Ronald Reagan And The Fall Of The Soviet Union: Plot Or Serendipity

Ronald Reagan And The Fall Of The

Soviet Union: Plot Or Serendipity

CSC 95

SUBJECT AREA - Foreign Policy

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in

its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

I. PREFACE

The fall of the Soviet Union was an amazing event for most Americans. For so many

years, we had seen the USSR as a threat and, in many ways, had come to accept it as a permanent

menace. For those of us who grew up with fallout shelters and civil defense drills, and whose

entire adult lives have been defined within the parameters of the cold war, the rapid disintegration

of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s was akin to winning the lottery -- staggering, elating and

totally unexpected. We celebrated the disintegration of our old foe and heralded a great victory

for the West and President Ronald Reagan in particular. Our champion anti-Communist had

accomplished what seven U.S. Presidents before could or would not -- he had stopped and then

reversed the tide of Communism.

The question that remains is: how much of what happened to the USSR was going to

happen anyway, and how much resulted from the efforts of President Reagan and his

administration? Was it just coincidence that the closing years of the Soviet empire mirrored those

of the most anti-Communist President in U.S. history? The purpose of this paper is to inquire as

to the specificity of President Reagan's plan to bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union and

to discover if his policies constituted a new form of containment. This Study is germane to a

complete understanding of the United State's part in the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and

to the larger issues surrounding the appropriate application of national power to "contain" another

nation's growth. I have chosen recent works by former U.S. government and administration

officials, and journalists for my research. These sources represent the continuum of opinion that

places President Reagan, on one end, as the mastermind behind the demise of the USSR and, on

the other, as an ill-informed, passive by-stander. I have chosen these particular works in order to

highlight current disagreements on President Reagan's rightful place and to offer a synthesis of

these views. Additionally, I have supplemented these sources with interviews from John

Lenczowski, Peter Rodman and Angelo Codevilla -- all mid-level insiders during the Reagan

years. Their perspectives, generally unbridled by concerns about attribution, assisted greatly in

penetrating much of the myth about President Reagan and his administration.

My line of inquiry will begin with an overview of U.S. containment policies (1947-- 1981)

highlighting differences in President Reagan's approach to containing the Soviet Union. I will

then offer case Studies of the top five external events leading to the disintegration of the Soviet

Union: the insurgencies in Angola, Afghanistan and Central America; the Solidarity movement in

Poland; and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to see if they reveal a coordinated anti-USSR

effort. I will then address the effects of these activities inside the Soviet Union and finish with my

conclusions.

II. INTRODUCTION

In December 1988, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the Secretary General of the

Communist Party of the USSR surprised the world when he appeared before the United Nations

and promised to cut Soviet forces in Eastern Europe by half a million troops and ten thousand

tanks over the next two years. The people of Eastern Europe must have pinched themselves to

make sure they were awake and that it was all really happening. The USSR did not have the will

to stay the course in Afghanistan and was now withdrawing support for the likes of Honecker,

Ceausescu, and Jaruzelski. By 1990, the Soviet economy had nose-dived and the Soviet

leadership was increasingly unable to control the new political forces within the country. The

attempted coup by Soviet hard-liners in 1990 was a last gasp attempt to hold on to the old system

but, in the end, it only served to accelerate the disintegration of the USSR. As the authority of

the USSR waned so did Mikhail Gorbachev's. Boris Yeltsin emerged from the political maelstrom

that followed to become the first popularly elected President of Russia. By the end of 1991, the

Soviet Union was no more and the era of U.S. and Soviet relations had, quite literally, ended.1

When President Reagan was elected in 1981, the strategy of de'tente described the

relationship that existed between the United States and the USSR . President Nixon and

Secretary of State Henry Kissenger had advanced this strategy in the 1970s and it had remained

fundamentally unchanged by both the Johnson and Carter administrations until 1979. While

Webster defines de'tente as a relaxation or reduction, as of tension between nations, President

Reagan believed the leadership of the USSR was interpreting de'tente as "freedom to pursue

whatever policies of subversion, aggression and expansionisn they wanted anywhere in the

world."2 President Reagan believed the United States had lost its hard-earned edge over the

USSR and that President Carter's administration was foolish to believe the USSR had any other

goal but their historically stated one of destroying democracy and replacing it with Communism.

