Faces of Power: Constancy and Change in United States Foreign Policy from Truman to Obama [third edition] 9780231538213

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Constancy and Change Since WWII
Part I. The Truman Administration
1. The Shattering of Expectations
2. Implementing Containment
Part II. The Eisenhower Era
3. A New Look for Less Expensive Power
4. Waging Peace: The Eisenhower Face
5. Crises and Complications
Part III. The Kennedy-Johnson Years
6. Enhancing the Arsenal of Power
7. The Third World as a Primary Arena of Competition
8. Kennedy’s Cuban Crises
9. Berlin Again
10. The Vietnam Quagmire
Part IV. Statecraft Under Nixon and Ford
11. Avoiding Humiliation in Indochina
12. The Insufficiency of Military Containment
13. The Middle East and the Reassertion of American Competence Abroad
14. The Anachronism of Conservative Realpolitik
Part V. The Carter Period
15. The Many Faces of Jimmy Carter
16. The Fusion of Realism and Idealism
17. The Camp David Accords: Carter’s Finest Hour
18. Iran and Afghanistan: Carter’s Struggles to Salvage Containment
Part VI. The Reagan Era—Realism or Romanticism?
19. High Purpose and Grand Strategy
20. The Tension Between Foreign and Domestic Imperatives
21. Middle East Complexities, 1981–1989: The Arab-Israeli Conflict, Terrorism, and Arms for Hostages
22. Contradictions in Latin America
23. The Reagan-Gorbachev Symbiosis
Part VII. Prudential Statecraft with George Herbert Walker Bush
24. Presiding Over the End of the Cold War
25. The Resort to Military Power
26. The New World Order
Part VIII. Clinton’s Globalism
27. From Domestic Politician to Geopolitician
28. Opportunities and Frustrations in the Middle East
29. Leaving Somalia and Leaving Rwanda Alone
30. Getting Tough with Saddam and Osama
31. Into Haiti and the Balkans: The Responsibility to Protect
Part IX. The Freedom Agenda of George W. Bush
32. Neoconservatives Seize the Day
33. 9/11, the War on Terror, and a New Strategic Doctrine
34. From Containment to Forcible Regime Change: Afghanistan and Iraq
35. National Security and Civil Liberties
Part X. Obama’s Universalism Versus a Still-Fragmented World
36. Engaging the World
37. Ending Two Wars
38. Counterterrorism and Human Rights
39. Ambivalence in Dealing with Upheavals in the Arab World
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Citation preview

FA CES O F P O W ER

FA C E S O F P O W E R Constancy and Change in United States Foreign Policy from Truman to Obama

S E Y O M B R O WN T H I R D E D I T IO N

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Seyom. Faces of power : constancy and change in United States foreign policy from Truman to Obama / Seyom Brown.—Third edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-13328-9 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-13329-6 (paperback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53821-3 (e-book) 1. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989. 2. United States—Foreign relations—1989– I. Title. E840.B768 2015 327.73—dc23 2014035282

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: Official presidential portraits: Office of the White House, White House.gov. References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

Preface

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Introduction: Constancy and Change Since WWII PART I

1

THE TR UMAN ADMI N I S T R AT I O N

1 The Shattering of Expectations 17 2 Implementing Containment 36 PART II 3

THE EISEN HO W E R E R A

A New Look for Less Expensive Power 57 4 Waging Peace: The Eisenhower Face 74 5 Crises and Complications 83

PART III

THE K EN N EDY-JOH N S O N Y E A R S

6 Enhancing the Arsenal of Power 117 7 The Third World as a Primary Arena of Competition 140 8 Kennedy’s Cuban Crises 154

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9 Berlin Again 166 10 The Vietnam Quagmire PART IV 12

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S TATEC R AF T UN DER N I X O N A N D FO R D

11 Avoiding Humiliation in Indochina 207 The Insufficiency of Military Containment 227 13 The Middle East and the Reassertion of American Competence Abroad 249 The Anachronism of Conservative Realpolitik 272 PAR T V

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PART VI 20

176

THE CAR TER P E R I O D

15 The Many Faces of Jimmy Carter 297 16 The Fusion of Realism and Idealism 308 The Camp David Accords: Carter’s Finest Hour 320 18 Iran and Afghanistan: Carter’s Struggles to Salvage Containment 334 THE REAGAN ERA—REAL I S M O R R O MA N T I C I S M?

19 High Purpose and Grand Strategy 365 The Tension Between Foreign and Domestic Imperatives 386 21 Middle East Complexities, 1981–1989: The Arab-Israeli Conflict, Terrorism, and Arms for Hostages 397 22 Contradictions in Latin America 431 23 The Reagan-Gorbachev Symbiosis 453

PART VII 24

PRUDEN TIAL STATECRA FT W I T H G E O R G E HER BER T WAL K ER B U S H Presiding Over the End of the Cold War 473 25 The Resort to Military Power 494 26 The New World Order 529

PAR T V III 28

CL IN TON ’S G LO B A LI S M

27 From Domestic Politician to Geopolitician 549 Opportunities and Frustrations in the Middle East 572

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Leaving Somalia and Leaving Rwanda Alone 580 30 Getting Tough with Saddam and Osama 585 Into Haiti and the Balkans: The Responsibility to Protect 590

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PART IX 33

THE F R EEDOM AGEN DA O F G E O R G E W. B U S H

32 Neoconservatives Seize the Day 609 9/11, the War on Terror, and a New Strategic Doctrine 34 From Containment to Forcible Regime Change: Afghanistan and Iraq 628 35 National Security and Civil Liberties 649

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PART X OBAMA’S UN IVER S A LI S M V E R S U S A STIL L-FRAGMEN TED W O R LD

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36 Engaging the World 659 37 Ending Two Wars 695 38 Counterterrorism and Human Rights 718 Ambivalence in Dealing with Upheavals in the Arab World 731 Epilogue

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Notes 771 Index 827

PREFACE

installment of my continuing effort to discover and analyze the basic assumptions held by the top U.S. policy makers since the end of World War II about the country’s international interests and purposes and about the power of the United States to protect and further them: What, in the eyes of these officials, has been at stake? How have they prioritized U.S. interests and assessed the threats and opportunities implicating those interests? And why have they— particularly these twelve presidents—taken (or avoided) certain actions that defined the course of U.S. foreign policy? The presidential-level concerns and decisions I have selected for analysis have all been defining moments for U.S. foreign policy. Although my exposition proceeds sequentially from the start of the Truman administration through the first two-thirds of the Obama administration, it does not purport to be a full history of this period’s foreign policy. Nor is it my objective to determine whether and when the decisions have been right or wrong—though occasionally I cannot resist the temptation to point out fundamental contradictions and distortions of reality, particularly when prevailing assessments of other powers’ intentions or capabilities were way off base. In coming to such judgments, I have been informed by the works of other scholars of the period—especially John Lewis Gaddis, Melvin Leffler,

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HIS BOOK IS THE LATEST

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Thomas Patterson, Robert Dallek, William Taubman, Walter LaFeber, and Marc Trachtenberg. My own research for this volume, however, as reflected in its interpretive narrative, has been directed mainly toward discovering the assumptions about the capabilities and intentions of other governments and significant political actors that have been in the minds of those who have guided the international relations of the United States as they chose or rejected certain courses of action—not whether these assumptions were correct or wrongheaded. The principal questions guiding my research and writing: As the highest U.S. officials made their foreign policy decisions, how weighty were geostrategic considerations as distinct from economic calculations? Were certain policies undertaken and others rejected because of moral considerations? To what extent did domestic politics—garnering congressional support, anticipating the next election, dealing with turf battles among agencies—affect the priority given to certain international interests over others? What about the emotional factors (concerns about appearing weak or strong; willingness to admit and correct mistakes; risk-taking propensities) that inevitably creep into even the supposed rational calculus and conduct of national security policy? And how can one know with any degree of confidence what the presidents and their key advisers were thinking when making moment-oftruth decisions? Memoirs, interviews, recorded telephone conversations, “Wikileaks” of official cables and e-mails, declassified memoranda of interagency meetings—all of these, along with the thick trail of public pronouncements and papers—are aids in the effort to “get into the heads” of the top policy makers. Admittedly, however, they are hardly conclusive as even the recollections of the responsible officials and their closest advisers are often self-serving reconstructions. A partial remedy is to make sure to at least read the memoirs of those who have been opponents on major issues. So this is, yes, an impressionistic interpretation. But it is offered by someone who has been professionally and closely attentive—as scholar, think-tank analyst, and participant in the policy process—to the pertinent official deliberations during a good part of the era covered by this narrative. My effort is at the same time modest and immodest. I offer no dramatic, previously secret revelations. Most of the public papers, memoirs, published interviews, and other primary sources, including a trove of now-declassified archival material—that I have explored can

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also be accessed by lay readers of this book. In addition, I rely on and cite authoritative works by other historians, political scientists, and journalists who have meticulously mined the relevant archives. My intended contribution is to connect the dots (or splotches) already out there, so to speak, to discover the underlying but sometimes unarticulated worldviews and philosophies of U.S. foreign policy that were held by the key decision makers and determined their major moves. In comparing my interpretive characterizations of the assumptions driving U.S. foreign policy across twelve presidencies with the narratives of scholars and journalists who have concentrated on particular administrations and who have assiduously probed the archival materials, I have been gratified to learn that most of my interpretations in previous editions are strongly supported by subsequent archival and declassified materials, and this has encouraged me to publish early interpretations of the foreign policies of recent and ongoing administrations even before much of the record is declassified and thoroughly analyzed by fellow researchers. For although some of this early analysis of what the president and other high officials had in mind is conjectural and can be prefaced by the phrase “it appears to me that,” I write convinced that it is important for the attentive public to engage in serious deliberation—before all the evidence is in—over the basic assumptions that seem to be underlying the country’s actions abroad and that addressing such assumptions will make for more informed debates and, hopefully, better policies. Those of us working in this field—historians, political scientists, serious journalists—know that even the previously confidential or secret statements by officials about the motives for their decisions are necessarily incomplete. Between the explanations by officials and their observed behavior there often remains a hazy area: the articulated premises do not lead inevitably to the actions taken, nor can one infer the premises backward from the particular actions. Some of the crucial considerations remain unarticulated, not necessarily out of an official design to hide them but just as much because actions by governments, like actions by individuals, are often the result of conditioned responses, of preprogramming, in which the actor “knows” what to do but is unable to summon to consciousness all of the reasons. Thus the search for the determinative policy assumptions cannot stop with public documents, archival materials, or directly elicited interview material. It must go behind the words and between the lines to seek out the most crucial premises—those that do in fact make the difference at forks

