is, he thought of American foreign policy from the inside out. Internationally, circumstances were not auspicious. In Iran, revolutionary Shi’a clergy had ousted the Shah, a longtime American ally against the Soviets and taken U.S. embassy staff hostage. Almost simultaneously, the Soviet army had invaded Afghanistan. Throughout the decade of the 1970s, the Soviets had advanced their interests by subverting the regimes of American allies and installing their own proxy rulers, adding to their existing empire in Eastern and Central Europe.
Reagan did not formulate his interest in economic strength as his foreign policy’s foundation on his own. In a conversation in the mid-1960s, ex-president Dwight Eisenhower had recalled to him the indispensable character of U.S. industrial power during the Second World War. Eisenhower also told him that the best use of military strength consists of winning without fighting a war at all. Surprisingly to those who never watched Eisenhower very carefully, he preferred Reagan to his former vice-president, Richard Nixon, whom he had used mostly as a rhetorical attack dog and intra-Party fixer in the 1950s. He may also have trusted Reagan more, sensing greater strength of character in a man many dismissed as an intellectually superficial and somewhat frivolous former Hollywood actor. Nixon and Reagan did take noticeably different approaches to foreign policy. While Reagan considered free trade as “a fundamental principle in its own right and a key pillar of the free societies he sought to promote,” Nixon regarded “international economic policy as a mere instrument subordinate to geopolitics.” More or less in line with that, Nixon regarded communist China as “the strategic key” to Asia, whereas Reagan made Japan “the strategic cornerstone” of his policy there. As a devotee of Realpolitik, Nixon “disdained the promotion of human rights and democracy,” while Reagan “put political and religious liberty at the center of his strategic priorities.” Finally, while Nixon made detente with the Soviets the centerpiece of his foreign policy, Reagan was detente’s “most prominent critic.” Nixon and his National Security Advisor, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, assumed that the Soviet rulers had abandoned Marxist-Leninist ideology; they had not. They assumed that the Soviet economy was viable; it was not. They believed that “moderated American policies could change Moscow’s’ international conduct”; they did not. And they assessed the Soviet regime to be stable, durable: not necessarily so. Nixon, along with his successors in the presidency, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, imagined that the treaties limiting the construction of nuclear weapons would work; this, too, was an illusion. Reagan did want arms control treaties, but only on the basis of a Russian saying he learned from an American student of Russian culture: ‘Trust, but verify.’ And the treaty conditions he wanted to verify were not those merely controlling the rate in which both countries were building their stockpiles of nuclear weapons but treaties that would require the reduction of those stockpiles and eventually eliminated nuclear weapons entirely. The prospect of retaliating against a Soviet nuclear attack with a counterattack that would kill millions of innocents sickened Reagan. At the same time, he understood that the Soviet rulers felt no such compunction. And so he concentrated on “building up American power to exploit Soviet weaknesses and force Moscow” to come to terms. Unlike his critics in America and among America’s allies, he had no illusions that the Soviets wanted peace, except on their own terms, which were antithetical to moral and political liberty.
President Carter exemplified the complacency of American Left-liberals, who had often inclined to excessive confidence in the good intentions of those farther to the Left than they. In Nicaragua, the Marxist ‘Sandinista’ regime had overthrown a right-wing thug named Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Carter and his advisers imagined that the Sandinistas were well-intentioned reformers. Reagan and his advisers correctly recognized them “as the vanguard of Marxism coopting Nicaragua and menacing the region,” allied with Castro’s Cuba and therefore with the Soviets. As it happened, the regime “would soon give up the pretense of pluralism” and “begin supporting communist insurgencies” in Central America, as predicted by Reagan campaign adviser Roger Fontaine. To this hard-headed analysis, Reagan would add support for regional governments “that answered to their citizens rather than abusing them”—abuse of citizens being what the Somoza regime had done, and what had made him vulnerable to removal. Carter’s misjudgments exasperated members of his own party; such Democrats as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, Eugen Rostow, Paul Wolfowitz, and Paul Nitze eventually served in the Reagan Administration, indispensably.
“In fairness to Carter,” Inboden cites his belated efforts to reverse course. Carter did in fact withdraw from the second strategic arms limitation treaty from Senate consideration, increase military spending, including funding for such new missile systems as the MX. He also signed off on “numerous covert actions to counter Soviet advances in the Third World,” including not only Nicaragua but Grenada, Jamaica, El Salvador, Yemen, and Afghanistan, where he sent arms to the Islamists who were fighting against the Soviet invaders. These measures came too late to help him politically, but they did give Reagan “some policies and programs on which to build” upon taking office in January 1980.
