Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (33 page)

In 1993, Samuel Huntington, a prominent professor of government, published a widely noted article that reminded readers of persistent dangers in this post–Cold War world. Titled “The Clash of Civilizations,” his essay identified serious “fault lines” throughout the world and argued that international relations were entering a new phase in which hatreds and rivalries among “different civilizations” would seriously threaten world peace. Huntington predicted that cultural and religious forces would prove to be especially disruptive. “Islam,” he warned, “has bloody borders.” The “central axis of world politics,” he emphasized, would be “THE WEST VERSUS THE REST.”
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Some reviewers wondered if Huntington had given too little attention to divisions
within
non-Western nations: between rich and poor, religious radicals and moderates, and ethnic and sectarian factions. These divisions—within Islam as well as within other religions—were complex, and they could be as fierce as the furies that incited rage and resentment against the West. In the next few years, ethnic and religious conflicts spilled blood in Chechnya, India, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, Congo, and many other places. Still, there was no doubting that Huntington had a point: Cultural and religious differences in the post–Cold War years posed profoundly complicated problems for American policy-makers in the 1990s.

This, then, was the unsettled world that was evolving during the time when Ronald Reagan was fashioning America’s foreign and military policies. Given the historic transformations that were developing during these years, it is perhaps no surprise that he, like other Western leaders, often improvised, sometimes clumsily, as he searched for answers to the dangers that threatened American interests and peaceful international relations.

D
ESPITE THE INFIGHTING
that disrupted Reagan’s team of foreign policy advisers in the early 1980s, the direction of his administration was clear. This had already been the case during the 1980 campaign, when the future president had emphasized again and again his belief that the United States was an exceptional nation that was destined to outlast and ultimately to overcome tyrannical systems such as Communism and to spread its democratic virtues throughout the world. This vision, which lay at the core of Reagan’s view of American history, was unwavering. It imparted a thrust to United States foreign policy that his admirers, looking for optimistic approaches that would dispel the “malaise” of the Carter years, found all but irresistible.

During the 1980 campaign, Reagan had repeatedly promised to invigorate America’s national defense. This, he asserted, was not a budget line: “You spend what you need.” And so he did. Reinstating development of the B-1 bomber, he secured funding for a new B-2 bomber, cruise missiles, the MX missile, and a 600-ship navy. American defense spending jumped by an estimated 34 percent in real 1982 dollars between 1981 and 1985, from $171 billion to $229 billion. Over the course of Reagan’s eight years in office, military spending totaled nearly $2 trillion. His defense expenditures represented a lower percentage of the federal budget than had been the case in the Eisenhower-JFK years (when the Cold War had been at its chilliest and when funding for domestic purposes had been relatively low). But Reagan’s defense spending was nonetheless huge, accounting for nearly one-quarter of federal expenditures for most of the decade.
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In building up America’s defense, Reagan and his top advisers hoped that they would intimidate enemies abroad, thus minimizing the likelihood of war. In November 1984, Weinberger spelled out this kind of thinking, which reflected his horror at the killing of American marines in Lebanon in 1983, as well as the continuing influence of the Vietnam War on American military thinking. The United States, he argued, should send troops into combat abroad only as a last resort and only under certain special conditions: when important national interests were threatened, when it was clear that Congress and the people backed such a move, and when policy makers had “clearly defined political and military objectives,” including a well-thought-out exit strategy. Above all, the United States should fight only when it had such overwhelmingly superior military force at hand that it was sure to win without significant loss of American life.
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Later, when Colin Powell embraced this thinking as President Bush’s chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it came to be known as the Powell Doctrine, which dictated American actions in the Gulf War of 1991. “War,” Powell said, “should be a last resort. And when we go to war we should have a purpose that our people can understand and support; we should mobilize the country’s resources to fulfill that mission and then go in to win.”
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After 1983, a good deal of the money raised for defense went to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which personally engaged him more than any other policy of his presidency except tax-cutting. SDI was not something that he suddenly dreamed up while in the White House. It stemmed from his horrified surprise at learning in 1979 that the United States, having spent billions on offensive weapons, had virtually no defense against incoming missiles. Reagan had a visceral horror of nuclear war, which he believed would lead to Armageddon, and he thought that the existing Soviet-American standoff of mutual assured destruction (MAD) via buildup of offensive missiles guaranteed either American surrender or mutual suicide. Establishment of a reliable defensive shield such as SDI, he believed, would convince the USSR that it was futile to build up its stockpiles of offensive weapons. Disarmament might then follow.

