Worldmaking (75 page)

Wolfowitz held Kissinger's logic in contempt, for it highlighted a damaging paradox: “You can't use democracy, as you appropriately should, as a battle with the Soviet Union, and then turn around and be completely hypocritical about it when it's on your side of the line.” Values and morality were an integral part of the struggle with the Soviet Union; the Cold War was nothing if not an ideological battle. The United States had to be on the side of the angels as often as possible.

Wolfowitz's aspirations were of course laudable, but they were applied inconsistently by the administration he served. In Chile, the Reagan administration continued to lend Augusto Pinochet's brutal regime its material and political support. U.S. policy toward El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua was sullied by egregious human rights abuses perpetrated by insurgent groups challenging leftist governments. These were ignored by the Reagan administration in the name of a wider anticommunist good, and people certainly noticed.
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Wolfowitz's assertion that “the best antidote to communism is democracy” was catchy, but it failed to capture the full spread of the administration's foreign policies, which were often just as callous and amoral as those pursued during the Nixon-Kissinger era.
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*   *   *

Secretary of State Shultz appointed Wolfowitz to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia in 1986. It was a position Wolfowitz coveted for personal reasons; his wife, Clare, was an anthropologist with research interests there. But this was also an important nation in world affairs. Indonesia was the world's most populous Muslim country and had been a steadfast ally to the United States following the bloody rise in 1967 of Suharto, who ruled the nation until 1998 as a repressive anticommunist. Suharto was precisely the type of leader whom Jeane Kirkpatrick viewed as essential to U.S. interests. There was never any danger of the United States applying political pressure on Suharto à la Marcos—the strategic stakes were much higher. Nonetheless, Wolfowitz politely chided Suharto for failing to encourage greater “openness in the political sphere” and established a bond of friendship with Abdurrahman Wahid, a critic of Suharto who led one of Indonesia's largest Muslim political parties. One of the most notable aspects of Wolfowitz's stay in Jakarta, however, was the degree to which he imbibed Indonesian culture. As the historian Richard Immerman writes, “Over the next three years he learned the language; he studied the culture; he toured the neighborhoods. He even won a cooking contest.”
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The three-year stint in Indonesia was an enriching period for Wolfowitz, clearly, but there was also a downside—he was far removed from the momentous events that occurred during the final two years of Reagan's presidency. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His youth (he was fifty-four) and vigor cast Gorbachev in vivid contrast to the decrepit gerontocracy—Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko—that preceded him. Indeed, Ronald Reagan once joked, “How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me.”
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In 1986, a hale and hearty Gorbachev announced a new policy of perestroika, roughly translated as “restructuring,” designed to liberalize the Soviet economy and remedy deficiencies in regard to supply and demand. Gorbachev followed this up in more radical fashion in 1988 with glasnost, or “openness,” which delivered on the promise of the Helsinki Accords, extending political freedoms, including freedom of speech, to the Soviet citizenry.

George Kennan was thrilled by Gorbachev's ascension but fretted that the Reagan administration was incapable of grasping this opportunity, just as Eisenhower had failed to act decisively following Stalin's death in 1953. In October 1986, Kennan recorded a diary entry that imagined him in conversation with this new leader: “You could give in to us on every point at issue in our negotiations; you would still encounter nothing but a stony hostility in official American circles; and your concessions would be exploited by the President as evidence that he had frightened you into compliance; and that the only language you understood was the language of force.”
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Kennan was correct in one sense. Many conservatives did indeed attribute Gorbachev's shift in direction to the pressure Reagan applied on Moscow through the radical hike in U.S. defense spending and the launch of the SDI. But he was wrong in another. Reagan's actual response to Gorbachev's ascension was far removed from the “stony hostility” that Kennan feared inevitable.
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Over the course of a brief but historic encounter in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev established sufficient trust to propose the elimination of
all
nuclear weapons by the year 2000.
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The suggestion was quickly scuppered—to the relief of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and many within the administration—by Reagan's refusal to shelve the SDI program, which Gorbachev fairly pointed out was not in the spirit of things. That such an idea was even seriously discussed was remarkable all the same, and it paved the way for nuclear arms negotiations of a more substantive nature than SALT I. The 1987 INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty was the first ever to deliver a real cut in the superpowers' nuclear arsenals: Moscow dismantled 1,836 missiles and the United States 859. This caused a predictable outcry from conservatives, among them Richard Perle, William Buckley, and Jesse Helms. Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus derided Reagan as “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.”
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More to their liking was Reagan's rousing demand in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in June 1987: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Both Secretary of State George Shultz and National Security Adviser Colin Powell had pleaded unsuccessfully with Reagan to delete these words, which they viewed as unnecessarily provocative in light of Gorbachev's moderation.
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But “tear down this wall!” was an increasingly rare bit of cheer for the ideologues. Moscow and Washington cooperated in the UN Security Council on the issue of arranging a cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War, East-West cultural exchanges proliferated, and Moscow raised the cap on Jewish emigration quotas. Gorbachev drew huge crowds of admirers when he visited the United States in December 1987, creating a phenomenon soon tagged “Gorby fever.” In May 1988, Reagan visited Moscow, informing his hosts that his earlier characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” no longer held true.
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Remarkable things stemmed from the warm personal relations that developed between the two men, described by Reagan as a “kind of chemistry.”
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Anatoly Dobrynin's laudatory assessment captures a truth: “Ultimately, Reagan's achievements in dealing with the Soviet Union could certainly compare favorably with, and perhaps even surpass, those of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.”
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Reagan launched his political career by attacking détente as defeatist; it closed with his surpassing Henry Kissinger's most optimistic assessments of what dialogue with Moscow might achieve.

