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From the Fall 1993 issue of Policy Review magazine:
1983
Awakening from Orwell's Nightmare
by
ANDREW E. BUSCH AND ELIZABETH EDWARDS SPALDING
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the end of
the Cold War. Although it was difficult to foresee at the time, a
series of events in 1983 would come together to stop the seemingly
inexorable advance of Soviet totalitarianism and to lay the
groundwork for the eventual triumph of the West.
These events were neither inevitable nor self-executing. They
depended upon the decisions of men, and of one man in
particular -- Ronald Reagan -- who understood the meaning of this
century, the nature of the Cold War, and the set of circumstances
that he and his country faced. In 1983, the elements of President
Reagan's strategy joined for the first time, making possible the
successes that wrought the changes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and
culminated in the 1991 implosion of the Soviet regime and the rest
of its empire.
The Evil Empire Speech
The central theme of President Reagan's foreign policy was the
ethical distinction he continually made between the West and the
Soviet bloc. At his first press conference as president, Mr. Reagan
bluntly referred to the nature of Leninist "morality," correctly
telling a contemptuous press corps that Soviet leaders "reserve
unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat,"
in order to achieve their objective of world communism. In a famous
speech before the British Parliament in June 1982, the president
called for a "crusade for freedom," and he predicted that it would
be communism, not freedom, that would end up on the "ash-heap of
history."
But President Reagan's most important Cold War speech was his March
1983 address to religious broadcasters in which he called the
Soviet Union an "evil empire":
Let us be aware that while they [the Soviet regime]
preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over
individual man, and predict its eventual domination over all people
on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.... I
urge you to beware the temptation of pride -- the temptation of
blithely declaring yourselves above it all and labelling both sides
equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive
impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant
misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle
between right and wrong and good and evil.
Mr. Reagan underscored the message that no longer
would the United States remain silent about the true nature of the
Soviet regime. Apprehending the importance of ideas and the danger
of truth far better than Mr. Reagan's critics did, the Kremlin
construed the evil empire speech as an act of political aggression.
Many people understood from the beginning that Mr. Reagan was
right. What since has become clear, however, is the effect that his
pronouncement had on those who lived in that empire. Among others,
Lech Walesa later maintained that the evil empire speech was an
epochal event in the long struggle of Eastern Europe to be free;
even former Soviet officials since have acknowledged that the
speech, in the words of Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, helped
"the motherland realize ... it was indeed evil." President Reagan's
ultimate vindication came when the foreign minister of the Russian
Federation, Andrei Kozyrev, added his concurrence: The Soviet
Union, Mr. Kozyrev said in 1992, had been an "evil empire."
The legitimacy of this rhetorical counteroffensive was reinforced
in September 1983 when the Soviets under Yuri Andropov shot down a
Korean Airlines passenger jet, KAL 007, demonstrating with
appalling clarity the accuracy of President Reagan's March charge.
The incident not only gave momentum to Mr. Reagan's exposure of the
nature of the Soviet regime; it also shut down a nascent movement
within the administration for a more accommodationist stance toward
the Kremlin.
The year 1983 also was significant for the intermediate-range
nuclear forces (INF) deployments in Western Europe. In November
1981, President Reagan reaffirmed the 1979 North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) dual-track decision, then championed by West
German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, to deploy missiles and to
negotiate for arms control. With the Soviets more aggressive than
ever as they deployed one SS-20 a week, President Reagan sought to
strengthen the West through the deployment of 108 Pershing II and
464 ground-launched cruise missiles, scheduled to begin in November
1983. To do so, he had to overcome one of the most powerful Soviet
propoganda offensives in the entire Cold War.
Peace Movements
As the Soviets had attempted to stymie NATO's founding and the
Western alliance in the late 1940s through subversion, aggression,
and totalitarian propaganda, so too, they tried to shape a
situation favorable to Kremlin hegemony in the superpower nuclear
age. It was all part of the same Cold War. The key to success, the
Kremlin knew, lay in dividing and sapping NATO of its unity and
meaning. The Soviets hoped, at a minimum, that opposition to the
Pershings and cruise missiles would become a substantial lever to
crack the Atlantic alliance. To this end, they sponsored and
inspired large portions of the nuclear freeze movement in Europe.
