 |
“Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, June 12,
1987.
|
A Reagan Doctrine for the Twenty-First Century. By Matthew Continetti. Washington Free Beacon, October 9, 2015.
Continetti:
How to confront Vladimir Putin.
From
Sweden in the Baltic to Tartus in the Mediterranean, Russian forces are on the
offensive. The consensus among U.S. officials not beholden to the White House
is that Mitt Romney was right. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the most dangerous
threat to America.
And not
only to America: Russia’s attempts to reclaim its empire spread conflict and
misery, prolong war, destabilize the postwar alliance system that has brought
security and prosperity to the world, and erode Western values such as freedom,
equality, and individualism. Though Russia may no longer espouse global
communist revolution, the consequences of its militarism and aggression are not
limited to a small geographic area. The Comintern is gone. But the goals of
dominating the Eurasian heartland, Finlandizing Europe, and isolating and
challenging the United States have returned. The stronger Putin becomes, the
more despotic, poorer, and more corrupt is the world.
Except
for sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the occasional
scolding, President Obama has been uninterested in retaliating against
imperialism and deterring further aggression. He holds the view that history
will expose Putin as a pretender and fool, and that Russia will be bogged down
in a Syrian quagmire just as it was bogged down in Afghanistan long ago. What
Obama forgets is that the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan came about
because the United States financed and equipped anti-Soviet forces—a course of
action he has rejected since the Syrian uprising began in 2011.
Obama’s
supporters note that there is no clear U.S. ally in the Syrian conflict.
Obviously not, since the president did nothing to identify and assist
potentially friendly anti-regime Sunnis when the war began. Nor has he aided
fully those few groups—“Syrian Kurds close to Turkey, moderate forces supported
by Jordan close to its border, and small number of other moderate
Syrians”—that, at least rhetorically, the United States backs today.
Obama’s
critics, meanwhile, are concerned with tactics. Both Hillary Clinton and Marco
Rubio have called for America to impose a no-fly zone over Syria. They’re
several years too late. A no-fly zone might have worked at the beginning of the
conflict, as part of a strategy of coercive diplomacy to remove Bashar al-Assad
and reach some sort of power-sharing agreement among Syrian tribes. Now, with
Su-25s flying unrestricted over Syria, a no-fly zone would be greeted by the
Russians as a nonstarter.
Worse,
it would invite direct confrontation with the Russians, who are already buzzing
NATO airspace from their new southern flank. Putin would like nothing more than
to humiliate America over the skies of Raqqah. A no-fly zone is also
superfluous. Our forces are already operating above parts of Syria—we could
establish safe-havens at any time without asking for Russian permission. The
problem isn’t our capabilities. It’s our lack of will.
What to
do? The time has come for a revised strategy towards Russia, the greatest
military and ideological threat to the United States and to the world order it
has built over decades as guarantor of international security. We’ve faced a
similar problem before. To create a freer and richer world, not the United
States but Russia must be knocked back on its heels.
That is
exactly what Ronald Reagan did in the final years of the Cold War. What is
required today is a Reagan Doctrine for the twenty-first century—a
comprehensive military, diplomatic, and cultural approach that elevates
America’s stature and diminishes Russia’s.
I can
hear liberals already: Reagan, they’ll say, was not a warrior but a peacemaker.
Didn’t he negotiate with Gorbachev, didn’t he offer at Reykjavik to eliminate
all ICBMs in exchange for the right of strategic defense? And so he did. But to
focus only on Reagan’s diplomacy is to suffer from historical myopia. It is to
ignore Reagan’s first term in favor of his second.
The
hawkish policies Reagan enacted between 1981 and 1985 gave him the economic,
political, and military leverage to become friends with Gorbachev later. And
only with Gorbachev: During Reagan’s first term, three Soviet leaders preceded
the author of glasnost and perestroika. The president didn’t meet
with any of them. “They keep dying on me,” he liked to say.
