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

by Conrad Black

  In January of 1986, Gorbachev proposed the removal and nondeployment of all intermediate missiles from Western and Central Europe, and conjured yet again the benign fable that cannot fail to cross the lips of the world’s leaders for long, of the complete abolition of nuclear weapons by 2000. Ronald Reagan was happy to join him in these endeavors, though with oft-expressed wariness about the believability of any Soviet leader. In July 1986, Gorbachev pledged to withdraw from Afghanistan. On October 11, 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan met at Reykjavik, Iceland, and Gorbachev, with no prior hint of such an ambitious plan, proposed the complete abolition of all nuclear weapons except tactical battlefield nuclear systems, along with anti-missile defenses, for which, he claimed, there would then be no need.

  Reagan, who was an idiosyncratic idealist and sentimentalist, as well as a sly old man now 75, professed to take the first option seriously, though he pointed out that he could not speak for his British and French allies, which were also nuclear powers. (There were also the Chinese, Indians, and Israelis and soon Pakistan and South Africa to think about, as well as all the nuclear-capable powers, dozens of them.) Reagan rejected scrapping his anti-missile defense program, but warmed up the almost equivalent fable of sharing it with the Soviet Union. This surrealistic exchange continued for two days, and then Reagan broke off the talks and the two leaders parted amicably enough, but in an atmosphere of disappointment. American allies were horrified, including the redoubtable Margaret Thatcher, who, when asked if she was for a “nuclear-free Europe,” instantly replied that she was for a “war-free Europe.”

  But Gorbachev had fatally shown his hand, his acute fear of SDI; Reagan had called him, in poker parlance, and it was clear that the United States was finally in a commanding position in the Cold War. Its economy was booming while Russia’s was floundering, and in defense terms, mighty America, led by a tough but humane and sometimes slightly dreamy leader, who yet possessed great moral integrity, a consciousness of his strength, and a genius at holding national opinion behind him, was about to spend the Soviet Union to the mat and develop absolute military superiority while professing only the elimination of the horrible specter of nuclear weapons. It ranked with the greatest foreign policy initiatives of Roosevelt, Truman, and Nixon, as a brilliant stroke of pure grand strategy.

  Unfortunately, Reagan, as his tide appeared to crest, was suddenly threatened by a bizarre episode that would be known as the Iran-Contra scandal. A number of American civilians had been seized by the militant Islamist organization Hezbollah, supplied and to some extent directed by the Iranian and Syrian governments, in Lebanon, and Reagan, who was susceptible to emotional human appeals, had overlooked or more likely condoned the sale of arms to Israel, which sold them on to Iran, supposedly in exchange, apart from the cash payment, for the release, one by one, of the hostages in Beirut. Even more unfortunately, it didn’t stop there, and after a time, Colonel Oliver North, an aide to the national security advisor, Robert (Bud) McFarlane, had rerouted the profit on the arms sales—which Israel (to the destruction of which state the Iranian government never ceased to aspire) faithfully remitted from Iran—to the assistance of the anti-Sandinista Contras in Nicaragua. Support of the guerrillas had sometimes been approved by the Congress and sometimes forbidden, and there is not a clear basis to the constitutional ability of the Congress to determine such things.

  One of the many unpleasant consequences of the Watergate affair was that the impeachment of the president became much easier to contemplate (and threaten) than it had been, and policy differences were routinely criminalized, especially when the White House and the Capitol were in different partisan hands, as was the case between 1969 and 2003 in 21 years with the Senate and 26 for the House of Representatives. An aircraft delivering arms to the Contras was shot down and the crew interviewed by officials of the Sandinista government. The story surfaced in an Arabic newspaper in Beirut in the first days of November 1986, and was endorsed by the Iranian government, which represented it as an act of cowardly and hypocritical boot-licking by the United States, especially when it emerged that McFarlane had turned up in Tehran in a disguise with a Bible for the Ayatollah Khomeini inscribed by Reagan.

