by David Milne
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Jimmy Carter rose to political prominence as the governor of rural Georgia—he made his wealth as the owner of a peanut-warehousing business—and his presidential campaign was driven by this well-cultivated outsider status, by the purity that supposedly accrues through avoiding direct contact with Washington, D.C.28 Carter was a born-again Christian, and while he did not lead with his religiosity, there is little doubt that a clear sense of right and wrong informed his worldview. Carter lambasted Kissinger, Nixon, and Ford for too narrowly defining America’s national interests and insisted that the nation’s foreign policy should pay greater heed to human rights. Carter pointedly exchanged warm letters with Andrei Sakharov, encouraged post-Helsinki dissidents across the Soviet Bloc, and established a Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the State Department that graded each nation on how well it treated its citizens. During his inaugural address in 1977, Carter declared, “Our commitment to human rights must be absolute.”29
The new president’s words and actions reassured an admiring Wolfowitz, who accepted the position of deputy assistant secretary for defense for regional programs. It was a midlevel job that invited Wolfowitz to contemplate and identify future trends, a function he was pleased to perform. But there was no job in the Carter administration for Paul Nitze, who had reason to expect better. In the summer of 1976, Nitze met and unnerved Carter—one witness described the meeting as “a disaster”—with his dark warnings about Soviet nuclear intentions and American vulnerability.30 Carter described Nitze as “typically know-it-all. He was arrogant and inflexible. His own ideas were sacred to him. He didn’t seem to listen to others, and he had a doomsday approach.”31 That the two men did not hit it off was not all that surprising. A few months previously, Nitze had written to Zbigniew Brzezinski that Carter’s human rights emphasis was “based upon a Wilsonian approach, an approach that was impracticable even in Wilson’s day, and which seems even more out of tune with today’s realities. I further question whether mea culpas about the United States as a nation are helpful. We have not, as a nation, ignored Latin America or the third world or engaged in military adventurism; we acted imprudently in Vietnam, but not from evil motives.”32 Not a man to be slighted without consequence, Nitze became one of Carter’s fiercest critics. (Nitze was generally more hawkish when unemployed.)
Wolfowitz’s new job at the Pentagon required him to identify parts of the world where American interests were present, to a hitherto underestimated extent, and threatened. Broadening the geographical remit of his doctoral studies, Wolfowitz identified the Persian Gulf as a particularly nettlesome region for Washington, and Baathist Iraq—the pan-Arab Baathist movement was driven by nationalism and a variant on socialism, dedicated to achieving an Arab renaissance, thus reducing the region’s susceptibility to the whims of larger nations—as a likely future threat. The vast oil reserves in the region, combined with dwindling U.S. domestic capacity, made the Persian Gulf an economically vital region, one where Wolfowitz suspected the Soviet Union would attempt to make mischief. Yet even without direct adventurism on the part of Moscow, an assertive and nationalist Iraq—implacably opposed to Israel, flush with high-tech Soviet weaponry—posed a clear threat to regional stability.
Wolfowitz presented his report—titled “Capabilities for Limited Contingencies in the Persian Gulf,” more commonly known as the “Limited Contingency Study”—to Secretary of Defense Harold Brown in 1979. It was a fascinating and accurate piece of futurology:
The emerging Iraqi threat has two dimensions. On the one hand, Iraq may in the future use her military forces against such states as Kuwait or Saudi Arabia (as in the 1961 Kuwait crisis that was resolved by timely British intervention with force). On the other hand, the more serious problem may be that Iraq’s implicit power will cause currently moderate local powers to accommodate themselves to Iraq without being overtly coerced. The latter problem suggests that we must not only be able to defend the interests of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and ourselves against an Iraqi invasion or show of force, we should also make manifest our capabilities and commitments to balance Iraq’s power—and this may require an increased visibility for U.S. power.33
What looks farsighted today, however, appeared quirky in 1979. The military brass did not favor a partial redeployment of its assets to the Persian Gulf; Harold Brown worried that Wolfowitz had created a threat where none existed. A confident young Baathist named Saddam Hussein was at that juncture outmaneuvering his rivals to consolidate power at the apex of Iraqi politics. Fearful that Wolfowitz’s report might be leaked, and Saddam recklessly and needlessly antagonized, Brown ordered that the study be buried deep in the Pentagon’s archive. Iran was America’s primary regional ally in the Middle East, and the Nixon Doctrine held that surrogates such as the shah should bear the preponderant burden of safeguarding the region. Farther down the line, Wolfowitz could not resist a little sarcasm: “Well, we don’t plan forces for the Persian Gulf. The Shah [of] Iran takes care of the Persian Gulf for us.”34
During his service to the Carter administration, Wolfowitz was given the opportunity to engage in ambitious blue skies thinking—if not the power to execute those ideas. Yet even as Wolfowitz mulled the future, the Carter present frustrated him. After assuming the presidency, Carter had needled Moscow with his human rights emphasis—which Brezhnev viewed as an aggressive intrusion into Soviet domestic affairs—but he was dedicated to achieving a second, more comprehensive nuclear arms control agreement with the Soviet Union: SALT II. In August 1978, Carter had vetoed a $37 billion arms bill because it provided for a $2 billion nuclear aircraft carrier that the president deemed unnecessary. A member of Carter’s White House staff correctly predicted that his veto would “make you look weak on defense issues at a time when public attitudes are shifting to the right.” On November 18, Carter’s pugnacious national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, identified “a growing domestic problem involving public perception [of foreign policy] … To put it simply and quite bluntly, it is seen as ‘soft.’” To reestablish his bona fides as a resolute Cold Warrior, Brzezinski advised the president to do something that “has a distinctively ‘tough’ quality to it.”35