President Reagan saw the Soviet leaders as moral and mortal enemies and believed that, by

surrendering the initiative to the USSR, Carter had sent a dangerous message that America was

prepared to accept, as inevitable, the advance of Soviet expansionism.3

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1 Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of

the Cold War (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 1994), 3

2 President Ronald Reagan, An American life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990),

266.

3 John Lenczowski, interview with the author. 1995

From President Reagan's point of view, the world in January 1981 was one fully engaged

by the Brezhnev Doctrine.4 The Soviet leadership, undeterred by the previous administration was

aggressively pursuing their goal of world domination. President Reagan saw USSR sponsored

"wars of national liberation" in El Salvador, Angola, Ethiopia, and Cambodia. The Soviet Union

was on a roll -- they had taken Indochina by proxy, sent military advisers to interfere in Ethiopia,

and helped engineer events in South Yemen. The USSR was involved in Mozambique and

Angola, and was advancing in Granada, Central America and, of course, Afghanistan. In Western

Europe, the Soviet leaders were beginning to make political inroads by virtue of the power of the

peace movement and challenging NATO's deployment of theater nuclear forces. President

Reagan saw a revolt against Communist rule being stamped out in Afghanistan and the stirrings of

democracy being extinguished in Poland. In his mind, the tide of Soviet excursions had to be

stopped and then setback.

President Reagan had a strong faith in the viability of the American economy and our

technological superiority. He believed that once the American economy revived we could

out-spend and out-produce the Soviets indefinitely.5 Early in his Presidency, President Reagan

saw cracks in the armor of the Soviet Union -- particularly in their economy. In his own words:

"You had to wonder how long the Soviets could keep their empire intact. If they didn't make

some changes, it seemed clear to me that in time Communism would collapse under its own

weight, and I wondered how we as a nation could use these cracks in the Soviet system to

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4 After Czech reformers were ousted by Soviet tanks in 1968, Brezhnev issued a public

justification for the action which became known as the"Brezhnev Doctrine." It stated that a threat

to the political system in any socialist country was a "threat to the security of the socialist

commonwealth as a whole." The implication was once a socialist country, always a socialist

country.

5 Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990) 236.

accelerate the process of collapse."6 President Reagan believed that the oppressive system

supporting the USSR "could not survive against the inherent drive of all men and women to be

free."7 In a speech at Notre Dame University in 1981, President Reagan asserted that "the West

will not contain Communism; it will transcend Communism," and dismissed the whole

Communist experiment as a "sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even

now being written"8 President Reagan personally believed that the Soviet Union was illegitimate

and non-reformable and that it had to be met from a position of strength.

In The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War,

Raymond Garthoff, former Deputy Director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs at the U.S.

Department of State, described President Reagan as the champion of the "essentialist" approach

to containing Communism. This approach assumed that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state

driven by a militant ideology and therefore intrinsically expansionist. Determined confrontation

was the only thing such a power understood. Garthoffs second "mechanical" approach conceded

that the Soviet Union was expansionist but that it was also a pragmatic power that could be

"managed" by the astute application of rewards and penalties. President Reagan seems to have

skirted both these approaches. While there is no question President Reagan intended to

strengthen America's position vis-a-vis the USSR, it is unclear whether or not his efforts

represented more than mere rhetoric. Was there a specific plan to that end or was his Presidency,

as some have suggested, simply another well-orchestrated act. Were President Reagan's actions

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6 President Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990)

238.

7 Ibid. 237.

8 Richard Pipes, Misinterpreting the Cold War: The Hardliners Had It Right. (Review

Essay, Foreign Affairs, New York, NY: Council On Foreign Relations Inc. January/February

1995)157

fundamentally different or simply a revitalized, more aggressive version of the containment

policies he inherited?9

In his first meeting with Prime Minister Thatcher in 1984, G.S.Gorbachev asked her what

she thought the Americans were really up to. Wasn't the Reagan administration bent on

humiliating and finally destroying the Soviet Union? Thatcher replied that President Reagan was

more reasonable than his public rhetoric would indicate.10 Indeed there are those who suggest

that President Reagan was all facade and although he sounded tough it was all an act to improve

U.S. leverage with the Soviet Union. Others believe that President Reagan understood that the

USSR was a moral and mortal threat to the United States and that he orchestrated a specific plan

designed to play to their weaknesses and bring them down.11 Still others believe that the Soviet

Union fell of its own weight, brought down by Gorbachev's bungling of the totalitarian

mechanisms that maintained the Soviet system -- the loss of the socialist ideological base, an

increasingly dissatisfied population and a late attempt to reform an unreformable political

System.12

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9 President Reagan relates in his autobiography that early in his first term he received

briefings that convienced him that the Soviet Union's economy was a "basket case." In his words:

"The Soviet economy was being held together by baling wire. In Poland and other Eastern-bloc

countries, the economies were also a mess, and there were rumblings of nationalist fevor within

the captive Soviet empire. If they didn't make some changes, it seemed clear to me that in time

that Communism would collaspe of its own weight, and I wondered how we as a nation could use

these cracks in the Soviet system to accelerate the process of collaspe."