  It was a pitiful and farcical story, and the president’s almost indestructible domestic popularity descended almost 20 points, very abruptly. There was much hip-shooting talk of “constitutional crimes” and so forth. In the midterm elections in 1986, the Democrats gained five House seats and eight Senate seats, taking control of that chamber for the first time in six years. Reagan at first told the country, in November 1986, that he had not traded arms for hostages. He set up the Tower Commission (Republican senator John Tower of Texas, General Brent Scowcroft, and former senator and secretary of state Edmund Muskie) to look into the whole affair. North and his comely assistant, Ms. Fawn Hall, had destroyed some of the relevant documents, and the commission was unable to determine exactly how much Reagan knew about it all.

  Reagan admitted in March that what he had approved, arms sales to Israel, had “deteriorated” into trading arms for hostages. He professed to have known nothing about the shipments of arms to the Contras. The CIA director, William Casey, suffered a stroke just before he was to testify before a congressional committee, and died without recovering. Watergate investigative reporter Bob Woodward of the Washington Post claimed to have entered Casey’s hospital room and interviewed him briefly and secured an acknowledgement of guilt, but Casey was unconscious and his room heavily secured at the time; this appeared to be an extension of the author’s talents for mythmaking, which were well enough demonstrated in the Watergate affair.

  On June 12, 1987, Reagan visited West Berlin for the 750th anniversary of Berlin, and made almost as well-remembered a comment in a speech at the Berlin Wall as John F. Kennedy had made there almost exactly 24 years before: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and repeated it several times as he labored the iniquity of it. Reagan had earned the esteem of the Germans, not least because when he visited the Federal Republic two years before and it was revealed that there were some Waffen SS draftees’ graves in a cemetery he was scheduled to visit, Reagan resisted the urgings of the Congress, his staff, and even his wife, kept to the visit (though he added a stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp first), and said that those conscripted into service for the Third Reich who gave their lives in combat at a young age were also victims. Reagan’s moral, as well as his physical, courage were evident and were the source of much of his great popularity.

  After this, there were some indictments, and some misdemeanor convictions, in the Iran-Contra imbroglio that led to fines and eventual pardons, and the whole matter dried up and the president’s popularity revived, but it was a discordantly harebrained and absurd interlude. It did not alter the correlation of forces between the United States and the Soviet Union, however. And on November 24, 1987, at Geneva, an INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) agreement was signed, reversing and avoiding the deployment of all such weapons in Western and Central Europe. This was a remarkable strategic victory for Reagan, Thatcher, and West Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had held fast to their deployment schedules. They traded the nondeployment of missiles for the removal of a larger number of Soviet missiles that had already been deployed. And the American Pershing mobile missiles were not, in fact, as yet fully developed, and the ground-launched cruise missiles the U.S. would now not be deploying could just as easily be launched from American warships based in European ports and American aircraft flying from European bases.

  There was another very cordial summit meeting in Washington, in December 1987, and in February 1988 Gorbachev promised the complete Soviet evacuation of Afghanistan within a year. The Soviets did leave within a year, having taken 28,000 combat dead for no remotely justifiable reason, and devastated much of the country. The puppet government they left behind was quickly overrun by the mujahedeen and Taliban the Americans in particular had armed, and the pro-Soviet regime crumbled in the next several y
ears and its leaders either fled or were summarily executed.

