Reagan Abroad

An interesting contention from Wilentz is that Reagan got it right in a big way on the so-called "Euromissile" controversy (the subject of the memorable "99 Luftballoons"). Wilentz says not only that the predictions of the naysayers proved wrong (which is clearly true) but that this was no sideshow. Rather, it "was a very important showdown in the history of the Cold War" and "may have played a role in Gorbachev’s emergence in 1985." I'd be interested in learning more about the evidence here. It's plausible enough that a failure of the Soviet hardliners in 1983 could have played an important role in Gorbachev's rise, but then again it might not be true. You'd really need to be a Soviet specialist to understand its role fully.

Either way, as Wilentz says the key move came later, when Gorbachev did come to power and Reagan broke with the bulk of the conservative movement to decide to cooperate in good faith with the Soviet reformers. Wilentz attributes this to the fact that Gorbachev had more experience with the left going back to the 1930s and 40s and thus was more sensitive than a typical conservative to changes within the Soviet leadership.

Comments

Wilentz attributes this to the fact that Gorbachev had more experience with the left going back to the 1930s and 40s and thus was more sensitive than a typical conservative to changes within the Soviet leadership.

This makes no sense (to me). Do you mean "Reagan" rather than "Gorbachev"?

Posted by J | July 1, 2008 10:44 AM

Wilentz attributes this to the fact that Gorbachev had more experience with the left going back to the 1930s and 40s and thus was more sensitive than a typical conservative to changes within the Soviet leadership

Matt means to say that "...Reagan had more experience with the left..." -- but he doesn't proofread his posts, because that's our job.

It usually is his job to say whether thinks an argument is stupid or not, but in this case he chose not to.

My own opinion is that Wilentz's argument (that Reagan's experience with the left in the 30s and 40s helped him understand that Gorbachev was different from other Soviet leaders) is pretty stupid.

Posted by peep | July 1, 2008 10:45 AM

Do you mean Reagan in the last sentence rather than Gorbachev? If you don't I don't think it makes any sense. I'm pretty sure Gorbachev,born in 1931, didn't have much experience with the left in the 30's or even the 40's in any significant way. It also seems worth remembering that it was Andropov who brought Gorbachev to Moscow.

Posted by matt (not the famous one) | July 1, 2008 10:46 AM

Gorbachev came to power with the objective of reforming and saving Communism, not destroying it. And as the not famous Matt notes, Gorbachev was a protoge of Andropov and so there wasn't any real indication that Reagan would find him a person he could deal with.

Posted by calipygian | July 1, 2008 10:53 AM

It would be cool if Matt really meant Gorbachev and was just making you all look stupid!

Without even reading Wilentz (gotta go to a meeting), I think the importance of placing medium range missiles in Europe goes to the Kaiser Soze factor.

What prevented nuclear war in the Cold Warwas the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, Which meant the Soviets had to believe a US president was willing for millions of Americans to die to make a point (like Kaiser showing "thse men of will what will truly was" by killing his own family in front of them). In the 1980's maybe that was still tenable if the Soviets sent ICBMs our way (the Air Force and Navy pretty much being on autopilot, or failsafe as they say, once the missiles hit), but its difficult to believe a US president would slit Cleveland's throat for the sake of Munich.

Putting nukes in Europe sidestepped that issue, any Russian would agree that slitting Munich's throat for the sake of Munich made a lot of horse sense. If the Reds came West and we started losing (as we inevitably would), we could nuke the Soviet Army and its bases all the way to the Russian frontier. It'd be up to Russia to hit our homeland first, and then we're back to the failsafe part.

Posted by beowulf | July 1, 2008 10:57 AM

Not really a Soviet specialist but do study Russia and its Foreign policy. The idea that Gorbachev emerged because the hard-liners 'broke' and let him in is in my mind a rather silly one. Andropov promoted Gorby as his heir apparent, and he had a major role in running the USSR during the decrepit Chernenko's brief run as General Secretary. Support for perestroika in the military-industrial establishment was gained largely due to their own recognition that the major developments in command and control technology and precision guided munitions such as the Cruise missile due to micro-processor technology (the so-called 'third revolution in military affairs') had made the USSR's military doctrine obsolete, and its armed forces technologicaly near-obsolete. They envisioned perestroika and glasnost as a means of gaining a 'breathing space' in the arms race during which the armed forces could technologically restructure and re-arm. Gorby seems to have had other ideas about the ultimate goals of his project, and the rest as they say is history.