1981
Reagan’s accession to the White House perturbed the Kremlin. The KGB assessment described the new president as representative of “the most conservative, chauvinist, and bellicose part of American politics,” a man who had the nerve to press “for the restoration of American world leadership after the defeat in Vietnam.” As for themselves, the Soviets “had begun saying that the USSR could absorb millions of casualties and still win a nuclear war, especially as its larger arsenal could survive an American retaliatory strike”—an unspoken acknowledgment of the fact that the Soviets had indeed survived the loss of millions inflicted upon Russia by the Leninist and Stalinist mass murders of the Twenties and Thirties, and millions more inflicted by the Nazis in World War II. More modestly, “Moscow hoped to use its growing military superiority to gain diplomatic advantage over Washington and induce further American retreat in the face of communist advances around the world.” That hope proved unfounded because the Soviets weren’t so strong, Americans not so weak and, crucially, because Reagan knew both of those things. Andrew Marshall, who headed the Office of Net Assessment at the Defense Department, estimated the USSR’s GNP as twenty-five percent of America’s, with its military absorbing thirty to forty percent of that. The problem was that “even if over the long term the Soviet system appeared unsustainable, in the near term the Kremlin was ahead.” The solution was to “impose disproportionate costs on the USSR,” starting immediately. So, for example, although the Soviets enjoyed a three-to-one superiority in the number of submarines, the U.S. advantage in “quieting technologies and sensory capabilities…enabled them to both detect and evade” the Soviet forces undersea. The Soviets’ vast superiority in tank numbers, threatening Europe, could not translate into superiority in tank warfare because the United States developed tank-killing aircraft. The qualitative power of technology could counter quantitative power of industrial production.
The Politburo did not yet see that, however. KGB director and future Communist Party Secretary Yuri Andropov understood that detente “had been advantageous to the Kremlin.” Now that Reagan was president, those halcyon days were gone, and it might even be that he would launch a first strike at the Soviet Union; “this misperception made the Soviets prone to misinterpret other American actions” and “more inclined to order a preemptive strike of their own.” They probably ordered a ‘first strike’ on Pope John Paul II, who was targeted for assassination by “a Turkish gunman…likely sponsored by the KGB.” The pope had committed the sin of opposing Soviet domination of his native Poland and of other countries in that region. Reagan himself had nearly died at the hands of a would-be assassin who was, however, merely deranged, no agent of a foreign power. “That they both survived bonded them in a sort of providential kinship,” which very much included plans for accelerating their campaigns against the Soviet Union.
By mid-year, Reagan confronted “three urgent questions”: What would he do about the Soviet deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles aimed at America’s European allies? What would he do about the plans of some of those allies to collaborate with the Soviets on a pipeline designed to supply Western Europe with Soviet oil and gas? And how far would he go to support the Polish independence movement, Solidarity?
The pipeline would provide the Kremlin with revenues and make the allies dependent upon it for their energy supplies. With an eye on the other two matters, Reagan chose to object to the pipeline without doing anything about it, for now. He sent emergency relief to Poland, combating the Kremlin’s economic squeeze on the country, where the Soviets’ puppet regime had declared martial law. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, now remembered as a loyal Reagan ally, dismissed the Polish crisis as “simply an internal situation,” conceivably not knowing any better. He did advise the pope that he intended to build up America’s nuclear stockpile in order to force them to negotiate nuclear arms reductions later on—the logic being that the Soviets knew that they couldn’t keep pace with any serious American effort. As for the Allies, he demanded “an absolute quarantine of all trade as President Roosevelt had proposed in 1938” against Nazi Germany. This was the first serious challenge by an American president to the legitimacy of the Soviet regime and its empire since the Coolidge Administration.
In the Western Hemisphere, Reagan chose El Salvador as the place “to stop communism’s advance and restore American credibility in the region.” El Salvador’s politically centrist president, José Napoleon Duarte, faced insurrections from communists and neo-fascists alike, the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) had the predictable Soviet backing; a “former military officer and sadistic killer,” Roberto d’Aubuisson, headed a coalition of rightists. D’Aubuisson had no important international support, but “Communist regimes around the world had chosen Central Ameria as a priority front,” calling it the “soft underbelly” of the United States. Sensitive to Latin American suspicions of American intervention in the region, Reagan sent a modest amount of aid to Duarte’s regime, including a handful of military trainers. “The symbolism mattered more than the size.” Reagan had taken “the first step in what would become not just a larger aid program for El Salvador but an eight-year immersion in Central America’s Cold War.” Here, too, he had the pope’s backing, and useful it was in that predominantly Roman Catholic landscape. For their part, the KGB targeted such liberal American religious bodies as the National Council of Churches, which dutifully (or perhaps dupefully) organized demonstrations against U.S. aid to El Salvador in front of the White House.
