The 1980s were a crucial period in the renewal of U.S. primacy and the making of the unipolar moment. During the 1970s, the structural context of world affairs had begun to offer significant opportunities for the reassertion of national power and influence. In the decade after, U.S. policymakers fully began to seize those opportunities to advance American interests and reshape the international environment in highly advantageous ways. They pursued forward-leaning policies for capitalizing on Soviet vulnerabilities and reestablishing U.S. ascendancy in the Cold War, for spreading democratic governance in countries from Latin America to East Asia, and for aggressively encouraging the advance of global capitalism. The subsequent rise of the unipolar post–Cold War order was undoubtedly a function of deep tectonic forces that had started to make themselves felt in the 1970s; it was also a result of concrete U.S. initiatives in the 1980s and after.
In each of the chapters that follow, I focus on a key aspect of U.S. state-craft during this pivotal decade, beginning with the Cold War. The course of that contest was ambiguous when Carter left office: the United States had undoubtedly been on the defensive during the 1970s, but the longer-range trends were far more favorable. In the space of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the ambiguity lifted entirely, and the Cold War moved markedly toward its ultimate resolution. By early 1989, it was the Soviet Union that was conducting a broad-gauged retreat from bipolar competition, and bilateral relations had improved so drastically that leaders on both sides were concluding that the superpower confrontation was reaching an end.1 It would be hard to imagine a more dramatic or consequential turnaround. A decade earlier, the dominant view had been that the United States was losing ground in the Cold War. Now it was on the verge of winning that struggle altogether.
The question of how and why all this occurred has inspired heated controversy.2 In retrospect, there is no question that the intensifying crisis of Soviet power provided the essential backdrop to the astonishing turn in the Cold War during the 1980s, or that the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev was indispensable to easing East-West tensions after 1985. Yet as the available source material manifestly demonstrates, the policies of the Reagan administration—and the role of Reagan himself—were also central to this outcome. Even before he took power, Reagan understood that the Kremlin confronted massive and growing difficulties. He also believed that the United States could exploit those weaknesses to restore American advantage, compel Moscow to behave with greater moderation, and ultimately begin easing Cold War tensions on highly favorable terms. Beginning in the early 1980s, his administration thus mounted a multipronged offensive that regained the geopolitical initiative and ratcheted up the pressure on a weakened Soviet empire. From mid-decade onward, he worked diligently and successfully to maintain this pressure while also engaging Gorbachev in productive diplomacy. In sum, Reagan took hold of the opportunities afforded by structural change, and in doing so, he facilitated a remarkable transformation of the Cold War and America’s international position.
There are, however, important caveats to this story. For all of Reagan’s eventual gains vis-à-vis Moscow, the history of his Cold War statecraft was more complicated and tortuous than is sometimes made out. Reagan’s first-term initiatives very effectively exacerbated the strains on the Kremlin and reestablished U.S. strength in the bilateral relationship. In the process, however, those initiatives also raised Cold War tensions to alarming levels. What permitted the diplomatic advances of the second term was therefore not simply Reagan’s vision and determination in waging Cold War, but also his willingness to learn and adapt. Beginning in late 1983 and early 1984, Reagan made a significant recalibration of U.S. strategy. He toned down his confrontational rhetoric, stressed the need for dialogue and communication, and generally worked to fuse the power and pressure he had built with the reassurance and trust that were necessary to permit fruitful diplomacy.3 This shift would prove essential to engaging Gorbachev from 1985 onward, and it showed that the process of forging successful strategy in the 1980s was often a complex and iterative one.
When it came to U.S.-Soviet relations, that process also entailed adverse consequences along the way. On the whole, Reagan’s Cold War record was one of historic achievement on an issue of tremendous geopolitical salience. There were notable drawbacks, however, from morally problematic partnerships with Third World allies, to military expenditures that figured in an explosion of national deficits and debt, to measures that ultimately encouraged dangers such as Islamic fundamentalism and nuclear proliferation. The United States may have been resurgent during the 1980s, but in the Cold War as in other areas, that resurgence had its costs.
Ronald Reagan became president at a critical juncture in U.S. foreign policy. As we have seen, America had absorbed blow after blow to its global position during the 1970s, fostering a widespread sense that the country was in inexorable decline. Amid the tumult and pessimism, however, several key trends were converging to create new sources of U.S. advantage and new openings for perceptive statecraft. The question of the 1980s, then, was whether American officials could turn structural opportunity into successful strategy—whether they could devise policies that would harness the positive trends, reverse recent setbacks, and mold the global environment in ways that accentuated U.S. influence and power.
The answer was hardly obvious when Reagan took office. Although he had deftly exploited Carter’s failings during the 1980 campaign, Reagan was not generally regarded as an incisive strategist when he arrived in Washington. Rather, Reagan’s apparent inattention to detail, his ideological and even Manichean rhetoric, and his attraction to simple solutions for complicated problems all caused many critics to view him as unsophisticated at best and downright dangerous at worst. Throw in his advanced age and his Hollywood background, and some of Reagan’s own advisers were initially skeptical. “When I first met Reagan,” said Paul Nitze, a top arms-control official during the 1980s, “I thought he was just a born loser.” One historian of this period has rendered an equally severe judgment, calling Reagan a “ceremonial monarch” with “limited knowledge of what was going on in the outside world.”4
Appearances can deceive, however, and Reagan was actually well equipped for the challenges he faced. The president had good strategic instincts, in that he possessed an intuitive ability to get to the heart of difficult issues, and a keen sense of how individual policies related to broader designs. Reagan, one adviser recalled, had “this marvelous ability to work the whole while everybody else is working the parts.”5 He also had the confidence to think big—to challenge prevailing orthodoxies and chart potentially ground-breaking courses of action. Reagan’s “strongest qualities,” George Shultz later wrote, included “an ability to break through the entrenched thinking of the moment to support his vision of a better future, a spontaneous, natural ability to articulate the nation’s most deeply rooted values and aspirations, and a readiness to stand by his vision regardless of pressure, scorn, or setback.”6 Moreover, while Reagan was no master of detail, he had spent nearly two decades prior to 1980 speaking and thinking about the central problems of U.S. diplomacy. This sustained intellectual engagement allowed Reagan to develop many core principles of his foreign policy before becoming president; it also gave him a firmer grasp of key geopolitical issues than many of his contemporaries realized.
Most important of all, Reagan possessed an unshakable faith in America’s national potential. To be sure, Reagan had frequently deplored the state of the country during the 1970s, and he was alarmed by many of the threats at hand. “Our nation is in danger, and the danger grows greater with each passing day,” he declared in 1976.7 Yet at a deeper level, Reagan firmly believed that the United States possessed immense and enduring strengths, from the dynamism of its economy, to the resilience of its political system, to the force of its ideological example. “It is important every once in a while to remind ourselves of our accomplishments lest we let someone talk us into throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” he said. Throughout the 1970s, Reagan thus took issue with those “who think we are over the hill & headed for the dustbin of history,” arguing that the country’s best days and greatest glories were ahead of it.8 This essential optimism pervaded his later conduct as president, and it left him well suited to pursue the sort of ambitious—even transformational—endeavors that ongoing global changes were now making possible. “Let us begin an era of national renewal,” he declared in his inaugural address. “We have every right to dream heroic dreams.”9
Nowhere, in Reagan’s view, was the imperative of such renewal greater than in superpower relations. Reagan had long seen the Cold War as an all-encompassing conflict between freedom and darkness, and he was as worried as anyone about the course of that contest in the 1970s. “If present trends continue,” he said in 1978, “the United States will be assigned a role of permanent military inferiority vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.”10 Reagan feared that adverse trends in the nuclear balance would soon give Moscow the chance to coerce and intimidate the West; he was equally troubled by recent Marxist victories in the Third World and by America’s apparent inability to respond effectively. The Soviets were becoming bolder by the day, he believed, and U.S. passivity would invite disaster. “The Soviets have spoken as plainly as Hitler did in ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” he said shortly becoming president. “They have spoken world domination—at what point do we dig in our heels?”11
Reagan, then, believed that the Cold War was reaching a crisis point. But as someone who had long expounded on the pathologies of the Soviet system, he was also perceptive of emerging strategic opportunities. The flip side of Reagan’s faith in democratic capitalism had always been a deep skepticism that communism could permanently endure. “Communism is neither an economic nor political system—it is a form of insanity—a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature,” he observed.12 Throughout the 1970s, Reagan was thus keenly aware that it was not Washington but Moscow that faced the more intractable long-term problems, from growing dissidence, to an increasingly brittle political system, to a command economy that was becoming less competitive by the year. “Nothing proves the failure of Marxism more than the Soviet Unions [sic] inability to produce weapons for its mil. ambitions and at the same time provide for their peoples [sic] everyday needs,” he wrote.13 Even when things seemed darkest during the Carter years, Reagan could still say that his theory of the Cold War was simple: “We win, they lose.”14 So long as the United States could tap into its fundamental advantages—and Moscow’s fundamental weaknesses—it would triumph in the end.
Doing so presupposed sound policy, however, and here Reagan believed that the country had taken a detour. Like many conservatives, Reagan saw détente as a strategic blunder, one that had “increased the tempo of Communist efforts to undermine Western security, while at the same time inhibiting the West from making appropriate responses to defend our security interests.”15 Détente had led America to slash defense outlays, he alleged, while doing nothing to prevent Moscow from raising its military budget or seeking advantage in the Third World. Likewise, it had allowed the Soviet bloc to profit from increased East-West trade and financial linkages, while causing leaders like Kissinger to mute their criticism of communist repression at home. Relaxing international tensions was a worthy goal, Reagan believed, but the particular characteristics of détente had helped Moscow increase its influence and hide its internal decay. “I don’t know about you,” he said in 1977, “but I [don’t] exactly tear my hair and go into a panic at the possibility of losing détente.”16
These attacks on détente were not entirely fair, because they ignored the constraints that U.S. policymakers faced, and because they slighted the fact that expanded East-West contacts were actually compounding Soviet-bloc weaknesses. But Reagan’s critique nonetheless informed his calls for a more assertive approach, one that would use all aspects of national power to meet the Soviet threat, exacerbate Moscow’s debilities, and regain the edge in the Cold War. “The essential elements of any successful strategy,” he said in 1979, “include political, economic, military and psychological measures.”17 In particular, Reagan advocated more determined steps to halt Kremlin encroachment in the Third World, and efforts to punish Soviet overextension by aiding anticommunist rebels in countries such as Afghanistan. More vocally still, he argued for a major military buildup to reverse the trends of the past two decades and provide greater leverage vis-à-vis Moscow. Military power was not “the only measure of national power,” he commented, but it was “the cement which makes national power effective in the diplomatic arena.”18
Perhaps most provocatively of all, Reagan contended that Washington should intensify the strains on the Soviet system itself. He called for stricter curbs on East-West commerce, and a public diplomacy campaign to support Eastern-bloc dissidents and highlight the worst aspects of communist rule. “A little less détente with the politburo and more encouragement to the dissenters might be worth a lot of armored divisions,” he predicted. In the short term, these measures would accentuate the ideological and economic bankruptcy of the system; over time, they might help foster internal reforms that would make Moscow a less authoritarian and threatening rival. “The more we focus attention on internal Soviet repression, and focus our demands in this area,” Reagan wrote, “the better chance that over the years Soviet society will lose its cruelty and secrecy. Peace could then be insured, not only because the Soviets fear our deterrent, but because they no longer wish to blot out all who oppose them at home and abroad.”19 The United States could turn the tide of the Cold War, Reagan believed, if it were willing to hit Moscow at its most vulnerable points.
During Reagan’s run for the White House, these proposals invited criticism that he was a reckless ideologue. The charges were misleading, however, for they mischaracterized Reagan’s long-term objectives. “Our goal is a stable peace,” he had said in 1978. “Who has ever met an American who favored war with the Soviet U.?”20 Reagan himself was appalled by the prospect and worried that an indefinite nuclear standoff might end in catastrophe. It was unacceptable, he said in 1980, that current strategic doctrine required holding “tens of millions of people hostage to annihilation in order to maintain a deterrent.”21 Accordingly, Reagan actually favored the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons, and he coupled his calls for a military buildup with reminders that true security lay not in the growth but in the ultimate reduction of superpower arsenals. “The nuclear threat is a terrible beast,” he declared, and the survival of civilization required that it be tamed.22
Reagan’s strategic goal, then, was not simply to wage Cold War more effectively. What he sought was leverage that would allow him to wind down that conflict on advantageous terms. Reagan calculated that by retaking the geo-political offensive and maximizing the pressure on an ailing Soviet empire, the United States could compel real changes in Moscow’s behavior. It could force the Kremlin to act with greater restraint and to accept that cooperation—not confrontation—was the only feasible course. Reagan’s underlying concept, he had once written, was that “in an all out race our system is stronger, and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause. Then a noble nation believing in peace extends the hand of friendship and says there is room in the world for both of us.”23 This idea often resurfaced during Reagan’s pre-presidential years, and after he had taken office, as well. “There was no miracle weapon available with which to deal with the Soviets,” he said in 1981, but “we could threaten the Soviets with our ability to outbuild them, which the Soviets knew we could do if we chose. Once we had established this, we could invite the Soviets to join us in lowering the level of weapons on both sides.”24 If the United States acted with vision and purpose, Reagan believed, the 1980s might be a transformative decade in the Cold War.
The basic challenge of Reagan’s first term was to turn this aspiration into a concrete set of policies. When he took office, the political climate for doing so was more propitious than at any time since the Lyndon Johnson years. The Soviet overreach of the 1970s had shaken America out of its strategic malaise, creating greater domestic receptivity to assertive statecraft. “The U.S. has recovered from the traumas of the 1960’s and 70’s and is prepared to move beyond its passive post-Vietnam foreign policy to deal decisively with the realities of the 1980’s,” Secretary of State Alexander Haig told Chinese officials.25 This did not mean that Reagan had an entirely free hand politically, because certain types of endeavors (such as the use of U.S. troops in combat) remained very sensitive, and the administration constantly had to gauge the limits of domestic backing for its initiatives.26 On the whole, though, public and congressional support for strong Cold War policies was far greater than it had been for recent presidents, giving Reagan an opening to begin turning rhetoric into reality.
