When Republicans strategise about how to deal with China today, many of them point to president Ronald Reagan’s confrontational approach toward the Soviet Union as a model to emulate. H.R. McMaster, who served as national security adviser under Donald Trump, argued: “Reagan had a clear strategy for victory in the global contest with the Soviet Union. Reagan’s approach — applying intensive economic and military pressure to a superpower adversary — became foundational to American strategic thinking. It hastened the end of Soviet power and promoted a peaceful conclusion to the multi-decade cold war.” A trio of conservative foreign policy experts — Randy Schriver, Dan Blumenthal, and Josh Young — made the case that the next president “should draw upon the example of former president Ronald Reagan in taking hold of China policy,” citing “the intent to win the cold war against the Soviet Union” that “permeated” Reagan-era national security documents. And in Foreign Affairs, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger and the former Republican representative Mike Gallagher cited Reagan to argue that “the United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it.”
I would have been more sympathetic to these prescriptions before I spent a decade researching Reagan’s life and legacy — uncovering a historical record that is sharply at odds with the legends that have come to surround the fortieth president. One of the biggest such myths is that Reagan had a plan to bring down the “evil empire” and that it was his pressure that led to US victory in the cold war. In reality, the end of the cold war and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — two consequences of his radically reformist policies (the former intended, the latter unintended).
Reagan deserves tremendous credit for understanding that Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader, someone he could do business with and thereby negotiate a peaceful end to a forty-year conflict. But he did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union. To imagine otherwise is to create dangerous and unrealistic expectations for what US policy toward China can achieve today.
To be sure, there is a superficial allure to the thesis that Reagan brought down the Soviet Union and won the cold war, because Reagan sometimes spoke of doing just that. Richard Allen, Reagan’s first national security adviser, recounted to me a conversation he had with the former governor in 1977 as he was preparing for his 1980 presidential campaign. “Do you mind if I tell you my theory of the cold war?” Reagan said. “My theory is that we win, they lose. What do you think about that?”
Once in office, Reagan raised defence spending — he undertook the largest peacetime military build-up in US history — and launched the Strategic Defense Initiative to create a “space shield” against nuclear missiles. He also provided arms to anti-communist insurgents in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, along with secret, non-lethal assistance to the Solidarity movement in Poland. Reagan often talked tough about the Soviet Union and forthrightly called out its egregious human rights abuses. In 1982, he prophesied that “the march of freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” In a 1983 speech, he labelled the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world.”
The most compelling evidence to suggest that Reagan had a strategy to defeat the Soviet Union — cited by advocates of a get-tough approach to China today — is a pair of now declassified national security decision directives issued in 1982 and 1983 by Reagan’s national security adviser, William Clark. NSDD 32 called on the United States to “discourage Soviet adventurism” by “forcing the USSR to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings, and to encourage long-term liberalising and nationalist tendencies within the Soviet Union and allied countries.” NSDD 75 further elaborated on the need “to promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced.”
It is easy to draw a direct connection between the policies enunciated in NSDDs 32 and 75 and the epochal events that followed just a few years later and culminated in the end of the cold war. Indeed, Clark’s admiring biographers, Paul Kengor and Patricia Clark Doerner, called the policies “the directives that won the cold war.”
Reality, however, is a lot messier than this simplistic storyline. “It’s tempting to go back and say, ‘You know, we had this great strategy and we had all these things figured out,’ but I don’t think that’s accurate,” Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz told me. “What is accurate was that there was a general ‘peace through strength’ attitude.”
Indeed, accounts that focus only on Reagan’s get-tough approach to the Soviet Union during his first term miss a big part of the picture. Reagan’s approach toward the Soviet Union was neither consistently tough nor consistently conciliatory. Instead, his foreign policy was an often baffling combination of hawkish and dovish approaches based on his own conflicting instincts and the clashing advice he received from hardline aides such as Clark, secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, and CIA director William Casey and more pragmatic advisers such as Shultz and national security advisers Robert McFarlane, Frank Carlucci and Colin Powell.