Six European countries had scheduled elections for 1983 -- Great
Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Belgium, Norway,
and the Netherlands -- and in each of these countries, the leading
liberal-left party had been captured by the peace movement and was
opposing INF deployment. Had voters in these countries turned
against deployment, the NATO alliance probably would have collapsed
at its greatest moment of peril.
Because of the resolution of key statesmen, the parties that stood
for military preparedness all won in 1983. Helmut Kohl and the
Christian Democrats won the West German elections in March,
defeating a Social Democratic Party that had drifted to the left.
Margaret Thatcher, who did so much to draw together NATO allies at
the Williamsburg summit of late 1982, was overwhelmingly re-elected
in Britain in June. Pro-deployment parties also won 1983 elections
in Italy, Belgium, Norway, and the Netherlands. France did not have
an election that year, but President Francois Mitterand, though a
Socialist, stood strong in his support of Mr. Reagan and
deployment, and against Soviet domination of the continent.
Euromissile deployment proceeded on schedule, and, more important,
the Atlantic alliance held strong. Late 1983 into 1984 was a period
of NATO cohesion unprecedented since the collective defense
organization's founding. NATO allies saw through the Kremlin
tactics aimed at straining Western unity in November 1983, when the
Soviets walked out of the START talks in Geneva. The allies
concurred with President Reagan that negotiations could come only
after the establishment of Western strength and acknowledgment of
that strength by the Soviet Union. As Mrs. Thatcher noted that
Reagan "strengthened not only America's defenses, but also the will
of America's allies."
The SDI Wild Card
President Reagan's revolution in strategic defense also came in
1983. His March 23 speech challenged the very nature of modern
warfare. It dazed the Soviets and helped to break the back of the
nuclear freeze movement. Mr. Reagan rejected the logic of mutually
assured destruction (MAD) and flexible response, which left
civilian populations totally vulnerable to nuclear destruction. He
announced the goal of making nuclear weapons "impotent and
obsolete." As the president said, "What if free people could live
secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the
threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that
we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before
they reached our own soil or that of our allies?"
With this March 1983 speech, President Reagan finished putting
forth his vision to transform radically the global strategic
situation and the nature of defense. Mr. Reagan showed that the
West had the political courage and know-how to fight and win what
Soviet thinkers commonly called the scientific-technical revolution
in military affairs. The Kremlin referred over and over to American
militarization of space. Soviet leaders Konstantin Chernenko and
especially Mikhail Gorbachev attempted vigorously to derail SDI.
Mr. Gorbachev and his Foreign Ministers Eduard Shevardnadze and
Aleksandr Bessmertnykh now have conceded the importance of SDI in
driving change in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. President
Reagan had begun to move the West beyond containment with the
promise of propelling the world beyond communism and Cold War.
Turning the Tide in El Salvador
As Ronald Reagan pursued a two-track strategy in Europe and on
defense policy -- one track securing the base of the Western alliance
and restoring our deterrent capacity, the other track seizing the
initiative with SDI -- he also constructed a two-tiered policy in the
Third World. First, President Reagan sought to brace American
friends and prevent further Soviet penetration. Second, he began to
pursue the offensive against many of the Kremlin clients that had
taken power in the 1970s: Cambodia, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan,
Grenada, and Nicaragua. No other year was as pivotal to the
president's strategy as was 1983.
It is easy to forget that, throughout 1982 and 1983, a serious
question existed as to whether the United States would be able to
ensure the survival of a fledgling democracy in El Salvador. When
the communists launched a major offensive in late 1983 that scored
several important victories, the Faribundo Marti National
Liberation Front (FMLN) was at its peak, leading Newsweek to
hypothesize that the Salvadoran army might collapse before
Christmas. There can be little doubt that failure in El Salvador
would have worsened prospects for democracy in Guatemala and
Honduras, if not prompted their fall. In that event, Mexico would
have been the next likely target.
Yet, while the war in El Salvador remained a stalemate, the first
signs appeared that U.S. aid was slowing the FMLN in the field.
Through American encouragement, El Salvador's government amended
itself: death-squad killings declined rapidly, and a crucial
shakeup occurred in the Salvadoran high command in November 1983.
All told, 1983 was the last year that the survival of the incipient
Salvadoran democracy was in immediate doubt.