This new atmosphere pertained most clearly to the defense budget. The downward pressure on defense had already been halted and reversed under Carter, and by Reagan’s presidency, the balance of power in Congress lay indisputably with the hawks. “Let’s face the realities,” one Democratic representative said in 1980. “There’s overwhelming support in this Congress for defense.”27 The appropriations process remained highly contested, of course, and debates over particular weapons systems and policies would rage throughout Reagan’s tenure. But there was nonetheless strong backing for significant overall defense increases, which created room for the multiyear buildup the administration sought. “The Congress granted the President virtually everything he asked” in his crucial first defense budget, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger later wrote, and Reagan would generally have his way with Pentagon appropriations through mid-decade.28
Politically, then, the administration was well positioned for a fast start in Cold War strategy. The bureaucratic climate often appeared more problematic. While virtually all the president’s advisers favored a more vigorous policy toward Moscow, “hardliners” clashed bitterly with “moderates” over the modalities and long-range aims of such an approach.29 “We had gobs of infighting on everything,” one official recalled. Reagan generally remained above the fray rather than tackling these disputes head on, a tendency that preserved good relations with his advisers but allowed the internal brawling to persist.30 The policy process could get very messy in consequence: end runs and other intrigues were commonplace, leaking was rampant, and American allies—and even U.S. officials—sometimes struggled to decipher the mixed messages emanating from Washington. “There is genuine bewilderment here and abroad,” wrote NSC staffer Richard Pipes in mid-1981, “whether we really have any ideas about the Soviet Union, or merely gut feelings and rhetoric.”31 The first year of Reagan’s presidency was particularly chaotic. Haig himself called the administration “a sort of Babel,” and his departure after just eighteen months fueled perceptions of a foreign policy adrift.32
Historians have echoed this judgment, characterizing Reagan’s management style as disorganized and even disastrous. Yet even though that approach had real—and sometimes very costly—liabilities,33 Reagan’s statecraft was never rudderless. The president, Pipes later reflected, “held a few strong convictions and they guided all his policies.”34 Reagan’s pre-presidential writings certainly demonstrate that he knew where he wanted to go in U.S.-Soviet relations, and his reluctance to resolve the internal conflicts on this subject was influenced by the fact that he simply did not fully agree with either side. Looking back on this period, no less an observer than Henry Kissinger concluded that Reagan “was the quintessential loner,” and that his style stemmed from a determination that “no one would have a special claim on him.”35 After all, the president’s vision of Cold War strategy was a nuanced one that incorporated hardline and moderate concepts. Between 1981 and 1983, he would work with representatives of both factions to set a multipronged geo-political offensive in motion.
Reagan’s man at the Pentagon was Weinberger, and his role in that offensive was to oversee a major expansion of U.S. military power. The Carter administration had laid the foundations by increasing defense spending and investing in advanced technologies and weapons programs; Weinberger and Reagan now built on those foundations and accelerated the buildup dramatically. The Pentagon poured resources into conventional and nuclear programs, including B-1B and B-2 bombers, MX intercontinental missiles, air- and ground-launched cruise missiles, Trident nuclear submarines and Trident II SLBMs, F-117 Stealth fighters and Apache attack helicopters, and precision-guided munitions. The constant-dollar defense budget surged over 40 percent from 1980 to 1986, with slower growth through the end of Reagan’s presidency.36 Despite strong criticism from peace activists, the administration also affirmed the 1979 NATO decision to deploy a new generation of cruise missiles and Pershing-II IRBMs to Western Europe. “The Soviets have a great fear of the Pershing,” Weinberger said; it was highly accurate and could reach East-bloc targets in under ten minutes.37 These and other improvements were deemed vital to bolstering U.S. credibility and deterrence and restoring American geopolitical advantage. “We must first make America strong again,” Weinberger commented.38
The urgency with which Weinberger and Reagan approached this task sometimes encouraged a scatter-shot approach to accumulating military capabilities.39 Yet although the administration was certainly plugging gaps wherever it found them in the early 1980s, key aspects of the buildup were very targeted and strategic in nature. The United States must “capitalize on our advantages and exploit our adversaries’ weaknesses,” Weinberger wrote. “It is essential that we . . . emphasize our specific comparative advantages.”40 The Pentagon invested, for instance, in the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and deep-strike capabilities needed to defeat numerically superior Warsaw Pact forces by hitting them at geographical and logistical chokepoints far in the enemy’s rear. These capabilities drew on U.S. technological advantages in areas such as sensors and guidance systems, and they would be incorporated into doctrinal concepts—the Army’s AirLand Battle and NATO’s Follow-on Forces Attack—that explicitly stressed the application of U.S. strengths against Soviet soft spots.41 The Navy was on the same wavelength. Its Reagan-era buildup was accompanied by adoption of a bold Maritime Strategy that threatened to counter aggression in one theater by utilizing superior naval striking power to hit exposed Soviet territories, lines of communication, and client-states in others. “The Maritime Strategy is a mobile, forward, flanking strategy of options, ” Navy officials wrote; it would “carry the fight to the enemy” and attack his weakest points.42
A similar ethos prevailed in the nuclear realm, as well. Reagan had been particularly concerned by the shifting strategic balance in the 1970s, because he believed that the ability to dominate the escalatory process conveyed significant coercive leverage. “The nuclear weapon,” he commented in 1978, “was always a decisive factor in the background.”43 In the 1980s, Reagan’s defense program emphasized exploiting superior U.S. technology to swing the balance back in America’s favor. Building on programs initiated during the 1970s, Reagan’s strategic modernization program prioritized the development and deployment of more accurate SLBMs, bombers (such as the B-2) that could penetrate Soviet air defenses, ICBMs (namely the MX) that could carry multiple warheads and strike their targets with great precision, and reconnaissance systems that would provide better damage assessment in real time.44 As in previous years, these programs were complemented by aggressive intelligence efforts to map Soviet nuclear forces—including ballistic missile submarines and mobile missile-launchers—to allow their effective targeting in case of war.45 And, again following in the footsteps of late Carter-era doctrine, the administration outlined a nuclear employment policy that envisioned using improved U.S. weapons and targeting capabilities to conduct crippling counterforce strikes, decapitate the Soviet “military and political power structure through attacks on political/military leadership and associated control facilities,” and achieve an “overall warfighting capability” that would allow Washington to prevail in any type of nuclear conflict.46 That capability would significantly strengthen deterrence vis-à-vis Moscow, administration officials believed; it would also strengthen U.S. leverage by ensuring that it was the Soviet Union—and indeed the Soviet leadership itself—that was most vulnerable in any crisis.
The vulnerability that Reagan was most interested in targeting, of course, was the Soviet economy, and here, too, the military buildup had tremendous implications. Dating back to the early and mid-1970s, defense intellectuals such as Andrew Marshall had predicted that the Pentagon could better shape the superpower rivalry through well-aimed military expenditures that would drive the Soviets into counterproductive, self-defeating responses. By investing in programs—particularly high-tech programs—in which the United States had major competitive advantages, Marshall believed, the Pentagon could tilt the strategic competition in America’s favor while also forcing the Soviets to expend disproportionate sums in a futile effort to keep pace. Marshall laid out this framework for long-term competition in a seminal 1972 study. The goals, he wrote, were “to induce Soviet costs to rise” and “to complicate Soviet problems in maintaining its competitive position.” The key to success was “seeking areas of U.S. comparative advantage, and . . . steering the strategic arms competition into these areas.”47
This concept of a cost-imposing strategy had already begun to influence U.S. weapons procurement during the Ford and Carter eras. It was even more closely matched to Reagan’s emphasis on taking advantage of Soviet frailties. “The Soviet Union is more vulnerable than ever,” he said in 1982. “They are literally starving their people to keep this up.”48 Drawing on recommendations from Marshall and other officials, Reagan endorsed the idea that sustained increases in U.S. spending, especially in areas such as Stealth technology and nuclear modernization, could force the pace of the competition and exacerbate Moscow’s military-economic dilemmas. A Pentagon review completed in 1982 integrated this concept into force development plans, emphasizing programs that would be “difficult for the Soviets to counter, impose disproportionate costs, open up new areas of major military competition and obsolesce previous Soviet investment.”49 Weinberger affirmed the same ethos with respect to nuclear issues specifically, writing that the United States would modernize its strategic forces in ways “that will force the Soviets into an expensive program of research, development and deployment to overcome it.”50 In effect, the United States would compel Moscow to choose between falling behind militarily, and courting still greater economic dangers by trying to match the pace. “If they want an arms race,” Reagan said in 1983, the Soviets would have to “break their backs to keep up.”51
The decision to pursue an antiballistic missile shield, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), represented the apotheosis of this approach. SDI demonstrated that Reagan was the one setting the policy agenda—he announced that initiative without consulting several prominent advisers—and it showed the peculiar mix of romanticism and realism that infused his worldview. On one level, SDI was a manifestation of Reagan’s repulsion at the stark logic of mutual assured destruction, and of his near-religious faith that strategic defenses could incentivize arms reductions by making ballistic missiles “impotent and obsolete.” It was “his personal hope,” Reagan commented, “that SDI could bring an end to nuclear war.”52 It was also Reagan’s hope, however, that SDI would throw the Kremlin badly off balance. Missile defense was “cost-imposing strategy” par excellence: it was an area in which America’s immense wealth, and its superiority in computers, sensors, and high-tech innovation, gave it all the advantages. Moscow, by contrast, would find it hard to respond, through either a major offensive buildup or development of a defensive shield of its own, without putting unbearable pressure on its rigid economy. Robert McFarlane, the NSC official who was deeply involved with SDI, repeatedly touted these advantages, and Reagan had the same idea. The Soviets had “great respect for our technology” and “must be concerned about our economic strength,” he said in one conversation on SDI. “It will be especially difficult for them to keep spending such vast sums on defense.”53
Reagan’s military policies were meant to reassert U.S. strength, exploit Soviet vulnerabilities, and allow Washington rather than Moscow to set the course of the superpower relationship. His Third World policies had the same objectives. Reagan had long warned that the struggle for the global south was reaching a critical stage; he now found kindred spirits in advisers such as CIA Director William Casey. “Nations which control key choke points are under severe threat,” Casey warned the NSC; the United States had to respond.54 Accordingly, the administration took several early steps to fortify the global perimeter. It endeavored to repair relations with estranged allies—and human rights violators—such as Chile, Argentina, and South Korea, with Reagan assuring their leaders that “there would be no public scoldings and lectures.”55 The president also affirmed U.S. support for China’s role in tying down Soviet troops and checking Kremlin influence in Asia, despite his earlier criticism of that country’s brutal communist regime. Washington and Beijing cooperated to support the Afghan resistance, and despite a serious dispute over Taiwan in 1982, the administration permitted greater sales of civilian and military technology to Deng Xiaoping’s government. “A strong, stable China can be an increasing force for peace, both in Asia and in the world,” a classified national security decision directive (NSDD) stated.56
More important still, the administration resolved to do whatever was possible to prevent additional Third World allies from falling prey to Marxist insurgencies. It was in El Salvador, of all places, where this determination to hold the line was most pronounced. A powerful guerrilla movement seemed poised to overthrow an unstable but pro-Western government when Reagan took office; the president feared that this outcome would further open the Western Hemisphere to Soviet influence and reinforce perceptions of U.S. impotence worldwide. Building on an initiative from the last days of Carter’s presidency, Reagan approved an infusion of emergency military aid to defeat a rebel “final offensive” in early 1981. His administration subsequently provided billions of dollars in economic and security assistance, along with training and intelligence support, to stave off a collapse, while also engaging in intensive diplomacy to stabilize El Salvador politically. “We must not let Central America become another Cuba on the mainland,” Reagan said. “It cannot happen.”57
The counterpart to these defensive efforts was an aggressive campaign to contest and roll back Moscow’s own sphere of influence in the Third World. The Kremlin was like “an overanxious chess player,” NIC analysts wrote: by expanding so eagerly during the 1970s, it had “exposed lines of attack to its adversary, placed advanced pawns in jeopardy, and acquired positions that it must defend at high cost.”58 At Reagan’s urging, Casey’s CIA sought to make those costs as high as possible. It provided arms, training, and funding to anticommunist insurgents, first mainly in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, and later in countries such as Angola and Cambodia. Opinions differed internally as to whether these groups could actually overthrow the regimes they confronted; what was not disputed was that the United States was now attacking Moscow’s overseas empire at its most exposed points. Washington would “do to the Soviets what they have been doing to us,” Pipes said. “At a very low cost, without a big investment on our part, we can make it very hard for them in these places.”59
Afghanistan was the centerpiece of this emerging Reagan Doctrine and the place where it would obtain greatest results. “Russia has fallen into a hornet’s nest in Afghanistan,” Casey declared in 1981.60 Again following Carter’s lead, the CIA built a covert partnership with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries to provide the anti-Soviet mujahedin with tools to sustain the resistance. The level of foreign support was modest at first but would grow substantially with time, culminating in the provision of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and up to $650 million in annual aid by the latter half of the 1980s. Even before that, however, the administration was determined to make Afghanistan a Vietnam-type quagmire for the Soviets, and to demonstrate that Moscow would not be allowed to consolidate its recent expansion. “The U.S. should not accept the notion that, once a Communist or pro-Soviet regime has come to power in a state, this situation is irreversible,” an NSC study concluded.61
To be clear, there were limits to Reagan’s assertiveness in the Third World. The president brushed away an ill-conceived proposal to blockade or perhaps attack Cuba in 1981, and because he was wary of courting “another Vietnam,” he generally viewed the use of U.S. troops as an inappropriate means of rollback.62 But even so, the administration did overthrow one pro-Soviet government by force of arms, by invading Grenada in October 1983. That intervention was truly a spur-of-the-moment affair; a radical coup had stoked fears about the safety of U.S. citizens, while also intensifying Reagan’s concerns that extremist elements were taking that small but strategically placed island more firmly into the Soviet-Cuban orbit.63 The expected low costs of military action against such a weak opponent sealed the case for intervention, which turned out to be a sloppier affair than U.S. commanders had predicted. All the same, the invasion succeeded in rescuing the American citizens, depriving Moscow and Havana of a potential client astride the Caribbean sea lanes, and underscoring Reagan’s harder and more opportunistic line toward the Soviet sphere of influence. “Now it is their dominos that are toppling,” wrote one U.S. intelligence official.64