In Asia, Japanese politicians had long resisted building up their own military, having reacted to the militarism which led to Japan’s crushing defeat in the war. Reagan continued the Nixon-Ford-Carter policy of selling arms to Communist China, so long as “the weapons did not threaten Taiwan and could not be used against the United States.” He considered both the PRC and the ROC as “partners” in achieving “his main priority: defeating the Soviet Union and bringing the Cold War to a peaceful end.” And in the Middle East, Israel struck a nuclear reactor in Iraq, then a Soviet ally, while Reagan mollified the Saudis by selling arms to them; the Saudis were no friends of Israel, but they were anti-Iraqi, anti-Communist, and an important oil supplier to the United States and Western Europe. “I didn’t want Saudi Arabia to become another Iran,” Reagan explained—that is, another rightist monarchy vulnerable to overthrow by anti-American fanatics, whether Communist or Muslim. He “wanted to send a signal to our allies and to Moscow that the United States supported its friends and intended to exert an influence in the Middle East not just limited to our support for Israel.”
1982
The year began with an important appointment: Reagan replaced the ineffectual Richard Allen with a capable man he trusted, William Clark, at the National Security Agency. “In short order [Clark] would become the most influential of Reagan’s national security advisors and one of the most important—albeit least remembered—national security advisers in history.” Later, he replaced mercurial and none-too-loyal Alexander Haig with steady George Schultz as Secretary of State. After a shaky first year, his foreign policy team was shaping up. For its part, the CIA issued reports indicating that Soviet economic growth had fallen substantially in the first years of the decade while subsidies to Warsaw Pact countries had increased more than fivefold since 1975. More, Kremlin cash reserves were dropping, as Saudi production lowered the worldwide price of oil, one of the most important Soviet commodities, and the inefficiencies of Soviet agriculture forced increasing grain purchases from foreign countries. “While Reagan’s national security team believed the Soviet regime was brittle, they differed on just how brittle it was.” Yet all of them diverged from the dominant view, which “saw the Soviet Union as stable and resilient.” Nonetheless, it was “militarily more powerful than ever,” even as its rulers continued to fear any American buildup as an unanswerable threat to that power. Reagan’s Director of East European and Soviet Affairs at the NSC, historian Richard Pipes, prepared a report for the president emphasizing the inherently expansionist character of Communism while remarking the crisis in the Soviet Union itself brought on by that expansion and the regime’s ever-increasing inability to pay the expenses incurred by it. Although no one in the Soviet ruling class intended to change the regime, the somewhat more reform-minded persons within it might be strengthened if the United States and its allies increased “the costs of [Soviet] imperialism.” Reagan concurred. He also endorsed Pipes’s intention not merely to influence Soviet behavior (as State Department officials usually tried to do) but to change the regime that produced Soviet behavior. “Reagan’s strategy of targeting the Soviet system itself may seem obvious in hindsight. But at the time it was risky, controversial, ridiculed by many, seen as revolutionary by others. No previous president had tried it.” Unnoticed at the time, Reagan sought not to achieve the unconditional surrender FDR and the Allies had won from the Axis powers in World War II but a “negotiated surrender,” whereby the Soviets would relinquish their empire, end its support for communist revolutions in the Third World, halt the nuclear arms race, and liberalize internally. None of this would happen soon, of course, some of it never, really, in the long term. In November, Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev died, replaced by KGF war horse Andropov.
In Europe, Reagan grew a bit closer to Prime Minister Thatcher, backing her military retaliation against Argentina, which had seized the Falkland Islands, then delivering a major speech at her invitation to the British Parliament in the summer. He also found a firm anti-communist ally in the newly elected Chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Kohl. These political friendships proved important because Reagan wanted to place intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe, so that NATO could counter the Soviet nuclear buildup, and the well-organized European Left would exert substantial pressure against that policy for the next two years.
