Max Boot’s Dirty War on the Reagan Doctrine

When the important writer Max Boot released his ten-year study of Ronald Reagan recently, it won a nice roll-out from the newspaper where he works, the Washington Post. The “Books” section showed a fine, noble, full-page color photograph of the 40th president of the United States. Reagan was wearing a brown suit — “fashion people” said in the day that only a Hollywood man like Reagan could look good and appropriate in a D.C. formal setting in a brown suit. The photo showed him striding down an elegant White House hallway, looking engaged, determined, his hands around the typescript of an impending speech. The image was all class and public business … perhaps even suggestive of history-making?

But no. There was to be no allowing luster in our public affairs. “In Reality” — the words were in capitals, IN REALITY — and as one turned the page, a second headline, “Tearing Down the Myth of Ronald Reagan.” The article instructed that in Reagan’s day “people” were “bamboozled” by the man. His speeches were “little more than a farrago of erroneous statistics” and “spurious quotations.” He started the phrase, “Make American Great Again,” surely mindless nativism. Even good sentiment must be warned against: “Nostalgia for Reagan underscores his irrelevance” today. Surely, we can still at least say Reagan helped win the Cold War? It seems not. We are told it is now known that the Soviet Union’s breakup was “entirely due to Gorbachev’s refusal to hold it together.”

All this black ink in the Washington, D.C. newspaper was occasioned by the substantial new book by columnist Max Boot, Reagan: His Life and Legend. The reviewer, so peevish about the president, is generous to the new book calling it “magisterial.”

The New Yorker and other publications are calling it among the best books of the year. But while it has fine passages, it is also crippled by an inadequate, negligent handling of a legacy project of both Reagan terms — the “Reagan Doctrine.”

The “Reagan Doctrine” involved a worldview and set of actions by the president that directly helped bring victory in the Cold War. What mattered was Reagan’s direction, action, and agency — not just Gorbachev’s losing. This is a vital matter in the history of U.S. foreign policy. The effort involved many people who are still contributing today to the public discourse, including several I teach with at the Institute of World Politics, the D.C. graduate school. We worked on some of the things the younger Mr. Boot does not appreciate or perhaps know of — despite the extensive list of sources in his book.

The Reagan vision called for a more free world. That in turn would result in a safer world for the U.S. and other democracies. It was not introduced as a “doctrine” by the president, a secretary of state, or an official historian. Instead, the foundations began to emerge during the campaign of 1980 and the first term — most strongly by 1982.

Its label came from that gentle genius Charles Krauthammer, one of the best essayists of his generation. The doctrine’s conception is in part due to a thinker Max Boot (and some other writers in this area) totally ignored: Jack Wheeler, an idealist of oversized personality and a minuscule California think tank called the Freedom Research Foundation. Dr. Wheeler’s creative thoughts won influence with Reagan speechwriters, planners, and William Casey. Office of Strategic Services veteran–turned-investment banker, Casey was given direction of the Central Intelligence Agency, and encouragement from the new president. One very active Casey aide, disliked by the establishment, Dr. Constantine Menges, later wrote a fact-jammed and valuable book on the political and human geography of all this, The Twilight Struggle. That book won no prizes but it is one of the places to look for realities and issues that Mr. Boot gives but a few lines.

Good governments should be built on freedom and to protect freedom. Men and women by nature would fight for their freedom. Soviet Communist despotism — in Reagan’s day — was their enemy, he believed. Communism was then strong enough to tyrannize millions and make gains in the world, too. Forgotten now are the Soviet leaders’ boasts of the late 1970s that they were changing the “correlation of forces,” especially by expanding in the Third World. That self-assessment by America’s enemy is hardly represented — and never evaluated directly — in this massive new book by Boot, yet he makes plenty of space to prod Reagan’s supposed naïveté about Communism, or fears of it.

In the 1980s, what the White House determined was that the USSR, despite its overseas expansions, could be de-legitimated and undermined if one could assess its critical vulnerabilities and stir a global struggle for freedom. National security directives of May 1982 and January 1983 laid out the policy and strategy. The U.S. would “contain and reverse the expansion of Soviet control and military presence” and increase the cost of its many ongoing insurgencies and proxy wars.

During that time, mine was an unimportant post with a very important member of the House Armed Services Committee, Jim Courter of New Jersey. The post gave me a close look, in early 1986, at Dr. Jack Wheeler and one does not forget his driving idea and its audacity. Years later he confirmed in interviews with me that his knot of American allies dared to believe that if the forces of freedom won even a single strategic fight, anywhere in the Third World where the Kremlin was investing, it would discredit the Brezhnev Doctrine everywhere. Brezhnev had asserted that all Communist gains were progressive, ordained by history, and must be guaranteed. The Reagan team flipped that formula. If the U.S. could aid victory in one place, the argument and prestige of the Kremlin might shatter.