In
their moral disapproval of force, in their fallacious belief that human beings
of every nation and every government share the same values and interests,
liberals forget that every diplomatic solution is based on the balance or
preponderance of military power. It is the weaker party that seeks negotiations—just
as Europe and the United States, consumed by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, did
after Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Just as President Obama, preoccupied with
ending the Middle Eastern wars and resolving the financial crisis, attempted
his reset with Russia. Just as Europe and the United States, in the grip of
anomie and malaise, have sought to freeze the conflict in Ukraine and
“de-conflict” the escalating war in Syria.
Let’s
reverse the equation.
Like the strategy pursued by our fortieth president more than thirty years ago, a twenty-first century Reagan Doctrine would have three parts:
Military buildup.
President Reagan reversed the degradation and demoralization of the U.S. armed
forces. The defense budget in his first term more than doubled. Yes, there was
waste. But more important than the $400 toilet seat were the B1 bomber, the
stealth fighter, the Trident submarine, and hundreds of F-14s and F-15s.
Defense spending created jobs, inspired patriotism, and laid the foundation for
American success in Operation Desert Storm and the Balkan wars. We use many of
these platforms to this day.
The
gusher of weapons scared our enemies. “The scale and pace of the American
buildup under Reagan,” writes Henry Kissinger in Diplomacy, “reinforced all the doubts already in the minds of the
Soviet leadership as a result of debacles in Afghanistan and Africa, about
whether they could afford the arms race economically and—even more
important—whether they could sustain it technologically.”
Who now
holds such doubts? The trajectory of U.S. troop numbers and defense budgets is
downward. The “sequester” is about to take a huge bite of the Pentagon’s
resources. Our ability to fight in two theaters at once, a pillar of postwar
American defense policy, is in doubt.
“Just
as the threats have become visible and undeniable,” write the authors of “To
Rebuild America’s Military,” a new American Enterprise Institute report, “the
United States is continuing to cut the armed forces dramatically, having
imposed the cuts through an extraordinary means—a law imposing arbitrary limits
on parts of the federal budget and employing the mindless tool of
sequestration—with no analysis whatsoever of the impact on the nation’s
security.”
The AEI
scholars recommend a return to the level of defense spending proposed by Robert
Gates, and the gradual build to “an affordable floor of 4 percent of gross
domestic product that would sustain the kind of military America needs.” These
numbers might not be as shocking as Reagan’s. But at least they would reverse
the hollowing out of the force. And they would grab the attention of the
Kremlin.
Both
left and right are likely to oppose more spending on the grounds of debt and
deficits. For the left to make this critique is disingenuous—their leading
economists say deficits do not matter in the current economic environment and
call for an expansionary fiscal policy. What the right needs to understand is
that deficit reduction and balanced budgets are worthy goals in a time of
peace. And peacetime this is not.
Strategic Weapons.
Vladimir Putin plays ICBM politics. His regime holds nuclear retaliation as its
ultimate trump in negotiations—and while the Russians have not played this
card, oh how they love to show it.
The
U.S. response is naïve. Not to mention contradictory. It combines idealistic
calls for nuclear abolition with hapless and toothless diplomacy that does
little to stop Iran from spinning centrifuges, North Korea from building more
bombs, and Russia from violating treaty commitments.
We
forget we hold nuclear cards, too. This is a fact Reagan did not lose sight of.
“The two strategic decisions which contributed most to ending the Cold War,”
writes Kissinger, “were NATO’s deployment of American intermediate-range
missiles in Europe and the American commitment to the Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI).”
Keep
the Pershing IIs on hold (for now). But please update and modernize our nuclear
forces, which exist in an embarrassing state of disrepair and neglect. And do
not forget the importance of strategic defense: Development of anti-ballistic
missile technologies would be a highly controversial, and highly important,
part of any renewed defense buildup. The broadening of the missile shield
reassures allies—and worries Russia.
Not
only would a revitalized and advanced nuclear force, coupled with increased
funding and enlargement of strategic defense, assert U.S. supremacy, deter
adversaries, and develop innovative technologies. It would also bring political
benefits to whoever proposed it.
