This Meeting is Over

[Roger Bissell]

This was reposted on the "Fighting for Liberty" forum from this web address:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=101306C

It details how Reagan saved our butts during the Cold War and earned the title of Greatest American President of the 20th Century. (By default, George W. Bush is the Greatest American President of the 21st Century. It appears that his title will remain intact until at least 2012, sad to say.)

REB

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'This Meeting Is Over'

By Alan W. Dowd : BIO| 13 Oct 2006

America won the Cold War in a manner and in a place that were both

unexpected. Victory came not with mighty armies sweeping across a

European battlefield or fiery missiles streaking off to faraway

targets, but rather with the force of words and will. Ronald Reagan

provided both at a place called Reykjavik twenty years ago this week.

Given that it ended the longest, costliest war in American history,

it is a moment worthy of remembrance.

Reagan set the table a year earlier in Geneva, where he made his

intentions clear to a young Soviet apparatchik named Mikhail

Gorbachev. He began by bluntly putting Gorbachev on notice. "You

can't win this arms race," he explained matter-of-factly. "There is

no way you can win it." It wasn't a boast or a threat—just a matter

of economic might and political will. After a decade of doubt,

America suddenly had both. Reagan went on to detail for Gorbachev the

full litany of Soviet aggression and brutality since 1917. "No

previous president had seen fit to say this directly to the Soviets

ever," as Derek Leebaert recalls in The Fifty Year Wound.

The summit ended with little progress. Gorbachev labeled Reagan "a

caveman, a dinosaur." For his part, Reagan called Gorbachev "a die-

hard communist." "Never, perhaps in the postwar decades," Gorbachev

would later recall, "was the situation in the world as explosive and

hence, more difficult and unfavorable, as in the first half of the

1980s."

Explosive and difficult are understatements. The Cold War spawned

tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and countless other wars, each

made bloodier by superpower intervention with arms and cash. From

1945 to 1990, these spin-off wars claimed as many as 30 million

lives, as Patrick Brogan has written.

Moreover, the decade of détente, which preceded Reagan's election,

had undermined America's global standing. Reagan's shock-

rehabilitation program, though essential, initially heightened East-

West tensions. Reagan used the bully pulpit of the presidency not

only to reinforce America's place and purpose in the world, but to

recast the Cold War in terms reminiscent of its earliest chapters. In

1983, for instance, he warned Americans not "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."

The words sent shockwaves around the world. But as the old saying

goes, the truth hurts. What else could be said of the monstrosity

Lenin spawned? We can measure its evil in many ways, but perhaps the

easiest way is its utter contempt for human life: One historian

estimates the Soviet regime's murder toll at a staggering 62 million.

And Lenin's victims died on nearly every continent. The trail of

blood stretches across eight decades and spans four generations.

In short, Reagan was not overstating when he called the USSR "evil."

Neither was he willing to coexist with the evil. Reagan matched his

rhetoric with action. He doubled defense spending during his eight

years as president and unleashed a withering volley of technology,

military aid and covert operations that fractured the very

foundations of Moscow's empire.

Taking his cues from Reagan, CIA Director William Casey launched

covert operations throughout Eastern Europe and, of course, in

Afghanistan. He told his deputies to "go out and kill me 10,000

Russians until they give up." Working with the mujahedin of

Afghanistan, the CIA did that and then some. Under Reagan, the CIA

even helped Afghan fighters carry out attacks inside the Soviet

Union. As Leebaert notes, Washington had never done anything like

this since the beginning of the Cold War.

All of this served as prologue to the Reykjavik Summit.

At Reykjavik, Reagan was ready to reduce the US nuclear arsenal by 50

percent, in exchange for reciprocal reductions on the Soviet side.

For his part, Gorbachev proposed a joint elimination of all offensive

nuclear missiles. He even offered huge reductions in Soviet

conventional forces in Eastern Europe. But Gorbachev's central goal

during the summit was to convince Reagan to give up the Strategic

Defense Initiative (SDI).

Reagan wouldn't be cajoled, blustered or charmed. Instead of dropping

SDI, he proposed that the system be developed and if demonstrated to

be a success, that Moscow and Washington share all anti-missile

technology in order to prevent an accident that could trigger

Armageddon.

Despite all the promises on the table—sweeping cutbacks in missiles

and warheads, the eventual denuclearization of Europe, even

eliminating all nuclear weapons within a decade—Reagan was insistent

on keeping SDI, and Gorbachev was insistent on killing it. As

Gorbachev put it during the summit, "I am increasingly convinced of

something I knew previously only second-hand. The President of the

United States does not like to retreat."

Disappointed, Reagan rose from his chair and declared, "The meeting

is over."

The headline of the BBC's "On This Day" feature expresses what most

observers thought at the time—and still think today: "Reykjavik

Summit Ends in Failure." But the summit was anything but a failure

for those who wanted the Cold War to end in a manner favorable to the

West. History was made at that place. Leebaert reminds us that Jimmy

Carter's own national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, argues

that Reykjavik is where the Cold War was won.