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in the road. The effort is not so much a science as it is an art, a collective art involving the sharing of information and insights among analysts and practitioners alike about the considerations prevailing at critical junctures. My informational and intellectual debts are therefore quite large. In addition to the standard primary sources in the public record and the published memoirs of policy officials, I have drawn on archival-based histories of the administrations under scrutiny and on various excellent “insider” accounts by Washington journalists. Much of my interpretation of these materials, however, is the product of informal and “off-the-record” exchanges over the years with a great number of individuals who have been involved in the policy process as policy makers or consultants to the responsible policy makers. Having stated my indebtedness to others in these general terms, I would like to be excused from specifically identifying here all those from whom I have obtained useful ideas and information in oral discussion. I have two main reasons (in addition to preserving the confidentiality of some of the exchanges): First, the acknowledgment ritual can too easily become an attempt to legitimate one’s claim to the truth by name-dropping. Second, acknowledgment lists are hazardous to friendships and cordial associations. Somebody is going to be left out, and no subsequent apologies will remove the suspicion that this was an invidious exclusion. The only way around this risk for a book like this, which is based on hundreds of interchanges, would be to include all the names in my old Rolodexes and the current contact list on my computer. (Perhaps I flatter myself that those excluded would care, but I do not wish to carry the burden of that anxiety.) I do, however, want to express special appreciation to the individuals who gave me invaluable help in the research and editing phases of putting together this updated version of the book: Sanjeev Kumar, a doctoral candidate in economics at Southern Methodist University, who became my mentor when it came to understanding the economic assumptions and controversies that affected the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and three very smart and resourceful research assistants— Lily Gebru, April Zinober, Ryan Swick—whose skill in using digital information resources largely compensated for my anachronistic search methods. A note on the expository form and style: Some of the policy deliberations and events are presented in greater detail than others. The detailed episodes are usually those around which there has been considerable controversy—among decision makers or policy analysts—over contending

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policy options and the reasons certain ones were finally selected. For the especially controversial actions (or decisions not to act), my narrative delves more extensively into the nuances of the various options being considered and the texture of the debates they generated at the highest levels. In many instances, the nuances and texture symptomatic of the underlying assumptions have been especially well captured in newspaper reports and interviews close in time to the unfolding events, and where this has been the case, I have retained my original rendering of the policy story rather than revise it retrospectively with more recent source material. The result—in places, journalistic-type accounts of who said what to whom; in other places, hermeneutic exegeses of presidential statements; in still other places, philosophical ruminations as to the implications for America’s role in the world—could pose an insurmountable challenge to a book editor. But not to my editor, Anne Routon and her staff at Columbia University Press and Ben Kolstad and his staff at Cenveo Publisher Services whose precise attunement to the purposes of my efforts provided me with just the kind of guidance I sought and needed. If and where the narrative flows, it is mainly the result of their felicitous channeling. Where it may bog down, my stubborn pedantry is the cause. Finally, I come to what some readers might think is the author’s pro forma acknowledgment of spousal support. Far from it. Those who have read Vanda Felbab-Brown’s own work or have had intellectual exchanges with her will know that my statement of professional indebtedness to her for keen critiques of both the structure and empirical substance of the analysis is hardly the stuff of marital obligation. It is rather the gratitude of one who has been privileged to have his insights sharpened and deepened by testing them out on an extraordinary mind.

FA CES O F P O W ER

INTRODUCTION Constancy and Change Since World War II Nixon and I wanted to found American foreign policy on a sober perception of permanent national interest. —Henry A. Kissinger

INCE THE COUNTRY’S FOUNDING, all U.S. foreign policy officials have been required, by oath of office and politically, to serve the threedimensional irreducible national interest: the physical survival and safety of the nation, its economic well-being, and the perpetuation of the American way of life—in the familiar words, “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” This obligation, enshrined in the nation’s laws and traditions of public service, which most high officials have striven to fulfill, has been the principal source of the constancy in U.S. foreign policy from Harry S. Truman to Barack H. Obama. Yet this obligation to serve the irreducible national interest leaves a great deal open. Its implementation varies with changing perceptions of international and domestic conditions and according to differing definitions of the country’s physical safety, economic well-being, and political liberty. Also, crises can occur that require prioritizing and making tradeoffs among safety, well-being, and liberty—at least temporarily. Presidents will be besieged in such situations by political advisers concerned about congressional reactions to and electoral consequences of the particular trade-offs being considered, and the resulting foreign policy decisions may not be fully consonant with, let alone derived from, the irreducible national interest.

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Nor do the foreign policy officials in noncrisis situations or periods of relative international quiescence necessarily make decisions with forethought and deliberation or systematically—that is, with objectifiable criteria and shared methodologies for assessing the conditions and evaluating the costs and benefits of alternative policies. Often policies are formulated and implemented intuitively (“by the seat of the pants”) or by default (where nondecisions allow programs already in place to keep running). Indeed, in the absence of crises that demand intense and focused attention at the presidential level, policy outcomes are often the product of lowerlevel bureaucratic politics (contests for ascendancy and funds among agencies with overlapping responsibilities) and congressional authorizations and appropriations responsive to interest-group pressures more than to informed deliberations about the national interest. The resulting pattern of constancy and change in U.S. foreign policy is briefly summarized below. Subsequent chapters provide a closer, administration-by-administration look at the principal policy choices, the debates surrounding these choices, and the assumptions on which the key decisions were based.

THE BASIC PATTERN United States foreign policy from Harry Truman to Barack Obama has comprised responses to two very different worlds: the world of the Cold War, perceived from Washington as essentially bipolar in its alignments and antagonisms, and the world since the Cold War, perceived as loosely multipolar-even as the Ukraine crisis of 2014 generated US-Russian tensions reminiscent of the Cold War. Although each of these basic configurations has been seen, sometimes quite differently, through the lenses of the successive administrations and by factions within each administration, the contrasts between the Cold War and post–Cold War period are profound enough to be regarded as different eras. Some policy makers and analysts also regard the period since September 11, 2001, or the period of upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East starting in the winter of 2010–11, as new eras. Whether seen as a new era or not, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the so-called Arab Awakening (or Arab Spring) spawned new divisions in the U.S. policy community over which threats and opportunities must be urgently tended to and the appropriate tools for doing so.

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THE COLD WAR IMPERATIVES Throughout most of the four decades following the defeat of Germany and Japan in World War II, U.S. officials considered the irreducible interest in all three of its dimensions (the country’s survival, its economic wellbeing, and its basic liberties) to be in jeopardy from the Soviet Union. The Soviet leaders were seen to be devotees of a way of life antithetical to the fundamental values of the American nation and bent on imposing their system on the world. But it was widely assumed that a major war to stop the Soviets would also place the irreducible national interest in jeopardy. Under eight presidents, these fears sustained the twin imperatives of containing Soviet expansion without starting World War III. This meant the highest priority was to be given to policies for (1) dissuading the Soviet Union from attempting to enlarge its territorial sphere of control, especially by military means or intimidation through military superiority, and (2) strengthening the ability of other countries to resist Soviet aggression and pressure. The major debates within the U.S. foreign policy community during the Cold War were rarely about these overriding objectives. Even before the end of World War II, a consensus coalesced within the Truman administration around the necessity of maintaining a balance of power vis-à-vis the Soviets that would dissuade them from expansionist moves. But, as will be elucidated throughout this narrative, there were substantial differences among and within the administrations over the definition of “power” and its ingredients and thus also over the appropriate “balance” of power in any situation. These differences were central to many of the foreign policy issues that preoccupied the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations—issues concerning t
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attempt to affect internal developments within other countries, particularly developments that might result in Marxist governments.

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My exposition of the constancy and change in U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War era (from Truman to Reagan) is largely the story of the debates over these issues between the administrations and their critics, and among factions within the administrations, and how they were resolved at the presidential level. A marked discontinuity in the story appeared early in the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush with the demise of the Cold War. No longer did the irreducible national interest demand that primary and continuing attention be given to countering Soviet expansion while preventing World War III. Without this objective providing a lodestar for navigating international waters, U.S. officials seemed to be suddenly disoriented. And they found themselves buffeted by strange and turbulent currents not on their navigational charts.