When
Reagan announced SDI in the spring of 1983, notes Kissinger, “The experts had
all the technical arguments on their side, but Reagan had got hold of an
elemental political truth: In a world of nuclear weapons, leaders who make no
effort to protect their peoples against accident, mad opponents, nuclear
proliferation, and a whole host of other foreseeable dangers invite the
opprobrium of posterity if disaster ever does occur.”
The
president’s duty is to ensure that it does not—not by terrorists who desire weapons of mass destruction, not by the states that possess them.
Insurgency. It was
Charles Krauthammer who coined the phrase “Reagan Doctrine” in an April 1985
essay for Time magazine. The article
described Reagan’s support for anticommunist forces in Nicaragua, Angola,
Afghanistan, and beyond. Some of those forces, like Solidarity in Poland, truly
were democratic. Others, like the mujahedin,
were the enemies of our enemy—and thus, in specific circumstances, worthy of
our help.
It
takes a set of moral blinders the size of the president’s ego not to recognize
today’s Russia as America’s enemy. There is no other power as devoted to
undermining U.S. authority and prestige and interests—from subverting the NATO
alliance to replacing us as the dominant external power in the Middle East to
hacking our technological infrastructure to harboring the fugitive Edward
Snowden. As America has waned, Putin has waxed. And so for America to wax,
Putin must wane.
We must
arm his enemies. That means deadly weapons and massive financial aid to
Ukraine. Forward bases in the Baltics. And the sending of arms and cash to the
Syrian rebels his jets are strafing. Not even the liberal Vox.com pretends that
Putin is going after ISIS; why should our government?
Imposing
costs on Putin requires dealing with unsavory people. It risks unforeseen
consequences, some potentially negative. But the actual consequences of the
policy being pursued at the moment—ongoing war, regional destabilization,
humanitarian chaos, Islamic radicalization, and erosion of U.S. leadership and
credibility—are worse.
The
insurgency launched by Reagan was not limited to arms. It also had an
ideological component. “The Reagan Doctrine has been widely understood to mean
only support for anticommunist guerillas fighting pro-Soviet regimes, but from
the first the doctrine had a broader meaning. Support for anticommunist
guerillas was the logical outgrowth, not the origin, of a policy of supporting
democratic reform or revolution everywhere, in countries ruled by right-wing
dictators as well as by communist parties,” says Robert Kagan in A Twilight Struggle.
Speaking
forthrightly and proudly of liberal values, and condemning their abuse within
the Russian sphere of influence, is a requirement of any foreign policy
associated with Ronald Reagan. As Secretary of State George Shultz put it in
1985: “The forces of democracy around the world merit our standing with them.
To abandon them would be a shameful betrayal—a betrayal not only of brave men
and women but of our highest ideals.”
Standing
with the forces of democracy is not the same as calling for elections
everywhere. Elections are not the beginning of the policy. They are its
endpoint. The beginning is in the rhetorical promotion of individual freedoms,
in renewed financial support for nongovernmental organizations promoting civil
society and an independent media, in education in the habits and traditions of
the West.
The
Kremlin spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on a global propaganda
network that spreads conspiracy theories, distorts reality, and incites
suspicion and hatred of the United States and its representative democracy. And
that is just Russia—China and Qatar have similar operations. We have nothing
that bears comparison. The main Putin network, RT, has more employees than the
Voice of America. We are disarming ourselves not only materially but also
ideologically. This must end.
The
agenda I have outlined would cost quite a bit of money. It would involve America
with some morally suspect individuals. The debate over it would be heated.
There would be reprisals.
But the
Reagan Doctrine was all of those things, too. And it worked. “The Reagan
Doctrine proclaims overt and unashamed American support for anti-Communist
revolution,” Krauthammer wrote in 1985. “The grounds are justice, necessity,
and democratic tradition.” Replace anti-Communist with anti-authoritarian, and
what has changed? If we are to reestablish American ideals, American interests,
and American pride, we must hurt the bad guys, and overtly and unashamedly
revise the Reagan Doctrine for a new American century.
Putin?
He is one bad guy. So let’s take off our gloves.
