Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  Reagan developed a comprehensive strategy for squeezing the Soviet Union and forcing the end of the Cold War. He opened close relations with the Vatican, concerting policy with the Holy See’s secretary of state, Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, and through his ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson. Wilson was a member of a subcommittee of the National Security Council that specialized in coordinating anti-communist activities with the Roman Catholic Church. When Casaroli came to lunch in the White House early in Reagan’s term, he told the president and secretary of state and other select luncheoners that there were approximately 100 million Roman Catholics behind the Iron Curtain who took their religion seriously, almost all of whom detested communism, and that the (Polish) pope (since 1978), John Paul II, intended, without urging impetuosity on the faithful, to tighten the screws on the Soviets. Like most Poles, the pope was unimpressed with communism and especially the Russian-imposed version of it in Poland, and the Polish and Ukrainian and Russian Uniate Catholic communities were particularly strong and aggrieved at communist religious and national oppression. This was a break from relatively placatory recent popes, other than Pius XII in 1948 and Paul VI in 1976, when, on each occasion, the Italian Communist Party made a determined charge to join the government or even lead it in that country, and they responded strongly (Chapter 11, and earlier in this chapter).

  Later in 1981, the United States imposed sanctions on communist Poland in response to the imposition of martial law in that country to combat militancy from the Catholic industrial unions. The United States and the Holy See also cooperated in Central America and elsewhere in Latin America. Reagan regularly disparaged the Soviet Union, ending what had effectively been a condition of unilateral verbal disarmament, describing it as “an evil empire” in a widely telecast speech on June 8, 1982, and on March 3, 1983, as a “sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”

  Reagan extended increased assistance to the anti-Russian resisters in Afghanistan, and to the pro-Western factions in the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, as well as, eventually quite controversially, in Central America. Reagan was annoyed by Soviet industrial espionage in the U.S., and he authorized CIA director William Casey to develop a complicated plan, ostensibly devised by the private sector, for the collection and pipeline-transmission of natural gas from a large gas-producing area, designed to generate such pressures that it would blow up the whole field. This was represented as a superior and very advanced design, which was deliberately allowed to get into the hands of Soviet agents. Reagan and Casey were vastly amused about a year later when one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history was recorded in the principal gas-producing region of Siberia. This humiliating fiasco drastically reduced the Soviet appetite for industrial espionage.210

  There were personality differences between the president and the secretary of state, and General Haig retired from that office in July 1982 and was replaced by George P. Shultz, a former marine combat captain and dean of business administration at the University of Chicago; Nixon’s labor secretary, budget director, and secretary of the Treasury; and president of the engineering giant Bechtel Corporation. He was as well-qualified as Haig and temperamentally more emollient.

  The president played what proved to be a decisive card on March 23, 1983, when he outlined his Strategic Defense Initiative, a plan for building a defensive anti-missile shield that was a combination of ground-launched and space-based missile-interception systems. It was ridiculed widely by the left and even the center in the United States as “Star Wars” (after the series of successful science fiction movies of that name that had recently been produced) and criticized by most of America’s allies as “destabilizing” of the equilibrium that Democratic presidents had promoted with the USSR As Reagan suspected, most of America’s allies were happy with an apparent equal correlation of forces between the two superpowers, because it enabled them to exercise maximum influence of the delicate balance between them, with minimum effort. The chief exception to this was the formidable Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, with whom Reagan developed a warm and close rapport, starting with American support of the British in the brief war that country had with Argentina over the strategically unimportant Falkland Islands in 1981. (This did not prevent Thatcher’s foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, from referring, ill-advisedly, to SDI as “a Maginot Line,” an unfounded comparison.)

