Ronald Reagans Policy Towards The Soviet Union - Research Paper Example

Ronald Reagan’s Policy Towards The Soviet Union Introduction During Reagan’s presidency in the Oval Office, the foreign policy of the United States toward the former Soviet Union was essentially shaped and determined by the legacy of the US involvement in the Cold War in the earlier years. Reagan Doctrine was nothing extraordinary or legendary. Rather in a sense, it was an appendage to the former US policy to the Soviet Union. But the new dimension that was added to the existing US foreign to the USSR during Reagan’s presidency was the country’s self-surviving assertive effort. Regarding the United States’ confrontation against the communist expansion, the Reagan Government’s role was of more of strategic than of ‘muscular’, an adjective that easily could characterize a major part of the US policy towards the USSR during the earlier US presidencies. Indeed military enforcement served as a part of Reagan’s Doctrine, but not the whole of it. Either being compelled by the contemporary socio-economic condition of the country or learning the best part of the lesson from the history of the United States’ military involvement in the Vietnam War and Korean War Reagan chose an effective strategic course of being diplomatic and tactical, meanwhile keeping the United States’ superior military image intact. Controversy about Reagan’s Leftist Trend Indeed the ‘simplistic’, ‘sectarian’, ‘dangerous’, and even ‘primitive’, as Anthony Lewis a columnist of The New York Times once called, Reagan also earned the title “the communist in disguise” because of his strategic approach to Communism (Schweizer, 1994, p. 47). D’Souza (2003) notes, “Reagan had a much more sophisticated understanding of communism than either the hawks or the doves”. Spending his boyhood in the procommunist environment Reagan was fully aware of the totalitarian nature of Soviet communism and he had been quite able to perceive the threat of the regime’s expansionism. Referring to the leftist part of Reagan’s life, David J. Meyer (2004) of Last Trumpet Ministries says, “Ronald Reagan was a Communist in Hollywood during the time of the heavy infiltration of Communism in that movie capital just after World War II ended. Reagan was the President of the Screen Actors’ Guild and was commonly known as “Red Ronnie.” (p. 3). Necessarily his comprehensible knowledge of the nature of communism and the lessons learnt from the United States’ involvement in the Cold War during his predecessors shaped the main line of policy towards the communist Soviet Union. That is, the main line of his policy towards the USSR was to confront, to contain, to roll back Soviet blocks and finally to let the “evil empire” under its own weight, while saving and restoring the country’s military superiority intact. Necessarily such stance was reflected in Reagan’s policy towards the Soviet Union. Being resolute to reinstate the United States’ pride and superiority in the world, he decided that America should be more active and assertive in confronting Communism and in providing active support to the friendly governments. Reagan’s rhetoric and his government’s military expenditure policies were directed to support this goal. Yet ultimately his foreign policy towards the USSR –though seemed to be more belligerent than that of the two earlier presidents- was “considerably more cautious than his sometimes bellicose statements suggested” (Profiles of US Presidents, n.d.). Reagan’s Dual Approaches to Communism and Reagan Doctrine Reagan’s policy towards the Soviet Union can significantly be marked as a dual approach in the sense that on one hand Reagan’s administration chose to provide both overt and covert support to anti-communist communities and guerrilla movements in order to “roll back” “Soviet-backed communist governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America” (D'Souza, 2003) and on the other hand, it put effort on growing an intimate, but cautious, relationship with the Soviet Authority. In reality, the “Reagan Doctrine meant above all a new American activism in Latin America” (Profiles of US Presidents, n.d.). In October 1983, the Government sent troops into Grenada, a Caribbean island, to exorcise an anti-US communist regime that revealed signs of forging a relationship with the Soviet Union. While the doctrine was intended to diminish the Soviet influence in the Soviet supported countries by opening the door of democracy and capitalism for those nations, its endeavor to grow the United States’ intimacy with Gorbachev’s administration necessarily pushed the pro-reform portion of the Soviet authority to move one step forward towards bringing changes within the country’s political system that eventually brought the abrupt collapse of the regime. A deep analysis of Reagan’s policy will show that the Reagan was aware of the self-devouring nature of the Soviet economy which was then sagging under the expenditure of an unusually large USSR army. During the last several years of the Cold War it became evident that with an unusually large and economically unproductive army that consumed as much as “25 percent of the Soviet Union's gross national product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors” (Lagon, 1994. P. 89) the Soviet authority would be forced to introduce whatever economic reforms needed. Referring to Reagan’s attitude towards the Soviet economy, D'Souza, (2003) says, Reagan did not need a Ph.D. in economics to recognize that any economy based upon centralized planners dictating how much factories should produce, how much people should consume and how social rewards should be distributed was doomed to disastrous failure. For Reagan the Soviet Union was a'sick bear,' and the question was not whether it would collapse, but when. (D'Souza, 2003) Reagan made proper use of this weakness of the Soviet economy; using this opportunity he not only brought the ever-expanding muscular, but hungry, soviet bear back at round table discussion, but also made the Soviet authority more aware of their own crisis by removing the eye-patch of idealistic enthusiasm. Meanwhile Reagan’s resoluteness to build up a sturdy military force and the “scale and pace of the Reagan military buildup” rather worked as a discouraging factor for the expansionist Soviet authority, as D'Souza (2003) says in this regard, “Through the Reagan Doctrine, the United States had completely halted Soviet advances in the Third World — since Reagan assumed office, no more territory had fallen into Moscow's hands” (D'Souza, 2003). The USSR authority, which primarily ignored Reagan's promise of restoring American pride and prestige in the world as mere political rhetoric, became stunned by “the scale and pace of the Reagan military buildup” (D'Souza, 2003). American Pershing and Tomahawk deployments proved to be an unnerving manifestation of the unanimity and resoluteness of the capitalist block. In reality, Grenada, backed by the Reagan Government rolled back to the democratic camp. The Stinger missiles that were provided by the Reagan administration to the warring Afghan mujahidin groups soon turned the Soviet expansionist dream into what the Soviets once called a 'bleeding wound.' In fact Reagan Doctrine was a mirror opposition to the Brezhnev Doctrine. The Brezhnev Doctrine acknowledged that once “a country went Communist, it would stay Communist” (D'Souza, 2003). In other words, the Brezhnev Doctrine exemplifies the communist expansionism. According to Brezhnev’s theory the communist region would ever expand by gaining more territories, but it was not supposed to lose any to the capitalism. On the contrary the first and foremost goal of Reagan Doctrine was to violate this very expansionism through strategic military resoluteness. In the very first place Reagan’s attack on the Grenada to restore the democratic government was the most affirmative manifestation of this doctrine. Aspects of Reagan’s Policy: “Rein the demon and let it Collapse under its own Weight” Reagan’s military strategy was an essential part of his “rein the demon and wait to see it collapse under its own weight” policy. But other approaches were indeed to hasten the collapse of the “evil empire” under America’s control. Along with Reagan’s resolute rearmament Reagan’s SDI program served a two-fold purpose for Reagan’s policy towards the Soviet Union. First, Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiatives was a defensive strategy on America’s at the risk of inviting another arms race. Leaving the traditional track of arms race of producing killer machines, Reagan made it clear to the Soviet authority about the United States’ defensive stance against the offensive communist expansionism. Secondly, the SDI program was a non-offensive armored challenge from the Reagan Administration to the economically self-devouring Soviet Army that then, if wanted, could intercept, but obviously they could not win. Thus Reagan made the country’s economic fragility obvious to the Soviet leadership. Reagan’s stance regarding the arm race and his policy to make the Soviet economic fragility more obvious are evident in one of his speeches: “We won't stand by and let you maintain weapon superiority over us. We can agree to reduce arms, or we can continue the arms race, which I think you know you can't win.” (Lagon, 1994, p. 67) Indeed Reagan's SDI program provoked the Soviet leaderships into another kind of arms race that they could hardly afford. Eventually Reagan’s policy worked and after 1985, the Soviet leaderships decided to try something different that was vividly evident in Gorbachev’s reformative approach (Nigel, 2006, p. 44-9). In this regard D’Souza (2003) says, It was Reagan, in other words, who seems to have been largely responsible for inducing a loss of nerve that caused Moscow to seek a new approach. Gorbachev's assignment was not merely to find a new way to deal with the country's economic problems but also to figure out how to cope with the empire's reversals abroad. (D’Souza, 2003) In fact what motive worked behind this policy of Reagan was to keep the economically fragile Soviet Union under control and let it collapse. By growing the fear of a rapid military build-up through events such as direct military invasion on Grenada, and by forcing the Soviets to wallow amid heavy damages and losses in Afghanistan, Reagan Doctrine successfully kept the regime away from further invasions. The Soviets did not dare to take any more risk of involving themselves in situations like Afghanistan. The possibility of accumulation resources that the soviet economy needed was annihilated. Reagan’s strategy was to enhance the regime’s economic appetite and let it be weaker, and thus to push the soviet leaders to bring a change on their own. Referring to Reagan’s policy, Ilya Zaslavsky, “who served in the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies, said later that the true originator of perestroika and glasnost was not Mikhail Gorbachev but Ronald Reagan” (D’Souza, 2003). Reagan’s Success to Win the World’s Moral Support Reagan not only had been able to create a deterrent to the communist expansion but also to win the world’s moral support against the Soviet aggression. Reagan’s moralist approach is evident in the following speech: “We must realize that…no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women” (Garthoff, 1994, p. 56). Successfully alleging terrorism, invasion, violation of individual rights, nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union which Reagan once called an “evil empire” he had been able to win the moral support of the commoners as at home and abroad. Soon Soviet activities and communist expansionism began to be viewed as invasions upon the countries’ sovereignty and independence. The intensification of the Cold War tension and the gradual diversion from the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty initiatives gave birth to a popular anti-nuclear weapon movement in the United States and Europe. The movement’s primary goal was to draw an end to the nuclear