THE POST–COLD WAR PROBLEM OF ESTABLISHING PRIORITIES With the end of the Cold War, the connections between particular international developments and the irreducible national interest—never that easy to pin down—became more elusive than ever. Without an identifiable primary threat to the country’s security and well-being, the question of which developments abroad were important enough for the U.S. government to attempt to influence became a major issue in itself. Pundits called for a new “vision” or “grand strategy” for U.S. foreign policy in the post–Cold War era to create generally understood criteria for establishing priorities among international undertakings, particularly those competing for scarce resources. It again became politically popular— more so than at any time since the start of World War II—to argue that U.S. foreign policy henceforth should be constrained by a strict definition of national self-interest. The strict definition would thrust the burden of advocacy, case by case, onto those who would have the country devote resources to furthering the security or well-being of other nations, let alone of humankind as a whole. The Gulf War to reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, justified by President George H. W. Bush as necessary for the “new world order” of revived respect for national borders, was an anomaly. The disorder of disintegrating states like the former Yugoslavia (previously held together by the communist dictator Tito) and failed or failing states (mainly in postcolonial

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Africa) was not deemed a sufficient threat to vital U.S. interests. “We don’t have a dog in that fight,” Secretary of State James A. Baker is reported to have argued, defending the reluctance of the United States to intervene to stop the ethnic cleansing (a euphemism for genocide) in the Balkans. But departing from his supposed “realist” stance, President Bush, late in his White House tenure, did deploy a supposedly temporary emergency force of 28,000 troops to Somalia solely for the purpose of ensuring that UN humanitarian relief convoys could pass through roads blocked by feuding warlords. The uncompleted mission, under the aegis of the Clinton administration, was expanded to include broader and more complicated peacemaking functions. However, when U.S. forces began to suffer casualties, President Clinton pulled them out. While wary of putting U.S. troops in harm’s way, the Clinton administration’s globalist foreign policy was all over the place. A vaguely formulated universalistic doctrine called “enlargement” justified a vigorous push to globalize the free market. National security strategy documents issued over the president’s signature claimed the right, if not the duty, to intervene around the world to protect people against human rights abuses by governments. Friends on one issue would be adversaries on another issue. Alliances would be fickle, yet NATO was enlarged, weakening it as a security institution but reviving Russian fears of encirclement. Multilateralism and support for the United Nations was proclaimed; however, after the pacification fiasco in Somalia, the United States instituted strict conditions on its participation in future multilateral peacekeeping operations. Ad hoc justifications more than principle produced military action to stanch ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo and a decision not to intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda. Even the Clinton administration’s vigorous military response to Saddam Hussein’s expulsion of the UN’s WMD inspectorate was a one-off reaction, not a démarche derived from a grand strategy on WMD proliferation.

9/11 AND THE PRIMACY OF THE WAR ON TERROR Then came the shock of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the Twin Towers in Manhattan and on the Pentagon. More than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, there was a felt need at the highest levels to put first things first—to prioritize U.S. interests and to derive particular policies from them. The country was under direct attack. This

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was war: a “war on terror.” While some critics objected to that formulation, arguing that the terrorists were criminals and should be countered with beefed-up police action, President George W. Bush insisted on subordinating just about everything to fighting what he never stopped calling a “war on terror”—a war that justified militarily invading two countries, neither of which had militarily attacked the United States. And as his definition of the prime objective of his foreign policy morphed into the Freedom Agenda for opposing tyranny around the world, still it was the quest for allies in the war on terror that dictated who would be friends or enemies and who would receive the bulk of U.S. economic and security assistance. Finding it necessary to subordinate the Freedom Agenda to the shortterm necessities of counterterrorism, the Bush administration attempted to assemble various “coalitions of the willing,” often containing some quite autocratic bedfellows, to maintain advantageous balances of power— regional and global—against al-Qaeda and other radical jihadist movements. This adaptation of the Freedom Agenda to presumed geopolitical realities was openly admitted in the last three years of the Bush administration and was particularly evident in the U.S.–Middle Eastern partnerships with the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, and Jordan. The Obama administration, also committed to the global spread of democracy and human rights, inherited the complex international webs of counterterrorist partnerships with various unsavory regimes. Although initially motivated to move U.S. policy away from the war on terror preoccupation and determined to give new emphasis to arresting the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the problem of global warming, and the alleviation of poverty around the world, Obama found that the threat of terrorist attacks was very much alive and that effective counterterrorism continued to require partnerships with autocratic governments with poor human rights records. Yet the partnerships constructed for prosecuting the war on terror were very different from the basic partnerships constructed for prosecuting the Cold War. During the Cold War, allies were expected to follow the U.S. lead across a wide range of issues, especially those related to countering the power of the Soviet-led coalition. By the fall of 2001, the pattern of world politics, no longer essentially bipolar, had become polyarchic in that, typically, one’s friend on one set of issues might well be one’s adversary on other issues. Even a traditionally loyal NATO partner, Germany, for example, might well pursue quite different strategies from the United States toward key countries in the Middle East. If the United States were

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to insist on across-the-board loyalty on all issues, it would have hardly any allies at all, even for the war on terror. Accordingly, George W. Bush’s early post-9/11 stance—either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists—soon gave way to a more pragmatic accommodation to the emergent polyarchic diversity, despite the uncompromising rhetoric of his Freedom Agenda. The next president, Barack Obama, made the more flexible approach the centerpiece of his foreign policy and gave it a name: engagement.

REALISM AND THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT Some of the variations in U.S. foreign policy since World War II have been a function of changing views in Washington about the extent to which, and how, the country should be committed to promoting democracy, human rights, and well-being around the world. The extremes on this issue are represented by the realpolitik notion that morality and altruism have no place in international relations and by the contrary conviction that it is the divinely given mission of the United States of America to root out evil in the world. For the most part, however, the dominant views among influential policy makers have fluctuated across a range considerably short of these extremes. The greatest controversies surround policies of moral intent whose likely consequences for the irreducible national interest are highly ambiguous or unpredictable. And altruistic policies have been rejected in cases in which it was evident their costs or effects would seriously undermine the ability of the United States to secure the safety and well-being of its own people. Policies for protecting peoples in other countries against repression or for advancing their economic well-being have generally commanded widespread support when they reinforced policies for securing the irreducible national self-interest of the United States. The country’s foreign policy leadership feels most secure with the electorate when it can satisfy the popular view of the United States as a country doing good for others while doing good for itself. Thus, officials of the Truman administration championed the United Nations, the Truman Doctrine, the European Recovery Program, and aid to the Third World as being consistent with American idealism as well as self-interest. John Foster Dulles preached anticommunism as a universal moral imperative. President Kennedy, unsentimental realist he is supposed to have been, proposed that the United States

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provide help for the world’s poor and repressed peoples, “not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” Jimmy Carter claimed that his administration’s commitment to human rights was a beacon of light and rallying inspiration for all those seeking dignity. Ronald Reagan eloquently embraced the goal of making all countries safe for liberty—both political and economic—for their own good. George Herbert Walker Bush claimed to be using force in the Persian Gulf on behalf of a “new world order” wherein weak states would be protected against military attack from bullying neighbors. Bill Clinton justified his vigorous economic globalization on the grounds it would enlarge the prospect of market democracies coming into being around the world. George W. Bush, although initially launching Operation Iraqi Freedom to prevent Iraq from developing a WMD arsenal, changed the rationale (once the WMD threat evaporated) to one of removing the tyrant Saddam Hussein and making Iraq an exemplar of democracy in the Arab Middle East. Barack Obama, while regarding peaceful “engagement” with foes as well as friends as the hallmark of realist statecraft, found it at times morally imperative to insist that dictators who brutally repressed their people— Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Bashar al-Assad in Syria—be removed from power. Policies to implement such intentions to do good, however—unless also part and parcel of a strategic rationale—have often been scrapped or postponed when their pursuit appeared to require a costly sacrifice of the country’s blood and treasure in war or to otherwise take away from the capacity of the United States to tend to its own security and material wellbeing. This realist constraint on idealist impulses has operated at a number of crucial junctures. t
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of the Hungarians who, believing Secretary Dulles’s earlier “liberation” rhetoric, were dying on the streets of Budapest to assert their independence from the Soviet empire t
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“development decade” frugally prioritized their congressional foreign

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aid requests on the basis of the Cold War strategic significance of recipient countries t
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a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy collapsed in the face of the perceived need to shore up the tyrannical shah of Iran as a regional bulwark against Soviet expansion t
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courtship of communist China by Nixon, Ford, and Carter was immoral) established a close political-military liaison with Beijing for the same reason that animated his predecessors: to counter Soviet power t
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Kuwait, called a halt to the Gulf War, leaving Iraq to continue to balance the power of Iran and leaving it to the Iraqi people to decide the fate of (actually, to be at the mercy of) Saddam Hussein t
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U.S. society to a flood of poor immigrants in a period of high unemployment, reneged on his campaign pledge to reverse the Bush policy of interdicting Haitian refugees on the high seas and returning them to the political repression and economic destitution from which they were escaping t
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for the democracy movements in the Middle East to strategic alliance considerations, failed to condemn Saudi Arabia’s deployment of troops to Bahrain to help King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa put down opposition protests These and other pragmatic compromises of U.S. moral commitments are symptomatic of the lack of a clear basis for choosing whether, when, and how U.S. policy should attempt to further the interests of others. At the presidential level, a multitude of interests and competing values complicate efforts to assess the material costs and benefits or moral worth of policy, let alone the trade-offs between geopolitics and ethics: Should the United States support national self-determination, including political secession, for ethnic groups that feel repressed within larger multiethnic states?

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Should human rights criteria affect the granting of trading privileges in the U.S. market and the extension of credits? Should the United States, on grounds of the well-being of others, tax its own people to fund sustainable development policies around the world? Should U.S. armed forces be put in harm’s way as a part of humanitarian conflict-control operations in countries with no direct or major significance for U.S. security? How much of a sacrifice in U.S. jobs should be incurred in the short run in the service of the longer-term goal of an open global market? If these issues could not be resolved by appeal to bedrock national interests, neither could they be resolved by appeal to the high ground of moral obligation—the Freedom Agenda of the neoconservatives in the administration of George W. Bush; the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine of human rights champions in the administration of Barack Obama. The current complexities of world politics preclude any such neat and obvious answers.