In Central America, Reagan lacked such reliable allies against the Communists. “Divided, plagued with ineptitude, and pocked with war criminals,” the El Salvador government was a weak reed. The Nicaraguan Contras “suffered similar maladies” and its insurgency against the Sandinistas had stalled. In Guatemala, a military government “became so barbaric in slaughtering its own people” in its ham-fisted resistance to Communist insurgents that Reagan could offer it “only token support.” Overall, he provided economic assistance, covert action, but no combat troops to America’s allies in the region. At Reagan’s insistence, El Salvador did hold national elections, which exposed the Communists to be “lacking in popular support.” Unfortunately, d’Aubuisson’s ARENA party won a majority of the vote; it took an energetic behind-the-scenes efforts by Americans to install a moderate as the new president. Rightist terrorism continued, but at least Duarte agreed to relinquish the presidency, “setting an important precedent for Salvadorean democracy.” For his part, Reagan increasingly saw that “right-wing authoritarians made bad partners,” and that “promoting democracy and human rights with friend and foe alike” was not only more consistent but quite possibly more practical.
He also learned something about Arab politics. The Palestine Liberation Organization had been active across the border from Israel in Lebanon. Reagan’s negotiator, Philip Habib, found that “his challenge was not just to persuade the PLO to leave Lebanon but also to persuade other countries to take them.” As it happened, despite “Arab leaders’ braying support for the PLO,” they well knew that the PLO and its Soviet-allied leader, Yasir Arafat were “troublemakers” whom they had no appetite to admit to their countries. Habib did manage to get the PLO out, encouraging Reagan to attempt a settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute. None of the parties involved liked the Reagan Plan, which would have required Israel to stop its settlement of Judea and Samaria and grant Palestinians “self-government” if not quite sovereignty over parts of the area (thereby angering the Israelis) without requiring Israel to withdraw to the borders it had prior to winning the Six-Day War, “anger[ing] many Arab leaders.” Ensuing negotiations went nowhere. “Reagan never built close personal ties with any Middle Eastern leaders”; there were no Communist regimes in the region, “except destitute South Yemen,” but neither were there any Arab states “receptive to appeals to democracy and free enterprise.” No one was ready to sign a treaty.
Domestically and in Western Europe, Reagan’s proposed arms buildup provoked the ‘nuclear freeze’ movement, which called for the United States and the Soviet Union to halt any additions to their nuclear stockpiles. Since the ‘freeze’ obviously advantaged the Soviets, who possessed a much newer set of nuclear weapons than the U.S. and its allies, the movement was self-defeating, but of course that made it quite appealing to the Soviet Union, which ordered the KGB into action with financial and organizational support of naive and frightened citizens in the democracies. A June demonstration turned out three quarters of a million protestors in New York city, the “largest gathering in the city’s history.” There could of course be nothing similar in the oligarchic regimes of the Soviet bloc. What the protestors “failed to appreciate is that Reagan feared and detested nuclear weapons as much as they did…. It is just that Reagan detested Soviet communism even more.”
Of even more substantial concern for Reagan was the U.S. economy, which was undergoing a major recession. His economic policies were in place, and they would work. But not yet. In the Congressional elections, the opposition Democratic Party gained 26 seats in the House of Representatives, one in the Senate. The Democrats also netted seven governorships. Wishful thinkers on the Left hoped to oust the president himself in the next election cycle, and that was not an unreasonable expectation at the time.
1983
By now, Reagan’s Asia strategy had been set and serious diplomacy in the region could begin. The strategy consisted of five “strategic triangles”— groups of three countries allied on some well-defined basis, whether moral, political, economic, military, or some combination thereof. The first of these consisted of the U.S., Japan, and Australia—commercial republics. The second was primarily military: the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, which at that time was not a republic. It aimed at containing Soviet expansion into the Pacific Rim, the Soviets having been the principal ally of North Korean during the peninsular war. The third was military and to some extent diplomatic; the U.S., Communist China, and Japan needed to coordinate their efforts against the Soviets despite the acknowledged regime rivalry between China and the other partners. The fourth, “the triangle of the Taiwan Strait” (U.S., Communist China, Taiwan) “delivered more headaches than benefits,” as the United States navigated the tensions between Beijing and Taipei while trying to maintain stable relations with both. As assistant secretary of state for East Asia Paul Wolfowitz explained, “The best way to rebalance relations with China [was] to make them realize that Japan [was] number one and [we wouldn’t] give awa anything more on Taiwan.” Finally, “the strategic triangle” of the U.S., China, and the Soviet Union was intended to keep communications among the three rivals open, to prevent a world war and to manage the crises that would likely occur.