Now, old-school Polibturo hardliners like Viktor Grishin and Grigorii Romanov have claimed they were next in line to the throne when Chernenko died, and that Gorby only took the top spot due to subterfuge and hardliners like Gromyko going weak at the knees during the critical moment. The evidence for this is tenuous, and the fact that Gorby was already meeting Thatcher and other foreign leaders in 1984 (and his own reputation as an extremely skilled CPSU politician) suggests the 'official' line that Gorby was more or less heir apparent of Andropov is the correct one, and that Chernenko was simply the last-gasp stop-gap of the old guard.

Given that Andropov was a foreign policy hardliner, who became convinced that Reagan was about to launch a surprise nuclear attack against the USSR, the idea that his hand-picked successor's accession represented the end of the hard-liner's is a difficult proposition to make. Reagan's actions DID bring the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1983 (due to Andropov's suspicisons and his subsequent launching of Operation: RYAN - a full court press by the KGB to monitor any and all indications of a forthcoming US attack) and his stubborn insistence on continuing SDI research probably prolonged it, and set back the course of nuclear disarmament indefinitely. More tellingly, Reagan's reaction after learning of Operation: RYAN, that he and his advisers simply never believed the Soviets would consider them morally capable of launching a first-strike, indicated the general paucity of his strategic vision and moral imagination.

Reagan, and his legacy, have been well served by the fact that he didn't beat Ford for the nomination in 1976, or Nixon in 68. If he had, history would have been considerably less kind to him - in fact, about as kind as its going to be to W.

Posted by Daragh McDowell | July 1, 2008 10:59 AM

While Reagan gets the credit for the "Euromissiles" deployment, the actual decision to produce and deploy the missiles originated with Jimmy Carter. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter saw the Soviets for what they were, and didn't think we could negotiate our way out of their deployment of SS-20s in the European theater. He authorized the production of the Ground Launched Cruise Missiles (GLCM) for deployment in Europe to counter the SS-20s, and also that of the Pershing II MRBMs. The Soviets were especially terrified of the Pershing IIs since it could deliver a nuclear weapons on top of the Kremlin within 15 minutes of launch. The Soviet willingness to enter into the INF Treaty was a result of this decision. I was a member of a GLCM unit in Belgium when that happened. Seeing Soviet inspectors at my formerly top secret missile base was not a sight that I'd ever think I'd see in my lifetime.

Posted by Pan | July 1, 2008 11:31 AM

Reagan broke with the bulk of the conservative movement to decide to cooperate in good faith with the Soviet reformers

WTF?

Obviously Matthew is too young to remember, but Reagan refused to break with the conservative movement when he decided to retain SDI at Rekjavik - to the immense consternation of everyone on the left and in the MSM (redundant, I know).

Posted by Al | July 1, 2008 11:41 AM

Following up my previous comment:

http://www.stdcomp.com/485tmw/untold.htm

In late 1977, then West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt called the United States to respond to the crisis. In January 1979, leaders of Britain, France, and West Germany agreed to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s proposal to deploy the Army’s Pershing II ballistic missiles (1800km) and the GLCM missiles (2500km) in Europe. Another part of the proposal called upon the Soviet Union to begin ‘meaningful’ discussions with the United States aimed at eliminating all intermediate range missiles in Europe. In December 1979, the ‘two-track’ proposal was unanimously approved by the NATO leaders. Politically, the deployment would clearly show U.S. resolve and commitment to NATO. Also, each host country would be seen as sharing the defense burden.

Posted by Pan | July 1, 2008 11:41 AM

Pan -

I just retired from the military. My last assignment was an arms control specialist. Not only did I have to take Russians to go check out the front sections of submarine launched missiles in their tubes in Georgia and the bomb bays of bombers in Louisiana, I got to check out the front sections of Russian submarine launched missiles in their tubes in Petropavlovsk, count the number of missiles in storage in depots in the Urals and inspect the bomb bays of bombers in central Russia.

Its a very different world from the one in which I joined the military 20 years ago.

Posted by calipygian | July 1, 2008 11:50 AM

"Wilentz attributes this to the fact that Gorbachev had more experience with the left going back to the 1930s and 40s and thus was more sensitive than a typical conservative to changes within the Soviet leadership"

I greatly respect Wilentz as a historian but this argument is bizarre. Being on the fringes of the Hollywood popular front left is hardly the best preperation for Kremlinology. I doubt most actual CP members had a clue what was happening in Russia.

Almost no one knew what was going in the Kremlin back then; probably not even the USSR's allies.