The Reagan Doctrine embraced selected countries where recently imposed dictatorships of the Marxist variety were protected by Soviet bloc aid vis-à-vis their subjects. Reagan’s policy offered not to fight in their place — not with American soldiers — but with American supplies for those doing the fighting for themselves. Five countries were most often mentioned: Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Angola, and, at times, Mozambique (whose guerrillas never were given American aid). None of these governments were yet powerful; all were newly commanded and administered by Marxist-Leninists loyal to Moscow.

For example: the “Contras.” Many members of a divided House of Representatives hoped to help these Nicaraguans fight for freedom at home and make their democratic way, despite Daniel Ortega’s new Sandinista and communist government. Anti-Communist insurgents failed, ultimately. Today, Ortega’s depredations continue as painful current events. All that is really different in Nicaragua are the ages of the last Sandinistas. Daniel Ortega’s brother Humberto, the former defense minister, died a few months ago while under house arrest — a prisoner of his own co-revolution. He had dared to offer some political criticism. Reagan’s political opponents of that time and now (which, then and now, include some over at the Washington Post) may or may not be content with the results of the U.S.’s failed efforts against communism there. Nicaraguans are not; lately, thousands have escaped to emigrate here.

The Reagan Doctrine unfolded gradually and in disparate zones. Angola was also a part of this vision of expanded territories of freedom; Reagan spoke out in his campaign for anti-communists fighting there. He made a policy address in Westminster (June 1982) lauding freedoms and civil law while excoriating the Communist alternative of Leninism. By then, limited aid was flowing to guerrillas in three countries: Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. Next, the president made a principled and pretty speech about democracy to the congress in Costa Rica, a free country in a region replete with transborder guerrilla movements sponsored and often trained and armed by Cuba and later Nicaragua.

Politics is about ideas but also people. One saw President Reagan welcoming to Washington individual fighting leaders of the anti-communist movements. Jonas Savimbi of UNITA in Angola is unfairly dismissed by Max Boot with one word — “brutish.” Really? He had a Swiss Ph.D., he was charismatic and multilingual, and he led a shadow government that stretched over as much as a third of Angola — a quarter-million square miles.

Dr. Savimbi was hosted twice at the White House, and lectured at the Heritage Foundation, while UNITA advisors and officials, such as Jeremias Chitunda, lobbied in the House office buildings. Hill staff groups met with Contras of Nicaragua such as Adolfo Calero. Some Cambodians who were giving their all against the Vietnamese-dominated Communist government in Kampuchea were liaising with famed Vietnam War writer Al Santoli, working out of Washington.

Better known is the work of Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson, one of the powerful Democratic Party congressmen who worked with Afghan representatives. The Tom Hanks movie about him may have its moments of farce but the reality, as confirmed to me by a Marine intelligence officer and liaison to the Mujahideen, is that our shoulder-fired missiles thrilled the “Muj” who used them, terrified the Soviet pilots, and changed the war. The Soviets began losing the war they’d started and freedom fighters everywhere else looked on.

By term two, in 1986, the Reagan Doctrine was changing a few maps. Maps had for several years shown accretion of Soviet armed influence, new client states, Red Air Force transports moving Cuban troops here and there in Africa, and so on. Soviet leaders who had boasted of the change in the correlation of forces quit doing so. The U.S. team had now re-imagined and linked together certain theaters of conflict and enthusiastic indigenous volunteers. The world showed hot points, small wars, where homegrown rebels were fighting against their Communist governments and foreign military advisors and troops.

This brings us to the first of a half dozen hard reasons any serious reader should feel misdirected and underserved by the Max Boot biography of the president.

1. “Rollback” Aid

The emergent U.S. strategy was to directly aid — not just exhort, but aid — anti-communist fighters. To borrow language from John Lewis Gaddis and his famous book Strategies of Containment, this can be called a kind of limited “rollback.” Washington offices had debated rollback for decades but had not done it. In the case of Hungary, two Republican presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower, separately pondered giving material aid to anti-Russian Hungarian freedom fighters. They did not! They pondered and then declined, on grounds of prudence. Now the Reagan administration was doing it, in the Third World, supplying aid to insurgents and accepting the moral and strategic consequences. That is a momentous fact of foreign policy.

2. Perpetuation of a False Narrative

A second reason this is worth telling and teaching in graduate schools now is that the Reagan Doctrine is the reverse of much of what U.S. citizens are taught in high school and college. Wherever there was low-intensity conflict, students were told they would see Uncle Sam on the side of a brutal government. Were leftist guerrillas calling for nationalism and freedom? Then the U.S. would be throwing in on the other side, or mindlessly calling for “stability.”

Whatever school one attended (and regardless of what you think of that picture), Reagan’s policy was the opposite in morals, law, and politics to what is currently assumed. The insurgents in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, and Nicaragua had Uncle Sam helping the guerrillas. The “reactionaries” and “dictators” fighting to keep power were flying Communist flags and supported by Moscow’s financial streams, technical experts, combat helicopter pilots, and East German Stasi officers.

The reality of the mid-1980s was a new global strategy for freedom fighters that contradicted a common image of what the U.S. had been doing in the world. The new vision would have thrilled Thomas Paine, the author of the 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense.