Having survived the ‘nuclear freeze’ movement and the Congressional elections it was intended to influence, Reagan sharpened his critique of the Soviet regime and continued his military buildup. In one of his most famous speeches, delivered in March at the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals, Reagan called the Soviet Union an “empire of evil.” Predictably, that phrase “offended American liberals and outraged the Kremlin.” It also “inspired the victims of Soviet tyranny,” including the imprisoned dissident Anatoly Sharansky, who tapped out the phrase in code to his fellow inmates after reading it in a spluttering Pravda editorial. On the military front, Reagan pushed ahead with his Strategic Defense Initiative—a planned system of anti-missile missiles intended to provide a shield against nuclear attack. This was another instance of the Administration’s quality-over-quantity approach to the arms race, each element of which would “neutralize Soviet weapons capabilities, bedevil Soviet planners, impose costs on the Soviet economy, pressure the Soviet system, and strengthen Reagan and Schultz’s hands at diplomacy.” “Reagan sought to outsmart the Soviets as much as outspend them.” The Soviet shoot-down of a South Korean passenger airliner that had inadvertently violated Soviet air space reminded Americans and the citizens of allied countries that the Moscow regime tended to shoot first, ask questions later.
Resistance to Soviet inroads in Latin America also intensified. Suriname had become the first South American country to align itself with the Soviet Union, following a coup by the Marxist Dési Bouterse in 1980. Although small, Suriname was big enough to hold a base for Soviet surveillance aircraft and, in the words, of National Security Advisor Clark, “the potential to control the Southern Caribbean and endanger shipping lanes.” Wary of military intervention in view of the likelihood of “regional backlash,” Reagan persuaded Brazil to pressure Suriname to back away from the Soviets and their Cuban allies.
Fears of Latin American reaction did not deter Reagan from ordering the invasion of Grenada, an island country off the Venezuelan coast, in October. Grenada had become independent from the British Empire nine years earlier, remaining in the Commonwealth. Its Marxist prime minister, Maurice Bishop, had formally maintained a non-aligned position in the Cold War, although in fact he allied with Cuba after his New Jewel Movement ousted a corrupt predecessor. Bishop resisted pressure from hardliners in his party to align openly with the Soviet bloc, earning him overthrow and murder. His government was building an airport capable of accommodating Soviet aircraft at the time of the intra-Communist coup. The American invasion left Queen Elizabeth II unamused and infuriated Prime Minister Thatcher, although she supported it publicly. “The invasion unearthed a hive of Soviet bloc personnel active on Grenada, including 800 Cuban troops, 49 Soviet advisors, 15 North Koreans, 10 East Germans, 17 Libyans (the tyrant Muhammar Quaddafy aligned with Moscow), and 3 Bulgarians. Captured documents confirmed that the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea “had embarked on major military assistance programs to Grenada.” Almost immediately following the invasion and removal of the Communist regime, the U.S. agreed to install a government headed by the British governor-general; “an election restored full democracy the next year.” This was “America’s first use of ground troops in combat since Vietnam and the first fighting by the all-volunteer force since the end of the draft in 1973.” Domestic critics of the American military took note. So did foreigners. The successful invasion also counterbalanced the shock of the terrorist attack on a Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon, which had occurred only a few days earlier. They had been inserted after the Israeli withdrawal and were intended to guard the country against renewed sectarian violence, a mission that obviously had proved too much for such a slender force. The perpetrators of that assault were members of a then-shadowy group called Islamic Jihad, later renamed Hezbollah.
1984
By this re-election year, the American economy had recovered from the recession without sparking any serious inflation. Reagan was heading for a landslide victory at the polls, the only lingering question being his mental status which, his enemies persisted in claiming, at best verged on senility. Both they and the foreign statesman with whom he dealt eventually discovered otherwise.
Early in the year, Secretary of State Schultz met with his counterpart, the old Soviet war horse Andrei Gromyko, whom he described as “a man of dignity and intelligence” who “believed in Marxist dogma he preached,” including the assurance that world peace was achievable as soon as “all the world turned communist.” Schultz added, “That was clearly not happening.” Reagan followed up on this diplomatic outreach without deflecting his administration from the military buildup and political pressure that promised to make his diplomacy effective. Delay occurred when Andropov died his unregretted death, replaced by Konstantin Chernenko. When Vice President George H. W. Bush met with him, he came away with the false impression that the United States could make progress in arms negotiations. But Chernenko turned out to be still another Party hack. The CIA’s director, William Casey, had a more realistic assessment, predicting that Chernenko would be the last Stalinist-era Party Chairman, and that subsequent chairmen would be less hidebound. Meanwhile, the KGB did its best to interfere with the American elections and failed. False claims included the lie that the United States had developed the AIDs virus.