  Despite the shrieks of impracticality and provocation of the domestic and international left, Reagan, as was his custom, carried U.S. public opinion with his plain and eloquent arguments that it was a completely defensive, conventional (no nuclear aspect) system and innocently asked what possible objection anyone could have to it. He said it was chiefly designed to deal with accidental missile firings, or the missiles of rogue states of the future. Groups of concerned scientists, the spiritual heirs of those scientists who had righteously opposed the development of the atomic bomb, claimed that space launch platforms of up to 45,000 tons would have to be sent into orbit. This was preposterous, but it was beside the point, because Reagan’s target was the psychology of the Kremlin and the Soviet economy. He correctly judged that the Soviet Union must be spending a backbreaking share of its wheezing command economy on its military capability and that Russian fear of American military-scientific prowess would incite Kremlin paranoia, already inflamed by the mighty Peacekeeper missile.

  The Soviet leadership saw the possible compromise of their nuclear deterrent capability. This was precisely what Reagan had intended. It was nonsense, because the science to shoot down missiles was bound to stay behind the science of propelling offensive missiles to their targets for a long time, and no sane person would conceivably embark on nuclear war on the assumption that he had a leak-proof nuclear missile defense. Again Reagan, though not a chess player, was a brilliant poker player, and as it became clear that American opinion supported the president and bought into his peaceful intentions, and he achieved initial funding for his program, the Soviet leadership became steadily more obsessed with, as they considered it, the mortal threat of SDI to their world status by negating the strength of their nuclear capability. In his more playful moments, Reagan even suggested he would share the technology with the USSR, an utterly absurd prospect, yet one that he carried off with great, apparently earnest, and brilliant histrionic virtuosity, (as one might expect from a retired professional actor).

  And he lost no opportunity to embarrass the Russians and make the most of their heavy-footed errors, as when they shot down a South Korean airliner, KAL 007, killing hundreds of passengers, when it accidentally entered Soviet airspace in the Far East, on September 1, 1983. Reagan called it a “massacre,” and it was outrageous, but was clearly not an intentional downing of a civilian airliner, just a trigger-happy response by a pilot to a nighttime intrusion. (The American cruiser Vincennes, on July 3, 1988, would have even less excuse for shooting down an Iranian civil airliner on a familiar flight path on a scheduled flight to Dubai, in Iranian airspace, in broad daylight, with antiaircraft missiles, killing 290 civilians.) Reagan in his first four years showed no interest at all in meeting with the Soviet leaders, as all his predecessors since Roosevelt had done. Leonid Brezhnev had died in office on November 30, 1982, after 18 years as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and was succeeded by former KGB (secret police) director Yuri Andropov (who had masterminded the crushing of the Hungarians in 1956). But his health was fragile from the outset, and he died on February 9, 1984, and was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who was 75 and evidently far from robust.

  The Reagan administration’s Middle East policy was not overly successful, and doubtless suffered from the assassination, by Islamist fanatics, of Egyptian president Sadat on October 6, 1981. Because of recurrent rocket attacks and sabotage missions across Lebanon’s southern border into Israel, that country invaded Lebanon and drove the Palestinian guerrillas into Beirut in June 1982, where the Israelis shelle
d them quite destructively. A UN resolution secured a cease-fire and a multinational force including 800 U.S. Marines was inserted to ensure that Palestinian terrorists did not reoccupy the south of the country. The French arrived on June 22 and the Americans on June 25. They were withdrawn after a short cooling-off period. After the Lebanese Phalange (Christian far right) massacred hundreds of Muslims in the Sabra and Shatila camps, a larger multinational force including 1,800 Marines was reintroduced. A relatively novel form of warfare for the international powers was encountered when suicide bombers crashed an explosives-filled car at the U.S. embassy on April 18, 1983, killing 17 Americans. Despite heavy precautions, a much deadlier strike came on October 23, when 241 Marines were killed in a suicide bombing of their barracks near Beirut Airport.

  Support for the mission collapsed and Reagan saw that there was no alternative to pouring forces into an absorbent and terminally inflamed area of the world or pulling out as gracefully as possible. He chose the second and all American forces were out of Lebanon on February 26, 1984. But in the meantime, he scored an Eisenhower-like free goal, largely distracting his countrymen by invading the Caribbean island nation of Grenada two days after the bombing in Beirut, so he was able to address the nation simultaneously on both subjects. Grenada was a Commonwealth country of 100,000, where Queen Elizabeth II was the monarch. The prime minister, Maurice Bishop, had been murdered and the whole population was under house arrest, and there was a developing Cuban presence in the country. The neighboring island countries, led by Dominica, urged intervention, and the United States occupied the island with the Marine contingent on the aircraft carrier Independence, supplemented by other air- and sea-borne forces from several states, totaling 7,600 invaders, on October 25.

