The Gipper and the Hedgehog

How an "amiable dunce" outsmarted the world.

Glenn Garvin from the November 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Arthur Schlesinger, just back from a trip to Moscow in 1982, said Reagan was delusional. "I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street -- more of almost everything," he said, adding his contempt for "those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink." (By the way, Schlesinger, who has spent his life in praise of JFK's adventures in Vietnam and Cuba but foamed at the mouth over every other American military action of the Cold War, proves Isaiah Berlin wrong: In addition to foxes and hedgehogs, there are also chameleons.)

Reagan nonetheless persisted. He boosted production of conventional arms and borrowed a play from the Soviet book by backing anti-communist insurgencies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Most controversially, he poured billions of dollars into his missile defense program.

Whether SDI will ever work (20 years later, it's still mostly theoretical) and whether, even if it does work, it's a wise strategic choice in a world where America's most implacable enemies are not superpowers with hundreds of ICBMs but terrorists with suitcases, are arguments for another time. But what has largely been overlooked in the debate is that the Soviets had no doubt whatsoever that it would work.

At arms summits, Gorbachev frantically offered increasingly gigantic cuts in strategic missiles -- first 50 percent, then all of them -- if Reagan would just abandon SDI. Schweizer, mining Soviet archives and memoirs still unpublished in the West, shows that Gorbachev's fears echoed throughout the Politburo. SDI "played a powerful psychological role," admitted KGB Gen. Nikolai Leonev. "It underlined still more our technological backwardness." Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko understood exactly what Reagan was up to: "Behind all this lies the clear calculation that the USSR will exhaust its material resources before the USA and therefore be forced to surrender." Most tellingly of all, the East German-backed terrorist group known as the Red Army Faction began systematically murdering executives of West German companies doing SDI research.

Reagan, unmoved, stiff-armed the Soviets on SDI while winning huge concessions on other weapons. When Gorbachev complained, Reagan needled him with jokes. (Sample: Two Russians are standing in line at the vodka store. Time passed -- 30 minutes, an hour, two -- and they were no closer to the door. "I've had it," one of the men finally snarled. "I'm going over to the Kremlin to shoot that son of a bitch Gorbachev!" He stormed up the street. Half an hour later, he returned. "What happened?" asked his friend. "Did you shoot Gorbachev?" Replied the other man in disgust: "Hell, no. The line over there is even longer than this one.")

The arms buildup (and a little-appreciated corollary, Reagan's jawboning of the Saudis to open their oil spigots and depress the value of Soviet petroleum exports) quickly took its toll. The Soviet economy began shrinking in 1982 and never recovered. By Schweizer's accounting, the various Reagan initiatives were costing Moscow as much as $45 billion a year, a devastating sum for a nation with only $32 billion a year in hard-currency earnings. Meanwhile, Reagan's rhetoric (the "evil empire" and "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speeches in particular) emboldened opposition movements in Eastern Europe. Less than a year after Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall fell; the Soviet Union itself disappeared a little later.

Neither Reagan's strategy nor Schweizer's book are without flaws. Regarding the latter, it makes me a little nervous that, in areas where I have firsthand knowledge, Schweizer is sometimes a mite sloppy with the details. He writes, for instance, that Moscow gave Nicaragua's Sandinista government two squadrons of MiG fighters. Actually, despite their endless pleading, the Sandinistas never got a single MiG -- Schweizer apparently has them confused with Soviet-made HIND helicopters, which were much less upsetting to the arms equilibrium in Central America. And I scratched my head over his contention that Grenada's Marxist government permitted the Soviets to use the island as a transit point for arms shipments to El Salvador. Why bother, when Cuba and Nicaragua were so much closer?

As for Reagan's strategy, it came with both costs and risks, all of which Schweizer brushes past. The defense spending binge (coupled with increased domestic spending that Reagan wouldn't or couldn't block) saddled the country with a trillion dollars in debt, which is real money even by Washington's standards. The U.S. government has always thrown money around like a drunken sailor, but enshrining the practice as a standard weapon in our military arsenal is a little scary.Even scarier is the risk that, when you draw lines in the sand, someone will cross them -- or worse, obliterate them. Schweizer describes a chilling scene at a Moscow party where Hungary's foreign minister listened in horror as a group of drunken Soviet generals slammed shots of vodka and bellowed that the imperialists were about to gain military superiority and the time had come to push the button. We weren't the only country with Strangelovian elements.

Schweizer's narrative, nonetheless, is important -- and not just to settle historical scores with the Schlesingers of the world. The flipside of his argument about Reagan's role in the fall of the Soviet Union is that detente was a dismal failure: that the Soviets responded to U.S. restraint with increased troublemaking in the Third World; that arms-control agreements actually destabilized the world by allowing Moscow to catch up with us; that, had we taken a firmer hand, the Cold War could have ended a decade or more earlier, at the cost of much less blood and money.

Those are sobering thoughts as we confront a new enemy that is as antithetical to freedom as was Soviet communism but much less predictable: Islamist terrorism. We once measured the threat to our security in easily quantifiable terms: the number and location of the enemy's soldiers and tanks, the aim of his missiles. As we learned on September 11, 2001, that way of reckoning has joined blimps and the Maginot Line on the scrap heap of military history. Reasonable persons may differ over whether George Bush chose the right target when he invaded Iraq. But it seems clear that Bill Clinton's tentative response to earlier Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and U.S. embassies in Africa only served to embolden Osama bin Laden. The 9/11 attacks taught us that if we wait around until the first punch is thrown, we're going to get a bloody nose and worse.

If only we could bring Ronald Reagan back from the fog into which he's vanished, I'd love to hear what he'd have to say on the subject.