The year 1988 ended in remarkable fashion. On December 7, Gorbachev delivered a speech at the United Nations that had seismic repercussions. He began by conceding that Moscow—and thus Marxism-Leninism—had no monopoly on wisdom and truth, which was akin to the pope suggesting the Bible was fiction. He followed this remarkable admission of ideological doubt by declaring that the Soviet Union would not deploy military force as a means to achieve its aims and observed that his goal was much more modest than that of his predecessors—to attain “reasonable sufficiency for defense,” which in practical terms meant demobilizing half a million troops from the Red Army. He ended by promising that Moscow would henceforth respect the right of all the constituent nations of the Warsaw Pact to self-determination: “the principle of freedom of choice is mandatory,” he declared.
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With remarkable grace and efficiency, Gorbachev had ended the Cold War—so far as he was concerned, at least.

So what had happened? Who deserved the acclaim? In a 1993 essay for the
National Review
, Wolfowitz identified Reagan's confrontational tactics as the catalyst for Gorbachev's radical reforms and Moscow's military retreat: “It is striking how many of Russia's new democrats give Ronald Reagan much of the credit for the Soviet collapse.”
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George Kennan believed that such extrapolations, common among Reagan's hawkish supporters, were illusory and indeed dangerous; the cause and effect, if any, was impossible to establish. As he observed to his friend the historian John Lukacs, “The suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous political upheaval, in another great country on another side of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish.”
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During a 1996 interview with John Lewis Gaddis—an admirer of Reagan's foreign policies—Kennan slightly revised his opinion. When Gaddis asked Kennan who had ended the Cold War, he predictably named Gorbachev. “But then he added,” Gaddis recalled, “watching carefully to see whether his interviewer, who came close, would fall off his chair: ‘also Ronald Reagan, who in his own inimitable way, probably not even being quite aware of what he was really doing, did what few other people would have been able to do in breaking this log jam.'”
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Perhaps the truth was simply that Reagan's instincts were good at identifying something substantively different in Gorbachev compared to his predecessors.
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The president sensed Soviet weakness during his first term and acted accordingly, and when he detected a meaningful change in direction in the second, he did the same. The fact that Reagan antagonized liberals
and
conservatives during his presidency certainly suggests the existence of a more flexible and pragmatic style than critics like Kennan, and indeed Kissinger, were capable of discerning. But Kennan's fundamental point, that Mikhail Gorbachev was the principal actor in the Cold War's final act—delivering the most important soliloquies—is a compelling one.

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The election of 1988 pitted Reagan's experienced, cautious, and uncharismatic vice president, George H. W. Bush, against Michael Dukakis, a similarly stilted communicator whom the Bush campaign damned as the stereotypical Massachusetts liberal: weak on crime and foreign policy, with an unsteady grasp of economics. The Dukakis campaign did their candidate no favors when they arranged for him to be photographed atop an M1 Abrams tank. The contrast between Dukakis's strained gesture and the machine guns, the oversized helmet with
MIKE DUKAKIS
lettered on the front and the blue shirt–claret tie combo peeking through the khaki, created an iconic image of electoral desperation. The photo op failed to convince Americans that proximity to a tank made Dukakis a more plausible commander in chief—just as proximity to Henry Kissinger failed to do the same for Sarah Palin in 2008. Instead, Republicans used the Dukakis tank footage in devastating campaign advertisements, superimposing the words “America Can't Afford That Risk” underneath his grinning visage. The election was a blowout: Bush won 53.4 percent of the popular vote to Dukakis's 45.7 percent, which translated into a 426-to-111 victory in the electoral college. The fact that Bush won in Vermont, New Jersey, and Connecticut says it all.

George Kennan was glad to see the back of a presidential administration whose cant he abhorred. He declared himself delighted to have “new and more intelligent people in and around the White House,” though he worried that the peaceable momentum with Gorbachev might be lost.
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For his part, Paul Wolfowitz lamented Reagan's departure and was much more ambivalent about Bush than was Kennan. The new president nominated Dick Cheney, a colleague from the Ford administration, to serve as his secretary of defense. Cheney recalled Wolfowitz from Indonesia to serve as his undersecretary of defense for policy. In his memoir,
In My Time
, Cheney recalled, “Paul had the ability to offer new perspectives on old problems. He was also persistent. On more than one occasion, I sent him on his way after I had rejected a piece of advice or a policy suggestion, only to find him back in my office a half hour later continuing to press his point—and he was often right to do so.”
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They made a close and like-minded duo, but a clear ideological gap divided Cheney and Wolfowitz, the two most hawkish members of the Bush administration, from the rest of the national security team.

President Bush appointed Brent Scowcroft, a former deputy to Henry Kissinger who shared much of his former boss's worldview, to serve as his national security adviser. Bush nominated another realist-inclined figure, James A. Baker III, to serve as secretary of state. For these staffing reasons, Wolfowitz deliberated for a while before accepting Cheney's job offer. The man who gave Wolfowitz his first job in Washington, Fred Iklé, observed that his friend “hesitated a long time. He couldn't make up his mind. He talked about going back to academia.”
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Perhaps he remembered his marginality during the incommodious Nixon-Ford years and did not want to repeat the experience in his prime with another “moderate” Republican. Regardless, Wolfowitz's friends and colleagues convinced him to accept the job; the administration needed more men of conviction to counter the renascence of Kissingerian realism. His new job asked Wolfowitz to turn away from the multicultural vibrancy of Indonesia and refocus his intellectual energies on the regions and issues that had consumed him during the 1970s: arms control, forward planning, the Persian Gulf, and the wider Middle East.