As the administration contested Kremlin positions along the periphery, it also put pressure on the core of Moscow’s empire in Eastern Europe and on the Soviet Union itself. The intelligence that Reagan received once president only confirmed his long-standing belief that Kremlin authority was in advanced erosion throughout the bloc, and that communist regimes had no good answers to the internal problems they faced. It was becoming impossible to ignore just “how tenuous was the Soviet hold on the people in its empire,” Reagan said in 1981.65 Numerous administration assessments echoed this conclusion, and contended that it was in America’s interest to exploit this distress and amplify pressures for internal change. “It makes little sense to seek to stop Soviet imperialism externally while helping to strengthen the regime internally,” wrote National Security Adviser William Clark; the task was to “weaken Moscow’s hold on its empire” though various means.66
One such means was a campaign of ideological warfare led by Reagan himself. From his earliest days in office, the president minced few words in his public statements on the Soviet bloc. He condemned Kremlin leaders as purveyors of “totalitarian darkness” and the “focus of evil in the modern world,” and he denounced communism as “some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”67 “The cult of the state is dying,” he pointedly declared in 1981; all Marxism had provided humanity was “a gaggle of bogus prophecies and petty superstitions.”68 This rhetoric was ideologically charged and even incendiary, but it was rooted in cold geopolitical logic. Reagan was seeking to lend encouragement to Soviet-bloc dissidents; to further discredit bloc governments at home and abroad; and to hammer home the fact that communism was a repressive, inhumane, and unproductive system that had little organic legitimacy with those it ruled. The idea, as one internal study put it, was that that “the long-term weaknesses of the Soviet system can be encouraged in part simply by telling the truth about the USSR.”69
Reagan’s rhetoric was only one part of this effort. The administration launched what VOA director Charles Wick called a “coalesced massive assault of truth” to illuminate the most repugnant aspects of communist rule via radio broadcasts, print media, and other outlets.70 Reagan also quietly repudiated his earlier criticism of the Helsinki accords, instead building on Carter’s example by using follow-on meetings of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) to publicize Eastern-bloc repression. At CSCE meetings in Madrid and later Vienna, U.S. representatives expressed solidarity with persecuted groups and individuals behind the Iron Curtain, and called bloc regimes to account for violating their Helsinki obligations. They linked improved performance on human rights to a broader warming of East-West relations, and made clear that the Kremlin would not enjoy real international legitimacy absent domestic reform. The Soviets were “seriously vulnerable to a counter-ideological attack by us,” lead U.S. diplomat Max Kampelman wrote; public criticism could isolate Moscow and empower dissidents within the bloc.71
At the outset, Reagan was especially optimistic about encouraging ferment in Poland. “This is a revolution started against this ‘damned force,’ ” he said; the rise of Solidarity showed just how fragile the bloc had become.72 Throughout 1981, Reagan’s goal was to create political space so the revolution could proceed. The administration communicated its support to Solidarity’s leaders; Reagan also attempted to deter Soviet military intervention by informing Leonid Brezhnev that an invasion would have “very serious” consequences in East-West relations.73 The imposition of martial law by the Polish government in December 1981 confounded this aspect of Reagan’s policy, but the administration still mounted a response. “We can’t let this revolution against Communism fail without our offering a hand,” Reagan wrote. “We may never have an opportunity like this in our lifetime.”74 The administration imposed economic sanctions on Moscow and Warsaw, and increased U.S. radio broadcasting into Poland and the bloc. And with help from various intermediaries, the CIA covertly provided funding and aid to Solidarity, helping to sustain that organization despite intense repression.75
This last initiative highlighted the tacit partnership taking shape between the United States and the Catholic Church. “It was a quite holy alliance,” Weinberger said. The pope’s visit to Poland in 1979 had helped spark the fire in that country, and demonstrated the power of religion as a fount of opposition to communist rule. Even before the crackdown, Reagan had therefore observed that “the Vatican and the Pope had a key role to play in events in Poland,” and the White House and Vatican had exchanged intelligence on the crisis.76 After the crackdown, the president and the pontiff undertook parallel efforts to keep Polish political resistance alive. The Church in Poland offered its facilities as protected “free space for independent, non-regime controlled educational and cultural activities” amid the repression that had driven Solidarity underground. The CIA began (indirectly) to provide Solidarity with printing materials, communications gear, organizational assistance, and other aid, geared, as one official wrote, toward “waging underground political warfare.” These mutually reinforcing programs (as well as another sponsored by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, AFL-CIO) were deliberately kept separate at the operational level, but there was plenty of information sharing and high-level strategic coordination among Reagan, John Paul II, and their aides. The president aimed to harness the moral authority of the Vatican “and make them an ally” against the Kremlin; the Polish crisis helped cement that partnership.77
The crisis also catalyzed Reagan’s efforts to wage economic warfare against the Soviet bloc. “The Soviet Union is economically on the ropes—they are selling rat meat on the market,” he told advisers. “This is the time to punish them.”78 Beyond emplacing sanctions—such as suspension of export licenses for electronics technology and oil and gas equipment—on Moscow, Reagan took several extra steps to force the Kremlin to foot the bill for reviving the battered Polish economy. The administration vetoed Warsaw’s membership in the IMF and obstructed debt-rescheduling proceedings for Poland. Although avoiding the extreme measure of declaring Poland to be in default on its debts, administration officials also aimed to limit commercial lending to Warsaw, by working privately with potential lenders and by declaring publicly that Eastern Europe—and the Soviet Union itself—had become risky bets for bankers. “Private sources of long-term credit to the Bloc have largely dried up,” the NIC reported in April 1982.79
In the aftermath of the Polish crackdown, Reagan’s initial impulse had been to act even more aggressively. “We would quarantine the Soviets & Poland with no trade, or communications across their borders,” he wrote in his diary. “Also tell our NATO allies & others to join us in such sanctions or risk an estrangement from us.”80 Urged on by hardliners such as Casey and Weinberger, the president gave vent to this impulse by forbidding U.S. firms from participating in construction of a long-planned Soviet gas pipeline connecting Siberia to Western Europe, and then—over Haig’s heated objections—extending the reach of the sanctions to cover U.S. subsidiaries and licensees overseas. This latter measure was aimed primarily at Western Europe, where such licensees and subsidiaries were heavily involved in the pipeline project. The immediate goal of the sanctions was to derail a project that was vital to Moscow’s energy exports; a broader objective was to signal that NATO, under U.S. leadership, would no longer be subsidizing the Kremlin economy. “One of the key foreign policy objectives of the Reagan administration,” an internal discussion paper noted, “has been to achieve a fundamental shift in the way in which our Allies view their relationship with the Soviet Union.”81
The pipeline sanctions were certainly punishing. The problem, as Haig had warned, was that they seemed to punish U.S. allies as severely as its adversaries. Margaret Thatcher and other leaders cried foul after the sanctions were applied extra-territorially in mid-1982, complaining that the restrictions were exacerbating economic pressures at a time when Western Europe was already in recession. “Naturally we feel particularly deeply wounded by a friend,” Thatcher said in a rare public censure of U.S. policy. In private, the message was the same. “She had a serious problem with unemployment and bankruptcies,” she told Weinberger, “and she didn’t want her closest friend, the United States, to be blamed by her people.”82 The pipeline sanctions were soon threatening an open rupture within NATO, and the crisis underscored, as the CIA wrote, that there remained significant “differences between the United States and our Western European allies.”83 It was left to Shultz, newly installed as secretary of state, to salvage the situation by finding a compromise. This he successfully did, via painstaking negotiations that eventually obtained an intra-alliance accord to place curbs on strategic trade and credit provision to Moscow in exchange for lifting the pipeline sanctions. The end result was a policy that was less sharp-edged than Reagan and some key advisers might have desired, but one that preserved alliance cohesion and, in conjunction with the other measures already described, represented the most sustained effort in decades to pressure the Soviet economy.84
That pressure was simultaneously being accentuated by Casey’s CIA, which was prosecuting a quieter, but potentially more damaging, campaign of its own. During the early 1980s, U.S. intelligence operatives reportedly sabotaged a branch of the Siberian gas pipeline by covertly providing Moscow with faulty computer software. When activated, that software caused malfunctions resulting in “the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space.” Casey was, meanwhile, trying something even more ambitious, waging a personal crusade to eviscerate Soviet hard-currency earnings by inducing Saudi officials to flood the market with cheap oil. And in 1984–1985, the CIA cooperated with NATO intelligence agencies as part of a counterespionage initiative that rolled up KGB programs to steal or illicitly purchase Western technologies. That initiative, one insider later wrote, “effectively extinguished the KGB’s technology collection capabilities” at a very inconvenient time.85 Reagan had long advocated a determined attempt to compound Soviet economic weaknesses. Within the confines of alliance politics, his administration was now doing just that.
All these policies added up to a wide-ranging assault on Moscow’s geopolitical position, and to an intensive effort to put Washington back in control of the Cold War. Internal planning documents spoke of “shaping the Soviet environment” and “maximizing our restraining leverage over Soviet behavior.”86 Following Clark’s appointment as national security adviser in early 1982, the NSC staff began to formalize these concepts through a series of presidential directives. NSDD-32, a major study approved by Reagan in May, laid out the objectives of American policy in blunt and ambitious tones: to “strengthen the influence of the U.S. throughout the world”; “to contain and reverse the expansion of Soviet control and military presence throughout the world”; “to foster . . . restraint in Soviet military spending, discourage Soviet adventurism, and weaken the Soviet alliance system by forcing the USSR to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings”; and “to encourage long-term liberalizing and nationalist tendencies within the Soviet Union and allied countries.” The end goal was to achieve “a fundamentally different East-West relationship by the end of this decade”—or, as Clark put it in a report to Reagan, to “re-establish American ascendancy” in the global arena.87
Even as Reagan pursued this program, however, he was also seeking to lay the groundwork for productive diplomacy. “The West has a historic opportunity, using a carrot and stick approach, to create a more stable relationship with the USSR,” he told West German officials; pressuring Moscow now could ultimately induce greater Soviet circumspection and facilitate bilateral breakthroughs. The Soviets might soon find themselves “in a desperate plight,” he predicted on another occasion, “and we might be able to say to them: ‘Have you learned your lesson?’ ”88 No adviser did more to support Reagan in this regard than Shultz. After replacing Haig in mid-1982, Shultz regularly affirmed the desirability of diplomatic engagement with the Kremlin once the proper conditions had been set. “While recognizing the adversarial nature of our relationship with Moscow,” he wrote to Reagan, “we must not rule out the possibility that firm U.S. policies could help induce the kind of changes in Soviet behavior that would make an improvement in relations possible.”89
This was precisely what Reagan aimed to accomplish in arms control. Little noticed amid Reagan’s emphasis on rearmament during the early 1980s was that his negotiators were simultaneously advancing some of the boldest dis armament proposals in decades. “Let us agree to do more than simply begin where . . . previous efforts left off,” the president declared. “We can and should attempt major qualitative and quantitative progress.”90 This ethos informed the administration’s “zero option” proposal, which called for not just reducing but eliminating all intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe. It also drove Reagan’s decision to discard the concept of strategic arms limitation in favor of more aggressive Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) focused on slashing strategic ballistic missile arsenals by at least one-third (which would later become one-half). The U.S. buildup, Reagan believed, would make these dramatic advances more rather than less likely. “For us to be successful in arms control,” he said in 1981, “the Russians have to see that the alternative is a buildup to match theirs.”91 This was a theme that the president consistently underscored. As he explained to Thatcher, “The main reason why the Russians were at the negotiating table in Geneva was the build-up of American defences. The Russians would not be influenced by sweet reason. If they saw that the United States had the will and the determination to build-up its defences as far as necessary, the Soviet attitude might change because they knew that they could not keep pace.”92
Admittedly, this emphasis on negotiating from strength could give U.S. diplomacy a fairly standoffish character. At home, Reagan opposed calls for a “nuclear freeze,” arguing that it would undercut the buildup needed to restore U.S. diplomatic leverage. The Soviets “are neither unilateralists nor philanthropists” with respect to arms control, he told congressional leaders; a freeze would “send precisely the wrong signal” to Moscow.93 Abroad, his negotiators took a hard line in START and the INF negotiations, making proposals that required asymmetrical Soviet reductions and signaling that they would rather forgo agreement than cut deals that fell short of U.S. goals. In 1982, the administration declined a potential breakthrough in the INF talks, made possible by informal contacts between Nitze and his Soviet counterpart, on these grounds. The decision pleased Pentagon hawks—who may have thought that a maximalist posture would scuttle prospects for arms control altogether—but, when it inevitably leaked, led many U.S. and European observers to worry that Reagan’s diplomacy was insincere.94
That critique might have applied to officials such as Weinberger and Casey, but it misunderstood Reagan’s position. In his diary, the president criticized those who “don’t think any approach should be made to the Soviets. I think I’m hard-line & will never appease but I do want to try & let them see there is a better world if they’ll show by deed they want to get along with the free world.” Even during 1981–1982, Reagan was working to establish lines of communication that might make such eventual progress possible. It was important, he told his NSC, not “to compromise our chance of exercising quiet diplomacy.”95 Reagan composed hand-written letters to Brezhnev and his successors during the early 1980s, stressing the need for dialogue and cooperation. “Is it possible that we have permitted ideology, political and economic philosophies, and governmental policies to keep us from considering the very real everyday problems of our peoples?” he wrote in 1981. “Should we not be concerned with eliminating the obstacles which prevent our people—those we represent—from achieving their most cherished goals?”96 Reagan also lifted the Carter-era grain embargo on the Soviet Union, and following Brezhnev’s death in 1982, he expressed interest in meeting with Yuri Andropov and with Konstantin Chernenko after him. The United States was not seeking an “open-ended, sterile confrontation with Moscow,” an administration directive stated, but a more “stable and constructive long-term basis for U.S.-Soviet relations.”97
This was indeed the essential thrust of Reagan’s policy: to bring all of America’s strengths to bear against an overextended Soviet Union, and thereby to accumulate diplomatic leverage that could be used to foster a longer-range improvement of relations on U.S. terms. NSDD-75, the single most important directive of Reagan’s presidency, made this program unmistakable. Signed by Reagan in January 1983, NSDD-75 described the key pillars of his Soviet policy:
1. To contain and over time reverse Soviet expansion by competing effectively on a sustained basis with the Soviet Union in all international arenas—particularly in the overall military balance and in geographical regions of priority concern to the United States. . . .
