by David Milne
Wolfowitz’s first year certainly proved as much. He led studies that challenged 1970s orthodoxies: the value of détente with Moscow, engagement with China, and the vital importance of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. So Wolfowitz argued that the United States did not need any arms control agreements with the Soviet Union and that their absence actually improved Washington’s strategic position. He attempted with some success to stall a growing momentum in the State Department toward interacting meaningfully with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He was a steadfast supporter of Israel and was strongly opposed to providing new military hardware to Saudi Arabia—such as the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS)—that might undermine Israeli military dominance. Finally, Wolfowitz repudiated Kissinger’s assertion that the existence of a multipolar world made it essential that Washington engage respectfully with Beijing. Wolfowitz viewed the People’s Republic of China as a repressive state devoted to upending the status quo in East Asia that America had devoted so many resources to underwriting. President Reagan’s announcement of a massive arms buildup negated the supposed requirement that Beijing be cultivated as a counterweight against the Soviet Union. Even in the most hawkish presidential administration of the Cold War, Wolfowitz’s PPS stood apart in its bellicosity and desire to challenge conventional wisdom.
On the issue of China, Wolfowitz clashed bitterly with Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., who had previously served as Kissinger’s deputy at the NSC and who held no doubts about China’s strategic importance to the United States in the Cold War. In the spring of 1982, Wolfowitz drafted a memo that strongly criticized Haig’s State Department for making unnecessary concessions to China on the subject of arms sales to Taiwan. As Wolfowitz’s biographer Lewis Solomon writes, “In view of the growing friction between the two, the Secretary of State snubbed other proposals for Wolfowitz’s policy planning staff and attempted to cut them out of the communication loop.”46 Wolfowitz’s willingness to push the envelope had turned out to be counterproductive—he lacked the bureaucratic guile of a Kissinger or a Nitze. In Scooter Libby’s judgment, Wolfowitz’s assemblage of conservative talent achieved virtually nothing that was concrete and enduring. In March 1982, The New York Times reported that Secretary Haig “has notified Paul D. Wolfowitz, the director of policy planning, that he will be replaced … Associates reported that Mr. Haig found Mr. Wolfowitz too theoretical.”47
The Times was a little ahead of the mark, though it did accurately characterize Haig’s basic view. But Haig’s own problematic relationship with President Reagan—his high self-regard and thinly disguised desire to aggregate power at Foggy Bottom—led to the secretary of state’s downfall in June. Reagan appointed George P. Shultz to replace him. Shultz, in turn, promoted Wolfowitz to become assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific. Through sheer good luck Wolfowitz had survived another day. “Paul, this is an administrative job,” Shultz cautioned. “It’s not just thinking. It’s a big area. You’ve got to get around, get to see a lot of people.”48 Wolfowitz had been given a wonderful opportunity to manage relations with a pivotal region. The job also required him to sharpen his bureaucratic acumen and relational skills and to better recognize when the gap between theory and reality was unbridgeable.
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Ronald Reagan was a remarkable figure in many respects: a former B-movie actor, president of the Screen Actors Guild, Democrat, Goldwater protégé, governor of California, and devotee of supply-side economics and small government. He was also a presidential communicator par excellence.49 Yet contemporary bipartisan consensus on Reagan’s varied attributes—his virtually uncontested status as one of America’s ten to fifteen “great” presidents—can obscure how polarizing a figure he was, particularly during his first few years in office. George Kennan certainly did not pull his punches when assessing the administration at the time, identifying in Reagan and his advisers a “childishness and primitivism” that could serve only to damage America’s global standing. “I love certain old fashioned values and concepts,” Kennan recorded in his diary, “but not his.” While Kennan recognized that the Soviet Union was not averse to hawkish bluster, he queried whether it was really necessary for the United States to follow suit; dignified silence was surely more elegant and diplomatically astute. Politburo posturing was “as Russian as boiled cabbage and buckwheat kasha. But what about my own government and its state of blind militaristic hysteria?” Kennan’s level of despair would sink below anything he had felt during the wretched Eisenhower-Dulles era, though at least he was not alone in finding serious fault with Reagan’s foreign policies. “I am only a small part of the resistance in the U.S. to the madness of the present-Am[erican] administration,” Kennan wrote hopefully in the spring of 1982.50
So how had the Reagan administration managed to rile Kennan quite so intensely? By offering a comprehensive repudiation of Kennan’s strategy of containment. Eschewing the protocol diplomacy of civility and moderation, the president excoriated the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world” during a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983. More substantively—and vexingly, from Kennan’s Atlanticist perspective—Reagan offered military support to any insurgent group in the developing world dedicated to overthrowing a leftist government; the initiative that became known as the Reagan Doctrine.51 Rather than “containing” communism behind the Iron Curtain, Reagan sought to extinguish it far beyond the European theater through supporting insurgencies in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Ethiopia.52
Allied to this rhetorical and proxy-supporting escalation of the Cold War was a vast increase in America’s defense expenditures. In collaboration with Secretary of State Caspar Weinberger, Reagan set his first annual defense budget at $220 billion, the largest ever in peacetime. Reagan planned for annual increases in the budget of 7 percent, which ultimately led to the 1987 defense budget weighing in at a colossal $456.5 billion. He devoted significant resources to the B-1 stealth bomber, F-14 and F-15 fighter jets, and the new generation of MX intercontinental nuclear missiles.53 And then in March 1983, Reagan announced the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a satellite based, laser-armed system designed to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles that was soon dubbed “Star Wars” by incredulous critics. Wolfowitz’s friend and ally Richard Perle embraced the nickname. “Why not?” he asked. “It’s a good movie. Besides, the good guys won.”54
Wolfowitz applauded Reagan’s rapid defense buildup and his willingness to lambast the Soviet Union on moral grounds—evil it assuredly was, why the fuss? But the aspect of Reagan’s foreign policy that pleased him the most was his clearly stated desire to spread democracy. In a speech to the House of Commons, greeted enthusiastically by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her front bench but more cautiously by the rest of the chamber, Reagan observed that democracy promotion was one of America’s principal goals, proposing a concerted effort to “foster the infrastructure of democracy” the world over. One passage on the world’s vast capacity for democratic enlargement must have sounded to Wolfowitz like the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth:
This is not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences. It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy … Let us now begin a major effort to secure the best—a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation. For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.55
Reagan was deploying the Wilsonian language of democracy promotion—but applied without exception. According to Lou Cannon, a Reagan biographer, “The Westminster speech expressed more cogently than any other address of his presidency Reagan’s belief that the forces of freedom would triumph over communism.”5
6 His words set off a chain of events that included the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy in November 1983—a nongovernmental organization funded by Congress devoted to supporting democratic institutions worldwide—and to a hardening of policy toward undemocratic but steadfast allies such as the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan.
This democracy-promoting yin was counterbalanced to some degree, however, by a realist yang. In 1979, Jeane Kirkpatrick published an influential article in Commentary titled “Dictatorships & Double Standards.” While her preference in ideal conditions was the Wilsonian proliferation of virtuous democracies, Kirkpatrick cautioned that the Cold War world was not so simple. The article launched a strong attack on the Carter administration for pushing autocratic leaders, such as the shah in Iran and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, to liberalize and democratize their governments too quickly. Kirkpatrick faulted Carter for encouraging far-reaching changes only in nations “under pressure from revolutionary guerrillas … We seem to accept the status quo in Communist nations (in the name of ‘diversity’ and national autonomy), but not in nations ruled by ‘right-wing’ dictators or white oligarchies.” Here was the double standard of Kirkpatrick’s title. Instead of pursuing laudable but self-defeating pipe dreams, she recommended that political leaders be patient with authoritarian governments that support U.S. policy. These regimes are more likely to evolve gradually in the direction of liberal democracy than Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. Allied to this was Kirkpatrick’s contempt for ahistorical wishful thinking. Wilsonianism was clearly the intended target:
Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances … Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary discipline and habits [of democracy].57
Kirkpatrick’s article made an immediate impression on Reagan, who read it soon after publication and sent her a note expressing admiration for her logic. After assuming the presidency, Reagan appointed Kirkpatrick as ambassador to the United Nations, the first woman ever to serve in that position.
In 1983, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and CIA Director William Casey both urged Reagan to appoint Kirkpatrick his national security adviser, which would have been another first for a woman. Secretary of State Shultz persuaded Reagan otherwise, however, later observing, “I respected her intelligence, but she was not well suited to the job. Her strength was in her capacity for passionate advocacy.” Shultz remarked that the role of national security adviser required the temperament of a “dispassionate broker,” which he believed did not describe Kirkpatrick. He may have been right. But then again, few national security advisers have historically resembled dispassionate brokers, a criterion that certainly would have excluded Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski from service. Perhaps the more likely explanation is that the path-breaking Kirkpatrick hit a glass ceiling. Yet while Kirkpatrick was prevented from hitting the heights, her distinction between useful right-wing and irredeemable left-wing versions of authoritarianism had a significant influence on the policies pursued by the Reagan administration, much to Wolfowitz’s chagrin.58
One of Wolfowitz’s primary goals at the State Department was to deploy U.S. influence in East Asia to compel various authoritarian governments—in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan, most notably—to transition to democracy. In collaboration with Richard Armitage, based at the Pentagon, and Gaston Sigur, on the NSC staff—the so-called troika—Wolfowitz began to consider how democratic change might be effected. They began with the Philippines, where Ferdinand Marcos had led the nation in dictatorial style since 1965—and whose wife, Imelda, was known globally for her extravagant tastes and spending. They had quite a task ahead of them. When Vice President George H. W. Bush visited Manila in 1981, he told a glowing Marcos, “We love your adherence to democratic principles and democratic processes,” a statement that rather underplayed his tendency to declare martial law whenever his regime was electorally threatened. When Jeane Kirkpatrick visited Manila a few years later, the savvy Marcos quoted verbatim from “Dictatorships & Double Standards” during a banquet toast. He thanked her ostentatiously for providing such a compelling rationale for continued U.S. support for anticommunist regimes such as his.59
Yet slowly but surely, aided by the support of Secretary of State George Shultz—who viewed the removal of Marcos as a strategic victory for Washington regardless of Wilsonian niceties—U.S. policy toward the Marcos regime hardened. In January 1985, Wolfowitz, accompanied by his aide Scooter Libby, traveled to Manila, where they met and encouraged Marcos’s principal political opponents. During congressional testimony, Armitage and Wolfowitz stated their clear preference for policies that would apply pressure on Marcos to liberalize the political system of the Philippines. In late 1985, the opposition leader Corazon Aquino appeared to win a snap general election, but Marcos refused to accept the result. Washington soon learned that Aquino was the fair winner, and that Marcos was clinging to power through the traditional recourse to electoral fraud. Shultz urged Reagan to threaten to cut off military aid to Marcos if he continued to refuse to accept the popular verdict and step down.
