WTH Should I Read: The Peacemaker

The WTH team continues our #WTH to read this summer series with a pod on The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink by Will Inboden (Director of the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, former William Powers, Jr. Chair at LBJ School, and above all a talented historian).

Spoiler: the foreign policy challenges we face today are not new. Swap Gorbachev for Putin, the Soviet Union’s vassal states in Central and Eastern Europe for Ukraine, and it becomes pretty clear that maintaining a free world requires, well, maintenance. This is something that Ronald Reagan understood well; the Reagan Doctrine was actually a controversial departure from the norm of containment, and incurred bipartisan skepticism. But it also worked. Freedom is not simply a luxury for the most privileged; it is a powerful tool to challenge the dictators who would rule the world.

Bonus: there is nothing like the beginning of an election cycle to make a political history book feel… refreshing. An unmissable theme in Peacemaker is that Reagan’s unique talent for leadership changed the course of history. Today, America may be following a Reaganite doctrine in our aid to Ukraine, but we have no Reagan. Americans do have the capacity for good leadership, decorum, sensibility, and yes, humor. Sometimes it takes a glance at history’s role models to remind us of our better selves.

HIGHLIGHTS

Why another book about Reagan?

WI: Part of it was my worry that with the passing of time, the longer we’re removed from the peaceful end of the Cold War and America’s victory in the Cold War, that there was a growing sense of inevitability. As we look back, well, of course the Soviet Union was going to collapse. Of course, the Cold War would end peacefully. Of course, nuclear destruction would’ve been avoided. Whereas for those of us who were old enough to remember that time, and especially as I was looking back on it, it did not feel inevitable at all, very few people saw that coming.

As far as the research, it’s just been in the last five or 10 years that quite a few Reagan administration national security documents have been declassified, and so I was one of the first scholars who was able to look through a lot of the transcripts of his meetings with heads of state, transcripts of National Security Council meetings, things like that. And so, there were new dimensions to the interior work of the Reagan administration that have just now become available and it was a great opportunity to present those to readers as well.

What did you learn about Reagan, the person?

Another part that came out was his real ability to empathize with foreign leaders and see the world through their eyes, and this applied to both his good relations with allied leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, or Prime Minister Nakasone of Japan or Brian Mulroney, but also to his diplomacy with Gorbachev. Again, that Reagan was a much more, I think, sophisticated student of the human condition and of leadership than we had realized.

The Reagan Doctrine was controversial…

Every previous Cold War president from Harry Truman through Jimmy Carter, Democrats and Republicans had followed different versions of the same framework of containment, which is we’re going to treat the Soviet Union as a permanent fixture on the geopolitical landscape. It had been around for 70 years, it’s going to be around for another century or so at least, was the belief. And so, the Soviet Union is a problem to be managed, but there’s no possibility of actually defeating it or of bringing it down, and Reagan reverses that equation. That’s why his famous line before he becomes president of, “My theory in the case in the Cold War is we win, they lose.” Again, that has a nice kind of visceral punch to it, but embedded within that I think is a very sophisticated, strategic reformulation of the belief that victory actually is possible and that the dissolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union actually is possible.

And people thought Reagan was nuts at the time to say that. Many Republicans thought he was nuts, certainly from the Nixon and Kissinger and Ford wing of the party, most Democrats thought so as well. And the prevailing expert consensus was that the Soviet Union is strong and durable and isn’t going to be going away.

What motivated RR to change U.S. foreign policy?

I think it comes down to this is Reagan was a man of ideas who believed that ideas drive history, and again, I’m not saying he’s an intellectual, he didn’t pretend to be otherwise, but he took ideas seriously. And we can see even back in the early ’60s when he’s first making his political debut on the national stage with his time for choosing speech for Goldwater, even then, Reagan is talking about vulnerabilities in Soviet communism because he thought the very idea of Soviet communism, of commanding every aspect of the economy, of enforcing atheism, of totalitarian political control, of controlling all of your vasal states in Central and Eastern Europe, he just found that idea appalling, contrary to everything he believed about human liberty and human dignity. And so he thought, “Well, how do you defeat a bad idea? You do it with a better idea.”

And his good idea was of strengthening and expanding the free world. And so, because he looked at the world more as a battle of ideas rather than just a clash of interests or material balances of power, he observed new vulnerabilities in the Soviet Union that very few people otherwise had seen, but he also had that positive vision of we’re not just going to delegitimize Soviet communism, we’re going to positively support the spread of free societies and human freedom as a better alternative.

Was Reagan’s focus on democracy just talk, though?

I think he absolutely believes that, and it’s really key to understanding him and the success of his policies. We see this play out in all sorts of different ways. One would be, for example, his speeches. I read all of his major speeches very closely for writing this book, but not only did I read the final version of the speeches or watched them on YouTube, but I dug into the speech writing files, and you see Reagan’s personal hand in so many of the speeches, especially say his Westminster speech where he calls for a crusade for freedom, where he says that Marxism-Leninism will end up on the ash heap of history. These are his ideas. Now, there’s an important qualifier to put in here, especially as the Republican Party is going through our own… I speak as a Republican, our own internal debates on our foreign policy, and there’s still obviously a bitter aftertaste about the less than ideal outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Reagan was very careful about using military force to impose regime change, for example, or impose democracy. He wanted a strong, capable military to deter the Soviets, to outspend them and put pressure on them, but for him, he believed just as much in America’s force of example, in diplomatic and economic support for freedom fighters and political and religious dissidents, and in carefully studying the tides of history. So, his commitment to freedom is unequivocal, but I think he’s more sophisticated, and if I even say realistic with a small R about how to support and encourage that in ways that it becomes much more sustainable.

The genesis of the Reagan Doctrine?

I even in other settings have a little riff I do comparing January of ’81 when Reagan takes office to our present moment, and part of that is the United States then, as now had very recently withdrawn in defeat and disgrace from our longest war in our history. It was Vietnam back then and Afghanistan more recently. And so for Reagan, the day he takes the oath of office is eight years almost to the day after the last American combat troop had left Vietnam, and less than six years after South Vietnam had fallen, helicopters out of Saigon, after South Vietnam had fallen into communism. So, the Vietnam legacy was not a historical memory for Reagan and his team, it was yesterday. It was still a very raw, painful wound on the entire United States.

Reagan realizes there are plenty of people in a number of these countries that have fallen to communism who don’t want to live under communist dictatorship. They don’t want to be satellites or colonies effectively of the Soviet bloc.

We don’t want to send American ground troops there. There’s no political appetite or capability for that, but let’s support those people who want to fight for their own freedom. It’s much more cost-effective for the United States, and yet it also is a way of putting real pressure on the Soviet bloc. And so, I think this is another revelation from my research, I think overall in the aggregate, the Reagan Doctrine was wildly successful. It imposed punishing costs on the Soviet bloc, especially in Afghanistan.

We could point to Angola as well, Cambodia, another one, and so yes, I think there’s a very direct through line from the Reagan Doctrine to supporting Ukraine today with arms, with economic aid, because they too are trying to fight for their own freedom against a Kremlin invasion. Sure, as you know from the book and from your own memories, there were downsides to the Reagan Doctrine. Some of the forces we were supporting engaged in some of their own atrocities or abuses. Some of them weren’t very effective fighters, but in the aggregate overall, I think it was very successful, and it’s certainly a positive lesson that Republicans today should take away.

How did Reagan get everyone on board?

Reagan was extremely supportive of American information warfare and broadcasting efforts, both on the black side and the white side overt and covert. So, he was one of only two presidents in history to even visit the Voice of America Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty Headquarters, JFK was the other one. Also, a Democrat who believed in the battle of ideas. Reagan dramatically increased funding for our broadcasting efforts, but he also made sure, working in tandem with Bill Casey, his CIA director, that the CIA was doing, it’s now been declassified, a massive covert action flooding the Iron Curtain of Soviet Union with translated copies of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn books and speeches, Dr. Zhivago, sermons, any sort of contraband literature to strengthen the free world’s battle of ideas in undermining the illegitimacy of communism.

Likewise, with his defense buildup, he saw it as very integral to strengthening his diplomacy because he wanted to keep the Cold War cold. He doesn’t want to get in a shooting war with the Soviets, but he also knows that his diplomatic efforts are going to be strengthened if he has a much more capable, advanced, well-funded military. And that’s why he invests so much in developing the next generation of weapons systems. Now, I do have to say, he was not always a great manager, that was one of his weaknesses, and that’s why there was a lot of backbiting and feuding and bickering within the administration. So, to understand some of the policies that didn’t work so well or scandals like Iran-Contra, that’s where some of his management liabilities come out, but on the big picture, especially on this Cold War strategy, he did get all elements of his government working in the same direction.

What about the [in]famous Evil Empire speech?