2. To promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced. . . .
3. To engage in the Soviet Union in negotiations to attempt to reach agreements which protect and enhance U.S. interests and which are consistent with the principle of strict reciprocity and mutual interest.
This approach was explicitly framed as a carrot-and-stick strategy, meant to maneuver Moscow toward the eventual recognition that competition was hopeless, and that accommodation was the better path. “The U.S. must convey clearly to Moscow that unacceptable behavior will incur costs that would outweigh any gains,” the directive stated. “At the same time, the U.S. must make clear to the Soviets that genuine restraint in their behavior would create the possibility of an East-West relationship that might bring important benefits for the Soviet Union.” This process would take time, and it would involve risks. But if it could be carried through successfully, the result would be a very different U.S.-Soviet relationship—and an immense payoff for America’s global position.98
So could it be carried through effectively? During the early 1980s, the record was one of success, failure, and adaptation. Reagan’s policies succeeded in harnessing the global currents at work and reasserting U.S. ascendancy over the Soviet Union. They failed, however, to produce more restrained Soviet behavior or reduce superpower tensions, and they actually contributed to a dramatic and potentially dangerous escalation of the Cold War. That failure, in turn, led to adaptation. During late 1983 and 1984, Reagan began to marry the strength he had built with a more conciliatory posture better suited to negotiation. It was less than a full-fledged “reversal” of policy, but this shift was nonetheless vital to preparing him to deal with the more flexible Soviet leadership that would soon emerge.
A key reason why Reagan was able to execute that mid-course correction effectively was that he was doing so from a position of great strength. If the president’s top priority was to restore U.S. power and confidence vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the outcome of his first term could hardly have been better. By 1983–1984, there was a pervasive sense—in Washington and Moscow alike—that the trajectory of the superpower competition had changed remarkably. U.S. officials evinced great confidence that their country was again on the march. “We have shown,” noted one NIC analyst, “that history is not on their side, but on ours.”99 In the Soviet Union, by contrast, the self-assuredness of the 1970s had given way to geopolitical pessimism bordering on despondency. “We are facing one of imperialism’s most massive attempts to . . . stop the advance of socialism or even to push it back in some places,” Andropov told Warsaw Pact leaders in 1983, and it was not clear how long Moscow could sustain the fight.100 As both U.S. and Soviet officials understood, the “correlation of forces” had shifted, and Washington was reaping the advantages.
This reversal of fortunes demonstrated what could happen at the intersection of good timing and good policy. The early 1980s were an opportune moment to press the Soviets, as it was then that the underlying structural trends of the prior decade began fully to burst into the open. The United States and the West were starting to recover from the recent economic shocks, whereas the Soviet Union was being exposed as a “crippled giant” in stark decline. “It is crippled in having only a military dimension,” a U.S. intelligence officer wrote in 1983. “It has not been able to deliver economic, political, or cultural benefits at home or abroad.”101 The economic stagnation, the social and ideological malaise, the ossification of the bureaucracy and the political system, the inability of a geriatric leadership to respond creatively to such challenges—all these fundamental debilities were getting progressively worse, leaving Moscow in an ever-weaker competitive position. Herbert Meyer, Casey’s close adviser at the CIA, put it squarely in a 1985 memo: “The tectonic plates of global power have broken loose.” “We are probably heading toward a major shift in the balance of global power, of a magnitude that happens only once or twice in a century.”102
Reagan had anticipated the possibility of such a shift, and his policies put Washington in position to leverage its effects. At every turn during the early 1980s, Soviet officials were confronted with aggressive U.S. initiatives that compounded Moscow’s problems and exploited its weaknesses. In the military realm, the U.S. buildup dramatically altered the dynamics of East-West rivalry. By this point, Soviet officials were coming to realize that improvements in the accuracy of U.S. ICBMs over the past decade had multiplied the lethality of the American nuclear arsenal by as much as a factor of three.103 The particular programs emphasized from the late 1970s onward, and especially under Reagan, accentuated the resulting disquiet. Kremlin planners now faced serious threats and vulnerabilities, from Pershing-II missiles that—they feared—were ideally suited to decapitating Soviet command-and-control targets, to precision-guided munitions that might vitiate Moscow’s conventional edge in Europe, to the looming deployment of MX missiles that would be the deadliest American ICBMs yet.104 The U.S. buildup thereby shattered Soviet confidence that the strategic balance was moving in Moscow’s favor; the new reality, said Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, was that America and its allies were building military strength “with unprecedented means and speed.”105 Moreover, the Reagan buildup showed that the United States was using its dominance in information technology to make qualitative leaps in the arms race, and to intensify that competition in ways the Soviets could not match. “We cannot equal the quality of United States arms for a generation or two,” Chief of General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov admitted. The United States had made “an incredible breakthrough of modern technology,” another Soviet official said, which would be “unthinkably expensive” to emulate.106
No aspect of the U.S. buildup was more effective in this regard than SDI. Although U.S. officials knew that the system was years or even decades away from deployment, for the Soviets it had an immediate psychological impact. Missile defense threatened to negate Moscow’s chief military achievement of the post-Stalin era—the building of the world’s largest ICBM force—and thereby, one Kremlin official later admitted, “to negate the essence of Soviet power in the international arena.”107 Nor was there any good recourse in prospect. Soviet military officials understood that the economy would have great difficulty supporting an equivalent investment in missile defense, or a major offensive buildup to overwhelm the prospective U.S. shield. “We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms,” Ogarkov said, “until we have an economic revolution.”108 The Kremlin had spent a generation—and taxed the system severely—in a quest for strategic parity and advantage; now those gains were evaporating and a new period of inferiority loomed.
The tables were turning just as markedly in the Third World, where the Soviet optimism of the 1970s had become a fading memory. In part, this was due to structural factors, in that Soviet economic stagnation—and the dismal performance of Moscow’s Third World clients—was badly undercutting the appeal of socialism in the global south.109 Yet it also reflected the concrete impact of U.S. policy. During the early 1980s, American intervention blunted the progress of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) insurgency in El Salvador and prevented an outright government collapse. In Nicaragua, the U.S.-backed Contras did not seriously threaten the survival of the Sandinista regime, but they did inflict rising punishment and keep it in a perpetual state of insecurity. “The guerrillas,” Shultz noted in 1983, “are now making the Sandinistas pay a price.”110 In Grenada, U.S. intervention destroyed socialism altogether. And in Afghanistan, U.S. aid helped sustain and gradually strengthen the insurgents, enabling them to become better-armed, more tactically proficient, and better able to raise the costs of a strength-sapping Soviet endeavor.111 All told, this renewed U.S. activism left a deep impression on Soviet policymakers. “Never before has the aggressiveness of American imperialism been so apparent,” Ustinov said. The cumulative effect of these endeavors was to limit prospects for additional Soviet advances, and to call into question whether Moscow could hold what it had. “There are trouble spots on every continent,” Ogarkov lamented.112
There were also trouble spots closer to home, and Reagan’s policies were having an impact here as well. Covert aid to Solidarity helped preserve that group as the core of political resistance to communism in Poland, and as a glaring example of Moscow’s inability to extinguish dissent within the bloc. And even though the U.S. economic warfare campaign was never as decisive as some officials had hoped, it did take a toll. The sabotage of the Siberian pipeline, the imposition of tougher NATO curbs on credit and strategic trade, the constriction of KGB technology-acquisition programs—these initiatives imposed additional costs on an economy in distress.113 Efforts to deny foreign lending to Poland had a similar effect. By early 1982, Western observers noted that Moscow and other Eastern-bloc governments were “digging into their pockets” to help Poland avoid default, and that the Kremlin had been forced to increase aid “at a time of considerable economic woe for the Soviet Union itself.”114 The total cost of all this is hard to quantify, but Moscow was feeling the squeeze. The West was exploiting “the growth of foreign debts, the food situation, our technological lag in certain areas and a series of other bottlenecks,” Andropov said in 1983. “For as long as these problems exist, our class enemies will try to turn them to their benefit.”115
Reagan’s rhetoric was proving just as discomfiting to Kremlin officials. “By drawing attention to the fact that in all the world there is not a single communist success story,” wrote Meyer, “we have at long last launched an offensive for which the Soviets have no defense at all.”116 This was no exaggeration—Soviet officials felt just these anxieties about Reagan’s verbal assault. As early as 1981, Chernenko had worried that this “especially strong anti-Soviet agitation” was catalyzing dissatisfaction with Moscow’s internal practices and inciting demands for reform. By 1983, Ustinov was saying that Reagan and NATO had “launched a limitless psychological offensive against the USSR and the countries of the socialist community,” maligning the Kremlin image at home and abroad.117 In this as in other areas, the well-timed and well-targeted use of U.S. power was making Moscow pay for its weaknesses, and contributing to a striking change in the trend lines of the Cold War.
Unfortunately, those policies were leading to a tenser and more dangerous Cold War in the process. Reagan had long believed that a successful geopolitical offensive could force the Soviets to accept the necessity of restraint and thereby enable a thoroughgoing reduction of tensions. For most of his first term, however, this was not what was happening. In Geneva, the START and INF talks seemed hopelessly stalemated. Soviet leaders dismissed U.S. proposals as “a mockery of reason,” and suspended arms-control negotiations altogether following the deployment of the first Pershing-II missiles in West Germany in late 1983.118 That decision severed the most substantive ongoing diplomatic process between East and West, and caused the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the hands of its “Doomsday clock” to just three minutes from midnight. “As the arms race . . . has intensified,” that publication stated, “other forms of discourse between the superpowers have all but ceased.”119
Relations were simultaneously deteriorating in other areas. Soviet involvement in Afghanistan hardly slackened, indicating that Moscow did not intend a near-term retrenchment in the Third World. And within the Soviet Union, the security services responded to growing international concern with human rights by repressing political dissent more severely than at any time since the Stalin years.120 Meanwhile, Soviet officials reciprocated Reagan’s confrontational rhetoric, likening the president to Hitler and charging him with “fanning the flames of war.”121 The overall diplomatic climate was abysmal, and the CIA deemed it “highly unlikely” that Moscow would “shift to a policy of genuine and far-reaching accommodation” anytime soon.122 Reagan might have turned the tide of the Cold War, but an end to that conflict—or even the moderation thereof—was nowhere in sight.
In retrospect, there were two reasons why Reagan’s success in achieving the former objective did not produce progress toward the latter. The first was simply age, in the sense that the enfeebled Kremlin leadership was probably incapable of executing fundamental policy changes of the sort Reagan sought.123 The second and perhaps more troubling factor, however, was the perception created by Reagan’s initiatives. From the Soviet perspective, Reagan’s offensive did not look like the prelude to diplomacy; it looked like an all-out crusade to destroy socialism, force Moscow into abject geopolitical capitulation, and maybe even prepare the conditions for war. Kremlin officials alleged that U.S. strategy aimed at “the annihilation of socialism as a socio-political system,” and Andropov warned that a “first strategic strike” could not be ruled out. “The Reagan administration has inaugurated open preparations for war,” Ogarkov said. “In several fields, the battle is already going on.”124
This attitude was perhaps the inevitable by-product of Reagan’s Cold War assault, and it is hard to see how he could have achieved such strength and advantage without also producing fear and hostility in the Kremlin. The trouble, of course, was that Reagan’s strategy rested on the idea that he could ultimately cut through that hostility to find accommodation, and yet the very nature of his policies made Soviet leaders view that prospect as absurd. Reagan was the “bearer and creator of all anti-Soviet ideas,” Andropov said; he wanted “a Soviet unilateral laying down of its arms.”125 Making concessions to such a zealot would be appeasement and a recipe for catastrophe. As one well-placed Soviet observer told NSC staffer Jack Matlock, “The leadership is convinced that the Reagan Administration is out to bring their system down and will give no quarter; therefore they have no choice but to hunker down and fight back.”126
This effect was probably exacerbated by the disorder within Reagan’s team. Throughout the early 1980s, administration hardliners consistently sought to short-circuit any move toward diplomacy, and made comments that could only have intensified Kremlin apprehensions. Pipes once insinuated that negotiations were fruitless and that conflict was inevitable as long as the Soviet Union was run by a Marxist-Leninist regime. Weinberger and other Pentagon officials made statements indicating that the administration sought a capacity not just to deter the Soviets but to “win” a nuclear war. One adviser even suggested that Americans build backyard bomb shelters to prepare for that conflict: “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.” Reagan’s preference for collegiality over discipline allowed this loose talk to go on for far too long, and fostered a climate in which it was even more difficult to signal his commitment to the eventual reduction of tensions.127
Just how cornered the Soviet leadership felt became clear in 1983, which marked the tensest period in superpower relations since the Cuban Missile Crisis. That year represented the peak of the Reagan offensive, punctuated by the “evil empire” speech and the announcement of SDI in March, aggressive naval maneuvers near the Soviet Far East in April, the invasion of Grenada in October, and the deployment of Pershing-II missiles in November. Throughout this period, Soviet nerves were frayed and the potential for miscalculation was severe. That fact became tragically evident in September, when an overanxious air defense command ordered the downing of a South Korean airliner that had accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 people aboard—including a U.S. congressman. At the United Nations, U.S. diplomats accused the Kremlin of “wanton, calculated, deliberate murder.” For their part, Soviet leaders believed that the incident was a CIA provocation, and the international denunciations that followed only added to their anxieties. “Fear of war seemed to affect the elite as well as the man on the street,” reported a U.S. observer in Moscow. “A degree of paranoia seemed rampant among high officials, and the danger of irrational elements in Soviet decision making seems higher.”128
It was an acute observation, given what came next. In November 1983, NATO held a major military exercise known as Able Archer 83. The exercise took place in locations across Western Europe, and was meant to simulate the escalation to general war and the launching of a full-scale nuclear attack. Unlike previous exercises, Able Archer was even initially slated to feature the participation of Reagan and other top Western officials, and it involved the use of new, highly encrypted communications codes.