Ever an optimist, Reagan also had a near-mystical faith in the nation’s scientific and technological ingenuity. Though he did not understand the technological aspects of SDI, he insisted that the United States should emphasize basic research on space-based defensive weapons, such as chemical lasers and particle beams, ground-based lasers, nuclear-tipped pump lasers, and a variety of kinetic-energy weapons. The essence of SDI was nuclear-powered lasers that would function in space. Not for nothing did skeptics label SDI “Star Wars.”
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Though various defense contractors jumped to Reagan’s side, opponents were quick to challenge his assumptions. Some of these skeptics feared that SDI would militarize space, perhaps setting off explosions that would ravage it. Others asserted that Star Wars circumvented the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty that the Soviets and Americans had signed in 1972. Still others speculated darkly that SDI was a cover under which offensive weapons, too, might be positioned in space. They worried that the Soviet Union, fearing that SDI would enable the United States to attack with impunity, might respond to the initiative by launching a pre-emptive strike, so as to smash America before it could emplace its new system of defenses. At the very least, critics added, the Soviets would devise new and trickier offensive weapons that could penetrate any defensive shield that American scientists might claim to erect. Most top scientists agreed that no defensive system could offer full protection against enemy attacks. Some foes of SDI thought that Reagan had lost his mind and was launching the nation on a grossly expensive, half-insane adventure into the bizarre and unknown.
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As American spending for SDI and other defense items increased in the mid- and late 1980s, critics such as these managed to spark considerable debate. An especially visible skeptic was Paul Kennedy, a British scholar of international relations who taught at Yale. In late 1987, he published a long and learned book,
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
, which attracted great attention and sold more than 225,000 copies in the following year.
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The United States, Kennedy conceded, was still a powerful nation—“in a class of its own economically and perhaps even militarily”—but it was overcommitting by intervening all over the world. For far too long it had been contributing heavily to a “spiraling cost of the arms race,” thereby exciting world tensions. Heavy defense spending in the United States, he said, was distorting economic priorities, weakening domestic infrastructure, and creating a “massive long-term decline in American blue-collar employment.” In short, the United States was guilty of “imperial overstretch.” If it did not mend its ways, it would suffer the fate of imperial Spain in the late sixteenth century and Britain in the late nineteenth. Rephrasing a deadly serious quip about Britain by George Bernard Shaw, he wrote: “Rome fell; Babylon fell; Scarsdale’s turn will come.”
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The attention accorded Kennedy’s book, which was hardly a quick read, suggested that he had touched a nerve. Within the next two years, fears about American economic and political “decline”—a decline caused in part, Kennedy and others argued, by overspending on defense—seemed to spread throughout the culture. Many Americans had already come close to panic following a precipitous drop in the stock market on October 19, 1987. On that day, “Black Monday,” the Dow Jones industrial average dropped by 23 percent, or 508 points, closing at 1738.74. It was the largest single-day decline in United States history. The Federal Reserve—then headed by Alan Greenspan—moved quickly to avert further slippage by offering credit that shored up banks and investment houses. In doing so, Greenspan pleased corporate leaders, many of whom lionized him thereafter. But the plunge in stock values dramatically exposed the speculative excess that had overtaken Wall Street in the 1980s, and it frightened CEOs, stockholders, and many other Americans. It was not until September 1989 that the market surpassed the high that had existed before the crash of 1987.

