by Dick Cheney
Who does not feel a growing sense of unease as our allies, facing repeated instances of an amateurish and confused administration, reluctantly conclude that America is unwilling or unable to fulfill its obligations as leader of the free world? Who does not feel rising alarm when the question in any discussion of foreign policy is no longer, “Should we do something?” but “Do we have the capacity to do anything?”
Six months later, on January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan began to restore America’s strength, confidence, and capacity to lead. He’d been elected in a landslide—489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49. Shortly after Reagan took the oath at noon, the Iranians released the American hostages.
ON OCTOBER 16, 1978, the papal conclave elected Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla to be bishop of Rome. History would know him as Pope John Paul II.
On hearing of Wojtyla’s election, Yuri Andropov, who was then head of the KGB, angrily inquired of the KGB chief in Warsaw, “How could you possibly allow the election of a citizen of a socialist country as pope?” The Soviets were right to be afraid. Shortly after becoming pope, John Paul II made clear the role he intended to play. The church behind the Iron Curtain was “not a church of silence anymore,” he said, “because it speaks with my voice.”
Pope John Paul II made a pilgrimage to his homeland in June 1979. Millions of Poles turned out to greet him as he made his way across the country. On June 2, his first day in Poland, he was received at the Polish White House by President Henryk Jablonski and Communist Party leader Edward Gierek. In his public remarks at the occasion, the pope spoke of the importance of freedom for the church in Poland. He reminded his hosts that they would be responsible for their treatment of people of faith “before history and before your own conscience.” He also told them that he would continue to care as deeply about the well-being of the Polish church as he had when he was archbishop of Kraków.
In sermon after sermon in this nation where communists had outlawed religion, John Paul II spoke of the “thousand-year-right of citizenship” of the Christian church in Poland. He said, “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude.” And he said, “Without Christ it is impossible to understand the history of Poland.” Not only was Christ the past, the pope declared, he was “our Polish future.” Millions of voices lifted in response chanting, “We want God!”
Communist Party signs posted on walls across the country read “The Party is for the people.” During the pope’s visit a handwritten addendum appeared on thousands of the signs: “But the people want the Pope.”
John Paul II’s last stop was his hometown of Kraków. He stayed in his old room at the archbishop’s residence. For each of the three nights he was there, thousands of young people gathered in the streets and on the roofs of adjacent buildings, cheering and singing. When the pope appeared on the residence’s small balcony, the chants rose up, Sto lat! Sto lat! (“May you live a hundred years!”) Instead of delivering a sermon, the pope sang, each night, with the Polish students and workers gathered outside his window.
His final mass was on June 10 on the Kraków Commons. The largest crowd in Polish history gathered to hear him. There in the fields of Kraków, the pope proclaimed:
As a bishop does in the sacrament of Confirmation so do I today extend my hands in that apostolic gesture over all who are gathered here today, my compatriots. And so I speak for Christ himself: “Receive the Holy Spirit!”
He spoke of “this Kraków in which every stone and every brick is dear to me,” and he urged his fellow Poles to be strong:
You must be strong, dear brothers and sisters. . . . You must be strong with the strength of faith. . . . Today, more than in any other age you need this strength. You must be strong with love, which is stronger than death. . . . When we are strong with the Spirit of God, we are also strong with the faith of man. . . . There is therefore no need to fear.
So I beg you: never lose your trust, do not be defeated, do not be discouraged. . . . Always seek spiritual power from Him from whom countless generations of our fathers and mothers have found it. Never detach yourselves from Him. Never lose your spiritual freedom.
Poland’s communist authorities were helpless against the power of this pope, a son of Poland, delivering God’s blessings to millions of his fellow countrymen. In a nation where faith was outlawed, every time John Paul II spoke, urging his people not to lose their “spiritual freedom,” not to detach themselves from God, not to be defeated or discouraged, he was committing the most radical—yet completely unobjectionable—act. The very foundations of Poland’s communist regime began to crumble.
Thirteen million Poles saw John Paul II in person during those nine days in June. His biographer George Weigel explained the lasting impact of his visit: “By giving his people an experience of their individual dignity and collective authority, John Paul II had already won a major victory from which there could be no retreat. He had begun to exorcise the fear . . . and the sense of hopelessness.” In an interview with journalist Peggy Noonan years later, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said, “We knew . . . Communism could not be reformed. But we knew the minute he touched the foundations of Communism it would collapse.” In 1980, when Walesa signed the charter creating Solidarity, the first labor union in a communist country, he did it with a pen bearing John Paul II’s picture.