For Moscow, Able Archer could not have come at a more alarming time. Soviet officials had long worried that Reagan might launch a surprise nuclear strike, and in fall 1983, malfunctioning radar systems had at least once reported that an attack was in progress.129 In this context, the elaborate procedures surrounding Able Archer looked suspiciously like an effort to mask preparations for war. Just how frightened the Kremlin leadership was remains debated, but high-ranking military officials may briefly have believed that war was likely, and Soviet conventional and nuclear forces went on higher alert. The mounting peril subsided when the exercise came to an end, but revelations about the Soviet view of Able Archer—soon provided by a British double-agent within the KGB—were hardly reassuring. As Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Gates later wrote, “A genuine belief had taken root within the leadership of the Pact that a NATO preemptive strike was possible.”130 Reagan had intended to throw the Soviets on the defensive, but this was something else entirely.
As a result, the events of late 1983 and early 1984 marked an inflection point in U.S. policy. By this juncture, Reagan was already concluding that America’s Cold War prospects were trending upward, and that the moment was approaching to place greater emphasis on diplomacy. The United States, one classified directive stated, could now “deal with the Soviet Union from more of a position of strength than in previous years.”131 At the same time, Reagan was feeling domestic pressure to adopt a less hostile stance. While the renewed Cold War consensus of the early 1980s was strong enough to sustain the U.S. buildup and other key measures, the escalating superpower tensions had produced concerns that Reagan’s policies might be too aggressive. There remained a strong antinuclear movement nationally and at the state and local levels; there were also widespread anxieties about the Cold War turning hot. Up to three-quarters of Americans thought nuclear war “likely” within the next few years, and nearly half thought that Reagan’s policies were “increasing the chances of war.” With a presidential election looming in 1984, such perceptions could prove politically fatal. The president had to counter the impression, wrote one adviser, that “Ronald Reagan would push us too close to the brink of war. . . . We must strongly position the President on the ‘peace’ side of the formula—‘peace through strength.’ ”132
The administration faced a similar imperative in U.S. alliance relations. Key NATO partners such as West Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom had faced vociferous domestic criticism over INF deployments. Demonstrations, sometimes featuring upward of 200,000 people, had become regular occurrences, and the political temperature had risen steadily as the first INF deployments approached. In October 1983, U.S. intelligence had warned of likely mass protests and sit-ins at U.S. military installations in West Germany, and that left-wing groups might employ “violence and terrorist acts” to impede the deployments.133 More broadly, it had become clear that Reagan’s policies were causing growing fears among NATO publics about the prospect of a superpower showdown that would leave Western Europe as its first and deadest victim. “European opposition to [INF] extends far beyond relatively insignificant traditional neutralist groups,” State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts had reported. “It stems from a deep-seated European anxiety that the U.S. may embark on a confrontational course with the Soviets.”134
Such concerns and agitation did not ultimately derail the NATO INF deployments. But they had already led the United States to inject some flexibility into its INF-negotiation position in early 1983, by announcing that it would accept an interim agreement that would merely reduce permitted deployments by the Soviets and NATO en route to the desired “total elimination of weapons of this class.”135 Moreover, these European sensitivities ensured that NATO leaders would continue to urge Washington to lean forward diplomatically as the alliance’s strategic position improved. “While the Federal Government would not be deflected from stationing,” West German officials stated, “the scale of the demonstrations and of the internal political problems caused by stationing would be far greater if the Americans were not seen to be negotiating really seriously.” In early 1984, West Germany’s Helmut Kohl recommended a Reagan-Chernenko summit to “probe” Moscow’s intentions. By that point, even Thatcher, the strongest supporter Reagan had in Europe, was reminding the president that “we all had to live in the same planet.” “We needed to ask ourselves how we could influence Soviet thinking,” she said. “It was clear that we could not do so unless we had a reasonable relationship.”136
As the crisis of late 1983 subsided, Reagan too was increasingly ready to move in this direction. Able Archer had underscored the president’s fears of nuclear war and his sensitivity to the prospect of tragic miscalculation. More generally, it gave him increased empathy for his Soviet counterparts. Reagan now grasped, he later wrote, that “many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike.”137 It was thus necessary to blend strength with reassurance: to convince the Soviets, as he told French president François Mitterrand, in early 1984, that “no one meant them harm,” and that they might actually benefit if they “joined the family of nations.”138 Advisers such as Shultz and Matlock echoed this conclusion, arguing that Reagan could only translate his position of advantage into successful diplomacy if he gained a “minimal level of trust” with Soviet leaders. If Reagan’s policy appeared geared toward war or “forcing collapse of the Soviet system,” the Kremlin hierarchy would not make the accommodations that would lead to a more stable relationship.139
What resulted from these various influences has been described as a dramatic “Reagan reversal.” It was really more of a calculated Reagan recalibration. The president remained convinced that firmness and pressure were essential to making Moscow cooperate, and through the end of his presidency, he would work to maintain and even increase U.S. leverage.140 Beginning in late 1983 and early 1984, however, he also made overtures designed to moderate the most aggressive aspects of his rhetoric, convince Kremlin leaders that he was genuinely interested in diplomacy, and thereby begin working toward an improved relationship.
Reagan made this case in public and in private. On January 16, 1984, he gave a major address in which he reiterated the need for “strength” and “realism,” but also stressed the dangers of unrestrained competition and the corresponding imperative of “dialogue.” “We will never retreat from negotiations,” he pledged. “Our commitment to dialogue is firm and unshakeable.”141 In his State of the Union address days later, Reagan declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” and promised the Soviet people that “if your government wants peace, there will be peace.”142 Meanwhile, the president was seeking a personal connection with Chernenko following Andropov’s death in February. In letters to the general secretary, Reagan acknowledged “the tragedy and scale of Soviet losses in warfare through the ages,” and averred that “our common and urgent purpose must be . . . a lasting reduction of tensions between us.”143 He continued this diplomatic offensive in a meeting with Andrei Gromyko in September. Reagan reiterated that “we live in one world and we must handle our competition in peace,” and suggested opening a high-level, private channel to Moscow.144
All this was very good news for George Shultz. For much of the first term, Shultz had been undercut by bureaucratic rivals—Casey and Weinberger chief among them—who seemed determined to obstruct substantive negotiations. There was an attitude among Reagan’s more hawkish aides, Shultz’s aide Charles Hill recalled, that “you could never do any kind of work” with the Soviets, and that “Shultz should be brought to his senses and locked up in a closet.”145 Reagan never fully clamped down on the infighting, which subsided only when Casey and Weinberger resigned in 1987. As the president corrected course from late 1983 onward, though, he did make it plain that he sided with Shultz on the need to match pressure with diplomacy. “George is carrying out my policy,” Reagan wrote in 1984. “I’m going to meet with Cap & Bill & lay it out to them.” Shultz’s star was ascendant, and he would soon emerge as the president’s most influential adviser. The secretary of state “would not win all the bureaucratic battles over Soviet policy” in the years to come, Gates later wrote, “but he would win increasingly often and he would win nearly all of the important struggles.”146
In the short term, these changes were mainly useful in preventing U.S.-Soviet relations from deteriorating further, and in aiding a very modest thaw in the second half of 1984. In July, the two governments concluded minor agreements on consular relations, trade, and improvement of emergency communication links. Soviet officials also confided that the Kremlin had decided to “unfreeze” the bilateral relationship, and following his long meeting with Reagan in September, Gromyko agreed to restart the arms-control talks.147 The prospects for more substantive change remained limited while the “old men” ruled in Moscow.148 But the longer-term effect of the Reagan recalibration was to better poise the administration to exploit the broader generational shift that was now approaching. By mid-1984, the fact that each recent Soviet leader had been more senescent than the last made it seem likely that the torch would soon be passed to a new cohort—“younger men,” Shultz wrote, “who might have a significantly different outlook.” When that shift did occur in March 1985, Reagan and Shultz were ready. In Moscow for Chernenko’s funeral, Shultz conveyed a special message to the new general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. He said, “President Reagan told me to look you squarely in the eyes and tell you: ‘Ronald Reagan believes that this is a very special moment in the history of mankind.’ ”149
It was a special moment indeed. The period between early 1985 and early 1989 marked a great change in the Cold War and in international relations. The dangerous hostility of the early 1980s gave way to intensive diplomacy, punctuated by five Reagan-Gorbachev summits, an unprecedented arms-control agreement that eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons, and a singular improvement in the tenor of East-West affairs. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, had begun to moderate its conduct virtually across the board, by initiating a withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Third World, making asymmetric or even unilateral military reductions, renouncing its long-standing claim to historical infallibility and ideological supremacy, and allowing remarkable liberalization at home. These changes represented an extraordinary deescalation of bipolar tensions, and the onset of a decisive Soviet retreat from the Cold War. The superpower contest was moving toward a conclusion when Reagan left office, and one that was eminently favorable to U.S. and Western interests.
Although the causes of this change are still subject to vigorous debate, there is no denying that Gorbachev’s ascension was absolutely indispensable to the process. If Reagan had been looking for a more flexible and forthcoming interlocutor in Moscow—someone who was actually willing to alter longstanding policies in the face of reality—then he could hardly have designed a better partner than Gorbachev. For as the president would soon realize, the new general secretary was a “somewhat different breed” of Kremlin ruler, far better suited than his predecessors to engagement with the West. He was younger and more vibrant than the men who had come before him, and was willing—as they were not—to confront outdated shibboleths and strike out in new directions. The new general secretary was “a real find of a leader,” adviser Anatoly Chernyaev wrote, “intelligent, well-educated, dynamic, honest, with ideas and imagination. . . . Myths and taboos (including ideological ones) are nothing for him. He could flatten any of them.”150
Most important, Gorbachev grasped that the Kremlin had maneuvered itself into a dire and deteriorating predicament, both at home and abroad. He often referred to the Afghan war as a “bleeding wound” for the Soviets. He also spoke eloquently of the unsustainable costs and dangers of the nuclear arms race, and he was keenly aware of just how onerous controlling Eastern Europe had become for the Kremlin. More broadly still, he understood from the outset that Moscow needed a period of international calm if it were to find the time, money, and focus necessary to address the metastasizing cancers of the system. “We had to understand,” Gorbachev believed, “that ‘we couldn’t go on living like this,’ both inside our country and in world politics.” This sense that the Soviets must “alleviate the pressure that had borne down on us due to our involvement in conflicts all over the world and in the debilitating arms race” continually influenced Gorbachev’s thinking, and it provided a powerful impetus to his policy departures.151
It was also, in some ways, a testament to the impact of Reagan’s first-term offensive. Although the general secretary would undoubtedly have had to confront the problems of internal stagnation and decline in any event, U.S. policies badly exacerbated the strains that so preoccupied Gorbachev when he took power. Even in 1985, he referenced the “very dangerous shift” the Cold War had taken under Reagan, and admonished Soviet officials to grapple with “the changes in the correlation of forces that are occurring.”152 More specifically, Gorbachev viewed the Pershing-IIs as a grave threat, and he worried that the Reagan buildup might soon force Moscow to choose between strategic vulnerability and economic disaster. The Soviets were faced with “ ‘Tridents,’ ‘Minutemen,’ arms in space,” he lamented in 1986, a new arms race that threatened “the deterioration of our ecological, strategic and political security, the loss everywhere, but above all exhausting our economy.” If Gorbachev wanted détente, in other words, Reagan’s policies were a key reason why.153
Unfortunately, none of this meant that Gorbachev pursued a broad-gauged retrenchment immediately upon taking power. From the start, the general secretary did genuinely want a relaxation of tensions. Yet he still had to contend with a strong faction of hawks in the Kremlin, and he remained uncertain whether Reagan would reciprocate or merely exploit conciliatory behavior. “You want to take advantage of the Soviet Union,” he charged during their first meeting.154 Moreover, as CIA officials correctly assessed, Gorbachev still believed that crafty maneuvering could permit him to secure a favorable détente—one that restored expanded East-West commerce and provided a more relaxed international environment—“on the cheap.”155 As a result, Gorbachev’s early appeals for rapprochement were matched with few concrete policy changes on Afghanistan, human rights, or arms control. “The USSR cannot simply reduce and will not reduce nuclear weapons to the detriment of its security, when the SDI program is being implemented in the U.S.,” he informed Reagan. What diplomatic overtures Gorbachev did broach during this period—his proposal for a superpower military withdrawal from Central Europe or an INF “freeze”—were slanted toward Soviet advantage, and were advanced as much to wrong-foot Reagan as to elicit serious negotiations. “However much Gorbachev represents the ‘new Soviet man,’ ” Shultz wrote in late 1985, “he and his colleagues are not about the squander the legacy of Soviet power and influence bequeathed to them by Brezhnev, Andropov, and the old guard.”156
The evolution of Gorbachev’s policies was thus gradual, and it was spurred by three principal factors. The first and most essential was the intensifying crisis of Soviet power. The Soviet domestic situation continued to worsen in the late 1980s, driven partially by plummeting oil revenues, and partially by blowback from Gorbachev’s own initiatives. The general secretary was determined to reinvigorate the Soviet system, but—in a recurring theme of his leadership—his solutions tended to make the underlying problems worse. Gorbachev’s early response to the deepening economic crisis, for instance, was an “acceleration” program that emphasized doubling down on investment in heavy industry in a quixotic quest to revive the moribund Soviet growth model. These investments, financed largely through deficit spending, could not restart an economy with fatal structural flaws. They did, however, intensify a fiscal crisis that became progressively more crippling. Similarly, Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign did little to alleviate the societal pathologies that were driving Soviet citizens to drink, but it did deprive the Kremlin treasury of perhaps $100 billion in proceeds from alcohol sales, and thereby compounded the budgetary problems all the more.