THE MANY FACES OF POWER The narrative of constancy and change in U.S. foreign policy from Truman to Obama is not primarily a story of debates over which national interests and values should be given priority. It is more a story of disagreements over the means—the power needed and how to apply it—to achieve the purposes of the country’s foreign policy. At times national power has been regarded almost exclusively in physical terms—the ultimate measure being the potential to inflict or defend against destruction in war. This view held sway in Washington more often during the early days of the Cold War, when foreign policy and defense officials gave highest priority to maintaining an advantageous military balance of power against the Soviet Union, than during the periods of détente and the end of the Cold War. The basic movement from the Cold War foreign policies to post–Cold War foreign policies can be seen in the morphing of the essentially monotonic concept of international power into a multifaceted view. By the early twenty-first century, the discourse on grand strategy was pervaded by efforts to distinguish between “hard power” (coercion with military force and/or economic sanctions) and “soft power” (noncoercive persuasion via the attractiveness of one’s character or values and/or ideas advanced in peaceful bargaining). And by the time of the Obama

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administration, the mark of an official’s or analyst’s sophistication on matters of foreign policy was the ability to discourse on “smart power”—the appropriate and effective mix, situation by situation, of soft and hard power as needed. This evolving appreciation of the multifaceted nature of power in world affairs has been reflected in the adaptation of U.S. foreign policy—by fits and starts and periodic retrogressions—to transformative developments in world politics: the supplanting of the bipolar Cold War system by a polyarchic system of multiple and crosscutting coalitions formed around a variety of issues, the diversification of friendships and adversarial relationships, the increasing role of nonstate actors, and the rise of nonsecurity issues to the top of diplomatic agendas. As these trends matured, U.S. policy makers saw that the properties of power itself were changing. The United States would gain the most influence by participating in the expanding variety of coalitions, partnerships, and multilateral institutions. Washington would gain thereby a large supply of usable political currency—in effect, promissory notes that said: “We will support you on this issue, if you support us on that issue.” Conversely, threats to withdraw support would serve as negative sanctions. Power in the form of promises to apply or withhold coercive measures (especially military force)—the dominant form of power during the Cold War—would still be of ultimate decisive importance in conflicts over vital security interests. But military power would be of declining use compared with other forms of power and sometimes even would have a negative effect in bargaining over the nonsecurity issues around which coalitions were forming and re-forming. For the threat to apply, military power could carry a high risk of devaluing other bargaining chips and could alienate the involved societies from one another, causing them to dismantle their cooperative projects and withdraw from coalition partnerships in virtually all fields. Pairs of countries with few interlocking relationships to start with (as was the case with East-West relations during the period of 1947 to 1967) could afford to be indifferent to such a falling-out between them. But active participants in the evolving international system, with its elaborately overlapping interests and coalitions, were significantly constrained from escalating to threats of war by the knowledge that their opponents in one field were often their supporters in another. If coercive bargaining strategies did have to be resorted to in the evolving system, prudent statespersons would be likely to conserve their overall store of influence by offering, withholding, and withdrawing assets well

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below the level of military force and avoiding the development of total nation-to-nation or coalition-to-coalition hostility. Rarely should a specific dispute warrant the costs in loss of influence that would accompany the escalation to war threats, the mobilization of military alliances, or the repolarization of the international system. Even during the Reagan administration’s efforts to revive Cold War bipolarity, increasing numbers of top U.S. policy makers, including President Reagan himself (having found a symbiotic partner in the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev), came to understand the new requisites for cultivating and effectively using the revised modalities of power. Accordingly, from the mid-1980s until September 11, 2001, the United States played down the use of force as an omnipresent adjunct to diplomacy. But this trend away from militarized diplomacy did not preclude the maintenance of the minimal military forces necessary to convince Russia, China, or any other potential adversary (sometimes called “peer competitor”) that it would be futile to resolve their disputes with the United States by force. And the growing appreciation of the multifaceted nature of power did not prevent the United States, under George H. W. Bush, from invading Panama to depose the dictator and drug runner Manuel Noriega or from going to war to throw Saddam’s forces out of Kuwait. Nor did it dissuade President Clinton from threatening military action to force Haiti’s military dictator to abdicate and give way to a democratic process or from ordering the U.S. Air Force to bomb Serbia in response to Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo and to bomb military targets in Iraq in response to Saddam’s violations of the post–Gulf War accords. Even so, the last fifteen years of the twentieth century did feature at least a substantial demilitarization of the vocabulary of power that had characterized U.S. foreign policy pronouncements since World War II. The dramatic reemphasis on the military face of power followed 9/11 in the regime-change invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the alleged neglect of other aspects of U.S. power became a central theme in the criticisms of the Bush foreign policy by Senator Barack Obama and others seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency. But throughout his tenure in the Oval Office Obama would find his inbox congested with issues requiring that he exercise his responsibilities as military commanderin-chief: the ragged exit of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan; the continuing defiance of North Korea and Iran concerning nuclear nonproliferation objectives; the persistence of terrorist threats by jihadists around the world; the brutal use of force by Muammar Gaddafi against Libyan

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rebels; Bashar al-Assad’s massacre of more than 100,000 Syrian civilians (his army using chemical weapons in some its attacks); Beijing’s coercive assertion of its claims in the Asian maritime disputes; Vladimir Putin’s bullying of Ukraine; and then the unanticipated explosive expansion of the brutal Islamic state movement—challenging Obama’s determination to reduce the role of the military components of power in international politics. Making sure that the international distribution of power was not adverse to U.S. interests was still a priority of the country’s top most foreign policy officials. In this there has been constancy from Truman to Obama. The change has been in the growing appreciation, development, and use of the multifaceted aspects of power required to deal with the increasing diffusion in the world polity.

PA R T

I THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION Do not be deceived by the strong face, the look of monolithic power that the Communist dictators wear before the outside world. Remember that their power has no basis in consent. —Harry S. Truman

The course we have chosen . . . involves building military strength, but it requires no less the buttressing of all other forms of power—economic, political, social, and moral. —Dean Acheson

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THE SHATTERING OF EXPECTATIONS Force is the only thing the Russians understand. —Harry S. Truman

the end of World War II, even before nuclear weapons were used against Japan, stood in awe of the terrible physical power humankind had developed. They had little confidence, however, in the capacity of nations still existing in a basically anarchic interstate system to exercise the self-control required to channel their tremendous power into constructive purposes. Throughout the government there was wide consensus that the survival of civilization required the strengthening of international institutions and also the eventual reduction of the amount of destructive power in the hands of individual nations. Yet this would require the kind of statesmanship that in the past had run afoul of strong American attachments to the values of selfreliance and national sovereignty. Thus, remembering the fate of Woodrow Wilson’s sponsorship of the League of Nations, U.S. delegations to the founding conferences for the United Nations were carefully selected on a bipartisan basis to ensure that influential Republicans as well as Democrats would have a stake in the development of the world organization. But in a more geopolitically oriented posture than Wilson’s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt regarded the wartime cooperation of the United States and Britain with the Soviet Union against the Axis powers as the embryo from which postwar patterns and organs of international

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cooperation would have to evolve. The premise of continued U.S.-Soviet cooperation had two faces: its internal, government aspect, where it was viewed as a necessary condition for managing the postwar world; and its public aspect, where the premise was viewed as a prediction that the presumed harmony would last. Characteristically, upon returning from his February 1945 conference in Yalta with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, FDR in his speech to a joint session of Congress sounded remarkably like Wilson, proclaiming that the structure of peace being built “ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.”1 The popular myth that Harry S. Truman, upon assuming the presidency on April 12, 1945, at the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, inherited a set of idealistic beliefs from the Roosevelt administration about SovietAmerican postwar cooperation is not borne out by historical research. Rather, FDR, in negotiating with Generalissimo Stalin at the Big Three wartime meetings in Tehran and Yalta, operated from premises very similar to the realpolitik notions of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Despite differences in style and nuance between the Briton and the American, both viewed Stalin as interested primarily in the security of the Soviet Union but also in exploiting opportunities for an expansion of Soviet control in the direction of the Mediterranean and the Near East. Both Western statesmen sought to relieve Stalin’s paranoid fears—of wartime Anglo-American collusion to weaken Russia and of postwar capitalist encirclement—by granting the Soviet Union a sphere of predominant influence in Eastern Europe and special awards in the Far East (including the Kurile Islands and lower Sakhalin from Japan, an “independent” outer Mongolia, and partial control or leases of key railway networks and ports in northeast China). In return, Stalin was supposed to accept British and American spheres of predominant influence outside these areas. The basic bargain having been struck, the Big Three could then manage other conflicts over secondary issues through consultation, since none of their vital security interests would be threatened. The new UN organization, with its veto procedures in the Security Council, was designed to work on the basis of this essential East-West modus vivendi. At his Big Three meeting with Stalin and top British statesmen at Potsdam in the summer of 1945, Truman did little more than endorse this basic realpolitik deal worked our earlier with Stalin by FDR and Churchill.2 But there was soon to be a major shift away from the Churchill/Roosevelt

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spheres-of-influence approach and toward what became known as “containment.” This took place at the top levels of the Truman administration a good year before being revealed to the public in the Truman Doctrine in 1947. Yet during the first two postwar years the general public got its ideas on the administration’s assumptions about international relations from the official rhetoric, which for the most part conveyed a set of more optimistic expectations: 1. That important international disputes would be settled by reasoned debate leading to an expression of majority will through the United Nations 2. That in important international disputes the Big Five (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China) usually would find themselves on the same side—the veto thus being an exceptional rather than a frequently used device 3. That any required sanctions against international lawbreakers would be organized by this international community The actual premise of East-West tension as well as the shift away from FDR’s view that “we can, and must, do business with Uncle Joe” to Truman’s more pessimistic perspective of 1946 that “force is the only thing the Russians understand” was kept from the public. In less than a year as president, however, Truman had come to believe the Soviets would expand as far as they could, were highly motivated to dominate the world, and would aggressively exploit all opportunities to enlarge their sphere of control unless effective countervailing power was organized to stop them. Yet before 1947, Truman felt that a candid presentation to the public of the internal government perception of the Soviet drive for power ascendency might shock the country into total abandonment of the laborious effort to build up international institutions. This would be tragic, since such institutions, if strengthened by support of most of the peoples of the globe, were truly regarded as the best long-term hope for peace. Yet without such candor, the public and their representatives in the Congress would probably not approve the stopgap military and economic measures that might be necessary to induce the Soviets to keep their end of the postwar bargain to become constructive participants in the building of a world order acceptable to a majority of nations. The effort by Truman’s subordinates to reconcile the president’s fear of shattering public expectations with his belief that standing up to the

