James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

The speech, as finally delivered, was breathtaking in scope. As a tangible demonstration of change, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would cut the size of its military by half a million troops. It would also withdraw six armored divisions from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and disband them; in all, Soviet forces in these three countries would be reduced by fifty thousand men and five thousand tanks. On the conceptual level, Gorbachev made it plain that the Soviet Union was abandoning many of the tenets that had guided its foreign policy for decades. He asserted that relations between nations should be free of ideology—thereby rejecting the idea that Soviet foreign policy should be based on questions of class or on the conflict between socialism and capitalism. Gorbachev also spoke of the importance of “freedom of choice” for all countries. “Interference in [a country’s] internal processes with the aim of altering them according to someone else’s prescription would be all the more destructive for the emergence of a peaceful order,” he said. In that single sentence, he formally abandoned the Brezhnev doctrine, which had been used to justify the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and, more generally, the preservation of the existing order in Eastern Europe.

More generally, the Soviet leader emphasized that nations, particularly the leading powers, should not use force in settling disputes and should rely instead on the rule of law and the United Nations. “All of us, and first of all the strongest of us, have to practice self-restraint and renounce the use of force in the international arena,” he maintained. He spoke of a new international order. He praised the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a benchmark for the Soviet Union and the rest of the world. Finally, Gorbachev’s address also embraced many of the ideas about a globalizing world that Shultz had been putting forward to him during the previous two years. It was impossible for any state to preserve a closed society when communications, information, and transportation were increasing contact so rapidly, Gorbachev said. He announced that the Soviet Union would end its jamming of radio broadcasts; the programs of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and the BBC would all be allowed freely into the country. “The world is becoming a single organism, outside of which not a single state can develop normally, whatever social system it belongs to or whatever economic level it has reached,” said Gorbachev. 3

Gorbachev’s watershed speech marked the furthest he had ever gone toward embrace of a liberal international order. Only a few weeks earlier, Gates had portrayed the Soviet leader as interested in rebuilding Soviet power in order to become a more formidable adversary to the United States. The United Nations address—especially its troop cutbacks—contradicted that interpretation. Reagan had repeatedly maintained that Gorbachev was fundamentally different from his predecessors and that his foreign policy represented a break with the past. For several years, critics had charged that Reagan was being overly optimistic or credulous. But the skeptics were wrong about Gorbachev, and Reagan was right.

Gorbachev’s meeting with Reagan and Bush that same day turned out to be an afterthought, an event of far lesser consequence than the Reagan-Gorbachev summits of the past or the speech Gorbachev had just delivered. The session was held on Governors Island in New York Harbor, a location dictated above all by security considerations; Shultz had originally proposed the Metropolitan Museum, but the Secret Service objected. The site also offered the advantage of a superb photo opportunity—Reagan, Gorbachev, and Bush with the Statue of Liberty in the background. The leaders were happy to oblige.

Powell and other Reagan advisers had already made clear that the meeting should not be considered a summit at all. There should be no proposals of substance, because it was too late for the Reagan administration to do anything. Bush, meanwhile, emphasized both before and during the meeting that he was attending only as vice president of the Reagan administration, not as the president-elect; Reagan was still in charge, and Bush intended to say as little as possible. For his own part, Gorbachev was distracted; he had been informed shortly beforehand of a major earthquake in Armenia, one that would require him to curtail his trip and return home as soon as possible.

On Governors Island, Gorbachev directed his attention to Bush, seeking to persuade him to say he would continue Reagan’s policies. Gorbachev told the president-elect that his foreign-policy initiatives were not designed merely for show; they were not mere gambits aimed at surprising or undermining American policy. “He was trying to convince Bush to sign on to everything Reagan had agreed to, and Bush wouldn’t do it, that was the gravamen of the meeting,” recalled Thomas Simons, the deputy assistant secretary of state. “Gorbachev’s message was that ‘the president and I have made progress, we think that’s a basis for the future, and I hope you agree.’ But Bush kept being evasive. He said, ‘I’m going to have to do a review, I’m going to look at things.’” 4

Afterward, Reagan recorded in his diary that the meeting was “a tremendous success.” Gorbachev “sounded as if he saw us as partners making a better world,” Reagan said. 5Yet by now, when it came to Soviet policy, Reagan had been consigned to history. The Reagan administration had already stopped proposing new policies. Gorbachev knew (and later wrote) that Reagan had become a lame duck. 6

The transition from the Reagan administration to the Bush administration was unusually antagonistic. In theory, this was merely a change from one Republican administration to another, from a president to the vice president who was succeeding him. It should not have been as difficult as the transition from the Ford administration to the Carter administration, or from Carter to Reagan. In fact, career officials found that the Reagan-to-Bush handover was, if anything, more rancorous than one involving a change of parties. Bush’s team was determined to take control of the new administration, to install its own personnel throughout the federal bureaucracy and to dispel perceptions of continuity with the Reagan era. Designated transition teams met rarely, if at all. Officials who had held jobs under Reagan were sometimes told to vacate their offices on a day’s notice.

At the State Department, those who had been part of the Reagan-Shultz diplomacy with Gorbachev were shunted aside. The incoming secretary of state, James Baker, brought in his own small network of aides; the new team was openly disdainful of those who had been involved in the summits or the negotiations of the previous four years. “Jim Baker called me in about a week after he was named secretary of state,” recalled Rozanne Ridgway, who had been in charge of European policy under Shultz. “He said, ‘Tell me, Roz, don’t you think that you all went too fast?’ I said, ‘No, sir.’” 7

The Nixon-Kissinger foreign-policy network reasserted itself. Reagan and Shultz were on the way out, and so, too, were the approaches they had embraced: the emphases on economics, ideas, and rhetoric as key components of American policy toward the Soviet Union. American strategy was to be redirected toward the more traditional issues of geopolitics and the balance of power.

Henry Kissinger quickly sought to place himself at the center of American policy once again. In December 1988, a month before the start of the new administration, Kissinger visited the White House to talk with the president-elect, Scowcroft, and Baker in Bush’s vice presidential office. He argued that they should allow him try to open up a secret channel to Gorbachev on behalf of the new administration. In particular, Kissinger was interested in arranging a quiet deal or understanding with Gorbachev about the future of Eastern Europe. The Soviet leader would be asked to agree that the Soviet Union would not intervene with force in Eastern Europe to stop political reforms or liberalization. In exchange, the Bush administration would recognize Soviet security interests in Eastern Europe and agree not to try to entice countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia away from their Warsaw Pact alliance with the Soviets. 8