Gorbachev’s political reforms, which began in earnest in 1987, would prove even more corrosive to the stability of the state. These reforms, which would ultimately include competitive elections and a real separation of powers, were intended to breathe life into a socialist project that had grown stale, and to create the political space necessary to pursue more thoroughgoing economic perestroika after Gorbachev’s initial quick fixes failed. In practice, however, political glasnost began to destabilize the Soviet system by venting long-repressed conflicts and grievances, and by unleashing criticism from hardliners and more radical liberalizers alike. In the end, these worsening domestic crises—political and economic—would destroy the union. Even before that, they made Gorbachev increasingly dependent on good relations with Washington, so as to gain greater access to Western trade and technology, transfer resources from military spending to domestic endeavors, and stabilize the international front amid domestic upheaval. “No matter where we turned,” Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze later recalled, “we came up against the fact that we would achieve nothing without normalization of Soviet-American relations.”157
That realization, in turn, interacted with a second factor, which was the radicalization of Gorbachev’s thinking. Even before he took power, Gorbachev had been a fairly unconventional thinker, one who drew on humanistic concepts, Western ideas about social democracy, and a deep revulsion at the Cold War arms race. As he subsequently gained authority and cooperated with liberal aides such as Chernyaev and Shevardnadze, Gorbachev fashioned these and other ideas into what he termed the New Political Thinking. The New Political Thinking stressed the impracticality of autarchy and isolation in the modern world, the imperative of avoiding war and reducing international tensions, and the need to promote global welfare rather than solely national interests. Whether these ideas reflected sincerity or an expediency born of desperation is still debated even among experts. What is clear is that these concepts loosened the grip of traditional Cold War thinking in the Kremlin and provided an ideological rationale for Gorbachev’s move toward accommodation with the West.158
These first two factors did not exist in a geopolitical vacuum, however; they were intertwined with a third, external factor, which was Reagan’s second-term diplomacy. From 1985 onward, the president was determined to seize the opportunities afforded by Gorbachev’s rise. He invited Gorbachev to a summit shortly after the Soviet statesman took power, and stressed that “our differences can and must be resolved through discussion and negotiation.”159 At this point, Reagan remained prudently suspicious of Gorbachev’s intentions, and he did not expect immediate breakthroughs. He did believe, however, that the pressures were building such that Soviet leaders could not indefinitely stand pat, and that Gorbachev was sufficiently different from his predecessors that he might be induced to initiate those changes and “make some practical agreements.” The key, Reagan told the NATO allies, was not to treat an early summit “as a watershed event in and of itself,” but as a way of drawing Moscow into “a vital long-term process” of diplomacy.160
The president’s confidence that such a process could be successful, in turn, was reinforced by reports he had received from many of those same allies. Just as leading NATO members had sometimes sought to take the sharper edges off of Reagan’s offensive, they were, in many cases, quick to perceive the possibilities presented by Gorbachev’s rise. Both Thatcher and Mitterrand had separately met with Gorbachev in 1984, when he was evidently a rising star in the Kremlin, and both had been struck by the contrast with the dour bureaucrats of the Brezhnev era. Mitterrand took note of Gorbachev’s willingness to speak frankly about Soviet economic difficulties, and his seeming openness to meaningful dialogue. Thatcher took a similar impression. “I like Mr. Gorbachev,” she memorably commented. “We can do business together.”161 Thatcher would subsequently tell Reagan that “she had the impression Gorbachev . . . was an advocate of economic reform and was willing to slacken government control over the Soviet economy,” and that prudent engagement might pay dividends.162
The question was how to structure such engagement, and here the administration had begun to set the parameters of the process well before Gorbachev took office. As Reagan started to recalibrate his policies in 1983–1984, State Department and NSC officials had laid out a four-pronged approach to diplomacy with Moscow, emphasizing superpower arms control, Third World issues, human rights and political reform within the Soviet Union, and bilateral economic and cultural ties. This approach was based on the idea that U.S.-Soviet negotiations could not be confined to arms control and trade, or otherwise compartmentalized to suit Soviet preferences. Instead, they would have to address all issues of concern to Washington. “It would be no use going into a Summit meeting pretending that these other problems did not exist,” Reagan had earlier told Thatcher. The administration would not insist on equal movement on all fronts at once, Shultz explained thereafter, but neither would it necessarily refrain from making “progress in one dimension contingent on progress in others.” In essence, the goal of diplomatic engagement would be to turn geopolitical leverage into wide-ranging changes in Soviet behavior.163
Doing so meant ensuring that the United States retained—and increased—the strength it had built during the early 1980s. “The strategic reality of leverage comes from creating facts in support of our overall design,” Shultz said. “We must structure the bargaining environment to our advantage” to show the Soviets that it was “in their own interest” to seek “better relations across the board.”164 Along these lines, Reagan Doctrine aid expanded during the second term, as the CIA opened a new front in Angola and intensified its Afghan program. The U.S. military budget also continued to increase—albeit at lower rates—and Reagan remained committed to moving forward with SDI.165 That program, administration officials noted, “confers powerful U.S. negotiating leverage.”166 And in the diplomatic realm, Reagan and Shultz informed Soviet officials that expanded East-West trade must await progress on other issues, while insisting that such progress must take the form of verifiable, meaningful changes in Kremlin behavior in the arms race, in the Third World, and on human rights and political issues at home. The U.S. approach, Reagan wrote in 1985, should be that of “just hanging back until we get some of the things we want.” “We can afford to set high conditions for agreements,” agreed National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci in 1987. “We want accommodation on our terms.”167
Yet it was equally imperative to maintain balance in U.S. policy—to ensure that sticks were complemented by carrots, that pressure was matched by reassurance. If nothing else, the experience of the early 1980s had shown that Soviet leaders who felt ostracized and existentially endangered were unlikely to be forthcoming diplomatic partners. “We all as politicians understood that progress becomes very difficult if we push the other person into a corner,” Reagan said in 1985.168 Tact was therefore essential. Threats, public demands, and inflammatory rhetoric would probably backfire; Reagan must demonstrate that improved Soviet conduct would elicit less hostility and greater respect from the West. “I think I can work with this guy,” he said in 1985. “I can’t just keep poking him in the eye!”169 If the United States were to have productive relations with Moscow, a hard line and a soft touch were both essential.
Admittedly, striking this balance was not always easy in the second term. Within the administration, hardliners such as Weinberger and Casey were never fully reconciled to thoroughgoing engagement with Gorbachev, whom they suspected of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Outside the administration, key figures from Reagan’s GOP base openly derided the administration’s diplomacy on these same grounds. Representative Jack Kemp (R-New York) would label Reagan’s arms control efforts vis-à-vis Gorbachev “a nuclear Munich.” Columnist George Will charged that the president had “accelerated the moral disarmament of the West—actual disarmament will follow” through the more measured approach he was now taking in superpower relations.170 Reagan could never entirely ignore such criticism, which occasionally caused him to take a more strident public line toward the Kremlin.
Yet even in the face of these charges, Reagan and Shultz kept their diplomatic goals firmly in mind. And so even amid the continuing disputes and polemics, they worked diligently through the late 1980s to build a productive and mutually respectful relationship with Gorbachev. In summit meetings and private correspondence, Reagan looked to establish personal rapport and trust with the general secretary, while also affirming his commitment to reducing the threat of war. “We harbored no hostile intentions toward the Soviets,” he said in 1986. “We recognized the differences in our two systems. But the President felt that we could live as friendly competitors.”171 And even as Reagan and Shultz pressed Gorbachev and Shevardnadze on a wide range of issues, they usually did so politely and privately, they indicated that progress would lead to better relations, and they pledged that they had no intention of humiliating Moscow if concessions were made. “If the Soviets loosened up, we would not exploit it,” Reagan promised Gorbachev in one discussion on human rights. “We would simply express our appreciation.”172 On the whole, then, the administration was now pursuing a more carefully calibrated and nuanced strategy for shaping Soviet behavior. That strategy combined positive and negative incentives; it was meant to make moderation at home and abroad seem necessary but also acceptable to Gorbachev. Over time, it would prove very effective in doing just that.
The first milestone came in November 1985 at the Geneva summit. The eventual result of Reagan’s early invitation to Gorbachev, the summit was important not for substantive breakthroughs on arms control or Afghanistan—there were none—but, rather, in the basic tone it set. Even as the two leaders sparred over subjects such as SDI and Central America, they began to feel more comfortable with one another. Reagan confirmed for himself that Gorbachev was a dramatic departure from his stolid predecessors: “You could almost get to like the guy.”173 Gorbachev’s reservations about Reagan were less easily overcome, but the general secretary did gain greater confidence that the president was not as reckless or unthinkingly anti-Soviet as sometimes portrayed. Observers on both sides noted a degree of personal warmth between the statesmen, and the summit concluded with pledges to sustain the dialogue. The primary accomplishment of Geneva, Gorbachev wrote to Reagan shortly thereafter, was to “overcome the serious psychological barrier which for a long time has hindered a dialogue worthy of the leaders of the USSR and the USA.”174
The dialogue soon intensified. At Geneva, the two leaders had invoked Reagan’s earlier language in declaring that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”175 In January 1986, Gorbachev outdid this statement with a more dramatic one: a public proposal to abolish nuclear weapons by the year 2000. The dominant belief in Washington was that the proposal was a propaganda ploy. But it appealed to Reagan’s antinuclearism, and he perceived an opportunity to advance the arms-control agenda. Reagan wrote to Gorbachev, endorsing nuclear abolition as an eventual goal, and in July he made his own proposal: to work toward a near-term agreement to eliminate offensive ballistic missiles. This overture, he wrote, “should open the door to some real arms negotiations if [Gorbachev] is really interested.”176 In the interval, the antinuclear sentiments of both leaders had been stimulated by the reactor explosion at Chernobyl in April, which served, per Gorbachev, “as a serious reminder of the terrible forces contained in the energy of the atom,” and of the need for cooperation to subdue that threat.177
These events were prelude to the Reykjavik summit in October. Envisioned as a preparatory meeting prior to a 1987 summit in Washington, Reykjavik turned into one of the most surprising and dramatic moments of the Cold War. Gorbachev was now feeling acute pressure to ease the strains on his economy. “We are already at the end of our tether,” he had told advisers; “an arms race that we cannot manage” loomed.178 At Reykjavik, the general secretary thus announced that he was ready to destroy all intermediate-range missiles in Europe, and to cut superpower strategic arsenals by half. That offer, in turn, alerted Reagan to the possibility of a major arms-control breakthrough and led to a series of rapidly escalating proposals: a U.S. bid to eliminate offensive ballistic missiles over ten years, then a Soviet counter-offer to eliminate strategic weapons, and then, tantalizingly, a moment when it seemed the two sides had agreed to abolish their nuclear arsenals entirely. The deal unraveled, however, because Gorbachev demanded potentially fatal restrictions on SDI as the price of any agreement. Reagan saw SDI as essential to maintaining deterrence as the United States reduced or eliminated its nuclear arsenal, and the summit ended amid mutual recriminations.179
Reagan later termed this encounter “one of the longest, most disappointing—and ultimately angriest—days of my presidency.”180 In hindsight, however, more was gained than lost in Iceland. It would have been extraordinarily difficult to negotiate the modalities of nuclear abolition, let alone sell that program to the Politburo, Congress, U.S. allies, and other potential veto players. And as tempers cooled after the summit, both leaders grew philosophical about its meaning. “The significance of that meeting at Reykjavik is not that we didn’t sign agreements in the end, the significance is that we got as close as we did,” Reagan told U.S. officials. Similarly, Gorbachev characterized the summit as “a breakthrough, which allowed us for the first time to look over the horizon,” and as evidence that Reagan was committed to improving U.S.-Soviet relations and taming the nuclear beast.181 Indeed, the fact that the two sides were contemplating such revolutionary measures showed how dramatically the relationship had changed, and how much the mutual distrust and tension were fading.