Although the issue had surfaced in 1982, vigorous debate over aid
to the Nicaraguan resistance exploded in the summer of 1983. The
aid battle and the Contras' fortunes see-sawed throughout the
1980s, but 1983 was the first year the United States concentrated
significant political attention on the Nicaraguan resistance. It
was in 1983 that the Reagan administration, for the first time,
frankly made the case for aid. Turning back attempts in Congress to
end existing funding for the Contras, the administration also
proposed expanding Contra troop strength to 15,000. The Nicaraguan
resistance already had reached 12,000 men under arms, higher than
any other guerrilla army in Latin America, and the Contras grew
bolder.
The Reagan Doctrine Defined
A turning point had been reached in policy toward Nicaragua and,
more generally, in policy toward Soviet Third-World clients:
"covert" aid to resistance forces increasingly would be covert in
name only. While the successes in El Salvador were crucial, they
came within the framework of traditional containment policy. At the
same time, a much more proactive policy in the Third World began to
take shape in Nicaragua -- what became known as the Reagan Doctrine.
The Reagan administration had staked out a position putting the
U.S. on the side of anti-communist forces not only materially but
also morally, and it had given notice to the Soviets that the
Brezhnev Doctrine was not an acceptable point of departure for
superpower relations. In addition, aid to the Nicaraguan resistance
was linked with aid to El Salvador as two sides -- offensive and
defensive -- of a coherent policy.
Just how correct President Reagan was about communist designs for
the region became clear later. Contra pressure helped force the
Sandinistas to hold elections in February 1990; shortly after they
were ousted, the FMLN sued for peace. This linkage further was
dramatized last May when a cache of arms and documents that proved
continuing ties between the Sandinistas and communist guerrillas in
El Salvador and elsewhere was discovered outside Managua.
Grenada: Puncturing Brezhnev
The most dramatic and abrupt reversal of the Soviet design
throughout the eight years of the Reagan presidency came on October
25, 1983, when U.S. airborne troops and Marines landed on the
island of Grenada. This small island country 100 miles off the
coast of Venezuela had fallen into the Soviet orbit in March 1979,
after Maurice Bishop, a Marxist lawyer, and his "New Jewel
Movement" seized power in a coup d'?tat. For the next
four-and-a-half years, Grenada moved closer to serving as a base
for Kremlin ambitions and power projection in the Caribbean, a
threat that President Reagan had identified and warned of in his
March SDI speech.
When Mr. Bishop was overthrown and executed in mid-October by even
more hard-line communist elements of the New Jewel Movement,
Grenada's small island neighbors, in the form of the Organization
of East Caribbean States, invited U.S. intervention. President
Reagan ordered the invasion to proceed on October 25. When the
operation ended a few days later, 75 percent of the American people
and 90 percent of the Grenadian people polled had supported the
action.
The American invasion of Grenada was the first major use of force
by the United States since the Vietnam War, and it was the first
time that U.S. troops had been used to liberate a communist
country. Vast stockpiles of Soviet weapons and a collection of
damning documents were discovered, American students were evacuated
successfully, Cuban forces were defeated in battle, and the
Brezhnev Doctrine was punctured. For the first time in recent
memory, the United States was on the offensive for freedom, both
substantively and directly.
Grenada was a tiny island with a tiny population of 85,000, but its
significance was huge. Historians should record that October 24,
1983, represented the high-water mark of the Soviet empire. Never
again would the communists in the Kremlin control as much territory
or wield as much influence as they did on the day before Army
Rangers landed at Point Salines. At the end of 1983, the Soviet
Third-World strategy was thwarted in key respects, and important
American allies had been reinvigorated.
Shock Waves of the Economic Rebound
Finally, victory against the Soviet Union in the Cold War was
undergirded by the remarkable recovery of the U.S. economy from the
stagflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In January 1983, the
United States began a 93-month period of sustained, noninflationary
economic growth. By the time the expansion ended in the summer of
1990 during the Bush administration, the Berlin Wall no longer
existed.
This economic expansion had three important effects. First, it
ensured the 1984 re-election of Ronald Reagan and the continuation
of the policies that were instrumental to victory in the primary
theater of the Cold War. Second, it guaranteed the economic
resources necessary to pursue these policies and, more generally,
to maintain a strong American presence in the world. Lastly, the
ability of the United States to pull itself out of its economic
doldrums had a momentous impact on the Soviets' faith in their
Marxist beliefs. America's economic growth disproved the
"inevitability" of the collapse of capitalism, which the Soviets
had thought to be at hand. Indeed, the recovery led to a serious
re-appraisal of economic collectivism throughout the West and the
Third World, inducing many socialist governments to introduce
capitalist reforms.