  Soon after the Afghan departure announcement, Gorbachev withdrew the Brezhnev Doctrine and declared that all the former satellite states were free to do as they wished as autonomous states. Soviet foreign ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov, playing off the popular Frank Sinatra song “My Way,” called this the “Sinatra Doctrine,” an amusing send-up of the penchant of Soviet and American leaders to lay claim to having established a doctrine. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and of the Warsaw Pact were widely predicted and were clearly presaged. President Reagan visited Moscow for another of his rapid-fire summits with Gorbachev in May 1988, and gave a well-received address at Moscow University praising the virtues of free enterprise. Many Western Sovietologists were now predicting the imminent collapse of the USSR itself, as leaders of the constituent republics and other more local jurisdictions were reorganizing in random and unprecedented ways. The USSR was like a jalopy going at excessive speed and starting to fall apart. Gorbachev never lost his faith in socialism and claimed all his reforms were designed to strengthen it. Though he had seen the astounding productivity of western Canada’s large farms, he never fully decollectivized Soviet agriculture. He did not grasp, then or subsequently, that the notion of “communism’s human face” was completely impractical; if it wasn’t totalitarian, or at least very authoritarian, it could not be imposed at all, and however it was imposed, it didn’t work very well. And this fact Ronald Reagan grasped with perhaps more conviction than any other American president.

  The Democrats nominated three-term Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis for president and distinguished Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen for vice president. Dukakis was an intelligent and articulate man but appeared somewhat desiccated during the fall campaign. Bentsen was witty and knowledgeable and impressed the voters. Vice president George H.W. Bush won a fairly spirited nomination race with the Republican leader of the Senate and 1976 vice presidential candidate, Robert Dole, and chose as his vice presidential nominee Senator J. Danforth (Dan) Quayle of Indiana. Quayle had a good policy record and was quite amiable but seemed to lack gravitas and had some difficulty explaining why he spent the Vietnam War in the National Guard. He survived the grilling of the White House press corps and the national media, but never entirely got over the impression that he was a lightweight. The campaign was not very elevated, and the Republicans, under their chief strategist, Lee Atwater, lampooned Dukakis for his opposition to the death penalty, belief in paroling convicts, and opposition to obligatory recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance (which Bush and Quayle then mechanically and solemnly uttered at the start of all their campaign appearances no matter how mundane).

  Like Eisenhower in 1960, had the Constitution and age (Reagan was now a sprightly 77) allowed it, the president would certainly have been able to win a third term, and Bush ran, essentially, as his stand-in and heir to his achievements and popularity. On election day, Bush and Quayle won safely enough, 48.9 million votes (53.4 percent) and 426 electoral votes from 40 states to 41.8 million votes for Dukakis and Bentsen (45.7 percent) and 111 electoral votes from 10 states and the District of Columbia. The Congress was almost unchanged, with Democratic gains of one Senate and two House seats. It was the fifth Republican victory in six presidential elections starting in 1968.

  Mikhail Gorbachev had made his last meeting with Ronald Reagan while they were both in office when he came to New York to address the United Nations in December. He announced a 500,000-man unilateral reduction in the Red Army. It was a fine capstone to a very productive, if rather unequal, relationship, and Gorbachev got off to a very good start with the president-elect (whom he had already met a number of times). By this time, large parts of the USSR itself were in disintegration mode. Popular Front, non-communist coalitions had gained control of the Baltic states and there was irredentist and separatist violence in the three Caucasus republics, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. In October and November 1988, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia all declared themselves to be legislatively sovereign, and declared their native languages and their traditional flags to be official. Gorbachev flew directly back from Washington to Armenia, which had been devastated by an earthquake, and was understandably incensed to be besieged by protesters complaining of mistreatment of Armenians in Azerbaijan, especially in the district of Nagorno-Karabakh, which sought to secede from Azerbaijan and unite with Armenia. There was immense agitation in both republics and daily demonstrations of up to 500,000 people in Baku, the Aziri capital. Gorbachev imposed a curfew on Baku (a city of two million) on December 5, and would have to try to impose order in Nagorno-Karabakh in February with paratroopers and a tank regiment, after it purported to secede from Azerbaijan.

  It is always a matter of skill whether the political center is a position of strength or weakness, and Gorbachev, advocating socialism and union of the country, was caught between conservative communists who feared liberalization would kill communism and reformers who did not believe communism could be reformed. This was Gorbachev’s insoluble dilemma, because both groups were correct.

  Ronald Reagan left office with a high approval rating. Though the only important domestic accomplishment in his second term was a bipartisan tax reform bill, he avoided the usual lame-duck problem with the great progress that he steadily made with the Soviet leader throughout his second term. Reagan had sharply lowered the personal tax rates of all taxpayers, and had produced very high rates of productivity increase (almost 4 percent per year for most of his time as president) and over 18 million net new jobs. Reagan’s reinvigoration of America’s economy and national morale, coupled to his massive strengthening of the American military and then his masterstroke of proposing development of an air-tight missile defense, had severely rattled the three infirm septuagenarians who preceded Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader. His calm firmness, gift for self-deprecation, constant good humor, sure political instinct, remarkable human qualities, absence of any officiousness or pomposity, and his unblustering espousal of good intentions impressed the nation and eventually the world. His almost hypnotic eloquence as an orator (he was in fact a benign demagogue, though his opponents tried to minimize his talents as those of a “good communicator”), as well as his exploitation of the addiction of his opponents to underestimate him, made him one of the most formidable politicians and outstanding presidents in the nation’s history. (Former defense secretary and longtime Democratic insider and Washington fixer Clark Clifford called him “an amiable dunce,” but Clifford didn’t think much of Eisenhower, either.)

  Reagan stuck to prosperity through the economic growth of free enterprise and lower taxes, and peace through strength. He delivered both and his standing as a president became clearer after he had retired and the scale of his achievement towered over the simplicity of his methods. Ronald Reagan was fortunate in having Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Helmut Kohl, and Trudeau’s successor in Canada, Brian Mulroney, as allies, and Mikhail Gorbachev as the eventual Soviet leader opposite him. But that takes nothing from his status as probably, next to (in chronological order only) Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, the greatest American president. He was revered as an ex-president and mourned by the whole nation when he died, aged 93, in 2004, after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease. For the first time, foreign leaders (Margaret Thatcher and Brian Mulroney) were among the eulogists at the state funeral of an American president.

  10. PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH

  George Bush was formidably qualified to be president: after being a well-decorated combat navy aviator while only 20, in World War II, a Yale alumnus, and a successful businessman, he served two terms in the House of Representatives and ran two unsuccessful but very respectable campaigns for the U.S. Senate in Texas; served as ambassador to the UN, Republican Party chairman, representative to China, and director of the CIA; and became only the sixth person to serve two full terms as vice president. He would be, as Richard Nixon wrote, “a good man with good intentions ... [bu
t] no discernible pattern of political principle ... no political rhythm, no conservative cadence, and not enough charismatic style to compensate.”211 He did, however, have a considerable aptitude for foreign policy and was well-respected personally by other national leaders. His secretary of state would be former White House chief of staff and Treasury secretary under Reagan, the very capable Houston lawyer and Bush’s political manager, James A. Baker. They had inherited a winning hand from their retired leader and didn’t have to wait long for America’s only remaining rival in the world to fold.

  The erosion of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc accelerated dramatically. In March and April of 1989, there were the first free party elections in Russia since 1917 (and there hadn’t been any for positions of real authority before that). Gorbachev claimed that 84 percent of those elected were Soviet Communist Party candidates, but their party loyalty was soft in many cases. Two leading new legislators were Russian patriotic leader and reformer Boris Yeltsin and scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. Gorbachev was desperately struggling to maintain ultimate central authority even as he yielded jurisdiction to the constituent Soviet republics. He did address the European Parliament at Strasbourg on July 6, 1989, and raised a subject that clearly indicated where he would like to take Soviet foreign policy if he could keep his country together, when he spoke of “our common European home.” He was well-received, but this was the old ploy, much used by de Gaulle and his followers, of playing the continental solidarity card against the U.S. connection (except, of course, when American intervention was necessary to protect or liberate Europeans from each other, as it had been for the last 40 years). It could have been a real distraction to the West if Gorbachev’s own position had been stronger.