In dealing with the Soviets, Reagan was constantly torn between two opposing images. On the one hand, there was the human suffering behind the Iron Curtain: after an emotional Oval Office meeting on 28 May 1981 with Yosef Mendelevich, a recently released political prisoner, and Avital Sharansky, the wife of the imprisoned Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, Reagan wrote in his diary: “D—n those inhuman monsters. [Sharansky] is said to be down to 100 lbs. & very ill. I promised I’d do everything I could to obtain his release & I will.”
On the other hand, there was the spectre of nuclear destruction if the US–Soviet confrontation spun out of control. This danger was brought home to Reagan by a nuclear war game, code-named Ivy League, on 1 March 1982. While Reagan watched from the White House Situation Room, the entire map of the United States turned red to simulate the impact of Soviet nuclear strikes. “He looked on in stunned disbelief,” the National Security Council staffer Tom Reed noted. “In less than an hour President Reagan had seen the United States of America disappear… It was a sobering experience.”
Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union was thus far less consistent than most of his admirers would admit. Although his meetings with Soviet dissidents pushed him toward confrontation, his knowledge of what a nuclear war would entail tempered him toward cooperation. He did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While many Reagan fans have suggested that NSDD 32 and 75 amounted to a declaration of economic warfare against the Soviet Union, Reagan repeatedly acted to reduce economic pressure on Moscow. In early 1981, he lifted the grain embargo that president Jimmy Carter had imposed the previous year in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When a Soviet-backed regime declared martial law in Poland in December 1981, Reagan imposed tough sanctions on the construction of a Siberian gas pipeline to Western Europe before lifting them the following November in response to opposition from European allies.
Hawks were frustrated by the president’s willingness to renounce one of the United States’ most powerful economic instruments without getting any concessions in return. Writing in the New York Times in May 1982, the editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, aired these frustrations under the headline “The Neo-Conservative Anguish Over Reagan’s Foreign Policy.” Podhoretz complained that Reagan’s reaction to the imposition of martial law in Poland was even weaker than Carter’s reaction to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan: “One remembers easily enough that Carter instituted a grain embargo and a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, but one is hard-pressed even to remember what the Reagan sanctions were.”
Conservatives would have been even more horrified if they had known that Reagan was secretly reaching out to the Kremlin at the time. In April 1981, he sent a sentimental handwritten note to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev professing his desire for “meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in fulfilling our joint obligation to find lasting peace,” and in March 1983, two days after calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” the president privately told Shultz to maintain lines of dialogue with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Indeed, Reagan hoped to meet with a Soviet leader from the start of his presidency and lamented during his first term that Soviet leaders “keep dying on me.”
Many admirers now give Reagan credit for a calculated strategy that combined pressure and conciliation, but this approach bore little fruit in his first term, instead baffling Soviet leaders: “In his mind such incompatibilities could coexist in perfect harmony, but Moscow regarded such behaviour at that time as a sign of deliberate duplicity and hostility,” Dobrynin wrote in his 1995 memoir.
In 1983, a series of escalating crises — including the Soviet shootdown of a Korean civilian airliner, a false Soviet alert of a US missile launch, and a NATO war game (code-named Able Archer) that some Soviet officials saw as a cover for a preemptive US attack — raised the fears of nuclear war to their highest levels since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Realising that the risk of Armageddon was very real, Reagan consciously dialled back his hawkishness. In January 1984, he delivered a conciliatory speech in which he spoke of how much the typical Soviet citizens “Ivan and Anya” had in common with the typical Americans “Jim and Sally” and promised to work with the Kremlin to “strengthen peace” and “reduce the level of arms.”
The problem was that Reagan had no partner for peace at the time: during his first term, the Soviet Union was successively led by the elderly hardliners Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko. Only when Chernenko died in March 1985 did Reagan finally find a Soviet leader he could work with in Gorbachev, a true “black swan” who rose to the top of a totalitarian system only to dismantle it.
Those who argue that Reagan brought down the “evil empire” usually focus on Gorbachev’s ascension as the turning point, crediting the US president and his defence build-up with the selection of a reformer as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The problem with this theory is that no one in early 1985 — not even Gorbachev himself — knew how radical a reformer he would turn out to be. If his colleagues on the Politburo had known, they likely would not have selected him. They had no desire for the Soviet empire, or their own power and privileges, to end.