weapon race. In America, the main goal of the hawks as well as the doves was a “nuclear freeze,’ an agreement between the two superpowers not to expand their atomic arsenals” (Profiles of US Presidents, n.d.). In 1982 approximately one million people gathered at New York City's Central Park in the largest mass demonstration to protest against the deployments of weapons of the two superpowers. Similar anti-nuclear awareness swept over the whole world. Under such pressure Reagan’s administration successfully had been able to align itself with this moral claim of the world through the non-nuclear Strategic Defense Initiatives against the nuclear threat of the Soviet Union (Nigel, 2006, p. 45). Background of Reagan’s Policy towards the Soviet Union A considerable part of Reagan’s policy was shaped by a number of pressure factors at home and abroad. In the face of increasing uproar from the public front, the task of sending more troops in support of the anti-communist movements in countries was not easy for Reagan who succeeded President Jimmy Carter in the oval office. In the post Vietnam War era, both Carter’s government and Reagan’s government had to face economic debilitation, though it was not as serious as the Soviet economic debilitation was. During Reagan’s presidency, the anti-war movements were as strong as they had been during the Vietnam War (Garthoff, 1994, pp. 76-9). Several issues that were crucial to the interest of America at home and abroad were, in some way or other, intertwined with ending the war. The first and foremost issue that confronted Nixon was the massive casualties that occurred on either sides of the war. Moreover the moral decay evidenced in the events of “My Lai Massacre”, “Green Beret Affair” and civilian cost in the operation “Speedy Express” infuriated the silent majority of the American to raise their voice against the war. But such a demand from the American mass posed successively a great dilemma for all Nixon, Carter and Reagan Governments. On one hand Reagan had to retain the sublimity of the US humanitarian image in the power politics in the international field during the rising tension of Cold War. (Denis, 2008, pp. 34-9) But Reagan understood that it was not possible through an utterly Military means. On the other hand, he had to pacify the outraged mob who massively could contribute to his failure in the next election in case he failed to manage a decent route that would not as risky as Nixon’s way, while retaining the humanitarian sublimity of the US image. During the first half of Nixon Presidency the casualty rate of the US troops was alarmingly high. As a support to “Vietnamization” the US Army continued air escalations and ground attacks on the north. The purpose behind it was to provide South Vietnamese with the scope to be able to lead sustainable offensive. These air escalation and ground ventures were substantially a failure that revealed the incapability of morally weak South Vietnamese Army. In the year 1969, the monthly average of the US personnel killed in the war was 776 which dropped to 344 in 1970, to 123 in 1971 and to 22 1972. But the withdrawal rate of the US Army was fairly smooth and even during the years between 1969 and 1972. (Denis, 2008, pp. 57-58) At home Reagan’s dilemma was that he could involve in any massive war that could mount up American casualties like the Vietnam War; but on the contrary if he followed the indecisive path of Carter presidency, the Soviets would manage a solution to their economic crisis by accumulating resources from their newly occupied states. (“Profiles of US Presidents”, 2010) Indeed this situation was reflected greatly and played crucial role in shaping Reagan’s policy towards the Soviet Union. This new policy “represented a conscious effort to repudiate the lessons that liberals and others had drawn from the failed war in Vietnam” (“Profiles of US Presidents”, 2010). Conclusion Necessarily Reagan’s policy was to follow the safe route to draw an end to the Soviet expansionism in order to cut off the supply line foreign resources to the Soviet economy. The underlying motif was to force the Soviet leadership to feel the country’s economic debilitation more acutely. Also according to Reagan’s policy the Soviet authority was compelled to bring necessary reforms in their sociopolitical and economic structure. Reagan Doctrine as well as “peace through strength” policy helped him a lot to attain his goal. His apparently belligerent attitudes, bellicose rhetoric, raising a moral defense and the resolute material and non-material support to the anti-communist groups in any part of the world, etc brought about a significant halt to the communist expansionism and let the ‘evil empire’ under the crushing pressure of its own weight. References D'Souza, D. (October, 2003). “President Ronald Reagan: Winning the Cold War”, American History. Retrieved October 18, 2011 from http://www.historynet.com/president-ronald-reagan-winning-the-cold-war.htm Dennis M. S. (2008). “The War in Vietnam, 1969-1973” available at http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change-Viet4.html Garthoff, R. L. (1994). The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War, Brookings Institution. Lagon, P. M. (1994). The Reagan Doctrine: Sources of American Conduct in the Cold War's Last Chapter. Praeger Publishers. Meyer, J. D. (July 2004). “The Time of God’s Final Call”, Vol. XXIII, No VII Retrieved August 2008 from www.lasttrumpetministries...y2004.html Nigel H. (2006). The SDI Enigma: Behind the Scenes of the Cold War Race for Missile Defense. Dulles, Va., Potomac Books. Profiles of US Presidents. (n.d.). “Richard M. Nixon - The vietnam war”, available at http://www.presidentprofiles.com/Kennedy-Bush/Richard-M-Nixon-The-vietnam-war.html Profiles of US Presidents. (n.d.). “Ronald Reagan - Foreign relations”, Retrieved October 18, 2011 from http://www.presidentprofiles.com/Kennedy-Bush/Ronald-Reagan-Foreign-relations.html Schweizer, P. (1994). Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 213 Read More