In December 1981, the Soviets had had enough. They ordered Polish general Wojciech Jaruzelski to impose martial law and arrest the leaders of Solidarity. When they came for Walesa, he told his captors, “This is the moment of your defeat. These are the last nails in the coffin of Communism.”
IN THE UNITED STATES, Ronald Reagan was providing the hammer. Reagan had ended the policy of détente and replaced it with a determination to confront and defeat communism. In a speech to the British Parliament on June 8, 1982, Reagan spoke directly about the “failure” and “decay” of the Soviet system:
It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep economic difficulty. . . . The dimensions of this failure are astounding: A country which employs one-fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to feed its own people.
President Reagan spoke of “the march of freedom and democracy,” which would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.”
A few months later, Reagan addressed those who argued that there was a moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union. In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, the president reminded his audience that totalitarian leaders who “preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth . . . are the focus of evil in the modern world.” He warned against ignorance where the nature of our enemy was concerned. “If history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.”
Finally, knowing that religious leaders had been active in the nuclear freeze movement, Reagan cautioned:
I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label[ing] both sides equally at fault. [It is an error] to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
President Reagan matched his words with actions. He restored the B-1 bomber President Carter had canceled, significantly increased U.S. defense spending, deployed Pershing missiles to Europe in response to Soviet deployment of SS-20s, and authorized the Strategic Defense Initiative, to develop missile defense technology to defend the nation from attack. The Soviets complained that SDI was destabilizing since it would make the doctrine of mutual assured destruction obsolete, and that Reagan’s increases in def
ense spending “disrupted the parity” in arms created over many years. His expenditures forced the Soviets to keep spending.
In a speech to the nation on March 23, 1983, Reagan explained why SDI was needed and provided a tutorial in defense budgeting. It shouldn’t be done, he explained, by “deciding to spend a certain number of dollars.” Rather, it had to be based on necessity, on a determination of what was needed to defend against all threats to the nation. Then, once a strategy to meet those threats was developed, a cost could be determined for carrying out the strategy. He explained how America’s spending on many of its critical defense programs had stalled or been cut over the years, while the Soviets had maintained a constant increase.
It was critical to America’s security that we not return to the days of slashed defense budgets. “It is up to us, in our time,” he said, “to choose and choose wisely between the hard but necessary task of preserving peace and freedom, and the temptation to ignore our duty and blindly hope for the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger day by day.”
Then he turned to SDI. “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” Even though it was a formidable task, he explained, it was necessary, and he had instructed his administration to pursue the possibility offered by “defensive technologies.”
In 1985, a new Soviet leader came to power. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Geneva in November that year. Reagan believed so strongly in the necessity of developing a defensive system that he told Gorbachev the United States would share the technology with the Soviets once it had been developed. Breaking with convention, Reagan and Gorbachev met alone for several hours without their advisors, and although they continued to disagree about SDI, they agreed to work toward significant arms reductions.
The two leaders met again in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986. Proposals for sweeping arms control reductions, including the elimination of all ballistic missiles and a 50 percent reduction in each side’s strategic arsenal, were on the table. Gorbachev continued to demand, however, that Reagan essentially give up SDI by confining it to laboratory testing. Reagan would not agree. In an exercise of diplomacy that should be studied by all future policy makers, Reagan knew what lines he would not cross. He was never desperate for an agreement, and he was unwilling to give up America’s right to missile defense in order to appease the Soviets.
One year later Gorbachev visited the United States. He had by this time dropped his demand that Reagan abandon missile defense. On December 8, 1987, the two leaders signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, Treaty agreeing to eliminate their intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles.
Inside the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had undertaken new policies to restructure and reform the government and economic system (perestroika) and to allow greater public discussion and dissemination of information (glasnost). Whether his reforms were real or would be successful was a subject of much debate in the West.
President Reagan traveled to Berlin in June 1987. Standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan talked about Gorbachev’s reforms:
And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control.
But how could the West know whether these were “the beginnings of profound change” or simply “token gestures”? Reagan answered his own question and issued a direct challenge to Gorbachev:
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
IN JUNE 1989, HUNGARIAN prime minister Miklos Nemeth cut off funds for the upkeep of the barbed-wire portion of the Iron Curtain along the Hungarian frontier. Shortly after that, he ordered the dismantling of the fence on the border between Austria and Hungary. In a clear sign that Moscow’s relations with its satellite states were dramatically changing, Gorbachev did not object.