Reagan knew that Gorbachev's empire was out of money. The growth rate

of the centralized Soviet economy had plummeted from the 5-percent

annual clip of the 1960s to just one percent. And the USSR was

diverting 30 percent of GDP to its military. Gorbachev recalls, "We

were increasingly behind the West...And I was ashamed for my country—

perhaps the country with the richest resources on earth, and we

couldn't provide toothpaste for our people."

Less than five months after Reykjavik, Reagan and Gorbachev met

again. And this time Gorbachev agreed to the INF Treaty, with no

linkage to SDI. It was the first treaty that actually eliminated an

entire class of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. Other

treaties followed.

Leebaert reports that Reagan, the man dismissed by the Left and its

allies in the press as doddering, forgetful and feeble, knew exactly

what he had accomplished—and had accomplished exactly what he set out

to do: "The Soviets blinked," as Reagan would write in his journal

after inking the INF deal. The Cold War was melting away—and so was

the Soviet Empire.

The revisionists and critics usually respond to this view of Reagan

in one of two ways: 1) The Soviet Union, they argue, was on the verge

of collapsing with or without Reagan; and/or 2) Gorbachev would have

made adjustments on his own because of the dire economic situation

facing his country.

Well, if the collapse of the USSR was inevitable and imminent, if the

Soviet Union just needed a push, why didn't Reagan's predecessors

push? Nixon pursued détente, offering the false impression, as

Leebaert observes, "that the Cold War was fading." Ford effectively

validated Soviet control over Eastern Europe at Helsinki. Carter's

secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, concluded that opposing Soviet

expansion in places like Africa "would be futile."

Carter himself ignored the consequences of détente until it was

almost too late. A Washington Post article published after a Carter-

Brezhnev summit captures the strange and sad symbolism of

Washington's interactions with Moscow in those gray days of self-

doubt and malaise. "Carter," the Post reported, "seems to have

developed a protectiveness, almost a fondness, for the older man,

especially after he saved Brezhnev from falling on Sunday morning."

Reagan was not about to save the Soviet state from falling.

Perhaps more important, consider what former Soviet officials say

about Reagan's role. Peter Schweizer quotes a number of them in his

book Victory:

According to one KGB general, "American policy in the 1980s was a

catalyst for the collapse of the Soviet Union."

One high-ranking party official calls Reagan's hard line "a major

factor in the demise of the Soviet system."

Former Soviet Foreign Minister Aleksandr Besmertnykh credits SDI with

accelerating the decline of the USSR.

Gorbachev himself admits today that the peaceful end of the Cold War

depended on Reagan as much as it depended on him. "I do not know how

other statesmen would have acted at that moment, because the

situation was too difficult," Gorbachev has said. "Reagan, whom many

considered extremely rightist, dared to make these steps, and this is

his most important deed."

As to the mythology surrounding Gorbachev, he did not enter office

ready to make peace or trigger a counterrevolution against Lenin's

brutal state. In fact, as Leebaert recalls, before Gorbachev unveiled

his glasnost program of openness with the West, he tried uskorenie—or

"acceleration." It included increased military spending, escalation

in Afghanistan and intimidation of restive neighbors. In 1985-86,

Gorbachev outlined a 45-percent increase in defense spending over

five years. And Leebaert's scholarship reminds us that it was under

Gorbachev that the USSR's germ-warfare labs reached their "high point

of developing an arsenal of deadly pathogens."

Gorbachev had to be persuaded to choose the path to peace, and Reagan

did the persuading. Gorbachev made a virtue of necessity only after

he realized Reagan wasn't about to be taken off task. At Reykjavik,

the Soviet Union's last leader realized he had in Reagan a

counterpart that wasn't enchanted by the same old empty promises.

When Gorbachev came to grips with this reality a few months later,

Reagan had the good sense and grace to turn the hard line into a soft

landing.

The war on terror is different than the Cold War. However, in this

ideological-military-political struggle, as in the one that ended at

Reykjavik, the US is still fighting what America's early cold

warriors called an enemy "animated by a new fanatic faith,

antithetical to our own, that seeks to impose its absolute authority

over the rest of the world." With such an enemy, as Reagan

understood, the solution is neither compromise nor coexistence, but

victory.

Alan Dowd is a senior fellow at Sagamore Institute for Policy

Research.

[Chris Grieb]

Roger; Thanks for the post. In discussing Reagan I would like to find someone Jan 1980 who would have been willing to say that by Jan 20, 1993 the USSR would be gone. I want to find that person. Reagan and John Paul 2 made it possible.

[omphalos]

If the Cold War was a poker game, SDI was Reagan's way of buying the pot.

The only thing which matters in poker is winning or losing.

We won.

My hat's off to the Gipper.

[Brant Gaede]

If the Cold War was a poker game, SDI was Reagan's way of buying the pot.

The only thing which matters in poker is winning or losing.

We won.

But we need to keep winning.

--Brant