ASTUTE? TRY STUPID:

Reagan the Astute: a review of THE REAGAN DIARIES Edited by Douglas Brinkley (Edward N. Luttwak, Times Literary Supplement)

Memoirs, biographies and policy studies gradually replaced the bungling-bumbling caricature with more realistic depictions, but it is only now, with the publication of his diaries, that we encounter a shrewd and watchful Reagan determined to have his way not only with political opponents and evil or misguided foreigners, but also with his own officials and bureaucracies – the greater challenge in many cases, for diversions can be very subtle, and obstructionism is so easily disguised.

Reagan’s policy towards the Soviet Union of replacing coexistence with de-legitimization had been proclaimed right through the 1980 campaign in which he defeated President Carter’s re-election attempt, but it was so shockingly revolutionary that many in Washington and around the world took it for granted that it was mere talk, destined to be quietly set aside once the new Administration took office. When State Department officials came to brief his transition officials on policy towards the Soviet Union, they did it by listing the inter-agency issues that would have to be resolved to prepare for the next “ministerial with Gromyko”. They focused on process, incidentally noting that there would be close consultations with Anatoly Dobrynin as usual, because in their eyes the only possible policy was to pursue coexistence. That Andrei Gromyko had held his office as Foreign Minister since 1957 and Dobrynin his Washington post as Ambassador since 1962 underlined the stolid continuity of the Soviet Union, which those senior State Department officials assumed would simply continue, as did most people around the world. It followed that any attempt to de-legitimize the Soviet Union was utterly unrealistic in their view, and very dangerous of course, for the recent invasion of Afghanistan had showed that Soviet leaders were willing to use their vast military forces very boldly. (These days it is widely assumed that the decrepitude of the late Soviet Union extended to its armed forces, but that is simply not true. For example, by the time US Intelligence detected and assessed that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had started, five army divisions and four assault regiments had already secured Kabul and seized key locations throughout the country.)

Nor could the State Department satisfy Reagan by calibrating the normal coexistence policies in a hardline direction, because the Carter Administration had already done that in response to the invasion of Afghanistan, imposing a grain embargo among other things. It was only with considerable difficulty that Reagan’s first National Security Adviser, Richard Allen, managed to explain to the State Department diplomats who met the transition team that policy towards the Soviet Union would have to be defined in an entirely new way, with aims very different from the preparation of the next meeting with Gromyko, which was duly “de-scheduled”. The only concrete result of that session was the revocation of Dobrynin’s unique privilege of entering the State Department directly from the garage. When his car swept into the garage entrance as usual, it was stopped and sent back to park in the street, forcing Dobrynin to enter on foot like all other diplomats. More substantively, Dobrynin lost his famed access to the White House under the new Reagan policy of minimizing instead of maximizing communications as well as inter-state relations with the Soviet Union, which overturned decades of conventional wisdom because its aim was not to domesticate the Soviet leadership but rather to undermine and indeed overthrow the entire regime.

On Wednesday, February 4 1980, during his fifteenth day in the White House, in the context of a Cabinet discussion of the grain embargo, Reagan wrote in his diary: “Trade was supposed to make Soviets moderate, instead it has allowed them to build armaments instead of consumer products. Their socialism is an ec[onomic] failure. Wouldn’t we be doing more for their people if we let their system fail instead of constantly bailing it out?”. This was no mere outburst, because policies of economic denial and de-legitimization were quickly implemented, beginning with the previously sacrosanct sphere of arms-control negotiations. The new policy alarmed European leaders to the point of panic in some cases, and evoked furious reactions from détente enthusiasts, but it was not much resisted by the State Department because Alexander Haig was the Secretary, and he had just enough personal contact with Reagan himself to realize that nothing would change his mind. It was an opposite problem that emerged, because Haig loyally set out to achieve Reagan’s purposes strategically, and therefore wanted to turn the new entente with China into a veritable alliance – there was even talk of combining infinite Chinese manpower with US military technology across the board, and not just the long-range radars already secretly installed in Xinjiang. There was a price, however: the abandonment of Taiwan, starting with the denial of arms sales.

But Reagan’s outlook was ideological, not strategic. He was not just anti-Soviet power but anti-Communist, and therefore would not abandon Taiwan.

You can basically boil the American redefinition of sovereignty down to the simple point of rejecting co-existence with totalitarianism and insisting on consensual government. At that point the commonality of Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Reagan and W emerges clearly and American policy becomes so glaringly consistent that their domestic opponents can be said to be literally unAmerican.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 26, 2007 11:47 AM