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Russians now might be a precondition for the eventual realization of these expectations is the central story of the Truman administration’s early gropings toward a coherent foreign policy.3 Truman recalls that during the first weeks of his presidency he gave much weight to the analysis of Soviet policies conveyed to him by Averell Harriman, at that time the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Harriman was urging a reconsideration of our policy toward the Soviet Union, fearing that to some extent the existing policy might be the product of illusions that the Soviets shared our commitment to an international order based on peaceful national self-determination. As recounted in Truman’s Memoirs, the gist of the Harriman analysis as of April 1945 was that Stalin was misinterpreting our generosity and our desire to cooperate as a signal that the United States would do nothing to prevent the extension of Soviet control over its neighbors. The Soviets, reported Harriman, had no wish to break with the United States, because they needed our aid for their program of postwar reconstruction, but Stalin would not hesitate to push his political frontiers westward if he felt he could do so without serious political challenge. We had to disabuse Stalin of his illusion of American softness, counseled Harriman. We could be firm with the Soviets without running serious risks because they could not afford to alienate a critical source of aid.4 Truman claims to have bought this evaluation and was disposed to follow Harriman’s advice that the way to exert a positive influence on Soviet policy was to be tough with them on specific postwar issues as they arose. The assumption was, as Truman put it, “anyway the Russians needed us more than we needed them.”5 The Soviets, because of their economic needs, had more to lose than to gain by the collapse of amicability between the great powers. We wished to preserve an atmosphere of United States– Soviet cooperation because this was the key to an effective universal collective security system, which in turn, it was hoped, would induce more responsible Soviet behavior. It was not yet considered necessary or desirable to be able to force a general showdown with the Soviet Union over any specific issue by pointing explicitly or implicitly to the military power at our disposal. When Truman had his first high-level “confrontation” with the Soviet diplomats Vyacheslav Molotov and Andrei Gromyko at the White House on April 23, 1945, and used language that, according to Admiral William Leahy, was “blunt” and “not at all diplomatic,” he was evidently still leading from a perceived position of economic leverage. In his Memoirs, the

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president recalls the Soviet foreign minister responding, “I have never been talked to like that in my life,” to which Truman shot back: “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.”6

THE BOMB The day after Truman’s confrontation with Molotov, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote an urgent note to the president, requesting “a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter. . . . It . . . has such a bearing on our present foreign relations . . . that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.” The secretary of war met with the president on April 25 and told him of the nuclear development program and that in four months a completed weapon would be ready. The discussion with Stimson, reports Truman, centered on the effect the atomic bomb might likely have on our future foreign relations.7 The bomb was henceforth to be very much a part of Truman’s overall calculus of the international balance of power, for ending the war with Japan, and for bargaining with the Soviets over postwar arrangements. If the bomb could bring about the surrender of Japan quickly, the lives of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers would not have to be risked in the invasion planned for the fall. It is not clear from memoirs and the archival records whether the president shared the belief of Secretary of State James Byrnes and other advisers that using it in early August might preempt the promised entry of the Soviets into the war and thus obviate the need to share the occupation of the Japan with them, avoiding the complications that were emerging in Germany.8 The historical evidence does show, however, that various of Truman’s advisers felt that the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might not have been necessary to get Japan to surrender before the planned costly invasion of its home islands. The popular version of Truman’s moment-of-truth dilemma and choice—either I put some one million U.S. soldiers directly in harm’s way on Japan’s beaches or I use the superweapon against Japan’s cities—turns out to be a gross simplification. So is his own memoir recollection: “Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.”9 First, the president was apprised of the intelligence findings in midsummer 1945 that, militarily, Japan was approaching the brink of complete

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collapse. The Joint Intelligence Committee of the Combined Chief of Staff reported that “effective air attacks can be directed against all important areas under Japanese control.” Also, the Home Islands were being basically strangled—blockaded at sea by U.S. mining, submarine, and aerial activities against both sea traffic and seaborne communications. “On the continent the Japanese are now forced to depend upon inadequate and vulnerable land communications.”10 Truman was also receiving reports based on MAGIC intercepts of Japanese coded messages that the Japanese high command, fearing the impending Russian entry into the war, was seriously contemplating suing for peace. Thus, the purpose of using the atomic bomb (in addition to continuing the devastating incendiary bombing of Tokyo and other population centers) was mainly psychological and political: to shock Japan’s government into complete capitulation, no deals—only the “unconditional surrender” of Japan, which had been proclaimed repeatedly as the U.S war aim. Second, Secretary of War Stimson, along with other officials in the administration, tried to persuade the president to modify the unconditional surrender demand so as to let Japan keep its emperor. There was a severe split over this issue at the highest levels of the Truman administration, with Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes adamantly opposed to Stimson’s effort, plus division within the departments themselves as well as among the military. The argument came to a head and compelled Truman to take sides over the effort to get such a provision inserted into the proclamation demanding Japan’s immediate surrender, which was to be issued at the forthcoming summit meeting in Potsdam. The proponents of permitting the emperor to stay on, at least as spiritual head of the nation, claimed that without such an allowance, Japan’s military, and even its ordinary citizenry, would fight on fanatically to their deaths, but if Japan could retain the emperor, an early pre-invasion surrender would not be as humiliating to the regime in Tokyo or to the people. Moreover, if it was their emperor who called on the military to stop fighting, the nation as a whole would be much more willing to accept its defeat and cooperate with the American occupation regime. But Secretary of State Byrnes and other proponents of unconditional surrender prevailed with the president on the grounds that the American people would not take kindly to any reneging on the promise to totally smash and forever remove the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor from power and that any backing off from the unconditional surrender demand would signal to Japan that America’s will to fight was weakening.11

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So the joint declaration issued at Potsdam on July 26 provided no exception for the emperor at all in its demand that “there must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest.” The document was explicit that nothing less than such an “unconditional surrender” (the term was retained in the document) was acceptable. “The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”12 Third, Truman’s posthumously published diary, as distinct from his memoir, reveals that what he was about to order did bother him. There is an entry on July 25 (the day before the Potsdam Declaration and his issuance of the military order to proceed with the plan to use the bomb on Japan) that even his admiring biographer David McCullough finds puzzling. “The most terrible weapon in the history of the world,” wrote Truman “is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” 13 Could it be that the president was not clued in to the basis on which Hiroshima was selected as the first target city by the Interim Committee (which was charged to develop the target list)—namely, that it contained “a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by worker’s houses”?14 Besides, if it was such a “terrible” weapon, simply the fact that it was to be dropped on cities would mean that many women and children would be killed. The reality of what he had authorized evidently did produce a shock of recognition after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. Having been informed of the success of the Nagasaki operation, Truman gave orders to stop further atomic bombing. According to Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace, “He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible, he didn’t like the idea of killing as he said ‘all those kids.’ ”15 Diplomacy now took over. By August 14, Japan and the United States converged on the terms of surrender. The sequence bears recounting. On August 6 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8, and its military forces moved across the Manchurian border on August 9, shortly before Nagasaki was bombed. On August 10 the Japanese government offered to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration but “with the understanding that the said Declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler.” Hours of intense debate in

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front of Truman produced the U.S. response of August 11 to which the Japanese authorities finally conceded: From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms.16

Ironically, despite the triumphant rhetoric coming from Washington, it was ultimately a conditional surrender, with the condition being the status of the emperor. But Truman continued to insist throughout the rest of his life that it was the use of the atomic bomb that brought the war against Japan rapidly to an end in August 1945, thereby saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers.

STANDING UP TO STALIN Certainly the bomb had changed the global balance of power. Truman now was confident that if it became necessary to lay all of his cards on the table in a confrontation with Stalin, he could soon do so from a unique position of strength. But the president was evidently unwilling at this stage— although recent scholarship shows he was pressured hard to do so—to make the bomb a visible and immediate part of his bargaining hand in diplomatic negotiations. At Potsdam in July he could have done so (having received news of the successful Alamogordo test while the conference was in session), but he still chose to rely on the Harriman strategy of catering to the expected Soviet hunger for economic assistance. Soon after Potsdam, however, the president joined those in his administration who believed that a U.S. diplomatic stance characterized mainly by firm verbal expressions of disapproval and implications of shutting off economic help would not be sufficient to reduce Stalin’s apparent appetite for expansion. “I’m tired of babying the Soviets,” Truman told Secretary of State Byrnes in January 1946. The past nine months had been filled with what the president saw as a series of Soviet power plays. The Soviet Union’s failure to implement the Yalta provisions for free elections in Eastern Europe was only part of the story that Truman now recounted to Byrnes with evident exasperation: the actual disposition of Soviet military forces, sheer physical control, was

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the critical factor in subsequent negotiations over the future of Europe. Under the circumstances, confessed the president, we were “almost forced” to agree at Potsdam to Russian occupation of eastern Poland and the compensatory occupation by Poland of German territory east of the Oder river. “It was a high-handed outrage.” The situation in Iran was another case in point—Iran of all places! The friendship of Iran had been critical for the Soviet Union’s survival in the war; the United States had conducted a major supply operation to the USSR through Iran. Without these supplies furnished by the United States, maintained Truman, the Soviets would have been shamefully defeated. Yet now the Kremlin was stirring up rebellion and keeping troops on the soil of Iran. Evidently, the original Harriman analysis that the Soviets would respond positively to our blunt talk was inadequate. Stalin, according to Truman’s personal reading of events, obviously placed a higher value on expanding the Soviet sphere of control than on maintaining good relations with the United States. The threat of decisive action had to be added to the blunt talk: “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making,” concluded the president. “Only one language do they understand—‘how many divisions have you?’ I do not think we should play compromise any longer.”17 These developing perceptions of Soviet aims were very much a part of the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal report to the president on the international control of atomic energy, which became, in effect, the plan presented to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission by Bernard Baruch in June. In contrast to the Soviet plan, which put destruction of existing weapons stockpiles before inspection and controls, the United States plan demanded prior establishment of a comprehensive international inspection and control apparatus with access to and authority over all relevant national facilities, including plants where raw materials could be converted into fissionable materials. Moreover, the veto was not to apply to the operations of the international control authority. Truman’s instructions to Baruch unambiguously outlined the considerations that were to be kept paramount: It was in our interest to maintain our present advantage, thus, we should attempt to gain a system of reliable international control that would effectively prevent the Soviets from proceeding with their own atomic weapons development program. And under no circumstances should we “throw away our gun” until we were sure others could not arm against us.18 While President Truman and a few of his official intimates had an early perception of the dominant means by which the emerging political

