The American Spectator

Books in Review

(Page 2 of 3)

The Andersons use the declassified notes of the meeting to record that Casaroli brought the message that Pope John Paul II regarded the United States as "the sanctuary for the future of the world...the world relies on your good judgment and wisdom." Reagan revealed, for the first time to any foreign government, as far as is known from public records, his intention to frighten the Russians "with our ability to outbuild them (militarily), which the Soviets know we can do if we choose." Then, "We could invite the Soviets to join us in lowering the level of weapons on both sides."

The cardinal, on behalf of the pope, offered a secret back channel to the Soviet government if Reagan wanted it, indicating a substantive policy of fomenting discontent behind the Iron Curtain, where there were 120 million Roman Catholics, including 40 million in the Soviet Union and almost the entire population of Poland. John Paul II, in a little-recognized move, rewrote the American Catholic bishops' 1983 letter on war and peace, making it generally conform to the new administration's policy. There were 65 million Roman Catholics in the United States, and while not all of them hung on every word of their bishops on national security matters (or anything else), this was distinctly helpful to Reagan. It was also the closest cooperation between the Vatican and the White House in American political matters since Pius XI sent then secretary of state Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli (soon to be Pope Pius XII) to the U.S. for the entire 1936 election campaign, to ensure that Father Charles E. Coughlin and other political clergy did not harass President Roosevelt with intemperate campaign allegations.

The Polish government had declared martial law on December 12, 1981, and the pope openly encouraged passive resistance. Reagan turned the screws of sanctions tighter and poured his oratorical talents into the denigration of the beleaguered Red empire. In a special National Security Council meeting of December 21, 1981, he referred to Roosevelt's Quarantine Speech of 1937 and considered an absolute quarantine of the Soviet Union and "review of our alliances" to reevaluate those who might not wish to cooperate. Haig urged caution and claimed the USSR might "go to war over this." Reagan replied, "Everyone stock up on vodka."

In his (supposedly Christmas) address to the nation that night, Reagan revealed that he had sent a sharply written message to Brezhnev, threatening further unspecified measures if Poland did not return to normalcy, and accusing the USSR (quite accurately) of flagrant violations of the Helsinki Final Act guaranteeing human rights in Europe. He told the NSC on December 23, 1981, that "There is hardly a news service in the U.S. that does not have a coterie of apologists for the USSR," and squelched temporizers and dismissed the UN as "impotent."

Reagan was out of patience with the argumentative and idiosyncratic Haig, who had a tendency to attach himself sadistically to marginal points and debate with Reagan. His resignation was accepted on June 25, 1982. Reagan considered Henry Kissinger, the most obvious replacement, slippery, disloyal to Nixon, ruffleable in crises, and overly respectful of the Great Power status quo. He respected Kissinger's professional competence but thought him an old-world Cold War cynic with little appreciation of the comparative strength of Western ideology in the conflict with Communism. Instead, he turned to the solid, well-tested Californian George Shultz, a former Marine colonel, business school dean, corporate executive, federal budget director, and secretary of labor and the treasury. Reagan changed rather ordinary national security advisers almost annually in his first five years. But his core national security group, Bush, Baker, Shultz, Weinberger, Casey, and Robert Gates (the only one still active in government), was very strong, especially when Howard Baker, Frank Carlucci, and Colin Powell were added in 1986. The observant could already see the possible impact of the three new star players on the world anti-Communist side: Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher. The Cold War was entering its last phase.

REAGAN BEGAN RESEARCH on a comprehensive missile defense system with a small working group on September 14, 1981, to which was soon added his envoy to the Holy See, William Wilson. It was entirely Reagan's idea to tie missile defense to nuclear missile reduction and ultimately elimination. He instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff on December 22, 1982, to explore the possibility of comprehensive missile defense. After feverish preparation, Reagan gave his famous Orlando speech of March 8, 1983, and said that the Soviet Union was "the focus of evil in the world." On March 23, he revealed in a national address from his office that the U.S. proposed to develop a comprehensive missile defense system. The authors show that his secret intention was to propose a joint reduction in nuclear weapons as defense capabilities proceeded, and when the U.S. was ready to deploy ground cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe, again to propose the zero option- complete withdrawal of intermediate missiles in Europe by both sides.