Sidney Blumenthal's book on the 1988 elections give a must better explanation for Reagan's excitement over Gorbachev. As a political idealist, Reagan's vision of being the President who led the victorious global struggle of the free world against a monolithic communist tyranny was replaced with the ideal of being the man who helped eliminate nuclear weapons and brought about world peace after figuring out Gorby was the real deal.

Posted by am | July 1, 2008 12:08 PM

It also seems worth remembering that it was Andropov who brought Gorbachev to Moscow. - matt (not the famous one)

Indeed, my memory may be fuzzy as I was a young kid at the time, but I distinctly remember when Gorby first came to power, people wondered wether he would undo what reforms Adropov started. People wondered the same thing, IIRC, about De Klerk in South Africa.

There is always a little bit of Nixon goes to China in all these sorts of reforms (including Begin in Israel).

Posted by DAS | July 1, 2008 12:26 PM

"Obviously Matthew is too young to remember, but Reagan refused to break with the conservative movement when he decided to retain SDI at Rekjavik - to the immense consternation of everyone on the left and in the MSM (redundant, I know).

Posted by Al | July 1, 2008 11:41 AM"

Which is why George Will accused Reagan of losing the Cold War in Reykjavik. And why neocons like Perle were calling Reagan a traitor to the cause.

Posted by Reality Man | July 1, 2008 1:23 PM

Obviously Matthew is too young to remember, but Reagan refused to break with the conservative movement when he decided to retain SDI at Rekjavik

And if you find the one green potato chip, that means potato chips aren't yellow.

The day after Rekjavik, George Will wrote "Yesterday will be remembered as the day America lost the Cold War." Richard Perle wrote something similar, keeping intact his decades-long string of being wrong about every single question he ever discussed.

Ronald Reagan was the anti-containment, anti-negotiation, anti-detente politician. That's what he ran on when he challenged Ford in 1976. He sided with the hardliners who rejected the Truman/Kennan Containment doctrine, and wanted to implement a rollback policy. He didn't believe that a contained Soviet Union would eventually reform and/or fall, and that our policy towards them should be like a seige. He believed we needed to roll them up, biting off outpost after outpost until the we were so much larger and more powerful that we could go in for the kill.

And he came to office prepared to do exactly that. That's what makes his amazing, world-historic flip-flop such an incredible accomplishment. After decades of preaching that Containment couldn't work, he was able to recognize very quickly that it had worked, and that the end game was upon us. After decades of preaching against negotiations and diplomatic thaws, he was willing to meet with Gorbachev. After decades of preaching that "the only thing those people understand is force" and sermonizing that we had to build up the strongest military we could possibly afford in preparation for the inevitable Armageddon, and that arms control was just a ploy by the Soviets to erode our advantages, he was able to see the wisdom of negotiating arms-control deals.

And it worked. The Communist Empire wasn't rolled back from Managua to Havana to Prague to Berlin to Moscow. It fell, first, in Red Square and in East Berlin. That's why Poland and Ukraine are now capitalist republics, while Cuba and Laos remain red. It didn't get rolled up from the outside in; it reformed, then fell, first in the very center of the empire, with the reform/revolutionary waves spreading out from there - exactly as containment theory predicted, and rollback theory insisted could never happen.

Reagan's flip-flop on this was one of the most important policy decisions in American history, and one of the most impressive political/ideological/intellectual feats by a president ever, but it's one the Reagan hagiographers prefer to ignore, because they are like Willl and Perle, and were never able to make the leap that Reagan himself accomplished.

Posted by joe from Lowell | July 1, 2008 1:27 PM

My personal feeling is that the events in the Soviet Union in the 1980's had their own dynamic, and that we had very little influence on them, no more so than under Nikita Khrushchev or Vladimir Putin.

While not a soviet specialist by any means, as a physicist I did know some dissidents, who tended to be surprisingly pessimistic about long term changes.

Posted by Marshall | July 1, 2008 1:38 PM

You guys are totally missing Matt's point! He's acknowledging, as so few on the left have the moral courage to do, that if it weren't for Reagan's hard-line stance on deploying missiles in Europe, the song 99 Luftballoons would never have been written. I don't know about the rest of you, but that's a vision I would prefer not to contemplate.

Posted by OhioBoy | July 1, 2008 1:40 PM

My personal feeling is that the events in the Soviet Union in the 1980's had their own dynamic, and that we had very little influence on them, no more so than under Nikita Khrushchev or Vladimir Putin.