  The incoming Americans were fired upon by a Cuban warship bearing the somewhat irritating name Vietnam Heroica, and it conferred great pleasure on many Americans to reduce that vessel to submerged fragments with an instant hail-fire of air-to-surface missiles. Though criticized by Britain and some other countries, it was a useful diversion and was generally popular in Grenada itself and in the U.S., and American forces were withdrawn completely after a few months. The United States suffered 19 dead and 116 wounded. Margaret Thatcher complained of the action as an unwarranted intrusion that annoyed her country at a time when she was campaigning against fierce opposition to deployment of NATO (i.e., U.S.) intermediate-range missiles in Britain. It was one of the very rare disagreements between Reagan and Thatcher, and it is not clear why Reagan did not try to involve a British component in the operation to make it a joint venture, other than his haste to put an easy victory on top of the tragedy in Beirut. Reagan took a number of opportunities for risk-free demonstrations of American military power, sinking in increments a significant part of the Iranian navy when that country challenged the U.S. fleet in the Persian Gulf, and shooting down Libyan fighters when they entered the declared airspace of a U.S. Sixth Fleet aircraft carrier battle group in the Mediterranean.

  By the end of 1983, inflation had virtually stopped, net job creation was running at about 250,000 per month, and unemployment was in steady decline. The public enjoyed lower taxes, and though budget deficits had been larger than at any time since World War II, they were now in decline and sharp decline as a share of GDP. The country had been heartened by Reagan’s jaunty eloquence, and apparent reestablishment of the credibility of the United States and its alliance system after the tumult and irresolution of the previous 20 years. He and George Bush, who had filled his position with distinction, were renominated without opposition, and the Republicans presented the 1984 election as an occasion to celebrate “Morning in America.” It was the first authentic peace-and-prosperity reelection campaign since Eisenhower’s in 1956 (and if that were exempted because of the Suez War and the Hungarian uprising just before the election, the comparison would go back to Hoover in 1928).

  The Democrats nominated former vice president Walter F. Mondale, after a close battle with Senator Gary Hart, which was highlighted by Hart challenging the press to find him with a woman not his wife, which they managed to do several times. It was nonsense, of course, but the Democratic nomination was unlikely to be worth much more than it had been in 1904 (against TR), 1924 and 1928 (against Coolidge and Hoover), 1956 (Eisenhower), and in 1972 against Nixon. Mondale tried to spice up his prospects by choosing for vice president the first female and fourth overt Roman Catholic (after Kennedy, Muskie, and Shriver) to be nominated for national office, New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro. She was a lively and scrappy candidate, but some of the questionable business connections of her husband were exploited for partisan purposes. Reagan and Bush were massively financed and organized and were unassailable on their record, and Mondale made his life more difficult by promising tax increases and suggesting a rather cap-in-hand approach to the Kremlin on arms control. The highlight of a bland campaign was when, in answer to a question, Reagan said in a debate that he would “not hold my opponent’s comparative youth and inexperience against him” (Reagan was 17 years older, and the oldest major party candidate ever to seek the office, 73).

  On election day, Reagan and Bush won another historic landslide, 54.5 million votes (58.8 percent) and 525 electoral votes (the highest total in history) to 37.6 million votes (40.6 percent) and 13 electoral votes. Mondale won his home state of Minnesota by only 3,764 votes. The Republicans gained 16 congressmen and lost one senator, but the control of neither house changed hands. It was a completely clean, courteous, good-natured election, with none of the acrimony and skullduggery that had been a feature of most elections since Eisenhower’s time.

  9. SECOND TERM AND ASSESSMENT OF RONALD REAGAN

  Konstantin Chernenko died on March 10, 1985, and was succeeded by Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The Soviet Union finally had a leader appreciably below the age of 60 for the first time since the young (and in his macabre way, dynamic) Stalin of the twenties and thirties. Gorbachev had had responsibility for agriculture and had traveled to a number of non-communist countries as a rising Kremlin figure, including a tour of large western farms and ranches with Canada’s Pierre Trudeau, and had conversations with Margaret Thatcher that she found quite promising. On April 8, 1985, he stopped the deployment of SS-20 intermediate missiles in Eastern Europe, to confuse the imminent NATO deployment of U.S. Pershing and ground-launched cruise missiles. He also dusted off the old saw invoked by half the Western leaders and all the post-Stalin Russian leaders about banning all nuclear weapons, as if this were remotely feasible and would actually make war less rather than more probable. Reagan was on a much more sensible line with the creation of nuclear defenses, but it would shortly be clear how sensitive a point this was with the new leaders of the Kremlin. The venerable Andrei Gromyko was finally removed as foreign minister after 28 years and elected president, replaced by the foreign policy untested Edward Shevardnadze of Georgia.

  Gorbachev announced a policy of openness (“Glasnost”) and of restructuring (“Perestroika”), which included a determined crackdown on the grave national problem of alcoholism, the denunciation and scattered prosecution of corruption, which was pandemic in Soviet government, the introduction of contested elections for some party offices, and the acceptance of private ownership of some small businesses. These steps were widely applauded in the West, and doubtless welcomed domestically, but there is no evidence that Gorbachev had any idea how vulnerable the Soviet system was to such shock therapy. It was a tremendous patchwork of ethnic and tribal groups and more than half the population of the USSR were not Russians. Ethnic and sectarian attachments die with difficulty when they are violently attacked, as by Stalin, rather than subsumed into a new world of egalitarian prosperity, as the North and South American and Australian immigrants from Europe were (and they retained their religions and as much connection to their native culture as they wished).

  Reforms on this scale are always hazardous, and for a time, no matter how well-managed, the transitory regime has many of the wors
t aspects, and few of the best, of both the old era and the one to which the state aspires. This brought down the Shah, as the most tenacious and generally oppressive of the old coexist very awkwardly with the vulgarity and arrivisme of the new. Instead of following Deng Xiao-ping’s model in China of massive economic reforms forced through by a state and party apparatus of scarcely loosened authority, Gorbachev tried comparative democratization without substantive economic changes. The move against alcoholism was almost as much a disaster as Prohibition had been in the United States in the twenties. The black market took over, and while alcoholism declined somewhat, government revenues plummeted.

  Reagan assisted this process with one of his most successful Middle East initiatives: he sold Saudi Arabia sophisticated military hardware formerly not available to Arab powers, including a fleet of AWACS radar detection planes, in exchange for a private promise from the Saudi king of a reduction in oil prices. Saudi Arabia, because of its preeminence in OPEC, was able to deliver on this, and the oil price, which was $30 per barrel in November 1985, had fallen to $12 by March 1986. Oil was the chief Soviet export, as its manufactures were of inadequate quality for export and its other natural resources were uncompetitively expensively extracted and generally surplus to the world’s requirements (apart from small quantities of gold and diamonds).

  This initiative was coincident with the first Reagan-Gorbachev meeting, at Geneva, in the house of the Aga Khan, the Ishmaelite leader, in November 1985. It was very cordial and a public relations success for both leaders. It was the first summit meeting in six years; Reagan promised full reciprocity in any genuine reduction of tensions and move to cooperation, but made it clear that the United States would never accept an inferior military status to any other country, and there seemed to be a similarity of view on arms reductions and Afghanistan between the two leaders. There was a divided view for a time in the senior councils of the West (Gorbachev had met the West German and French leaders too) whether the new Soviet leader was trying to gull the West into relaxed vigilance, or was really about to dismantle the authoritarian capabilities of the Soviet state, unaware of what a shambles of economic and jurisdictional meltdown was likely to occur.