Fact vs. Fiction - Chapter One

NO Mr. Bush...you are NOT Ronald Reagan...

Starting with the arrogant, petulant attitude with which Bush approached foreign policy to his reliance on hawkish "neoconservatives" who suffer from paranoia, his has been a presidency that led to more rather than less terrorism and growing anti-Americanism (read: anti-Bushism) and anti-Semitism around the globe.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

"Mr. Reagan gave us an enlightened foreign policy that achieved most of its diplomatic objectives peacefully and succeeded in firmly uniting our allies. Today those who claim to be Mr. Reagan's heirs give us "shock and awe" and a "muscular" foreign policy that has lost its way and undermined valued friendships throughout the world."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/opinion/11DIGG.html

New York Times - June 11, 2004

How Reagan Beat the Neocons by John Patrick Diggins

Almost everywhere in the press one reads that President Bush sounds an awful lot like Ronald Reagan. Commentators and politicians alike have drawn the comparison between Mr. Bush's "muscular" foreign policy and the Reagan doctrine. However macho and aggressive Mr. Bush's foreign policy may be, when it came to the Soviet Union, Mr. Reagan's was anything but.

In 1985, Mr. Reagan sent a long handwritten letter to Mikhail Gorbachev assuring him that he was prepared "to cooperate in any reasonable way to facilitate such a withdrawal" of the Soviets from Afghanistan. "Neither of us," he added, "wants to see offensive weapons, particularly weapons of mass destruction, deployed in space." Mr. Reagan eagerly sought to work with Mr. Gorbachev to rid the world of such weapons and to help the Soviet Union effect peaceful change in Eastern Europe.

This offer was far from the position taken by the neoconservative advisers who now serve under Mr. Bush. Twenty years ago in the Reagan White House, they saw no possibility for such change, and indeed many of them subscribed to the theory of "totalitarianism" as unchangeable and irreversible. Mr. Reagan was also informed that the Soviet Union was preparing for a possible pre-emptive attack on the United States. This alarmist position was taken by Team B, formed in response to the more prudently analytical position of the C.I.A. and then composed of several members of the present Bush administration. The team was headed by Richard Pipes, the Russian historian at Harvard, whose stance was summed up in the title of one of his articles: "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War."

Not only did the neocons oppose Mr. Reagan's efforts at rapprochement, they also argued against engaging in personal diplomacy with Soviet leaders. Advisers like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, now steering our foreign policy, held that America must escalate to achieve "nuclear dominance" and that we could only deal from a "strategy of strength." Mr. Reagan believed in a strong military, but to reassure the Soviet Union that America had no aggressive intentions, he reminded Leonid Brezhnev of just the opposite. From 1945 to 1949, the United States was the sole possessor of the atomic bomb, and yet, Mr. Reagan emphasized to Mr. Brezhnev, no threat was made to use the bomb to win concessions from the Soviet Union.

The Star Wars missile defense system advocated by Mr. Reagan is often regarded as the final nail in the coffin of communism, as a military system that the Soviets could not afford and only fear. The first assumption was right, the second dubious. Margaret Thatcher, who urged Mr. Reagan to regard Mr. Gorbachev as "a man we can work with," also gave him more blunt advice on Star Wars: "I'm a chemist; I know it won't work." Like Mrs. Thatcher, Soviet scientists regarded it as a fantasy, and thus they were hardly impressed with Mr. Reagan's offer to share it with them once it was perfected. (It still hasn't been, nearly two decades later.)

Those advisers in the Bush administration who regard themselves as Reaganites ought to remember that Mr. Reagan ceased heeding their advice. According to George Shultz's memoir, "Turmoil and Triumph," Mr. Reagan would become uneasy when his hawkish advisers entered the Oval Office. In his own memoir, "An American Life," Mr. Reagan ridiculed the "macabre jargon" of warheads, I.C.B.M.'s, kill ratios and "throw weights," the payload capacity of long-range missiles. The president thought their figures sounded like "baseball scores" and dismissed his pesky advisers. Mr. Reagan rejected the neocons; George W. Bush stands by them no matter what.

The difference between Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush's militant brain staff is that he believed in negotiation and they in escalation. They wanted to win the cold war; he sought to end it. To do so, it was necessary not to strike fear in the Soviet Union but to win the confidence of its leaders. Once the Soviet Union could count on Mr. Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev not only was free to embark on his domestic reforms, to convince his military to go along with budget cuts, to reassure his people that they no longer needed to worry about the old bogey of "capitalist encirclement," but, most important, he was also ready to announce to the Soviet Union's satellite countries that henceforth they were on their own, that no longer would tanks of the Red Army be sent to put down uprisings. The cold war ended in an act of faith and trust, not fear and trembling.

But many neocons came to hate Mr. Reagan, saying he lost the cold war since he left office with communism still in place. Some even believed that the cold war would soon be resumed. Dick Cheney, as President George H. W. Bush's defense secretary, dismissed perestroika ("restructuring") as a sham and glasnost ("opening") as a ruse, he insisted that Mr. Gorbachev would be replaced by a belligerent militarist; and warned America to prepare for the re-emergence of an aggressive communist state.

Mr. Reagan gave us an enlightened foreign policy that achieved most of its diplomatic objectives peacefully and succeeded in firmly uniting our allies. Today those who claim to be Mr. Reagan's heirs give us "shock and awe" and a "muscular" foreign policy that has lost its way and undermined valued friendships throughout the world.

John Patrick Diggins is a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of the forthcoming, "Ronald Reagan: Morning in America."<<