The rise of “Asian tigers,” notably Japan, whose rapid economic growth seemed to threaten American hegemony, aroused special alarm. Japanese interests between 1987 and 1989 bought a number of American properties, including CBS Records and Rockefeller Center. When it was reported in 1989 that Sony had purchased Columbia Pictures,
Newsweek
featured a cover story, “Japan Buys Hollywood.” A 1992 best-seller,
Rising Sun: A Novel
by the popular writer Michael Crichton, raised the specter of the Japanese taking over the American economy. Slightly shorn of its racial coding, it was made into a popular Hollywood film of that name in 1993. One anguished scholar, upset that the United States was lagging in research and development, wrote in 1993 that the nation was in danger of becoming a “third world country” and that the American Dream itself was under siege.
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Given the consumerist nature of American culture—and the relatively low attention that most schools and universities paid to math, science, and foreign languages—there was cause to be concerned about the competitive capacity of the United States in the future. But many pessimists exaggerated the nation’s plight at the time. To be sure, America’s share of international production, at around 50 percent of world GNP in 1945, had declined since the end of World War II, but it was hardly surprising that energetic industrial nations such as Germany and Japan would advance after recovering from the devastation that had overwhelmed them. Moreover, these nations still had a long way to go to close in on the United States, which remained an economic giant in the 1980s. With 5 percent of the planet’s population, America accounted for 25 percent of world production in 1990. Knowledgeable observers, eyeing the sluggishness of the Japanese bureaucracy and the infighting that divided its potent interest groups, predicted (correctly, as it turned out) that Japan would someday lose its competitive edge and that the United States would continue to be a giant in the world economy.
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Reagan seemed to pay little, if any, attention to debates such as these. From 1983, when he launched SDI, to 1989, when he left office, he vigorously, even passionately, championed the plan. As the research inched ahead, many top officials still did not believe that he truly expected the “science” to pan out. They speculated that he supported SDI primarily to force the Soviets to consider developing their own defensive shields, the costs of which would bankrupt their economy, or that he was using SDI as a bargaining chip to get the USSR to enter into negotiations. Later, when the Soviets did seriously negotiate, some observers said that Reagan had succeeded in this clever purpose.
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Reagan denied that he pushed SDI for these reasons. Certain that MAD was potentially catastrophic, he thought SDI would avert Armageddon.

He was equally certain of another thing: Communism was a corrupt and oppressive system that would die out in the end. Sure of this outcome, he took steps to hasten the process. From the start, he proclaimed what became known as the Reagan Doctrine, which provided military aid, either openly or covertly, to anti-Communist military forces in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Angola.
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Some of these recipients, notably in El Salvador and Guatemala, responded to insurrections by carrying out murderous attacks on democratically inclined opponents, including unarmed peasants. Their actions, following upon those of the United States in the Vietnam War, helped to swell worldwide human rights movements in the 1980s.

Reagan, largely ignoring human rights activists, showed no inclination in the early 1980s to back away from his anti-Communist policies in the world. Working with the AFL-CIO and Pope John Paul II, a Pole, he encouraged the forces of Solidarity, workers that were leading a struggle against Soviet domination in Poland. Addressing the British Parliament in June 1982, he announced that the world had reached a “historic turning point” and that “communist tyranny could not stop the march of freedom.” The Soviet Union, he said, was facing a “great revolutionary crisis” and would end up “on the ash heap of history.” In March 1983, when he denounced the Soviet Union as an evil empire, he famously branded Communism as a “sad, bizarre chapter in history whose last pages are even now being written.” In September 1983, when a Soviet fighter plane shot down a Korean Air Lines passenger jet that had wandered into Soviet airspace, he denounced the act, which killed 269 people, including sixty-one United States citizens, as a “crime against humanity.”