Carter did get tough, but only after the United States suffered some serious foreign-policy reverses. In January 1978, Carter visited Iran, where he paid warm homage to the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, identifying among the choreographed crowds in Tehran the “respect … admiration and love” that ordinary Iranians supposedly felt toward him. As the historian Odd Arne Westad notes, “It was perhaps the worst possible moment for a presidential visit; just as the shah needed to shore up his nationalist credentials to confront the opposition.”36 Over the remainder of 1978, protests against the shah’s rule grew more fervent and widespread—December witnessed a remarkable two-million-person demonstration in Tehran.37
In January 1979, the shah fled the country and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from his exile in France, wasting little time in establishing a theocracy that looked (way) backward, not forward, for inspiration. On November 4, 1979, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and seized sixty-six American hostages, fifty-two of whom remained captive for the next 444 days. Carter launched a disastrous helicopter-led rescue attempt in April 1980 that resulted in the destruction of two aircraft, the death of eight American servicemen, and the resignation of his courtly secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, whose trepidation had been ignored. The United States lost its major regional ally in the Middle East, its prestige took a significant hit, and its vaunted military failed to rescue its own citizens. Such were the dark consequences of “America’s first encounter with radical Islam,” as David Farber describes the episode in the subtitle of his 2006 book.
The Iranian Revolution was a crushing blow to U.S. interests in the Middle East, alone sufficient to cast a Democratic presidency into fatal disrepute. But Iran was just the beginning. Other foreign-policy “losses” combined to cast Carter’s presidency
into almost Stygian gloom. In July 1979, a leftist insurgent group, the Sandinistas, toppled the repressive but reliably anticommunist government of Anastasio Somoza—whose family had ruled Nicaragua since 1936. And then on December 25, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in a desperate attempt to prop up a Marxist-Leninist government struggling to quell an Islamist insurgency riled by secular efforts to reduce the influence of political Islam on Afghan society. Carter’s response was fierce. He withdrew the SALT II treaty from consideration in the Senate, increased defense spending, reinstituted registration for the draft, embargoed grain and technology shipments to the Soviet Union, and ordered an American boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. The president also authorized the CIA to begin funneling arms and supplies to the Afghan insurgent movement, the mujahideen, although Zbigniew Brzezinski later allegedly claimed that covert support commenced as early as July 1979, predating the invasion by some six months.38
George Kennan faulted nearly all of Carter’s responses. During testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 27, 1980, Kennan was asked for his thoughts on how to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis. His reply was simple and somewhat surprising: declare war on Iran. This remarkable suggestion showed that there was nothing predictable or doctrinal about Kennan’s thinking—he clearly possessed the ability to shock. The crisis evoked bad memories of Kennan’s own internment during the Second World War, and he believed that only an official declaration of war would permit a fruitful resolution of the crisis. When asked about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, however, Kennan counseled a moderate response and chided President Carter for his belligerence. Moscow’s move southward was not the first stage of a wider gambit to dominate the Persian Gulf, as Carter and Brzezinski appeared to be suggesting; rather, it was a weak and defensive move that portended little except a protracted and enervating conflict for Moscow.39
Wolfowitz viewed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as the consequence and culmination of Kissinger and Nixon’s détente policy, which had encouraged Soviet adventurism. Brezhnev was actually surprised when Carter withdrew the SALT II treaty from Senate consideration. That is how comfortable the Politburo had become in its “normalized” relationship—Moscow believed it could invade another nation and assume the continuation of business as usual. The Iranian Revolution, meanwhile, reinforced Wolfowitz’s view that the Persian Gulf would become a major area of crisis and contestation. And again, it laid bare the Nixon-era fallacy of recruiting regional powers to serve American interests. During Jimmy Carter’s 1980 State of the Union address, Wolfowitz could have been forgiven for claiming vindication for the contentious logic presented in his “Limited Contingency Study.” In a pugnacious speech, the president warned that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”40 The Carter Doctrine was the Wolfowitz Doctrine melted down and recast. The Persian Gulf was now deemed a vital area of American concern.
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At the close of 1979, as Carter reeled from this three-part succession of bad news, Fred Iklé called his former staffer and advised him to leave the administration with all due haste. Iklé was now advising Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign and anticipated a decisive victory for his man in the next election. “Paul, you’ve got to get out of there,” Iklé warned. “We want you in the new administration.”41 Republican hawks like Jesse Helms had viewed Paul Nitze warily for his service to Truman, and Iklé worried that these same men would dismiss Wolfowitz as a Carter man. By remaining in an administration whose policies he disliked through a misguided sense of loyalty, Wolfowitz ran the clear risk of sabotaging a future job in a more accommodating administration. He did not need to be told twice. At the beginning of 1980, Wolfowitz resigned from the Carter administration and took a job as a visiting associate professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University—the institution Nitze had founded with Christian Herter in 1943. Here Wolfowitz bided his time, dearly hoping that Iklé’s confidence about Reagan’s electoral prospects was well placed.