In Poland, the once-banned Solidarity was allowed to contest open elections. Their campaign posters featured a picture of American actor Gary Cooper from the movie High Noon and the name Solidarność (Solidarity) in bold red print. Solidarity won 99 of 100 seats in the Polish parliament. Poland had a noncommunist prime minister for the first time in its postwar history.
Pressure across the rest of Eastern Europe built in the summer of 1989. East Germans began to attempt to escape to the West through Hungary’s partially open border, and they besieged the West German embassy in Budapest. In September 1989, the Hungarian government announced it would allow the refugees to go “to a country of their choice.” When the East German government curbed travel to Hungary, thousands of refugees overran the West German embassy in Prague. Within East Germany, citizens began demanding the types of reforms they knew Gorbachev was adopting inside the Soviet Union.
In November, in response to mass demonstrations in Berlin, the government of East Germany decided to lift some of the travel restrictions on its citizens. The regime had not intended to open the wall immediately, but on November 9, 1989, as Politburo member Gunter Schabowski was briefing the press on the new rules, he stunned reporters by announcing that citizens could leave “through any of the border crossings.” When the journalists asked when the new rules would go into effect, Schabowski paused, looked through his papers, and said, “According to my information, from today—onwards, immediately.”
Thousands of East Germans appeared at border crossings. The guards, lacking any formal instructions, opened the gates. To cheers, singing, applause, and tears, East Germans rushed through—free at last. West Germans met East Germans on top of the wall with picks and hammers and they began to chisel away at the wall itself. In October 1990, East and West Germany were reunified and invited to join NATO.
It was one thing for Gorbachev to allow greater freedom for Poles or Hungarians or Czechs, but completely another when those demanding their independence were in parts of the Soviet Union, like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Gorbachev had not planned to oversee the breakup of the U.S.S.R. Historian Tony Judt noted that “Gorbachev was letting Communism fall in Eastern Europe in order to save it in Russia itself.” It was a miscalculation. Two years after the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union itself would collapse.
The unraveling began with a coup against Gorbachev conducted by hard-liners who believed his reforms were moving too quickly. In August 1991, the coup plotters managed to put Gorbachev under house arrest at his vacation dacha in the Crimea. The coup unraveled within a few days, but Gorbachev never regained full power. Boris Yeltsin, who’d stood atop a tank outside the Russian White House to face down the coup, emerged as the hero of an independent Russia. Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party on August 24, 1991. Four months later, the Soviet Union was dissolved and the Cold War came to an end.
COMMUNISM, SOME SAY, WAS doomed to fail. A system that attempted to extinguish the human spirit, innovation, freedom, and individualism could not survive. A governing theory that required force to keep its citizens under its control would eventually crumble. But history tells us otherwise. The Soviet Union and its totalitarian satellites did survive for decades, using force against their own people and others. According to the Council of Europe, during the period of the Cold War, communism was responsible for the deaths of 94.5 million people. It was not preordained that the Soviet system would implode. It was certainly not preordained that it would do so relatively peacefully.
The history of the Cold War is many things. It is the stor
y of the triumph of freedom over tyranny, of the courage of millions who fought the oppression of Soviet dictatorship around the globe, and of the importance of achieving peace through strength. It is the story of individual leaders. Men and women like Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Miklos Nemeth, and Mikhail Gorbachev played critical roles in ensuring that tyranny would not prevail. Ultimately, the story of the Cold War is the story of American leadership. The free peoples of the world would not have prevailed without us. Through Republican and Democratic administrations, some more successful than others, over the course of forty-five years, we contained the Soviets and then defeated them.
THREE
Dawn of the Age of Terror
Just as surely as the Nazis during World War II, and the Soviets during the Cold War, the enemy we face today is bent on our destruction. As in other times, we are in a war we did not start and have no choice but to win.
—VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2004
As the Cold War ended, some declared that the era of the superpower was over, and predicted we would see the rise of a new multipolar global power structure. That didn’t happen. Instead, America emerged as the world’s only superpower. Our preeminence became evident in August 1990, even before the final disintegration of the Soviet Union, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
The Soviets had been Saddam’s main arms supplier. When he sent his forces into Kuwait, the Soviets had a decision to make. On their last legs as a world empire, would they support the aggression of their client state?
At the time of the invasion, Secretary of State James Baker was in Mongolia. He flew immediately to Moscow and held a press briefing with Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow’s Vnukovo-2 airport. Standing shoulder to shoulder, Baker and Shevardnadze issued a joint statement condemning “the brutal and illegal invasion of Kuwait” and calling for an arms embargo on Iraq. “That was the day, for me, when the Cold War ended,” Baker said later.