Gorbachev did not want to reform the Soviet system in order to compete more effectively with the Reagan defence build-up. In fact, it was the opposite. He genuinely worried about the dangers of nuclear war, and he was appalled by how much money the Soviet Union was spending on its military-industrial complex: an estimated 20 per cent of GDP and 40 per cent of the state budget.
This was not a reflection of a Reagan-induced crisis that threatened the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union but rather a product of Gorbachev’s own humane instincts. As the historian Chris Miller has argued, “When Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, the Soviet economy was wasteful and poorly managed, but it was not in crisis.” The Soviet regime, having survived Stalinist terror, famine, and industrialization, as well as the second world war and de-Stalinisation, could have survived the stagnation of the mid-1980s as other, poorer communist regimes such as China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam did.
There was nothing inevitable about the Soviet collapse, and it was not the product of Reagan’s efforts to spend more on the military and to curb Soviet expansionism abroad. It was the unanticipated and unintended consequence of the increasingly radical reforms implemented by Gorbachev, namely glasnost and perestroika, over the objections of more conservative comrades who finally tried to overthrow him in 1991. The Soviet Union broke up not because it was economically bankrupt but because Gorbachev recognised that it was morally bankrupt and he refused to hold it together by force.
If any other member of the Politburo had taken power in 1985, the Soviet Union might still exist and the Berlin Wall might still stand, just as the demilitarised zone still divides North Korea from South Korea. Although he did not induce Gorbachev’s reforms, Reagan deserves credit for working with the Soviet leader at a time when most conservatives warned that the president was being hoodwinked by a wily communist.
Reagan and Gorbachev hardly saw eye to eye on everything. They clashed over human rights in the Soviet Union and Reagan’s beloved Strategic Defense Initiative. But despite temporary setbacks, the two leaders signed the first arms control accord to abolish an entire class of nuclear weapons, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, in Washington in 1987, and in 1988 the Reagans travelled to Moscow. During the visit, as the two leaders strolled through Red Square, Sam Donaldson of ABC News asked Reagan, “Do you still think you’re in an evil empire, Mr. President?” “No,” Reagan replied. “I was talking about another time and another era.”
There is little evidence that pressure on the Soviet Union in Reagan’s first term made the Soviets more willing to negotiate, but there is a good deal of evidence that his pivot toward cooperation with Gorbachev in his second term allowed the new Soviet leader to transform his country and end the cold war. Yet many conservatives conflate Reagan’s second-term success with his first-term failures, applying the wrong policy lessons to relations with communist China today.
Ramping up confrontation with Beijing regardless of the consequences risks a repeat of the war scares that brought the world to the brink of catastrophe in 1983, and such a strategy has even less of a chance of success today. Even if it was not on the verge of bankruptcy, the Soviet Union’s economy was weak in the 1980s, thanks to communist central planning and a fall in world oil prices. China, on the other hand, has successfully combined free-market economics and political repression to become the world’s second-largest economy. As the journalist Fareed Zakaria has noted, the Soviet economy accounted for roughly 7.5 per cent of global GDP at its peak; China today makes up about 20 per cent of global GDP. There are no policies that the United States can plausibly implement that will “defeat” China — it is hard to know what “defeating China” even means. It is easy, however, to imagine that unrelentingly hard-line policies from both the United States and China could raise the risk of a nuclear war.
The United States should continue to contain and deter Chinese aggression, limit the export of sensitive technology, and support human rights in China while still engaging in dialogue with Chinese leaders to lessen the risk of war. This was the prudent approach to the Soviet Union that US presidents of both parties adopted during the cold war. But Washington should not imagine that it can transform China. Only the Chinese people can do that. Today’s confrontation with China can only end if Chinese leader Xi Jinping is succeeded by a true reformer in the Gorbachev mould. Unless that long-shot scenario comes to pass, pursuing a one-sided caricature of Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union is likely to make the world a more dangerous place. •
This article first appeared in Foreign Affairs. © 2023 Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency
