VICTORYThe Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union.By Peter Schweizer.284 pp. New York:The Atlantic Monthly Press.
SOMETIMES American foreign policy debates seem governed by a Newtonian law stipulating that for every stupid, overstated, politically inspired argument there is an equally stupid, overstated, politically inspired counterargument. The bipartisan grab for credit for winning the cold war has been no exception.
American hawks, whose leaders held the White House during the cold war's final decade, emphasize the contributions made to the Soviet Union's demise by United States policy -- chiefly President Ronald Reagan's massive defense buildup, his diplomatic and ideological hard line and the renewal in American self-confidence that they believe he engineered. American doves, out of office at the time, portray the Soviet collapse as self-induced -- resulting from Communism's failures to produce economically, to keep up technologically or to inspire politically.
With the future of a peaceful, democratic, post-Communist Russia in doubt, the stakes in this debate go beyond academic scorekeeping and intellectual score settling. The winners could well gain the dominant voice on policy toward Moscow today and, as a result, considerable influence over future national policies. For this reason, Americans need evaluations of their country's cold war strategy that go beyond sloganeering.
Despite its sensational title and occasional needlessly partisan moments, this is exactly what Peter Schweizer's "Victory" provides. Mr. Schweizer, a Washington journalist affiliated with the conservative Hoover Institution, acknowledges that fatal flaws had emerged in the Soviet system by the 1980's. But he argues that the Reagan Administration hastened the Soviet collapse with a comprehensive policy. It squeezed Moscow economically and switched from a defensive strategy of containment to one of challenging Soviet power in Afghanistan, throughout Eastern Europe and even on Soviet territory itself.Basing his book on interviews with top Reagan policy makers (especially in the intelligence community) and Soviet officials, as well as on classified American documents, Mr. Schweizer describes how the President and his national security team got the surprise of their lives when they entered office in 1981. After spending most of the previous decade warning against the rise of Soviet power and aggressiveness, the Reagan Administration discovered that Moscow was wheezing economically. At the urging of the new Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey -- the mastermind of the victory strategy, according to Mr. Schweizer, and the focus of the narrative -- the United States launched an all-out overt and covert economic war on the Soviets.
MR. SCHWEIZER says the Reagan military buildup sought not only to strengthen American forces, but also to strain Moscow's limited economic base. The centerpiece of this military effort was a policy of greatly expanded research and development on high technology weapons. By pushing programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was ostensibly intended to neutralize a Soviet nuclear attack, the Reagan White House attempted to wage the arms race in areas where American know-how, not Soviet numbers, would be decisive.
The United States also sought to shut off a major Soviet source of hard currency by blocking Moscow's oil and gas exports to Western Europe (with only limited success, as Mr. Schweizer recognizes) and by persuading Saudi Arabia to help drive down world oil prices (with much more success). The vise was tightened further, Mr. Schweizer contends, by restricting the eastward flow of Western credit and technology, thus denying the Soviets valuable financial resources and damaging the Soviet economy's military and civilian sectors.
In addition, to insure that the Kremlin would have to spend billions putting out fires in Poland and Afghanistan, the Administration began to funnel aid to Solidarity in Poland and to upgrade the weaponry and intelligence supplied to the mujahedeen, the Muslim guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. Finally, Mr. Schweizer provides convincing reasons for concluding that Jimmy Carter, even a Jimmy Carter sobered by the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, would never have instituted a similar policy.
Whether or not the Reagan policies worked and did contribute decisively to winning the cold war, Mr. Schweizer's account adds significantly to our knowledge of the struggle's climactic stages. Although many of the tactics he describes were common knowledge, their strategic coordination has been largely unknown, and a number of the individual elements of the strategy have remained secret as well.
THE author's unfailing admiration notwithstanding, these policies add up to a puzzling and sometimes unsettling portrait -- of subtlety, guile and tactical brilliance existing side by side with what can only be called utter recklessness; of commendable audacity and ingenuity coexisting with serious disrespect for American political processes. Thus the same officials who orchestrated the delicate plan to depress world oil prices (clinched by telling Saudi Arabia's King Fahd of the dollar's coming devaluation) also urged the buzzing of Soviet air defenses not only with American fighter planes but with bombers as well. Those who secured tacit Vatican and active Swedish help for Solidarity also supported mujahedeen guerrilla operations inside the Soviet Union.
The revelations made by the author unintentionally are at least as stunning. American voters, for example, may be surprised to learn that in 1980 they elected a President who was not only tough on the Soviets, but who also soon became determined to back them into a corner, with all the risks that strategy entailed in those hair-trigger times. Indeed, Mr. Schweizer presents new evidence that Mr. Reagan's bellicose rhetoric and his Strategic Defense Initiative did in fact create fears in the Kremlin of an American nuclear attack.
Similarly, "Victory" sheds new light on Reaganomics. It turns out that critics who faulted the President for running up unpre cedented peacetime budget deficits were missing the point. In the minds of Mr. Reagan and associates like Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, the cold war period was not peacetime. And yet the Administration refused to seek public sacrifices to fight this "war."
Since, as the author acknowledges, "Victory" is more journalism than history, it is no surprise that he raises more questions than he answers. A first group of questions concerns methodology. Even for a book in the "now it can be told" genre, Mr. Schweizer's work needs greater documentation. In particular, too much vital information is attributed simply to anonymous Soviet or American sources. Skeptical readers will also have problems with many of the Soviet sources who are named, for in the post-cold-war world many financially strapped former Soviet operatives have learned how profitable stroking Western egos can be. Further, although the author clearly has interviewed many of Casey's chief aides, we hear nothing from the late director's bureaucratic opponents. Surely the story Mr. Schweizer tells of C.I.A. infighting has more than one side.
A second group of questions concerns the costs of victory. Some were legal and political. Like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and other cold war Presidents, Ronald Reagan purposely shut the American people and Congress out of decision making. Did the ends of victory always justify such means -- especially since the United States was always strong enough to avert foreign policy catastrophe? How long could huge covert paramilitary operations and arms-for-hostage deals have been continued without irreversibly damaging American political institutions and boosting public cynicism to levels no healthy democracy could tolerate?
Other costs were economic. Fighting a "war" without public knowledge or sacrifice may have helped Mr. Reagan win re-election. But in the process, many would argue, America's public finances were damaged, harming our economy and crippling our political capacity for dealing with a raft of growing domestic ills. And the Administration's obsession with victory in the cold war blinded it to growing threats on the industrial and technological fronts, with serious consequences for American living standards, for the country's long-term capacity to create wealth and even for its ability to support assertive foreign policies. As former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger sagely observed in a 1989 speech, the United States, too, crossed the cold war finish line gasping for breath. Some readers will undoubtedly complete "Victory" dismissing such complaints as nitpicking. Others will wonder if American democracy and prosperity can survive another such triumph in our still dangerous world. 'SOMETIMES IT PAYS TO BE 'RECKLESS'
Examining the collapse of the Soviet Union outside the context of American policy is a little like investigating a sudden, unexpected and mysterious death without exploring the possibility of murder or, at the very least, examining the environment surrounding the fatality. . . . The fact that the collapse and funeral of the Soviet Union occurred immediately after the most anti-Communist President in American history had served eight years does not prove cause and effect. But it does demand investigation. . . . Thus far, the investigation of Reagan policy in relation to the collapse of the Soviet Union has been scant. The focus has been almost exclusively on the policies of Gorbachev. This is somewhat akin to studying the collapse of the South after the Civil War by concentrating on the policies of Gen. Robert E. Lee without at least looking at the strategies employed by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.
Some believe that little or no connection can be drawn between American policies in the 1980's and the collapse of the Soviet edifice. . . . Former Soviet officials do not share this view. The fact is that Reagan administration policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union was in many ways a radical break from the past. There is also irony in this view, in that those who now believe American policy had little effect on internal events in the Soviet Union counseled in the 1970's and 1980's for an accommodating stance toward the Kremlin because it might moderate Soviet behavior. Reagan was called a "reckless cowboy" who might steer us all to the nuclear brink.
The fact the greatest geopolitical event since the end of the Second World War happened after eight years in the Presidency of Ronald Reagan has also been described as "dumb luck." It might be wise to recall, however, that when the exploits of a French commander particularly unpopular with his colleagues were dismissed as "luck," Napoleon retorted, "Then get me more 'lucky' generals."From "Victory."1
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/10/books/how-we-won-the-cold-war.html#
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