The SDI speech was popular in the U.S., though the liberal media and faint hearts in the scientific
community flapped hysterically, as had been foreseen. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists unctuously claimed that control vehicles would have to be launched into space that would weigh 45,000 tons, as much as the great passenger liners of a century ago such as the Titanic and the Aquitania, a fatuous assertion. But Reagan's popularity, good nature, and forensic skill held the bulk of U.S. public opinion in place.

The allies also fussed predictably. Thatcher, West Germany's Helmut Kohl, and other conservatives were solid; Mitterrand was inscrutable in his magnificent Gallic cynicism; and the social democrats, like Canada's Trudeau, many of the West German opposition SPD, and the Scandinavians and Dutch, havered and widdered. But Andropov, as Reagan had hoped, was horrified, and spoke of an effort to render the USSR's backbreaking military effort "obsolete." Two years before, the Kremlin had thought that military superiority might be in sight. Now the horizon was darkened by a new defensive arms race, a comatose Russian economy, ferment in the satellite countries, and a geriatric leadership crisis (where Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev had reigned for nearly 60 years, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko died in 28 months).

Reagan's initial idea, explained to a select group of journalists the day after the SDI speech, was to give the technology, once developed, to the Russians (who had been trying, without conspicuous success, to develop such a system for 10 years). No one could believe this (Reagan's 1984 election opponent, Walter Mondale, called it a "non-starter"). It did encourage speculation that Reagan was just trying to win the arms race and put Russia to the wall.

This was a magnificent poker bet; SDI was alldefensive, non-nuclear, and the Western left's effort to ridicule it as sci-fi Star Wars was always belied by the Kremlin's evident fear of it. British foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe's description of it as a "Maginot Line" was a nonsensical charge, as SDI was to add to offensive strength, not to substitute for offensive weakness, as Maginot did, and would bankrupt the country against which, not by which, it was to be deployed.

On August 4, 1983, Andropov expressed interest in the zero option for European intermediate forces. On September 1, the Russians shot down, without warning, a Korean civilian 747 airliner that had strayed into Soviet airspace, without warning, and killed 269 people. A U.S. monitoring station in Japan had picked up and recorded the Russian pilot's skyboy comments as he shadowed and shot down the target.

Reagan's genuine outrage was heavily supplemented and well served by his timeless theatrical, not to say histrionic, talents. It was a Soviet public relations disaster, and showed again Reagan's astonishing good fortune: the near fatal assassination attempt, the accident-free period after he fired the air traffic controllers; for the Gipper, the ball always bounced as it should.

The Soviets had walked out of all arms control talks: conventional forces, strategic (START), and intermediate (INF). The U.S. had always resisted strategic arms reduction or even a no-first-use of such weapons agreement, because of Soviet conventional forces superiority in Europe. Now it was possible to envision an INF zero, gradual strategic reduction, and a symmetrical or even joint SDI deployment. It was an infinitely more appealing basis of world security than MAD, and from Reagan's perspective, it was an exquisite pleasure to have the domestic left squealing in ridicule at a system that clearly frightened the Kremlin.

IT WAS A MASTERLY AND FORTUITOUS alteration of Great Power strategic thinking, including the shell game Reagan conducted about how to assure that the USSR wouldn't lose its retaliatory ability with his on-again, off-again sharing or jointly deploying the SDI technology. The nuclear age had begun with Truman and Eisenhower advocating "massive retaliation," and Eisenhower added the flourish of "more bang for the buck": a larger nuclear lead and smaller conventional forces. This line of thinking reached its apogee with the Formosa Resolution in 1955 that authorized the president to use any degree of force he judged necessary in support of what he considered to be the national interest, including the strategically irrelevant offshore Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu.

Kennedy announced his preparedness to "bear any burden, pay any price," and the result was the Vietnam expedition. Kennedy and Johnson allowed the USSR to catch up with the U.S. in nuclear throwweight, and Mutual Assured Destruction was supposed to lead to fruitful arms control discussions. Instead, it led to greater Soviet adventurism while the U.S. sank into the "limited war for a limited objective" quagmire in Indochina, which MacArthur and Eisenhower had warned their successors to avoid.

topics:
Nuclear Weapons, Ronald Reagan, Cold War