This file was uploaded by Ben Morehead, Associate Publisher of _Policy_Review_ magazine and authorized agent for the copyright holder. All rights reserved. You may contact the Associate Publisher on the following major online services: America Online screen name: Ben486 CompuServe ID: 71603,2037 Internet node and ID: benjamin@access.digex.net Prodigy ID: GJJT78A To order Policy Review, call 800-544-4843. 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'ˆtat. 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.