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conflict with the Soviet Union would be waged, they were not ready in late 1945 and 1946 to make it the explicit central premise of our foreign policy. To do so would have required a major reversal of the rapid postwar military demobilization already in full gear. It would have shattered the public’s expectations, reflected in the congressional agenda, that the most urgent business before the nation was to convert to a peacetime economy. James Forrestal’s notes of a combined State-War-Navy meeting of October 16, 1945, recount that “it was agreed by all present that . . . it was most inadvisable for this country to continue accelerating the demobilization of our Armed Forces at the present rate.” The secretary of war contended the situation was of such gravity that “the President ought to acquaint the people with the details of our dealing with the Russians and with the attitude which the Russians have manifested throughout.”19 Appeals to the president for governmental candor with the people about the international situation were made during the next few months by Secretary Forrestal, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and other members of the cabinet.20 But Truman apparently needed more than individual instances of Soviet belligerence in order to go before the American people and tell them, brutally, that their fondest hopes for returning to the pursuit of happiness were based on false premises. Even as the increasing newspaper reports of Soviet totalitarianism at home and expansion abroad became a part of the public consciousness, Truman’s public posture toward Soviet belligerence continued to stress the mobilization of “world opinion” to back up the principles of the United Nations Charter—issue by issue, situation by situation. Governmental conceptions of the emerging struggle with the Soviet Union are supposed to have been given new cohesion and direction in February 1946, however, by George Kennan’s eight-thousand-word cable from Moscow, where he was deputy chief of mission in the U.S. embassy. The essentials of the Kremlin’s grand design, the motives (rational and irrational) behind its imperialistic policies, and the meaning of its style of diplomacy were analyzed in historical and psychological depth and with great cogency (see the end of this chapter for a fuller account of Kennan’s analysis). Here was the authoritative and coherent analysis of the Soviet threat that many within the administration, particularly Forrestal, were seeking. But there is no evidence that this early report from Kennan contained, either explicitly or by logical implication, the concrete policy prescriptions Forrestal wanted the president to champion.

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Kennan did urge, like Forrestal and his colleagues, the importance of having the public “educated to the realities of the Russian situation.” And he discounted any uncontrollable deterioration of Soviet-American relations that might result from such a campaign. Yet he saw no urgency for paying particular attention to the military components of power. “Gauged against the Western world as a whole,” observed Kennan, “the Soviets are still [this was early in 1946] by far the weaker force. Thus their success will really depend upon the degree of cohesion, firmness, and vigor which the Western world can muster.”21 But Truman was fully aware of the military implications Forrestal and others in the administration were drawing from Kennan’s analysis of Soviet intentions and capabilities—implications starkly presented to him in September 1946 in a special highly classified report titled “American Relations with the Soviet Union,” prepared by White House Counsel Clark Clifford and his assistant George Elsey. “It must be made apparent to the Soviet Government,” Clifford concluded, synthesizing the views of scores of high-level officials he interviewed, “that our strength will be sufficient to repel any attack and sufficient to defeat the USSR decisively if a war should occur.” And this meant the United States had to be “prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare.”22 Truman, wary of the Kremlin’s reactions if the Soviets got hold of the Clifford-Elsey report, ordered all copies to be locked away.23 Also, if Truman’s Memoirs are accurate, he personally, as early as the winter of 1945–46, saw the Russian pressures on Iran and Turkey as a dire threat to the global balance of power. Russia’s failure to withdraw its armies from Iran stemmed from its central geopolitical interests in Iranian oil and control of the Black Sea straits. Russian possession of Iranian oil, the president was convinced, would seriously alter the world’s raw material balance and would be a blow to the economy of Western Europe. But the power play in Iran was also directly related to the demands the Soviets had been making on Turkey for special privileges and territorial concessions. Turkey had been resisting these demands but would be in a much weaker position to resist if outflanked in the east by Russian armies or a Russian puppet state.24 Truman saw Soviet geopolitical ambitions revealed starkly in the Kremlin’s proposal to put the Black Sea straits under joint Turkish-Soviet control. Recalling his own studies of Middle Eastern history, the president recognized in the present communist thrust a continuation of czarist Russian attempts to gain control of the strategic exits to the Mediterranean

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Sea. If the Soviets were to succeed now, he deduced, it would only be a question of time before Greece and the whole Near and Middle East fell to them.25 “There isn’t a doubt in my mind,” he wrote less than a year after the close of the Second World War, “that Russia intends an invasion of Turkey and seizure of the Black Sea Straits to the Mediterranean.”26 Moreover, Truman did begin to “show the flag” in 1946 in his dealings with the Russians on Middle Eastern issues. The battleship Missouri was sent to Istanbul to demonstrate support for Turkey’s refusal to accede to Soviet demands for joint control over the straits. And he sent Stalin a secret ultimatum on the issue of Soviet troops in Iran, informing him that the United States would send troops in if the Russians did not get out and that he had ordered preparations for the movement of American ground, sea, and air forces.27 But however effective Truman’s early moves were as gambits in the management of the particular crisis situations, they were not yet presented to the public as parts of a grand strategy toward the Soviet Union in which the American military potential would be consciously and more or less continuously displayed in back of diplomatic efforts to moderate Soviet behavior. Nor was the administration ready to openly embrace the balance of power ideas Winston Churchill was then advancing. When the British leader delivered his sensational “Iron Curtain” speech in March 1946, with President Truman sitting on the platform, the premises Churchill advanced about Soviet motives and behavior were already widely shared in U.S. policy-making circles. But the main policy conclusion he drew, that there ought to be a publicly proclaimed Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, was still not acceptable at the highest levels in the American government.

THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE Those officials who favored the Churchillian grand strategy for dealing with the Soviets were provided an opportunity to push their case in February 1947, when a note from the British government headed by Clement Attlee informed the United States that drastic economic conditions made it necessary for the United Kingdom to withdraw all support from Greece by the end of March. The president’s top political and military advisers were of the opinion that it was only the presence of British

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troops in Greece since the war that had prevented that faction-ridden nation from being swept into the Soviet orbit. The prevailing view within the State Department was that unless the tottering Greek government received immediate assurances of large-scale military and financial aid, the regime would lose all authority and the increasingly successful communist guerrillas would seize control of the country. Truman translated the local situation into the starkest global terms: if Greece fell to the communists, Turkey would become highly vulnerable to Soviet power plays and subversion. Inevitably, the entire eastern Mediterranean would be sealed behind the Iron Curtain.28 To save the situation this time, more than a White House decision— which had been sufficient for deploying the navy and sending blunt diplomatic notes in the earlier Turkey and Iran crises—was required. Large-scale economic and military assistance, to be directly administered by American officials, would need congressional authorization and special appropriations. But Republican majorities had just taken control of both houses and, according to Speaker Joseph Martin, were determined to fulfill election promises for a 20 percent across-the-board reduction in income taxes with a collateral reduction in government spending. Administration supporters in the Congress, their numbers severely diminished in the 1946 elections, were disposed to regard the Republicans as being in tune with popular sentiment. The stage was set for the administration to level with the nation that a dramatic turn in U.S. foreign policy was needed, that high national interests were at stake. But to service these interests, the nation would have to reorder its priorities. The public expression of this fundamental démarche was Truman’s address to Congress on March 12, 1947, requesting assistance for Greece and Turkey—the so-called Truman Doctrine. But for many in the administration responsible for foreign diplomatic, economic, and military programs, Truman’s formal request to Congress was only the exposed tip of an iceberg of massive intellectual and bureaucratic activity. The seminal statement conceptualizing and catalyzing the new orientation was probably neither Truman’s address nor Secretary of State George Marshall’s at Harvard a few months later, but Under Secretary of State Acheson’s effort to educate the bipartisan group of congressional leaders Truman summoned to the White House on February 27, 1947. According to a State Department official who was present, the leadoff presentation by Secretary Marshall went very badly. Marshall, rather than expounding on the central strategic importance of Greece and Turkey (a subject on which

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he was very well versed), conveyed the impression that the reasons for extending aid to Greece and Turkey flowed essentially from humanitarian impulses toward these countries and loyalty to Britain. Many of the congressional leaders present were not at all impressed, preoccupied as they were with reducing taxes. Acheson got Marshall’s attention and was given the floor. In bold strokes, he displayed the view of Soviet Middle Eastern strategy that had prevailed at the White House and top State Department levels for more than a year. The under secretary described the continuing Soviet pressures on Turkey for territorial cessions and for military and naval bases in the Turkish straits, which, if granted, would mean “the end of Turkish independence.” Soviet pressures on Iran were portrayed as “encircling movements,” also apparently focused on the straits. It was only because the Turks, with strong diplomatic backing from Britain and the United States, had stood up to the Russians that these moves had failed for the time being. As a result, the communists were currently concentrating their pressure on Greece, Acheson explained, where all reports indicated communist insurgents would succeed in seizing control “within a matter of weeks” unless the government of Greece received prompt and largescale aid. This was obviously more than helping the British salvage their interests, said Acheson, building up to his main message. The substance and tone of this message are best rendered in the account of the State Department official whose account is the basic public source for the White House meeting of February 27: Only two great powers remain in the world, Acheson continued, the United States and the Soviet Union. We had arrived at a situation unparalleled since ancient times. Not since Rome and Carthage had there been such a polarization of power on this earth. Moreover, the two great powers were divided by an unbridgeable ideological chasm. . . . And it was clear that the Soviet Union was aggressive and expanding. For the United States to take steps to strengthen countries threatened with Communist subversion was not to pull British chestnuts out of the fire; it was to protect the security of the United States—it was to protect freedom itself. For if the Soviet Union succeeded in extending its control over two-thirds of the world’s surface and three-fourths of its population, there could be no security for the United States, and freedom anywhere in the world would have only a poor chance of survival. The proposed aid to Greece and Turkey was not therefore a