This is where when I talk about Reagan as a man of ideas, he had studied Marxism-Leninism, he understood communist ideology a lot more than people gave him credit for. And so if you look at some of the most poignant or memorable phrases from his speeches, evil empires, he said, Marxism-Leninism will end up on the ash heap of history, communism is some bizarre ideology that we won’t just contain, but we’re going to transcend, all of those are trying to take head on and counter Marxist ideology, which believes in the historical dialectic and the inevitability of classless utopia coming in, who believes that capitalism is the engine of imperialism, rather than communism. So when he uses those phrases, he’s really wrong-footing Soviet ideology and Marxism-Leninism.

One of the vignette I also want to share because this goes back to early part of Dany’s question about how did Reagan understand and see the vulnerabilities in Soviet communism? It’s because anytime a dissident was freed from the Gulag and able to get exile or asylum in the United States, Reagan would try to meet with them and he’d ask them, “What’s life like living under communism?”

And he’d hear over and over, “We hate it. It’s miserable. The food lines are miles long. None of us have a real job. We don’t trust our government. It’s all built on an edifice of lies,” and so when Reagan is hearing these firsthand accounts from people living under the system, that gives him a lot more skepticism when he’d read say, a CIA assessment that says the Soviet economy is strong and durable and doing just fine. And so, that also was one of the insights to how he saw the weaknesses of Soviet communism because hearing these firsthand accounts.

And Communist China today?

Communist China today is not identical to Soviet communism in that communist China today is not sponsoring communist revolutions around the world. Now, they’re trying to exert their influence in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere, but they’re not trying to export their ideology globally. Similarly with Putin, he’s not trying to export Putinism globally, he’s just trying to impose it on a few vulnerable states in the near abroad such as Ukraine, but where I will disagree is I still think that there are ideas shaping these new despots, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, ideas that dictatorship is better than democracy, that state control is a more viable system than a free society, and that they certainly don’t want to allow free world ideas into their societies.

And so, I think that if the United States today completely abandons the battle of ideas, we’re just unilaterally disarming ourselves. We need to confront China with military power and certainly decouple our economic ties. Those dimensions are there as well, but there still are plenty of Chinese people who don’t like living under a system of constant surveillance and totalitarian control, who are more attracted to the ideas behind the American system and the free world. So, I think it can’t be a one for one page from the Reagan playbook, but I still think there’s enough there that we should have more confidence in our own values and the fact that certainly a critical mass of people share them. And if we doubt that, just ask Putin and Xi Jinping because they’re obsessed with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the end of the Cold War, and they think that it’s free world ideas that played a key part in that. So even if we may be not sure ourselves, that’s what they believe, and so let’s exploit that.

Talk about Reagan’s use of humor as a tool…

Reagan thought that the best way to understand a society is hearing firsthand accounts from people that are living under it, especially a closed society like Soviet communism. And he further thought that one of the best ways to understand its vulnerabilities is, what are the jokes that people are telling surreptitiously outside of the Kremlin’s hearing? Because humor is a way that we cope with difficult situations and with deprivation and privation. And so, he tasked the CIA and then some of our embassy diplomats with every week sending him a cable of what are the latest jokes being told on the streets of Moscow and the breadlines elsewhere. He’d sometimes share those in his speeches, but he’d also share some of those jokes when he’d be meeting with the Soviet leader, such as Gorbachev, and this drove Gorbachev crazy because Gorbachev also knew that these jokes were revealing a lot of vulnerabilities of their own system.

What did Reagan get wrong?

It’s clear, especially from Reagan’s last couple of meetings with Gorbachev, that Reagan really desired a genuine friendship between the United States and Russia. Well, post-Soviet Union Russia, and the Russian people. And Reagan would often reference the end of World War II, and he’d say, “Look, the United States has a history of turning enemies into allies.” Look what we did with Japan and Nazi Germany after we defeat them militarily in the war, we then provide for their economic reconstruction, we help them build their own democracies, and they’re now two of our best allies and friends. And he would say, “I want that same possible future for the United States and Russia.”

So in that sense, I do think he was envisioning a better path forward, but for all of his strategic vision in leading the United States to a peaceful victory in the Cold War and the Soviet Union’s collapse, I never found any evidence of a really comprehensive blueprint that he put together or hedging or contingency planning of like what if Russia descends into chaos or has a weak leader in the rise of oligarchs in the Yeltsin area and everything that it has become since then?

Full transcript here.