10 Micheal R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels (New York: Little,

Brown and Company, 1993) 30.

11 Raymond Garthoff in The Great Transition and Peter Schweizer in Victory represent

opposite ends of the spectrum on this issue. Schweizer believes that the fall of the Soviet Union

was the direct result of a specific President Reagan plan while Garthoff sees more complex

interactions at work which dilute much of what has been attributed to the Reagan administration.

12 In his book The Age of Exteremes: A History of the World 1914 to 1991, Eric

Hobsbawm argues that what brought about the collaspe of the Soviet Union was a raising tide of

expectations that an authoritarian elite could not satisfy: "Beginning in the 1960's; the (USSR and

the nations of Eastern Europe began to open up their command economies to trade with the

III. CONTAINING COMMUNISM 1947 -- 1981

If we are to discover the levels of detail of President Reagan's plan to unhinge the Soviet

Union, we must try to understand if that plan was fundamentally different from those that

preceded it. If President Reagan did indeed see the Soviet Union as diametrically opposed to the

United States and if he had a strategic plan to bring them down, then everything he did must be

measured by its contribution to that vision and plan.

In 1946, the United States found itself faced with an emerging and aggressively

expansionist Soviet Union who was fully prepared to take part in shaping the post-war world.

Neither Presidents Roosevelt nor Truman could avoid the Faustian bargain brought about by their

strategies to allow the Soviet Union to bear the brunt of the fighting to defeat Germany.13

Although both Truman and Roosevelt recognized the danger of allowing the Russian armies to

occupy large parts of Eastern Europe at the end of the war, geo-political realities prevented either

from doing much about it. The United States could not defeat Germany then Japan, keep

causalities below those of W.W.I and have enough forces left over to limit USSR advances in

Eastern Europe and the Far East. As a result, the Red Army ended W.W.II in a dominant

position throughout Eastern Europe and parts of the Far East. In the aftermath of victory, the

United States found itself at odds with an increasingly uncooperative Soviet Union and at a loss as

to what to do about it. Leonid Brezhnev summed up the Soviet attitude when he told Czech

leaders in 1968: "Your country lies on territory where the Soviet soldier trod in the Second

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western world. Inevitably, their citizens began to compare their cramped apartments and dreary

cultural life with the wonderous freedoms available in the west. Meanwhile, under cynical

autocrats like Leonid Brezhnev, even card-carring communists shed their hopes for a classless

society. In the 1980's; when economic crisis battered the ramparts of the Soviet empire, its

ideological empire was bare."

13 In Strategies of Containment, John Lewis Gaddis relates that for every American soldier

who died fighting against Germany in WWII, 53 Russian soldiers died.

World War. We bought that territory at enormous sacifices and we shall never leave it. In the

name of the dead in World War II who laid down their lives for your freedom as well, we are

therefore fully justified in sending soldiers into your country. It is immaterial whether anyone is

actually threatening us or not: it is a matter of principle, independent of external circumstances.

And that is how it will be, from the Second World War to eternity."14

In December 1946, George Kennan, a Foreign Service Officer station in Moscow,

produced his appraisal of the situation in the Soviet Union. The famous "Long Telegram" he sent

back to the States stood American foreign policy makers on their collective ears and became the

basis for the series of policies aimed at meeting Soviet expansionism. These policies and the

actions they produced would come to known as "containment". According to Kennan, the Soviet

Union saw itself as an ideological entity being assailed from all sides by a hostile outside world.15

Soviet ideology and world view were incompatible with those of the West and that this situation

was not susceptible to change in the near future. Further, the Soviet system of internal repression

required an external threat and since Hitler's Germany no longer produced it, the West and in

particular, the United States served as the new threat. According to Kennan, the suspicions of the

Soviet leadership ran so deep that not even total capitulation by the United States would suffice to

ease their fears -- the USSR would manage to smell a rat no matter what we did. Kennan went

on to describe Soviet foreign policy as "the product of internal influences not susceptibte to

persuasion, manipulation or even comprehension from the outside."16 Kennan made American

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14 Richard L. Pipes, Misinterpreting the Cold War: The Hard-liners Had It Right. Review

Essay, Foreign Affairs (New York, NY: Council On Foreign Relations Inc, January/February

1995)12.