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matter of bailing out the British, or even of responding on humanitarian grounds to the need of a loyal ally. It was a matter of building our own security and safeguarding freedom by strengthening free peoples against Communist aggression and subversion. We had the choice, he concluded, of acting with energy to meet this situation or losing by default.29

Here, full-blooded, were the central premises of what came to be called the Cold War: the two-way polarization of the international system around two great powers; an unbridgeable ideological hostility between the two groupings, with the group led by the United States committed to individual liberty and a pluralistic international system and the group led by the Soviet Union committed to totalitarian statism and a monistic international system organized on the Soviet model; and an intention by the Soviet-led group to impose its way of life on the rest of the world. From these premises it was deduced that any allowance of an extension of Soviet control over additional areas, even if they were limited extensions, would not reduce Soviet aggressiveness but, on the contrary, would stimulate further aggressiveness by adding to the material and political resources with which the Soviets hoped to impose their will. The policy implications for the U.S.-led group were clear: a balance of power had to be maintained against the Soviet-led group, and the intention to apply this power wherever and to whatever extent necessary to prevent any further extension of Soviet control had to be unambiguous. President Truman’s address before Congress on March 12, 1947, asking for $400 million in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey was based on these premises, but he deliberately refrained from making them as explicit as Acheson had done in the private session. A number of statements that emphasized strategic considerations were deleted from one of the last drafts of the speech on the recommendation of Acheson, whose view was that too much emphasis on the strategic considerations might be alarming to the American people, who were not accustomed to thinking in these terms in time of peace. The emphasis in public was to be on the global ideological conflict and on the economic assistance needed by governments friendly to the United States to successfully combat subversion:30 I believe [Truman told the nation] that it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

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I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world— and we must surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.31

THE MARSHALL PLAN The Marshall Plan for the economic recovery of Europe, announced just four months after the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine, was also conceived of by Truman and Acheson as a geopolitical counterthrust to Soviet-sponsored subversion of the West, but it was presented to the public largely as a compound of humanitarian largesse and enlightened economic statesmanship, the latter proceeding from the premise that an economically healthy Europe was a precondition for the world trade required by an expanding U.S. economy. It was a conscious policy decision to underplay the global balance-of-power considerations. Between Truman’s address to Congress in March 1947 and Marshall’s speech at Harvard in June, the Moscow conference of foreign ministers adjourned in recognized failure to make any progress in resolving the EastWest discord over the future of Germany and Austria. “The Americans came home from Moscow,” Walt Rostow recalled, “firm in the conclusion that the United States should never again negotiate from a base of weakness. . . . The picture of Europe was one of mammoth slow-moving crisis. There was a growing awareness that something big had to be done in Europe to avoid a disaster to the American interest; that a substantial program of economic aid addressed constructively to the problems of economic recovery was required to deal with the multiple threats to the Eurasian power balance.”32 Secretary of State Marshall reported to the country over the radio that “disintegrating forces are becoming evident. The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate . . . action cannot await compromise through exhaustion.”33 In a then secret memorandum, George Kennan and the policy planning staff recognized that “the communists are exploiting the European

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crisis and . . . further communist successes would create serious danger to American security.” But Kennan advised Secretary of State Marshall that the American effort to aid Europe should be directed not to the combating of communism as such but to the restoration of the health and vigor of European society. Its target should be the economic maladjustment that was making European society vulnerable to exploitation by the Marxist movements in Europe, which the Russians were exploiting in turn.34 Significantly, there was a brief separate section at the end of the memorandum advising that steps should be taken to remove two “damaging impressions which are current in large sections of American public opinion.” These were: a. That the United States approach to world problems is a defensive reaction to Communist pressure and that the effort to restore sound economic conditions in the other countries is only the by-product of this reaction and not something we would be interested in doing if there were no Communist menace. b. That the Truman Doctrine is a blank check to give economic and military aid to any area of the world where Communists show signs of being successful. It must be made clear that the extension of American aid is essentially a question of political economy in the literal sense of the term and that such aid will be considered only in cases where the prospective results bear a satisfactory relationship to the expenditure of American resources and effort.35

Secretary of State Marshall heeded this advice. Launching the program for European recovery at Cambridge on June 5, 1947, he claimed, “Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” And the offer to join in the cooperative effort was made to all European nations.36 Under Secretary of State Acheson worried that the Kremlin would have its East European satraps participate in order to sabotage it. But Marshall did not want the United States to be the one to be blamed for closing the curtain between Eastern and Western Europe. Although the offer was genuine, many in the United States government and Western Europe were relieved when—as Kennan had predicted—Stalin prevented the Eastern European states from joining the effort.37 Marshall had a multifaceted view of the balance of power considerations: he believed that the revival of Western European economic vigor,

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which was based in large measure on manufacturing, would have been facilitated by the raw material resources that once again could be tapped in the Eastern European areas. Eastern Europe in turn could provide a market for the West’s manufactured goods. To maintain an advantageous balance of power against the Soviet Union, the West needed a strong Western Europe; it did not require an unhealthy Eastern Europe. Moreover, there were some in the United States government who felt that an Eastern Europe largely dependent for its own well-being upon economic relations with the West would be less subject to total Soviet control.38 But such conjectures became academic as the Soviet Union moved even more swiftly during the summer of 1947 to transform the lands it had occupied militarily into dependent units of a tightly integrated economic and political system. The last hopes for some preserve of Western liberalism in Eastern Europe died in February 1948, when the Communist leadership in Czechoslovakia, backed by Soviet armed might, demanded and was granted full powers of government. Meanwhile the public dissemination in the summer of 1947, through the medium of Foreign Affairs magazine, of George Kennan’s analysis of Soviet grand strategy and the concept of “containment” as a countervailing grand strategy of the West provided the missing link for policy-oriented intellectuals who were trying to piece together the real basis, as distinct from the surface rationale, for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Kennan’s coherent analysis and prescriptions were, of course, only one of a number of alternative formulations of the emerging official premises about U.S.-Soviet relations. In some accounts of U.S. Cold War policy the “X” article is treated as the official position of the government. This is incorrect. Many of its premises continued to be debated within the highest levels of the administration. But it did take the public wraps off a core set of beliefs around which there was an operating consensus among the responsible decision makers: the Soviets’ “unfriendliness of purpose,” as Kennan put it, was “basic.” It proceeded from the inner structure of Soviet-Russian society. Soviet policies over the foreseeable future would reflect “no real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the Socialist and Capitalist worlds, but rather a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.” Consequently, “if the Soviet government occasionally sets its signatures to documents which would indicate the contrary, this is to be regarded as a tactical maneuver permissible in dealing with the enemy.” Moreover, the Soviets, believing in the ultimate triumph of their cause, were as patient as they

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were relentless. “The Russians look forward to a duel of infinite duration.” The implications for American policy needed to be faced: “Sporadic acts” of standing up and talking tough to the Russians were not enough, even if they seemed to produce temporary Soviet retreats. “The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” This policy would require “the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy.”39 Notably, Kennan’s basic containment prescription in the “X” article had more military-sounding overtones than did the wording in his earlier long telegram from Moscow. He subsequently insisted this was not his intent; rather, he meant to emphasize the nonmilitary means of countering Soviet policy.40

2

IMPLEMENTING CONTAINMENT The question we have had to face is whether the Communist plan of conquest can be stopped without general war. Our Government and other countries associated with us in the United Nations believe that the best chance of stopping it without war is to meet the attack in Korea and defeat it there. —harry s. truman

Foreign Affairs was designed to share with the public the premises about Soviet intentions, on which there was an emerging consensus among Truman administration officials, and their implications for U.S. policy, which had been outlined by Secretary of State Marshall in a report to the cabinet in early 1947. According to the account in James Forrestal’s diary, Marshall stated that “the objective of our policy from this point on would be the restoration of the balance of power in both Europe and Asia and that all actions would be viewed in light of this objective.”1 There was still a significant lack of consensus, however, on the components of the “balance of power” Marshall wanted restored. The administration was broadly divided between those who regarded the industrial strength of the United States, based on a sound economy, as the weightiest ingredient in the global balance, and those who viewed the extension of Soviet control over new areas of the globe as the most important factor. In the pre–Korean War period, the Bureau of the Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the White House staff tended to stress domestic economic considerations, whereas State and Defense tended to emphasize stopping the Soviets. But even among those who were most oriented toward a global, geostrategic view of the power rivalry with the Soviet Union there were

T

HE “X” ARTICLE IN

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important differences over both the components of the balance of power and of the American strategies required to stop Soviet expansion. The divergent points of view in 1947–1948 clustered around Secretary of State Marshall and Secretary of Defense Forrestal.

