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Engaging adversaries is a complicated task, involving a balance of foreign policy and domestic political constraints. We finally had a chance to read James Mann’s fascinating book on Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, and it provides some surprising examples.
On coming to office, Reagan enshrined his Cold War views in two important national security directives. NSDD-32 declared that the US would seek to undermine Soviet influence in Eastern Europe and NSDD-75 committed the administration to a policy of seeking change inside the Soviet Union itself (“regime change,” in contemporary parlance). A central theme of Mann’s book—and his earlier Rise of the Vulcans—is that these proto-neoconservative approaches were not only at odds with the Democrats but with the Kissingerian view of détente as well. Kissinger took the bipolar Cold War structure as a given, and thought it was naive to expect that the Soviet Union could fundamentally change.
But in contrast to his hardline advisors—and Harvard historian Richard Pipes in particular—Reagan wanted nothing to stand in the way of “compromise and quiet diplomacy” with the Soviet Union. To the contrary, NSDD-75 explicitly stated that the administration would “seek to engage the Soviet Union in negotiations to attempt to reach agreements which protect and enhance U.S. interests."
Reagan gradually became preoccupied with the objective of abolishing nuclear weapons altogether. Part of his willingness to pursue summitry with Gorbachev was motivated by this wish (later picked up by his last Secretary of State, George Schulz, who emerges as the most far-seeing protagonist in the book). Ironically, the harshest critics of his changing nuclear views and willingness to engage included none other than the old-line realists: Nixon, Kissinger and Scowcroft. After criticizing him for being to hardline, they now criticized him for going soft,
Mann rightly attributes the end of the Cold War not to Reagan's budget-busting military build-up but to longer-term Soviet weaknesses and the emergence of a reformer who recognized them. Gorbachev saw a normalization of relations with the US—including significant concessions on arms control--as a prerequisite to even more complex internal reforms. Despite his staunch anti-communism, Reagan was far ahead of both the realists and neo-cons in picking up on Gorbachev’s interest in this regard.
We are still a long way from a North Korean Gorbachev; to the contrary, Pyongyang seems to have drawn the conclusion from the collapse of the Soviet Union that the reformist path can be a suicidal one. But the lesson of Mann’s book is sobering: while there is risk in missing signs of reform, a reformist counterpart is a central pre-requisite for a strategy of engagement to yield meaningful results.