15 John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment. (New York: Oxford University Press Inc,

1982) 33.

16 Ibid.,356

foreign policy makers understand that they were in for a long term struggle with the Soviet Union

-- one requiring more than simple patience and firmness.

The Soviets believed they were beyond judgment because they were on the side of history.

At the first meeting of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform)17 in September 1947,

Andrei Zhdanov, a politburo member, said of the post-war world: "The world is now divided into

two camps, the imperialist and anti-democratic and the anti-imperialist and democratic and the

principal driving force of the imperialist camp is the United States emboldened by their

newfound power and temporary atomic monopoly."18 Early proposals to "rollback" the Russians

from their European and Far East holdings vanished with the explosion of the first USSR atomic

bomb in August 1949 and the Communist victory in China in October of the same year. The

United States found itself with less and less leverage over the Soviet Union due to the rapid build

up of their nuclear arsenal.

The history of American containment policies represents a continual process of balancing

the burden of long term containment on the U.S. economy with the threat of an aggressive Soviet

Union. Gaddis describes five distinct approaches to this balancing act in the post-war world era:

1. Kennan's original strategy of containment, implemented by the Truman administration

1947 to 1949.

2. The National Security Council Action 68 (NSC-68) brought about by the Korean

conflict and implemented 1950 to 1953.

3. The Eisenhower-Dulles "New Look", 1953-1961.

4. The Kennedy-Johnson "flexible response", 1961 to 1969.

5. The policy of de'tente initiated by Nixon-Kissenger and continued by Ford and Carter

until the invasion of Afghanistan late in 1979.

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17 Stalin used the Communist Information Bureau to coordinate the policies of the world's

Communist parties.

18 Peter W. Rodman, More Precious Than Peace. (New York, NY: Charles Schribner's

Sons, 1994) 48.

The Korean War, more than anything, helped to solidify the United States1 global role in

the 1950s as the containing force on Communism. Although NSC-68 recognized the danger

posed by Soviet expansionism, it did little to counter it. Not until the North Korean invasion in

June 1950 did the United States begin the level of military build up necessary to make it a player

on the world scene. NSC 73/4, that followed in August 1950, warned the invasion of South

Korea should not be taken as an isolated event and it represented part of a larger plan. Indeed, it

seems the North Koreans made the same mistake the Japanese had in 1941-- they had provoked

the United States into action. Kim il-sung and Stalin's throw of the dice in June 1950 was a great

blunder and a monumental overreaching that provoked a response -- America's definitive

undertaking of a global role. It was a role which Stalin could not have intended or welcomed.19

This aside, there were always swings of policy resulting from U.S.economic pressures that

worked to the benefit of Moscow. As American forces began to be cut back after the Korean

war, the Republican administration promoted a "new look" in defense policy that trimmed the

budget and promised "more bang for the buck" -- there was actually little option for the United

States other than to bluff with nuclear weapons where we could not or were not willing to engage

with conventional forces.20

The United States' move toward de'tente in the late 60s recognized that the world had

become a much more complex place since the early days when the Soviet Union could be

contained by the simple act of geographic encirclement.21 The capabilities of the USSR now

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19 Peter W. Rodman, More Precious Than Peace. (New York, NY: Charles Schribner's

Sons, 1994) 51.

20 Ibid., 59.

21 Some have called this period De'tente I in order to highlight, as De'tente II, that phase of

President Reagan's second term in which he adopted a less comfrontational stance with the

Soviets.

allowed them to reach beyond simple geographic bounds and there was little support in the United

States for direct confrontation and certainly none for another peripheral engagement like Vietnam.

Peter Rodman, a long time Kissenger aide, asserts that Nixon and Kissenger would have loved to

do in 1969 what President Reagan was able to do in 1981. In the 1970's and 80's, U.S. policy

makers were forced to deal with a decrepit gerontocracy while, in 1985, President Reagan had

Gorbachev who was willing to re-assess everything and who believed that the Soviet system had

to be reformed. Additionally, the economic basis of foreign policy had reversed from 1975 to