While the Kremlin remained mired in its reality-skewing Marxist distortions, Reagan saw the enemy regime quite clearly. He told Chancellor Kohl, “The Soviets seem to have created an aristocracy such as the one they overthrew.” He elaborated in a conversation with British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe: “The Soviets have created their own aristocracy, and are primarily interested in maintaining the power of that aristocracy.” For a man often judged to be in his dotage, he remained unusually clear-headed.
Looking to the future, Howe’s boss, Prime Minister Thatcher, met with Mikhail Gorbachev, widely and rightly expected to be the Party Chairman in waiting. “I certainly found him a man one could do business with.” Gorbachev focused his diplomatic attack on the planned SDI system, which Thatcher also opposed, privately. Gorbachev “detected [this] as an alliance rift that he might exploit.” When she took her doubts to Reagan, however, he remained firm, insisting “that SDI would work and that it was central to his dream of escaping the insanity of mutual assured destruction.” As Schultz put it, “We may be moving from…mutually assured destruction to mutually assured defense.” A CIA analysis concluded that the Soviet Union simply could not afford to “compete successfully” with the United States in this are because they were a long way from developing the high-grade computers necessary to operate such a complex system.
Central America saw advances in El Salvador, setback in Nicaragua. Vice President Bush was detailed to deliver “a blunt message” to the military: “immediately cease terrorism, extrajudicial killing, and other death squad activity, or Reagan would terminate all American aid.” The officers capitulated. The administration successfully to pressure Congress, he delivered a televised address to the American people, reporting the $4.9 billion in aid to Cuba and Nicaragua from other members of the Soviet bloc. This would have worked, except that a CIA attempt to mine the harbor at Corinto and other port cities resulted in damage to ships from friendly countries. “Congress immediately passed a law forbidding any future mining operations, and House Majority [James] Wright led ten congressional Democrats in writing a fawning letter to Ortega” criticizing “those responsible for supporting violence against your government.” On top of that, Congress banned the use of U.S. funds to the Contras, and Reagan needed to abandon “any notions of overthrowing the Sandinista government.” He turned instead to a plan for a “negotiated settlement that would wean Managua from the Soviet and Cuban orbit,” enhancing an already existing lineup of Latin American countries which aimed at promoting democracy there. Some elements of his administration refused to relinquish efforts to arrange military aid. The new National Security Adviser Robert “Bud” McFarlane approached Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, to provide aid to the Contras—the “small first step toward what would become the biggest scandal of Reagan’s presidency,” the ‘Iran-Contra Affair,’ which was implemented and exposed in Reagan’s second term.
The main initiative in Asia was Reagan’s visit to China in April. By this time, both countries had “shed the illusory hopes each had cultivated in the previous decade, whether Beijing’s dream that the United States would jettison Taiwan entirely, or Washington’s ambition that a United States-China partnership would by itself transform the region.” While Chinese Party Chairman Deng Xiaoping had introduced some economic liberalization to the regime, this was nothing more ambitious than Lenin’s efforts in 1920s Russia: an attempt to bring in ‘capitalist’ investments to prop up the existing regime. Reagan remained focused on stepping on the paws of the Soviet bear, agreeing to increased “cooperation between the two governments on intelligence, arms sales, and trade” while remaining more closely allied with Japan.
In the Middle East, Reagan cut America’s losses in Lebanon. Pope John Paul II regretted the withdrawal of the Marines to ships offshore Beirut, correctly expecting “an orgy of bloodletting” against Maronite Christians. The problem was that the American strategy had depended upon making the Lebanese army into a solid fighting force capable of protecting the country. But the army was hopelessly riven by the same factions that plagued the nation as a whole. Absent a massive influx of American and allied forces, nothing could be done; such an effort being out of the question, nothing was done and Lebanon descended into the misery it has suffered every decade since then.
In the ongoing war between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Iranian mullah regime, Reagan continued to back the tyrant Hussein—reluctantly, preferring a stalemate. His strategic purpose in the region was to keep “other hostile powers out of the region while preserving the stable energy supplies on which the United States and its allies depended.” This straightforward approach was complicated by the fact that “the gulf monarchies” that produced the oil wanted to keep U. S. aid secret, lest they inflame the passions of the more radical Muslims in the region, “while NATO members and Japan wanted the benefits of secure oil without paying the costs.” As elsewhere, “allies were hard to live with but harder to live without.”
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