Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

The president’s announcement was greeted with dismay in Moscow. Kremlin leaders viewed it as a further escalation of the arms race, designed to deprive the Soviet Union of its hard-won military parity. They could not accept American assurances that SDI was purely defensive. Their reasoning was simple. If the United States succeeded in deploying an antimissile system that protected American cities from incoming warheads, it would enjoy a huge strategic advantage. Such a development would allow Washington to launch a first strike against the Soviet Union with impunity or, at the very least, engage in nuclear blackmail. The alternative—being dragged into another exhausting high-tech race with the rival superpower—was equally alarming to Soviet leaders.

It did not take Gorbachev long to realize that the Soviet Union could not afford to match the American investment in “Star Wars.” At the Geneva summit he offered Reagan a sweeping trade-off. The Kremlin would agree to a 50 percent reduction in the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers, including its own SS-18 missiles, in return for a pledge from Washington to respect a 1972 treaty banning ballistic missile defenses. If the United States refused to compromise, the Soviet Union would be forced to take “countermeasures.” Rather than compete directly with SDI by building its own nuclear shield, it would attempt to overwhelm the American defenses with bigger and better offensive missiles.

“Everything is coming to a halt if we can’t find a way to prevent the arms race in space,” the Soviet leader warned. 88

“I’m talking about a shield, not a spear,” replied Reagan, departing from his prepared notes. “Even if everybody reduces [offensive missiles] by 50 percent, it’s still too many weapons. SDI gets around that.”

“It’s emotional… one man’s dream,” Gorbachev shot back, exasperated by Reagan’s stubbornness. “I want to reduce the number of weapons, but SDI is threatening a new arms race.”

FOR ALL HIS SHORTCOMINGS—the seemingly eccentric ideas and notorious inattention to detail—Ronald Reagan possessed an incredible political sense. His adversaries repeatedly underestimated him. His aides were amazed by his ability to glide through life, with seemingly minimal effort, achieving goals that were beyond the reach, or even the imagination, of workaday politicians. Even for those close to him, this was a paradox that was difficult to explain. “He knows so little,” marveled the detail-obsessed McFarlane shortly after his resignation as national security adviser in 1984, “yet he accomplishes so much.” 89

Part of the reason for Reagan’s success in dealing with the Soviets was his abiding faith in the strengths of the American system of government. Shortly after he became president, a French intellectual named Jean-François Revel wrote a book entitled How Democracies Perish that became a bible for many American conservatives. It begins with an alarming prediction: “Democracy may, after all, turn out to be a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.” The central thesis of the book is that it is futile to expect that economic crises would cause the mellowing or disintegration of Communist states. According to Revel, it is far more likely that the opposite would happen. In order to cover up their internal failures, Soviet leaders would become more aggressive, more militaristic. Totalitarian societies were, by their very nature, cohesive and well regimented. There was a growing danger that they would overwhelm the fragile Western democracies.

Reagan did not share the view that the Russians were ten feet tall. His political sixth sense told him that democracy was a much stronger form of government than totalitarianism, precisely because of its pluralistic nature. He believed instinctively that communism’s death knell was already sounding, a conviction that he expressed in his speeches. “In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right,” he told the British Parliament in June 1982. “We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union.” 90Reagan’s prediction that the “march of freedom and democracy” would leave communism on the “ash-heap of history” seemed like a vain hope at the time—certainly to thinkers like Revel—but it proved astonishingly accurate.

In his dealings with Gorbachev, Reagan displayed a flexibility and tactical finesse that belied his reputation as a Cold War warrior. His ingrained optimism, and his confidence in himself, led him to go further down the road to disarmament than many conservatives thought wise. “I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands,” he joked to the Soviet leader at the end of three days of discussions in Geneva. 91It was almost as if there were two very different Reagans: the confrontational Cold War ideologue and the pragmatic Hollywood negotiator.

One Reagan spoke as if treaties with Communist states were not worth the paper they were written on. The other concluded one of the most sweeping arms control agreements in history with the rival superpower. One Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” The other traveled to the heart of that empire and joined his Soviet counterpart in burying the Cold War. One Reagan spoke as if the only language that the Communists understood were force. The other was a dreamer who thought he could convince a Communist leader of the superiority of the capitalist system by flying with him in a helicopter over the villas and swimming pools of Southern California.

There was an objective need for both Reagans in the collapse of communism. Had the president failed to respond vigorously to the Soviet arms buildup or the invasion of Afghanistan, the Kremlin would have had less incentive to change its ways. On the other hand, if he had heeded the advice of his right-wing friends and spurned the olive branch offered by Gorbachev, a historic opportunity to negotiate a peaceful end to the Cold War might have been lost.

“If Reagan had stuck to his hard-line policies in 1985 and 1986, Gorbachev would also have been forced to take a much tougher position,” said Anatoly Dobrynin, the veteran Soviet ambassador in Washington. “Otherwise he would have been accused by the rest of the Politburo of giving everything away to a fellow who does not want to negotiate. We would have been forced to tighten our belts and spend even more on defense. Remember the party still had everything under control at that time, and this was a realistic option.” 92

Reagan’s dream of constructing a nuclear shield around the United States bedeviled his future dealings with Gorbachev. But the president’s initiative also had the effect of altering the political dynamics between Moscow and Washington by exposing Soviet economic weakness. In a perverse kind of way it may have helped pave the way for the dramatic breakthrough in superpower relations.

The launching of “Star Wars” provoked a contradictory reaction in the Soviet Union. Supported by some sections of the military, politically well-connected weapons developers immediately began an intense lobbying effort to be given the resources to counter the American program. A decision was taken to significantly increase defense spending during the 1986–90 plan period. At the same time, the prospect of a new high-technology arms race had a sobering impact on Kremlin policy makers.

“The Russians really believed that Reagan would do what he said he was going to do. The perception was the reality. They believed. This may have been Reagan’s greatest achievement. He conveyed political will,” said Suzanne Massie, who helped Reagan prepare for his meetings with Gorbachev. 93“The SDI program had a long-lasting impact on us,” acknowledged Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, a leading American expert in the Foreign Ministry. “We realized that we were approaching a very dangerous situation in the strategic counterbalance we had been living in.” 94