3. Assisting the Oppressed in Liberating Themselves

A third reason to care relates to how our Pentagon and leaders currently align policy and military strategy. A mismatch may result in a gross error. What America saw in the mid-1980s was a clean match between policy and strategy. The White House took a stand for freedom and against communism overseas. And, its strategy of rendering material and moral aid allowed non-Americans who wanted to fight for their own liberty the ability to do so. Violence countered violence.

Congress and Reagan also ran a parallel and semi-secret material assistance program to the Solidarity underground in Poland. This too was subversive in pro-freedom ways, but different for being wholly non-violent. With fighting there will be controversy, and all know the Reagan White House was damaged by the Iran-Contra funding scandal — a blunder that came after congressional support for the Contras lagged. Despite this, the larger program of aiding insurgents had sound strategic logic — then and now. In Afghanistan, by contrast, Congress kept approving semi-clandestine aid and the guerrillas beat Red Army enemies in a fair fight. Undergirding these coordinated actions were documents such as National Security Decision Directive 75, prepared in 1982 and signed the next January.

4. Cost-effective and Efficient Confrontation

Reagan’s strategy was not costly. It was efficient. It compares to the U.S. success of the early 1950s in the Philippines when it sent supplies, arms, and a few dozen advisers to help locals defeat an insurgency by the “Huks.” Contrast this with the mass occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish–American War. The U.S. was successful in both encounters, but the 1950s event was dramatically cheaper. The Cato Institute complained that the Reagan Doctrine did bear a cost too — few others did. It was cheap.

Excepting Afghanistan, most aid recipients received a minimum. But there is another, more important measure of “efficiency” in war: lives. Few to no U.S. lives were lost in these Third World theaters on Reagan’s new map. Moral questions still abound — deaths of in-country natives were numerous — but an accounting of U.S. strategy must grant that it was efficient.

5. The Macroeconomics of the Imperial Communist Enemy

The Ronald Reagan team observed a USSR with an unnatural and sputtering economy, many bad investments, and overcommitment in distant zones. The U.S. used that against Moscow. It enhanced the expense of those foreign enterprises and drained the Soviet bloc’s internal economies. The new print sources noted at the opening of this article (that is, the book and the book review), both imply Reagan had unconnected or shoddy policy ideas and was flying by the seat-of-his-pants, fueled by his hatred of Communists.

In actuality, somewhat like Winston Churchill, Reagan was a politician, not an economics academic, who knew in his bones that communist economics were self-defeating. It is probable that neither Churchill nor Reagan read Das Kapital, and they did not need to. They did read Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. They both had abundant common sense. They had a feel for human nature. They each said that, as communism was unnatural, it would collapse. Certain Reagan speeches stuck a deft finger into sore spots in Soviet central planning.

Max Boot makes much of a few pauses or shortfalls in Reagan’s program of sanctions and embargoes and anti-Communist aid programs, but together the initiatives compounded stress where the Kremlin was overextended in military and economic terms in the Third World. Reagan’s doctrine was draining treasure, as well as blood, from the Soviets and their partners in outlying states.

Strategists sometimes speak of the alternatives of annihilation and attrition; this was attrition strategy. Attrition — not annihilation. The Boot biography concludes that the strategy did not bear many fruits during the first Reagan term, which is true but not relevant. Attrition is a slow-working strategy, but a good one. It is much better than a detonation, always risky in great power rivalries. Better to have the White House help overeager Soviets overstretch.

The Reagan Doctrine was an efficient, and even brilliant, form of Great Power Competition. He had a few others, including the Strategic Defense Initiative, aimed toward the same ends. The White House, with advisors like Peter Robinson and William Casey, helped the Soviet bureaucrats blow out their budget overseas, which punished their own people at home. It is certain that Mikhail Gorbachev knew this, even if Mr. Boot does not.

6. “Winning Without Fighting”

A strategist can study (and respect) the Reagan Doctrine for its meaning in “war termination.” One of the usual themes of inquiry in classes at the Institute of World Politics is “winning without fighting.” The exhortation to win without fighting comes from the Sun Tzu book The Art of War — two and a half millennia old. Does anyone really win without fighting? Clausewitz himself doubts it … but might the answer be “yes” anyway? There are certain cases of success at the levels of “show of force,” and of tactics, and of strategy. This is one. It is right to dispassionately conclude that, in a global contest over decades, while the U.S. did fight in many places, especially Vietnam and Korea, it won without a global open war, without nuclear weapons and overt combat against Chinese divisions or Soviet armies. And it won this during the Reagan presidency.

Ronald Reagan was not merely present when this happened, as suggested by Boot’s passive voice on pages 717-722 (“The world had changed dramatically…”). He was the leading architect of one side’s victory over the other, and in that fulfilled Sun Tzu’s highest recommendation as to efficiency and success: to win without a war.

READ MORE:

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Yes, Ronald Reagan Did Win the Cold War

The Washington Post’s Looney Liberal Readership

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