Reykjavik was equally significant for what it revealed about U.S.-Soviet power dynamics. Reagan’s policy rested on the belief that Washington could take a hard line in the negotiations because of the leverage that the U.S. buildup—and Soviet economic decline—afforded. “We want peace,” he had said in 1985. “They need peace.”182 After Reykjavik, it was hard to argue with that analysis, because Gorbachev’s desire to head off further competition had led him to alter the Soviet posture in several ways. The general secretary had not only endorsed eliminating intermediate-range missiles in Europe (a proposal that Soviet officials, including Gorbachev, had heretofore ridiculed), but he had also accepted the need for on-site verification, agreed to include Soviet IRBMs in Asia within the INF package, and made important steps toward the U.S. position on START. Gorbachev, Shultz noted, was “laying gifts at our feet . . . concession after concession.” Reagan, meanwhile, had given up very little; Gorbachev asked “when the U.S. would start making concessions of its own.”183
At Reykjavik, of course, the Soviets had made all movement in their position contingent on restricting SDI, but that demand soon proved untenable as well. “As difficult as it is to conduct business with the United States, we are doomed to it,” Gorbachev told the Politburo in early 1987. “We have no choice. Our main problem is to remove the confrontation.”184 A final effort to derail missile defense failed after Shultz warned Gorbachev “to weigh carefully the advisability of tying the entire relationship with the United States to SDI.” By the end of the year, Gorbachev had set aside the issue and assented to a landmark INF treaty that eliminated U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range missiles worldwide. The treaty mandated the destruction of roughly 1,500 Soviet deployed missiles, as compared to 350 on the U.S. side; it left the British and French nuclear arsenals untouched (another reversal of long-standing Soviet policy); and it effectively represented Moscow’s acceptance of Reagan’s core position from 1981.185 From Gorbachev’s perspective, there was simply no longer any alternative to accepting this formula. The treaty was necessary to remove “a pistol held to our head” in the form of the Pershing-II, he believed, and to reduce the “funds swallowed up by the insatiable Moloch of the military-industrial complex.”186
Unsurprisingly, the asymmetrical reductions of the INF treaty, and the firmness of Reagan’s arms-control posture, elicited some Soviet resentment. “Two great powers should not treat each other like this,” Gorbachev told Shultz in 1987.187 Frustration aside, however, the INF treaty improved Soviet security by eliminating the Pershing-II, and it provided a friendlier diplomatic climate in which Gorbachev could pursue defense cuts. Reagan and Shultz managed any residual friction quite nicely, through well-timed gestures and conciliatory public relations. When Gorbachev requested the scrapping of seventy-two older, largely symbolic Pershing-1a missiles in West Germany as part of the INF pact, Reagan persuaded Bonn to agree. The president and Shultz also took care to frame the treaty not as a Soviet cave-in but as a mutual triumph. That approach shone through at the Washington summit in December, when Gorbachev received a state dinner, twenty-one-gun salute, and other honors. This treatment gave Gorbachev’s image a diplomatic fillip as the Soviet political scene become more fraught, and it underscored the idea that more forthcoming behavior would win legitimacy and respect abroad. Gorbachev clearly appreciated the experience: he testified that the summit showed “how much the human factor means in international politics,” and that it marked “a new level of trust in our relations with the United States.”188
As Reagan maneuvered Gorbachev toward a more positive stance on arms control, he was doing something similar vis-à-vis Soviet policy in the Third World. From 1985 onward, Gorbachev grasped that Moscow had lost momentum in the developing regions, and that the expansion of the 1970s had come at a high price. As scholars have documented, however, he initially refused to give up the struggle. “We cannot afford to lose,” he explained. “Even if we cannot move decisively ahead, we still can and should keep what we already have.”189 In letters to Reagan, Gorbachev accused Washington of supporting groups “which are, in essence, terrorists,” and he increased Soviet aid to the FMLN and the Sandinistas. Even in Afghanistan, the Soviet military intensified its operations—including cross-border strikes into Pakistan—in hopes of weakening the insurgency and strengthening the Kabul government, and Gorbachev demanded that any Soviet withdrawal be linked to the termination of foreign aid to the rebels. “They should find a balance of concessions,” he told Reagan in 1987.190
The trouble with this policy was that it was unsustainable. The price of supporting Moscow’s Third World allies was becoming harder to bear as the Soviet economy deteriorated; U.S. officials joked that the “colonial regions are exploiting the Soviet Union!”191 And if it was true, as Gorbachev acknowledged, that the Kremlin had suffered a “total defeat” in Afghanistan, then dragging out that misadventure would only compound its military, diplomatic, and economic onus. “It is obvious,” noted a Soviet report in May 1987, “that the absence of a solution to the Afghan problem is being used to harm the interests of all socialist countries.”192
The effect of U.S. policy during the late 1980s was to accentuate Gorbachev’s incentives to accept this reality and begin a broad retrenchment from the Third World. Admittedly, U.S. aid to guerrillas in countries such as Angola and Nicaragua never resulted in the military overthrow of communist regimes during Reagan’s presidency, but it did drive home the price of maintaining Soviet positions along the global periphery. This was especially true in Afghanistan, where in 1985–1986 the administration ramped up covert support in hopes of forcing “the removal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan and the restoration of its independent status.”193 That increased support—especially provision of Stinger missiles—took a heavy toll on Soviet forces during 1986–1987 and ensured that the quagmire only worsened for Moscow. Intelligence reports confirmed that the Stingers were undermining Soviet air superiority, allowing the guerrillas to consolidate safe havens, and generally empowering the resistance. “The Stinger missile has changed the course of the war,” noted one assessment.194
The counterpart to this military pressure was a strong diplomatic offensive. Reagan and Shultz continually reminded Gorbachev that no overarching détente would be possible unless his policies toward Afghanistan and other regional conflicts changed. “The absence of any progress on regional issues is a fundamental impediment to a general improvement of our relations,” Reagan wrote before one summit.195 Yet they also hinted that Soviet retrenchment would allay tensions and be conducive to a better relationship with the West. The occupation of Afghanistan was “a dreadful quagmire,” Reagan declared in 1987, but the Soviets could “win accolades from people of good will everywhere . . . by grounding their helicopter gunships, promptly withdrawing their troops, and permitting the Afghan people to choose their own destiny. Such actions would be viewed not as a retreat but as a courageous and positive step.”196
This two-pronged approach was well suited to maximizing the strain on Soviet positions, while also playing on Gorbachev’s need for diplomatic progress and greater access to Western trade and technology.197 In late 1987–1988, the general secretary began taking steps to cut Soviet losses and decrease East-West frictions. Soviet officials sought U.S. assistance in ending conflicts in Namibia and Angola, and advised their Third World clients that Kremlin aid had limits. In Central America, Gorbachev would soon suspend arms shipments to Nicaragua and begin reducing assistance to the FMLN, as he urged both parties to make peace with their U.S.-backed rivals. “The concerns of our strategic allies in the Soviet Union are concentrated around the geopolitical problems the worldwide struggle against imperialism poses,” Nicaraguan leaders lamented, “and not in acting sympathetically with the Revolution.”198
This retreat from the Third World was most dramatic in Afghanistan, from which Soviet troops began pulling out in May 1988. Gorbachev saw the withdrawal as essential to bettering the Soviet image abroad and facilitating rapprochement with Washington. It would “confirm our new approach to solving international problems,” he said, and “deprive our enemies and opponents of their most powerful argument.”199 To further mollify Reagan, Gorbachev set a firm timeline for the withdrawal, and “front-loaded” the removal of Soviet troops into the opening months of that period. These concessions did not convince Reagan to halt aid to the rebels, which U.S. and Pakistani officials saw as critical to toppling the communist regime left behind in Kabul. “Nothing . . . prevented us from continuing to support those we had supported, and . . . we intended to do so,” Shultz told Shevardnadze.200 But the administration did lessen the embarrassment for Moscow, by praising Gorbachev for his statesmanship, and by endorsing diplomatic accords that let him claim that the Soviets were withdrawing as part of an international settlement rather than a unilateral surrender. Matlock, then U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, later wrote that the accords “gave Gorbachev the political cover he needed to extract his troops.” Similarly, Chernyaev agreed that the withdrawal “would be easier and more graceful to do . . . within the framework of an agreement.”201 In Afghanistan as in arms control, Reagan accomplished key geopolitical objectives without humiliating a weakened Kremlin in the effort.
Nowhere was this balancing act more important than in promoting human rights and political liberalization within the Soviet Union. Reagan had long argued that these domestic matters were in fact crucial geopolitical issues, because a less authoritarian Soviet Union would be a less secretive and dangerous Soviet Union. Human rights, he told Shevardnadze, were “literally at the heart of the U.S.-Soviet relationship.”202 As superpower diplomacy accelerated, Reagan and Shultz continually pushed Gorbachev to release political prisoners, liberalize laws on dissent and political activity, expand emigration for Soviet Jews and other dissidents, and provide greater liberties for religious groups. The president pursued these issues at every summit and in numerous other forums, reminding Gorbachev that little else would be possible without moderation of Soviet rule at home. “If the Soviet Union intended to improve its relations with the United States,” he said at Geneva, “it would do well to change its reputation with respect to individual freedom.”203
This pressure was applied with a relatively light touch, however, because Reagan understood that Gorbachev was unlikely to budge on this most sensitive subject if he felt harangued or disrespected. Washington must not “force Gorbachev to eat crow and embarrass him publicly,” Reagan had written in 1985. “We must always remember our main goal and his need to show his strength to the Soviet gang back in the Kremlin.”204 The administration generally pursued the human rights dialogue through quiet diplomacy rather than public challenges, and Reagan and Shultz framed the issue not as one of the United States issuing demands, but as an area in which Moscow could repair its tarnished image. Likewise, they held out the prospect that meaningful progress would bring tangible benefits, from expanded trade to an agreement to hold the next Helsinki follow-on meeting in Moscow. Gorbachev badly wanted the latter reward as a symbol of Soviet international legitimacy; U.S. diplomats and the Western allies dangled the carrot of a positive answer to encourage liberalization. “We must propose a challenge as well as offer an inducement,” State Department officials wrote.205
Gorbachev did not always take kindly to these exhortations—“he would not sit as the accused before a prosecutor,” he once told Reagan.206 Nor did he require U.S. prodding to understand that some kind of liberalization was imperative to political and economic rejuvenation at home. Yet even taking these issues into account, there is considerable evidence that Reagan’s carrot-and-stick approach did advance the cause of Soviet reform. It strengthened the hand of liberalizers such as Shevardnadze, while helping convince even KGB officials that greater respect for individual rights was vital to progress on key priorities like trade and arms control.207 Eventually, liberal Foreign Ministry officials began asking U.S. diplomats to push the rights question more vigorously, for precisely this reason. “Can the Department provide me a list of prisoners that I could pass on to Kashlev?” inquired one State Department official. “I take it that he would like to use it to put some additional pressure on Moscow.”208 Similarly, by putting the issue of reform squarely athwart the path to improved relations, Reagan reinforced Gorbachev’s inclination to leaven Soviet repression, and provided an incentive for him to move further and faster than he might otherwise have done. As Chernyaev later said, “Our policy did not change until Gorbachev understood that there would be no improvement and no serious arms control until we admitted and accepted human rights, free emigration, until glasnost became freedom of speech, until our society and the process of perestroika changed deeply.”209
These advances were most marked from early 1987 onward, as Gorbachev sought to remove human rights as a stumbling block in East-West affairs. In April, he told Shultz that Moscow would consider “any proposal that emerges in the humanitarian area,” and the two countries soon formed working groups to address the subject more systematically.210 Before long, the Soviets were moving forward on numerous fronts: ending the jamming of VOA and other Western broadcasting, releasing 650 political prisoners between early 1987 and early 1989, and allowing the emigration of Jews, Armenians, and ethnic Germans to skyrocket from 1,900 departures in 1986 to 77,800 two years later. As part of the CSCE process, the Kremlin also accepted firmer criteria for judging human rights performance in the Eastern bloc, stronger protections for Helsinki monitoring groups, and provisions to ease the flow of information among citizens. “Under Gorbachev human rights performance has made significant—by Soviet standards, remarkable—progress,” CIA analysts noted.211
Throughout the late 1980s, Reagan’s role in facilitating this progress was based not simply on his ability to apply leverage, but also on his willingness to support and reward advances where they occurred. Just how important this latter aspect of policy was became clear at the Moscow summit in late May and early June 1988. In the year prior, Soviet reform had accelerated. Gorbachev was now working to outflank his opponents and empower greater economic restructuring through a program of unprecedented political liberalization: strengthening the judiciary, introducing democratic elections, improving individual rights and protections, and making other changes that would significantly weaken the institutional bases of Soviet authoritarianism. Those reforms divided the Communist Party, however, with both liberals and hardliners questioning the pace and scope of the proposed changes. Facing growing opposition at home, Gorbachev looked to his chief diplomatic interlocutor for reassurance that political reform would be rewarded abroad. Through private channels, he had Anatoly Dobrynin pass an oral message in March 1988 expressing Soviet concern that “the President still thinks of the USSR as an evil empire whose social and political positions have placed it on the ash heap of history. The Soviets request that, if this in fact is not the President’s perception . . . then it would be important for the President to state this prior to the Moscow Summit. The Soviets ask what concrete steps they could take over the next few months to prompt such a statement by the President.”212 Gorbachev, one U.S. assessment noted, was seeking “Western endorsement of glasnost.”213
Reagan responded with a careful blend of pressure and encouragement. In April, he gave a tough speech on U.S.-Soviet affairs, and at the summit he pushed energetically for greater reforms “across the board.” He asked Gorbachev to decree “that religious freedom was part of the people’s rights, that people of any religion—whether Islam with its mosque, the Jewish faith, Protestants or the Ukrainian church—could go to the church of their choice.”214 He and Shultz also pushed for the institutionalization of existing reforms and the repeal of antidissent laws used to limit political discourse. Finally, speaking publicly at Moscow State University, Reagan extolled the virtues of political and economic liberty and the need for change in the Soviet system. “Democracy is the standard by which governments are measured,” he declared; an authoritarian Soviet Union would be neither economically competitive nor internationally respected in the modern world.215
As Reagan issued this challenge, however, he also expressed his admiration for what Gorbachev had done so far. Appreciating that Gorbachev was now seeking to change the Soviet system in remarkable ways, the president provided a strong endorsement.216 He publicly praised perestroika and glasnost, credited Gorbachev with making immense changes in Soviet policies, and stressed the general secretary’s personal contributions to the improved East-West relationship. And as the Soviet leadership had requested, he consigned the “evil empire” label itself to the ash heap of history, calling it an artifact of “another time, another era.”217 As historian James Mann has noted, Reagan’s rhetoric hit its mark, bolstering Gorbachev prior to a crucial party congress in June, at which he continued with the reform agenda. The general secretary certainly grasped the significance of Reagan’s gestures; he and aides such as Chernyaev and Shevardnadze all looked back on the summit as a watershed in cooperation and trust.218 The two sides had “come a long way,” Reagan himself said.219
By the close of Reagan’s presidency, in fact, it was becoming hard to deny that U.S.-Soviet relations had changed fundamentally. At their last summit in New York in December 1988, the president and Gorbachev reminisced warmly about their previous meetings, and treated each other more as old friends than as leaders of rival superpowers. Reagan reaffirmed that “we were all on Gorbachev’s side concerning the reforms he was trying to make in the Soviet Union”; Gorbachev replied that his country “would never go back to what it had been.”220 The general secretary had made that much evident in a speech at the United Nations the same day. In that address, he announced a unilateral 500,000 troop reduction in the Soviet military, the removal of 50,000 soldiers and 5000 tanks from Eastern Europe, the endorsement of “freedom of choice” in “the social development of nations,” and the renunciation of class struggle and ideological conflict as the basis of Moscow’s relations with the world. It was necessary to avoid being “hemmed in by our values,” he said; the Kremlin had no claim “to be in possession of the ultimate truth.”221 One longtime observer of U.S.-Soviet affairs later called the speech “the most astounding statement of surrender in the history of ideological struggle.”222
Gorbachev would not have put it that way, but he did mean his address to show that the Cold War was ending and that the Soviet Union was distancing itself from zero-sum competition with the United States. “This speech should be an anti-Fulton—Fulton in reverse,” he told advisers.223 This retreat from Cold War was rooted in necessity, in that the Soviets could no longer sustain an intense global struggle, and it also reflected the humanistic principles of Gorbachev’s new thinking. Yet it was no less a product of Reagan’s success in establishing a more stable, productive relationship. It was now possible to demilitarize Soviet policy, Gorbachev said in 1988, “because politically we have entered a new situation in our relations with the United States.” Or as he told Reagan in New York, “It had all begun in Geneva.”224
As we will see in chapter 6, it would fall to George Bush to preside over the final endgame of the Cold War, and to fully reap the harvest of Soviet decline. Through the 1980s, however, the Reagan administration played an indispensable role in seizing the opportunities before it and moving the superpower struggle toward that resolution. From the start, Reagan moved to retake the geopolitical high ground through a determined Cold War offensive. After late 1983 and early 1984, he then blended the hard line and the soft touch necessary to encourage a dramatic reduction of tensions on eminently favorable grounds. The president’s second-term diplomacy maintained enough firmness and leverage so that Gorbachev had to make real concessions as the price of an improved relationship, but it also fostered the mutual respect and confidence needed to convince the general secretary that accommodation was a path worth taking. Reagan was, no doubt, very lucky to come along when the Soviet Union was falling into deep systemic crisis, and to find in Gorbachev the exceptionally congenial partner who was so critical to making American diplomacy effective. But even so, Reagan’s policies showed that the United States was now putting the structural possibilities at hand to excellent use.