While not a soviet specialist by any means, as a physicist I did know some dissidents, who tended to be surprisingly pessimistic about long term changes.

Posted by Marshall | July 1, 2008 1:46 PM

And it worked. The Communist Empire wasn't rolled back from Managua to Havana to Prague to Berlin to Moscow. It fell, first, in Red Square and in East Berlin.

It was rolled back in Afghanistan which was the Soviets' Vietnam.

The salient fact was that the Soviets couldn't compete economically with the West. It was a third world country. This is the main point, not the individual personalities of Reagan and Gorbachev.

I thought Wilentz's various op-eds during the primary had a very pro-Hillary bias. He seemed rather unobjective for a historian.

Posted by Peter K. | July 1, 2008 1:50 PM

"It also seems worth remembering that it was Andropov who brought Gorbachev to Moscow."

Andropov was a hard-line Stalinist who as head of the KGB was one of the few in the Soviet Union to know how badly the Soviet economy was f***** up.

He was reformer the way the Deng Xioping was one. If Andropov had lived, the USSR would have likely moved in a Chinese direction -- economic liberalization coupled with an authoritarian party-state.

Thanks to kidney disease the Kremlin was lead instead by his follower who was motivated more by a social democratic liberalism than market Stalinism.

Posted by am | July 1, 2008 2:10 PM

Indeed, my memory may be fuzzy as I was a young kid at the time, but I distinctly remember when Gorby first came to power, people wondered wether he would undo what reforms Adropov started.

Actually, my first thoughts about Gorbachev were what made him unique from his predecessors: he was the first one born after the Russian Revoution.

Posted by Randy Paul | July 1, 2008 2:23 PM

He was reformer the way the Deng Xioping was one. If Andropov had lived, the USSR would have likely moved in a Chinese direction -- economic liberalization coupled with an authoritarian party-state.

The Soviets were rigid orthodox Marxist doctrinaires and were not willing to enact any kind of sweeping economic reforms. Gorbachev's hallmark was political reform instead of economic reform. Gorby thought that by liberalizing the political atmosphere, the USSR could buy time and get its command economy act together to compete with the West. He didn't realize until the bitter end the centralized GOSPLAN economy could not be reformed. Deng Xiaoping, on the other hand, was a pragmatist who didn't care anything about economic doctrine if it served the purpose of maintaining the CCP's monopoly on power. This is the fundamental difference between the Russians and Chinese. Russians love to talk about their soul, literature, philosophy. Chinese just want to make money and eat.

Posted by pan | July 1, 2008 2:35 PM

"Actually, my first thoughts about Gorbachev were what made him unique from his predecessors: he was the first one born after the Russian Revoution.

Posted by Randy Paul | July 1, 2008 2:23 PM"

That's a point that often gets overlooked. He came of age and started his higher education during the Kruschev years, which brought us The Thaw (IIRC Yeltsin was from this same generation). He intellectually developed in the Soviet Union's one real moment of intellectual openness. This probably played a role in making him a reformer. He just didn't realize it was a system that depended on oppression and would collapse with political reform.

Posted by Reality Man | July 1, 2008 2:38 PM

A friend of mine pointed out that Gorbachev was the first post-WWII leader of the USSR, meaning the first man in charge who hadn't lived through a searing horror. This probably made him far less paranoid than previous leaders. In addition, of course, Gorbachev had not known Stalinism for nearly as long (he'd have been 22? when Stalin died).

Posted by Barry | July 1, 2008 2:55 PM

A friend of mine pointed out that Gorbachev was the first post-WWII leader of the USSR, meaning the first man in charge who hadn't lived through a searing horror. This probably made him far less paranoid than previous leaders. In addition, of course, Gorbachev had not known Stalinism for nearly as long (he'd have been 22? when Stalin died).

Posted by Barry | July 1, 2008 3:01 PM

Gorbachev was just one of a long line of things the neocons have been dead wrong about, yet they still refuse to go away (or at least shut up.)

Posted by Mike | July 1, 2008 3:11 PM

The Soviet Union fell because it became tiresome to the Soviets to maintain it. They decided en masse, like rock candy coalescing on a string, that they'd rather party (and make money) than be in The Party anymore. There was too much Russia for Communism to exterminate.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 1, 2008 3:27 PM

Absolutely. The 1983 West German election, which was won by the pro-NATO pro-missile right by a 55-45 margin, was the hinge of history. If the anti-missile folks had won, NATO would have unraveled and the victory for Soviet prestige would have kept the Communists in power to this day.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 1, 2008 5:45 PM