James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Globalization and the information revolution offered Shultz a solution. He argued that the Soviet Union should alter its relationship with the rest of the world because doing so would make it economically stronger—and conversely, clinging to the status quo would enfeeble its international position. “The basic argument was that we’re in an information age that demands openness, and it’s going to happen all over the world,” recalled Shultz in an interview. “And any country that closes itself off, or stays apart from it, that country is going to lose out.” 11

Shultz’s presentation had the virtue of being phrased in terms of inevitable economic trends. He was not telling Gorbachev what he should do, but merely explaining how the international economy was being transformed. The presentation played down relations between the two superpowers and instead emphasized the larger context of what was happening elsewhere around the world. In fact, there was an implicit warning that the Soviet Union would be in danger of losing out to other rising powers if it concentrated too heavily on its military competition with the United States. Shultz specifically described to Gorbachev how other countries such as China, Singapore, South Korea, and Israel were rapidly advancing in technology. He did not have to mention the two other nations whose economic power was rising still more rapidly: Japan and West Germany, both of which had recovered from the destruction of World War II.

The collection of ideas that Shultz offered Gorbachev had some shortcomings. Shultz was suggesting that Gorbachev reinvigorate the Soviet Union by integrating it into the international economy, but after seventy years of central planning, the Soviet Union was in no position to do so. Shultz’s presentation emphasized the simple dichotomy of an open society versus a closed one: in his schema, as a result of the information revolution, open societies would succeed and closed ones would fail. He did not suggest the possibility of opening the economy while maintaining a tight control over dissent—the approach that China would later take, with extraordinary economic success.

Nevertheless, it seems clear Shultz’s message was well crafted to appeal to the Soviet leader. “Gorbachev’s fundamental failing was that he did not really understand economic problems and the policies to deal with them. He was always looking for advice,” wrote former Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, who returned from Washington to Moscow in 1986 and worked for the Politburo for the following three years. 12

Talking to other Soviet leaders two days after his conversation with Shultz, Gorbachev seemed to embrace some of the secretary of state’s ideas. “The world is interconnected, interdependent,” he told the Politburo. In his memoirs, written nearly a decade later, Gorbachev described his meeting with Shultz in April 1987 to have been “a milestone. It was the first time that we touched on the philosophical aspects of the new policy, on the roles and responsibilities of our countries.” He did not discuss the specifics of Shultz’s lecture about the information revolution. But the Soviet leader said he had come to the conclusion during that meeting that in Shultz, he was dealing with “a serious man of sound political judgment… a statesman, an intellectual, a creative and at the same time a far-seeing person.” 13

While Shultz encouraged Gorbachev to dream about a revived Soviet economy, others in the Reagan administration had for several years been hoping to undermine that economy. Indeed, years later, some of Reagan’s former aides and conservative admirers argued that the Soviet Union’s collapse had resulted from a deliberate, if unstated, campaign by the administration to drive the country into bankruptcy.

“Nobody talked about it. Nobody articulated it,” Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, said in an interview. “And I mean nobody, ever, articulated it. But I think that everybody understood it, that that was our goal, frankly, right there from the beginning.” By “our” goal, Kirkpatrick acknowledged, she was speaking not necessarily of the entire U.S. government but of a small group within the administration during Reagan’s early years in office: above all by the CIA director William Casey, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, National Security Adviser William Clark; and herself. It was a goal, Kirkpatrick believed, that was shared by Reagan. 14

By this interpretation of Reagan administration policy, the measures for subverting the Soviet regime were led by the Strategic Defense Initiative and the broader defense buildup, both of which might require high-cost Soviet responses. Other elements included cooperation with Saudi Arabia to drive down the price of oil; restrictions on high-technology exports to the Soviet Union; and covert support for the Solidarity movement in Poland and the mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan. 15In addition, Casey’s CIA is reported to have carried out a program of economic sabotage, including at one point an apparently successful attempt to explode a pipeline in Siberia. 16Reagan’s 1983 executive order, labeled NSDD-75, said vaguely that one strand of American policy was to create “internal pressure” on the Soviet regime.

There are, however, several problems with the idea that the Reagan administration won the Cold War by intentionally driving the Soviet Union over the brink.

The first is that there is no consensus among Reagan administration officials that such a strategy was ever the driving force behind the American policy. The strategy may have existed in Casey’s mind, but others in the administration did not see it that way. During a series of discussions about Soviet policy among the administration’s leading officials, “nobody argued that the United States should try to bring the Soviet Union down,” recalled Jack Matlock, who served on the staff of Reagan’s National Security Council. 17Even Weinberger, the administration’s most ardent hawk, did not believe Reagan’s policies were aimed at toppling the Soviet Union. “There were some people who said that the whole thing was just an attempt to run the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. Actually, it was not, in my view,” said Weinberger in one interview in 2002. “What he [Reagan] needed, what we needed and we were in full agreement on, was to restore our military deterrent capability—to get a capability that would make it quite clear to the Soviets that they couldn’t win a war against us.” 18

The secret policy directive NSDD-75, which lies at the heart of claims that the Reagan administration sought to bring down the Soviet Union, was in fact watered down by Reagan himself before it was approved. By the subsequent account of Richard Pipes, the Soviet specialist on the National Security Council staff who drafted NSDD-75, the president personally intervened to delete provisions that would have authorized American efforts to block the Soviet Union’s access to hard currency and would have sought to induce the Soviets to shift resources from defense industries to consumer goods. Pipes recalled that while signing this order, Reagan specifically emphasized the importance of compromise with the Soviet leadership. 19

Even if there was a faction in the early Reagan administration that sought to bring the Soviet Union down, that group of officials increasingly lost out as time went on. “The old shoes were hopelessly outgunned; one by one, we drifted away,” wrote Thomas Reed, who first worked for Reagan in California during the 1960s. Reed, who favored tough policies to confront the Soviet Union, had served as Air Force secretary during the Ford administration and worked on Reagan’s National Security Council staff in the early years, before giving up. 20

Reed’s departure was merely part of the larger trend. Pipes left the NSC in 1983; Clark was replaced a few months later, Kirkpatrick left at the end of Reagan’s first term. Casey stayed on but died in early 1987. Meanwhile, Reagan’s own views evolved. In an interview for this book, Kirkpatrick said Reagan for years believed that Soviet leaders “weren’t reliable people, that they were aggressive and expansionist and dangerous.” She then added: “Those were his views, and he maintained those views, I think—until the Gorbachev era.” Gorbachev, she said, changed Reagan’s thinking. 21