Though it did not necessarily appear that way to the electorate in 1980, Carter had scored some notable achievements as president. In 1977, the United States and Panama signed a treaty that promised to return the Canal Zone to Panama at the end of the century but that permitted the United States to unilaterally deploy its military if the canal was ever imperiled by external threats. In 1978, Carter presided over successful negotiations between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat at Camp David that led to their signing an Egypt-Israel peace treaty the following year—ending the technical state of war between the two nations that had existed for the previous thirty years. (Wolfowitz was so impressed by Sadat’s bravery and the quality of his speechmaking that he taught himself Arabic to “appreciate the valor of Sadat’s speech in the original.”42) And while Nixon and Kissinger had pioneered the opening to China, it was Jimmy Carter who officially normalized relations with Beijing in 1979. The positives in Carter’s foreign-policy record, however, were largely obscured by events in Iran, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan won a crushing victory in November 1980, winning 489 votes in the electoral college to Carter’s 49 (of which 11 came from his home state of Georgia).
Reagan was the most conservative Republican presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater, and his victory suggested a major political realignment in the United States. George Kennan was initially unsure of what to make of Reagan’s ascension. Although he abhorred the unsophisticated right wing of the Republican Party, he was more concerned by what he viewed as Jimmy Carter’s reckless saber-rattling following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1980 Kennan wrote, “Never since World War II has there been so far-reaching a militarization of thought and discourse in the capital. An unsuspecting stranger, plunged into its midst, could only conclude that the last hope of peaceful, nonmilitary solutions had been exhausted.” Perhaps, Kennan mused, Reagan’s campaigning bark would be worse than his governing bite—he could scarcely be more belligerent than Carter in the summer of 1980. Reagan’s first presidential press conference swiftly disabused Kennan of this notion. Casting an eye over the Soviet leadership, Reagan informed the assembled press corps that “the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime: to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that.”43 Kennan became a fierce critic of President Reagan’s moral certainties, which he viewed as simplistic and dangerous.
In 1976, Paul Nitze and Eugene Rostow had formed a pressure group called the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). The group was hostile to détente and positive that the Soviet Union was building an ominous strategic superiority in the field of nuclear weapons. Its membership included former treasury secretaries Henry H. Fowler and Charles Walker, and national security hawks Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz, Richard Pipes, and Nitze himself. The CPD became a bane of Carter’s presidency. After Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty in June 1979, Nitze quickly mobilized the committee to block its ratification in the Senate. One concerned Carter adviser confided to The Washington Post that “Paul Nitze is worth 100 bureaucrats.” Another staffer gamely observed, “Henry Kissinger we will have to stroke; Paul Nitze we will have to beat.”44
Some chance. While the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan applied estocada to SALT II, Nitze’s deftly managed lobbying effort had already mortally weakened the bill. The CPD was a highly effective advocacy organization, a shadow foreign-policy establishment in many respects, making it unsurprising when Reagan made so many national security appointments with a CPD affiliation. Richard Allen became national security adviser, William J. Casey became the director of Central Intelligence, Jeane Kirkpatrick became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Richard Pipes became a senior staff member on the National Secur
ity Council. Nitze returned to policy prominence as an arms control negotiator. The hawks had finally found their roost.
But finding a job for Wolfowitz proved problematic. He had worked for the Carter administration for too long and was viewed by some as guilty by association—just as Iklé had feared. Richard Allen again headed the president-elect’s foreign policy advisory team and Wolfowitz’s résumé worried him. His assessment was, “He was a goner, as far as I was concerned. He’d just been at the Pentagon. He had worked for Carter. I thought he was a Carter guy.” John Lehman, a friend who had worked with Wolfowitz in the Nixon administration, urged Allen to look beyond happenstance, meet with Wolfowitz in person, and form his own opinion. Allen agreed, met with Wolfowitz, reversed course, and never again doubted his foreign-policy credentials.45 He suggested that he become director of policy planning at State, and Wolfowitz gladly accepted.
On the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms raised the same objections to Wolfowitz as he had to Nitze: He was a Democrat and hence soft on national security. Helms’s colleagues convinced the elderly senator otherwise, however, and Wolfowitz assumed his position, hiring promising young scholars from America’s elite universities, including Francis Fukuyama from Cornell and Zalmay Khalilzad, another former Telluride student, from Chicago. He also reached out to one of his former students at Yale, a conservative lawyer named I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and to the conservative African American activist (and Telluridian) Alan Keyes. While Wolfowitz’s team also included moderates like Dennis Ross, who later served in the Clinton administration, and Stephen Sestanovich (yet another Cornell contemporary), there is no doubt that Wolfowitz, and the majority of his twenty-five-person staff, were on the hawkish, neo-Wilsonian end of the spectrum.