They also demonstrated that vision and adaptation were both central to successful statecraft during the 1980s. From the beginning of his presidency, Reagan knew where he wanted to go in U.S.-Soviet relations, and he devised a deliberate, multifaceted strategy meant to take him there. Yet through 1983–1984, that strategy was only partially effective. It took time, experience, and the ability to learn and recalibrate accordingly for the administration to find the right mix of policies to achieve its long-range aims. Indeed, had Reagan not moderated his stance toward Moscow, he would have been hard pressed to profit from Gorbachev’s ascension or win the diplomatic gains of his second term. Turning bold ideas into good policy is almost always something that requires flexibility as well as perseverance. Reagan’s dealings with the Soviets were no exception to this rule.
Nor were they an exception to the rule that even good policy has liabilities. As noted previously, Reagan’s statecraft was a high-risk endeavor, in that it contributed to a sharp increase in East-West tensions during the first term. Throughout the 1980s, his policies incurred significant costs as well. Several of these costs pertained most directly to issues covered in later chapters, and will be explored more fully there. Yet they still deserve to be discussed briefly here, because they demonstrate the weaknesses of a very productive Cold War strategy, and because they show that U.S. resurgence entailed its own dilemmas.
Many of those dilemmas clustered around the Reagan Doctrine, which was among the administration’s most effective—and troubling—endeavors. The upside of the Reagan Doctrine was that it served as a highly economical method of punishing Soviet overextension and creating pressures for Kremlin retrenchment. The downside was that it occasioned a range of negative byproducts. Some—not all—of the “freedom fighters” whom the CIA supported were unsavory or downright repugnant characters, from Angola’s Jonas Savimbi to anti-Sandinista rebels who engaged in torture, assassination, and devastating economic sabotage. More broadly, the fact that U.S. policy toward countries such as Angola and Nicaragua essentially aimed at fueling ongoing civil wars meant that the Reagan administration bore some responsibility for perpetuating the horrific violence that afflicted these nations.225 At the time, U.S. officials justified these interventions on grounds of geo-political necessity, and on the rationale that the likely alternative—Soviet-backed communist regimes—would be worse. “There are degrees of evil,” Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick said.226 All the same, there is little question that Reagan’s Third World initiatives muddled the moral clarity of U.S. policy, or that they contributed to the carnage and instability that often constituted the Cold War’s primary legacies in the global south.
The Reagan Doctrine also fed into dubious behavior within the executive branch. The excesses and ambiguities of the Contra war eroded congressional support for that war as time went on; the resulting restrictions led the administration into the series of improvisations and illegalities that produced the Iran-Contra scandal. The crux of the scandal was that Reagan’s aides had sold arms to Iran and diverted some proceeds to the Contras, despite legal prohibitions on such activity. When the story broke in late 1986, it caused a major political blowup that threatened to cripple Reagan’s foreign policy—and perhaps even cause his impeachment—just as U.S.-Soviet diplomacy was taking off. The president eventually escaped such punishment, and the controversy subsided, when investigators found no “smoking gun” linking Reagan directly to the illegal activity. Nonetheless, the officials who executed the operation certainly believed that they were carrying out the essence of the Reagan Doctrine. “Do whatever you have to do to help these people keep body and soul together,” the president had instructed at one point.227 Indeed, a major lesson of the scandal was that Reagan’s enthusiasm for covert action, and the deficiencies of his management style, could lead the administration onto treacherous ground.
The drawbacks of the Reagan Doctrine were ultimately most pronounced and most lasting in Afghanistan, where, Gates later wrote, “our operations . . . had lingering and dangerous aftereffects.”228 Those aftereffects flowed largely from the fact that, although America’s Afghan allies were courageous fighters, many of them possessed a worldview scarcely less hostile to Washington than to Moscow. “You could see at the time that some of them hated us,” John McCarthy, the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Pakistan, recalled. “These were very anti-Western kinds of types, very fundamentalist in terms of their approach to modern life.”229 Accordingly, U.S. support to the resistance constituted “the crown jewel” of the Reagan Doctrine and an exemplary form of rollback, but it simultaneously empowered a new generation of enemies. Likewise, the Afghan conflict served as a nexus and finishing school for radical Muslim fighters not just from Afghanistan but from around the world, some of whom would form the core of an international jihad during the 1990s and after. “This networking was facilitated considerably by the Afghan war,” U.S. counterterrorism official (and later ambassador to Pakistan) Robert Oakley noted.230
Although no one could have fully foreseen the consequences of these developments at the time, Reagan did perhaps miss a chance to limit the ills that grew out of the Afghan war. By the late 1980s, Kremlin officials were seeking U.S. support for a coalition government that could survive the Soviet withdrawal and provide order in postwar Afghanistan. Many resistance leaders “wished to establish a fundamentalist regime,” Shevardnadze warned Shultz; the superpowers should “agree to discourage extremism.”231 Yet even though U.S. officials understood the prospects for instability in Afghanistan, they declined to pursue a solution that would have brought communists into the Kabul government. To cut this deal, top officials feared, would enrage congressional conservatives and offer an unneeded concession to a Soviet government whose bargaining position was eroding by the day. “Why take this risk when the Soviet hand is so weak?” wrote one official. “Why face the political heat on the Hill?”232 Instead, the United States focused on providing the mujahedin with enough weapons to defeat the communist government that remained after the Soviet withdrawal. This choice helped ensure the eventual fall of that regime, but it also contributed to the chaos in which the Taliban and its terrorist allies would later flourish.
Nor were these the only pernicious outcomes of the war. As I discuss in chapter 5, cooperation between Washington and Islamabad was essential to supporting the Afghan resistance, but it tied Reagan to a military dictatorship whose authoritarian tendencies and efforts to Islamize Pakistani society were fomenting long-range polarization. “In time,” the CIA predicted in 1981, the policies of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s government might have “profound and unsettling” effects.233 In addition, U.S. dependence on Zia was ensuring that Reagan could do little to dissuade that government from developing a nuclear weapons capability.
From the mid-1960s onward, U.S. officials had made concerted efforts to retard the spread of nuclear weapons, in the belief that proliferation—especially in conflict-prone regions such as South Asia—could present a major threat to international security. From the late 1970s onward, U.S. officials also knew that the covert Pakistani nuclear weapons program was reaching critical mass.234 Yet in 1979–1980, the Carter administration had opted to downgrade its emphasis on the matter in order to facilitate geopolitical cooperation on supporting the anti-Soviet jihad. “Our big problem with Pakistan was their attempts to get a nuclear program,” Harold Brown explained, and “although we still object to their doing so, we will now set that aside for the time being.”235 Despite misgivings, the Reagan administration followed the same path. There was “overwhelming evidence that Zia has been breaking his assurances to us” on nuclear matters, Shultz wrote in 1982, but it was necessary to be “mindful of the essential role that Pakistan plays in support of the Afghan resistance.”236 Conscious that Washington could not exert real pressure on Zia without jeopardizing the anti-Soviet resistance, Reagan’s diplomats generally soft-pedaled the nuclear issue just as Pakistan was making key strides toward the bomb. All told, Reagan succeeded in bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan, but in doing so, he courted longer-term dangers in a volatile region.
Finally, and not least of all, there were the financial costs of Reagan’s policies. The military buildup of the 1980s was the centerpiece of Reagan’s offensive, and it played a key role in restoring U.S. advantage. Yet that buildup was also hugely expensive, and it entailed unavoidable trade-offs between military strength and fiscal discipline. “It is very difficult for me to believe that one can cut the budget as they would like to cut it, that one can cut taxes as they want to cut taxes, increase defense as one wants to increase defense,” predicted Chief of Naval Operations Thomas Hayward in 1981.237 Reagan had campaigned on the notion these priorities were in fact reconcilable, but he soon had to admit that the skeptics were correct. “If it comes down to balancing the budget or defense,” he said, “the balanced budget will have to give way.”238
Give way it did, in spectacular fashion. The price of Reagan’s military programs—when combined with the impact of his tax cuts—was an explosion of deficit spending and national debt. Annual deficits reached nearly $250 billion during his presidency, and publicly held national debt tripled from $711 billion to $2.1 trillion. The cost of debt service reached one-sixth of federal outlays when Reagan left office, and the ratio of debt to GDP rose from 26 percent in 1980 to 42 percent in 1989. By historical comparison, Reagan incurred more debt than all previous presidents combined, and on his watch the United States became a debtor nation for the first time in seventy years.239 As long as Washington could attract large amounts of foreign capital, it could finance this debt without excessive near-term dislocations. Even so, Reagan’s fiscal record raised questions about when the country’s inability to live within its means might itself become a source of insecurity. By the late 1980s, Reagan himself was acknowledging that “his biggest concern was the budget deficit,” and allies like Thatcher warned that this problem might ultimately undermine America’s “great strength” in global affairs.240 As U.S. debts grew in later decades, these concerns would only become more pronounced.
Taken together, these issues showed that while Reagan’s approach to the Cold War achieved truly striking results, those results came at a price. The president effectively used U.S. power to exploit Soviet decline, reshape superpower affairs, and make possible a dramatic improvement in America’s global position. At the same time, however, his policies were sowing more troublesome legacies, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua to Washington, DC. These legacies did not negate Reagan’s historic achievements in the Cold War, nor did they make his statecraft particularly unusual: trade-offs and unintended consequences are the norm in world affairs. They did indicate, however, that America’s international renaissance contained the seeds of problems to come.
The Reagan years were a time of profound change in the Cold War. At the dawn of the 1980s, the United States appeared to be reeling from a string of geopolitical reverses, and struggling to handle an emboldened Soviet Union. By mid-decade, however, the tide of the superpower contest had turned unmistakably; by the time Reagan left office, bipolar tensions were easing dramatically and in ways that earlier generations of U.S. statesmen would have found nearly inconceivable. There were still crises to come and issues to be resolved, certainly, and those tasks would fall not to Reagan but to his successor. Yet the U.S.-Soviet relationship the president left behind in early 1989 was virtually unrecognizable from what he had inherited eight years earlier.
That transformation illustrated three key themes regarding America’s geo-political trajectory during the 1980s. The first was that U.S. officials were now aggressively exploiting the emerging chances to reassert American primacy and profit from the tectonic shifts at work. Here as elsewhere, of course, Reagan did not cause those shifts to begin, and he was fortunate to hold power at a time when the global context was becoming far more permissive than before. What can be said, though, is that Reagan and his advisers generally understood the possibilities that were presenting themselves in the Cold War, and that they fashioned policies that ultimately made the most of them. From the outset, the administration deliberately and concertedly used all aspects of national power to exacerbate Kremlin weaknesses and build a position of U.S. strength; from 1983–1984 onward, it adroitly combined positive and negative inducements to facilitate striking improvement in the bilateral relationship. The Reagan team indeed turned structural opportunity into successful strategy, and in doing so, it began to shape global changes to America’s decided advantage.
The course of U.S.-Soviet relations also illustrated a second theme, however, which was that this process of turning structural opportunity into successful strategy was precisely that—a process. For all of Reagan’s prescience and vision, there was a substantial measure of trial-and-error adaptation in his policies. The geopolitical offensive of the first term may have restored U.S. leverage, but it also led to an alarming spike in Cold War tensions. It would thus take the searing experience of Able Archer, and the resulting Reagan recalibration, to bring about an approach that fused strength with reassurance and permitted the turn in U.S.-Soviet relations after Gorbachev took power. The development of effective U.S. policies during the 1980s was not a seamless or uncomplicated affair, and Reagan’s dealings with the Kremlin provided ample demonstration of that fact.
They also showed that the foreign policy breakthroughs of that decade had their downsides. Regarding the Cold War, the primary outcome of Reagan’s statecraft was a marked reduction in the Soviet threat and a fundamental improvement in the U.S. global position. Yet that statecraft required trade-offs, and it produced negative second-order effects in the moral, financial, and geopolitical reams. Some of these effects proved fairly transient in their impact; others fed into the threats that would characterize the post– Cold War era. This, then, constituted a third essential theme of Reagan’s Soviet policies: that the renewal of U.S. primacy brought about problems—and blowback—of its own.