Reagan agonized over this for a while—such a move certainly contradicted Jeane Kirkpatrick’s theory—before following his secretary of state’s counsel and dispatching the ultimatum. This led inevitably to the end of Ferdinand Marcos, who was flown out of the Philippines with his wife on an American Air Force plane. A precedent had been set. A year later, massive street demonstrations demanded the removal of Chun Doo Hwan’s authoritarian government in South Korea. Reagan again urged the leader of a flailing, unloved autocracy to step aside and allow history—marching toward a liberal-democratic endpoint—to run its course.60
Henry Kissinger was distressed to witness the repudiation of yet another of his strategic maxims. Détente was a dead accented letter, balance-of-power diplomacy had been dismissed as anachronistic and contrary to American values, and now “better the devil you know” had been rent asunder. He attacked the Reagan administration for its democracy-promotion agenda: “Are there no other overriding American interests?” he asked despairingly. What would other American allies with an authoritarian coloring (and there were many) make of Reagan’s shabby treatment of Marcos? “Whatever else may be said about the Marcos regime,” wrote Kissinger, “it contributed substantially to American security and had been extolled by American presidents for nearly two decades.” Kissinger closed his article by recording “grave concerns” about this Wilsonian resurgence.61
Wolfowitz held Kissinger’s logic in contempt, for it highlighted a damaging paradox: “You can’t use democracy, as you appropriately should, as a battle with the Soviet Union, and then turn around and be completely hypocritical about it when it’s on your side of the line.” Values and morality were an integral part of the struggle with the Soviet Union; the Cold War was nothing if not an ideological battle. The United States had to be on the side of the angels as often as possible.
Wolfowitz’s aspirations were of course laudable, but they were applied inconsistently by the administration he served. In Chile, the Reagan administration continued to lend Augusto Pinochet’s brutal regime its material and political support. U.S. policy toward El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua was sullied by egregious human rights abuses perpetrated by insurgent groups challenging leftist governments. These were ignored by the Reagan administration in the name of a wider anticommunist good, and people certainly noticed.62 Wolfowitz’s assertion that “the best antidote to communism is democracy” was catchy, but it failed to capture the full spread of the administration’s foreign policies, which were often just as callous and amoral as those pursued during the Nixon-Kissinger era.63
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Secretary of State Shultz appointed Wolfowit
z to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia in 1986. It was a position Wolfowitz coveted for personal reasons; his wife, Clare, was an anthropologist with research interests there. But this was also an important nation in world affairs. Indonesia was the world’s most populous Muslim country and had been a steadfast ally to the United States following the bloody rise in 1967 of Suharto, who ruled the nation until 1998 as a repressive anticommunist. Suharto was precisely the type of leader whom Jeane Kirkpatrick viewed as essential to U.S. interests. There was never any danger of the United States applying political pressure on Suharto à la Marcos—the strategic stakes were much higher. Nonetheless, Wolfowitz politely chided Suharto for failing to encourage greater “openness in the political sphere” and established a bond of friendship with Abdurrahman Wahid, a critic of Suharto who led one of Indonesia’s largest Muslim political parties. One of the most notable aspects of Wolfowitz’s stay in Jakarta, however, was the degree to which he imbibed Indonesian culture. As the historian Richard Immerman writes, “Over the next three years he learned the language; he studied the culture; he toured the neighborhoods. He even won a cooking contest.”64
The three-year stint in Indonesia was an enriching period for Wolfowitz, clearly, but there was also a downside—he was far removed from the momentous events that occurred during the final two years of Reagan’s presidency. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His youth (he was fifty-four) and vigor cast Gorbachev in vivid contrast to the decrepit gerontocracy—Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko—that preceded him. Indeed, Ronald Reagan once joked, “How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me.”65 In 1986, a hale and hearty Gorbachev announced a new policy of perestroika, roughly translated as “restructuring,” designed to liberalize the Soviet economy and remedy deficiencies in regard to supply and demand. Gorbachev followed this up in more radical fashion in 1988 with glasnost, or “openness,” which delivered on the promise of the Helsinki Accords, extending political freedoms, including freedom of speech, to the Soviet citizenry.