The Vulnerable Empire
Ronald Reagan entered office determined to turn around the Cold War
and complete the policy of containment. In both theory and
practice, President Reagan grasped that the Soviet Union was at a
crisis point in the early 1980s, and he saw clearly the central
contradiction within Kremlin policy that made the Soviet empire
vulnerable: it was bankrupt economically, yet was engaging in
renewed heights of external aggression. By 1980, still on a
perpetual wartime footing because of their ideology, the Soviets
invested more than two to three times what the United States did on
military spending. Mr. Reagan aimed to push this Soviet paradox of
internal decay and outward expansion, all the while reminding the
world of the tyrannical nature of the Soviet regime. In this task
he succeeded. Although their economy continued to falter and their
military spending consumed over 25 percent of GNP by 1987, the
Soviets under Mikhail Gorbachev still attempted to accelerate world
communism and emulate the arms and military capacity of the West.
But within the next four years, the Kremlin lost its empire, and
its domestic and foreign policies collapsed.
Certainly there were important points in shifting the Cold War
prior to 1983: the growth of the consensus in favor of increased
defense spending in the late 1970s; the throttling of SALT II; the
catalytic impact of Iran and Afghanistan; and the election of
Ronald Reagan in 1980. The president understood the import of these
factors, conveyed them to the American people, and incorporated
them into his policies. While victory against the Soviets was
nearer after 1983, its outline was not visible for several years.
In contrast to most of the media and foreign policy experts,
President Reagan knew that the triumphs of 1983 should not be
translated into conciliation and compromise as the political theme
of 1984.
The Beginning of the End
In sum, then, 1983 was the crucial year. It was the year that
America conclusively demonstrated it was not in decline, as had
seemed the trend at any point from 1968 on, but vigorously would
defend itself and carry the fight to the Soviets. The ideological
counterattack reached full voice, NATO was saved, nuclear
deterrence was protected successfully from the assault of the
nuclear freeze movement, the strategic defense initiative was
launched, El Salvador and with it containment in Central America
survived the worst that could be thrown against it, the groundwork
was laid for the Reagan Doctrine, the Brezhnev Doctrine was
disassembled in Grenada, and an economic expansion began that
reaffirmed American prosperity for the rest of the decade. In many
respects, the "Vietnam syndrome" that had prevented American vigor
for a decade was dismantled, not in the Persian Gulf War of 1991,
but in 1983.
These factors, including SDI, Euromissile deployment, and elements
of the rhetorical counteroffensive, created what Mr. Shevardnadze
later referred to as a "Gordian knot" for the Soviet leadership,
which found itself at times "sinking into despair over the impasse"
that ultimately would lead to a radically new policy direction.
Genrikh Trofimenko, who was head of the Department for the Study of
the U.S. Foreign Policy at the former Soviet Institute of the USA
and Canada, similarly remarked that Mr. Reagan's strategy, and the
effect it had on the Soviet regime, convinced "99 percent of all
Russians that Reagan won the Cold War."
None of President Reagan's grand strategy that began to coalesce in
1983 was inevitable; in fact, every element of it was bitterly
opposed and ridiculed by powerful segments of American and Western
political, cultural, and intellectual opinion. And even those who
believed in the policies could not know the outcome. Only the
steadfast political wisdom, confidence, and determination of Ronald
Reagan -- and the common sense of the American citizenry -- ensured that
America held firm. A president must join prudence and courage in
the service of right principles, and he must be led by the soul of
his people while being willing and able to lead their minds.
As 1980 denotes a watershed in domestic politics, 1983 is the
counterpart in world politics. The year 1983 -- a year of
extraordinary importance to the ongoing triumph of human freedom in
the protracted conflict against communist totalitarianism -- stands
out as more than a historical marker. It is an anniversary worth
noting not only for its own sake but also for the lessons it
offers: history is made by human beings making choices, and in a
battle for the survival of great and good principles, simply being
right is not enough. Fortune favors the brave.
To reprint more than short quotations, please write or FAX Ben
Morehead, Associate Publisher, Policy Review, 214 Massachusetts
Avenue, NE, Washington, DC 20002, FAX (202) 675-0291.