MARSHALL VERSUS FORRESTAL Marshall’s most passionate commitment now was to the success of the European Recovery Program. But he did concede that a militarily strong Western Europe was essential to right the global balance of power and provide the means locally to dissuade the Russians from attempting an easy fait accompli either by political subversion or military aggression. Western Europe itself could not contain the Soviets in a major war, but it could provide the front line of defense. The United States would have to come to the direct aid of Europe in any such war, but as in the Second World War, the full weight of American power would be felt in the later stages of the war as mobilization went into high gear. Marshall favored universal military training in the United States to provide the base for such mobilization should it ever be required and to signal in advance the refusal of the United States to tolerate Soviet aggression; but he did not view Soviet aggression as sufficiently imminent to require a major increase in U.S. military forces. Even in response to the Soviet provocations around Berlin in the spring of 1948 and the blockade of 1948–1949, Marshall pressed for priority to be given to European rearmament. Marshall, of course, was sensitive to the strong political motivations in the White House and Congress for keeping the lid on expenditures and very likely saw universal military training plus European rearmament— neither of which would require any sudden major increases in the U.S. budget—as compatible with continued congressional financing of the multibillion-dollar project for rebuilding Europe’s economy just getting under way.2 Secretary of Defense Forrestal gave priority to the rearmament of the United States as the most effective means of preserving the balance of power against the Soviet Union. To procrastinate on the buildup of an effective U.S. military posture would be to “deny Marshall the cards to play” in current crisis situations.3 Strengthening European military capabilities was important, but Forrestal was skeptical of the Europeans’ ability to sustain their level of effort on economic reconstruction and simultaneously

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build the kind of military establishments needed to balance Soviet military power in Europe. In the meantime—he wrote in late 1947—under current budget allocations reflecting the existing policy of assisting European recovery before American rearmament, we were taking a “calculated risk.” That risk involved reliance on the American strategic advantage, consisting of American productive capacity, the predominance of American sea power, and the exclusive possession of the atomic bomb. But the last factor, he warned, would be of “indeterminate” duration. “The years before any possible power can achieve the capabilities to attack us with weapons of mass destruction are our years of opportunity.”4 It is clear that had Forrestal been given his way, he would have attached greater urgency to the buildup of a balanced U.S. military posture that did not bank too heavily on either the perpetuation of the atomic monopoly or the rapid recovery of Europe that would allow Europeans to assume the major burden of sustaining the balance of power on the continent.5 This difference between Marshall and Forrestal over the components of effective international power was in fact resolved in favor of Marshall by the White House and the Bureau of the Budget. Considerations of domestic political economy rather than a systematic analysis of the capabilities needed to carry out the nation’s foreign policy commitments seemed to determine the executive choice to stick with military budgets well below $15 billion a year until the Korean emergency revised the prevailing priorities.

NSC-68 Actually, a systematic appraisal was called for by the president and undertaken by a special State-Defense task force months before the North Korean invasion of South Korea. The Soviet blockade of Berlin during 1948–1949 and the collateral negotiations of the North Atlantic Treaty had focused attention in the State Department and the White House on the limitations of the usable military power at the disposal of the West in case of major conflict in Europe. The Soviet atomic bomb detonation in August 1949, three years ahead of U.S. intelligence estimates, gave immediacy to the alarms Forrestal had been sounding on the temporary nature of the U.S. strategic advantage. And the fall of China to Mao Zedong the next month, placing the bulk of the Eurasian heartland under communist control and raising the specter of a division of the world’s population into two halves, was suddenly seen by many in the administration, as it had not been when

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only hypothetical, as an immense strategic fact of life. The convergence of these events with the need for Truman to say yes or no to an H-bomb program produced a requirement for some kind of coherent doctrine on our military capabilities, just as the withdrawal of the British from Greece in 1947 produced the need for a doctrine on U.S. intentions. Truman’s decision in January 1950 to give the green light, tentatively, to the H-bomb program was accompanied by a directive to the secretaries of state and defense to make a comprehensive review of U.S. foreign and defense policies in light of the developments just mentioned.6 In the process of preparing the general strategic appraisal called for by Truman, a dialogue on the components of the global balance of power, analogous to that conducted between Marshall and Forrestal in the 1947– 1948 period, was now reenacted within the State Department between George Kennan and Paul Nitze.7 Kennan laid greater stress on the nonmilitary components of the bipolar struggle and felt the Soviets were so reluctant to become involved in a major war against the United States that the most important fact in the strategic equation was a clear resolve by the United States not to tolerate piecemeal opportunistic extension of Soviet control. Translating this into military terms was difficult and apparently uncongenial to Kennan. However, he is reported to have urged the organization of mobile, quickly deployable U.S. task forces that could be rushed to the scene of “brushfire” conflicts and thus confront the Soviets with the choice of desisting from their provocation or engaging the United States in a military clash that might expand into a major war. Kennan’s analysis of the Soviets convinced him the Soviets would back down when confronted with such a stark choice. Kennan thus did not feel that a general rearmament program was necessary. Moreover, rearmament would further focus national energies on the cruder means of waging the Cold War, as opposed to flexible and subtler forms of diplomacy and a stress on improving the quality of life of the Western nations. Paul Nitze, who became a liaison between State and Defense when Acheson became secretary of state in January 1949, gave greater weight than did Kennan to the overall balance of military force between the Soviets and the United States. Succeeding Kennan as director of the policy planning staff in 1950 and chairing the ad hoc study group that produced the strategic paper requested by the president, Nitze had critical input in shaping the advanced planning concepts being developed at the time. Kennan retained his influence as State Department counselor, and his knowledge of the

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Soviet Union was influential in the deliberations of the study group, but Nitze was known to have the full support of Secretary of State Acheson, who took the study very seriously. Forrestal’s economy-minded successor at Defense, Louis Johnson, was a weak secretary who provided little support or guidance to Defense Department participants in the study. Any initiative or major departures in overall strategic planning, then, would be responses to the momentum generated by Nitze in fulfilling Truman’s desire for a new strategic appraisal. Nitze contended that the nation’s military planning was seriously constrained by the strict budgetary limits imposed by the White House and the Bureau of the Budget. In light of the emergence of a Soviet nuclear weapons capability, the United States would need not only to improve its massive destructive capabilities (as was contemplated in the H-bomb program) but also to balance the Soviet capabilities for conventional war. These ideas emerged as major premises in NSC-68 (the paper’s file number upon referral to the National Security Council).8 For the first time since the war, military planning concepts were tied to an explicit body of assumptions about the political and technological state of the world. On the basis of an analysis of Soviet economic strengths and weaknesses, the study projected that in four years the Soviets would have a nuclear arsenal sufficient to neutralize the U.S. nuclear capability for deterring local wars. Moreover, the Soviets would build this capacity without any diminution in their local war capability. Thus, by 1954, if the West did not take significant compensating measures, the balance of military power would have shifted in favor of the Soviets. When this happened, economic and technical assistance would be insufficient to contain Soviet expansion. NSC-68 also challenged prevailing premises about the U.S. economy. Reflecting Nitze’s view, it argued that the nation could well afford to devote 20 percent of the gross national product to national security purposes as compared with the 5 percent then being spent. In budget terms, defense expenditures could and ought to rise as high as $60 billion a year from the $15 billion then programmed. Nitze had an important ally in Leon Keyserling, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, who was a consistent advocate of economic “expansionist” policies. 9 In retrospect it is not possible to say whether this alliance of Nitze and Acheson at State and Keyserling in the White House would have moved Truman away from his conservatism on defense expenditures and allowed him to order the implementation of NSC-68 had the Korean invasion not taken place in June 1950. 10

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Acheson had begun to lay the groundwork with his talks in February 1950 on the need to create “situations of strength” vis-à-vis the Soviet Union prior to attempting any kind of global spheres-of-influence settlement (as was again being suggested by Churchill). But as yet these declarations did not go much beyond making the aspiration explicit to wider public audiences.11 Any diversion of a larger portion of the nation’s resources to affect the global balance of military power was still not administration policy. Truman understood that such a shift in the allocation of resources would have to rest on popular consent; and the people, he believed, did not yet appreciate the current function of the military balance of power in global diplomacy.

THE KOREAN WAR Truman and his advisers had little doubt that the North Korean attack across the thirty-eighth parallel on June 25, 1950, was masterminded in the Kremlin, with Stalin calculating that the United States had neither the capability nor the will to commit its forces to defend the South Korean dictatorship of Syngman Rhee. The Unites States had pulled its post–World War II occupation forces out of Korea and, implementing its side of an agreement with the Soviets, had not provided the South with the wherewithal to build up its own military forces to counter the North’s Sovietassisted military buildup.12 Moreover, perhaps Soviet spies in the Pentagon were aware of a 1947 planning document of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) writing off Korea as strategically necessary to hang onto in the event of a United States– Soviet war.13 And then there was Secretary of State Acheson’s response to a reporter’s question at the National Press Club on January 12, 1950, in which, consistent with the JCS strategy, he stated that the U.S. “defensive perimeter” for the Pacific area and Japan “runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukus,” adding that it “runs from the Ryukus to the Philippine Islands.”14 The public omission of South Korea from the defensive perimeter might have confirmed Kremlin assumptions that their wellarmed proxy in North Korea could swiftly overwhelm the South’s inferior forces and reunify Korea under a communist government, presenting the United State with a fait accompli that it had no will to fight to undo. Truman immediately decided that although Korea itself was not worth a general war, Stalin had to be disabused of his calculation that the Soviets

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or their allies could breach containment lines wherever the local defensive forces were weak; the Russians had to be put on notice in no uncertain terms that such moves on their part did risk general war. Truman, Acheson, and Marshall (now secretary of defense) also feared that letting the communists (was Mao also involved?) get away with the invasion would crucially undermine the confidence of the NATO allies and Japan that the United States would come to their defense if they were attacked. Swift military counteraction was imperative. Not wanting to wait upon a declaration of war from Congress and operating under the aegis of two emergency UN Security Council resolutions, 15 the president ordered General Douglas MacArthur (then still in Japan overseeing its rehabilitation) to provide immediate assistance to the South Korean military and to organize a UN “peace action” to compel the North Koreans to withdraw behind the thirty-eighth parallel. (The Soviet Union could not veto the Security Council authorizations of these actions, having absented itself from the UN deliberations in protest against the organization’s refusal to let the new communist regime in Beijing occupy China’s seats in UN agencies.) Within days, as it became evident that logistic and air support for the South Korean forces could not turn the tide, Truman acceded to MacArthur’s request for authorization to commit U.S. ground combat troops to the battle. During the rest of the summer of 1950, the situation in Korea looked increasingly bleak. Human wave attacks by the North Korean military were pushing the UN (mostly U.S.) forces back into the southeast port city of Pusan, and the Pentagon brass were readying plans for evacuating the defending troops to Japan. But MacArthur came forward with a daring strategy that Truman approved despite the skeptical reservations of most of his other military advisers: an amphibious landing of U.S. forces at the port of Inchon at the neck of the peninsula. The U.S. forces would sweep eastward across the peninsula and trap the North’s forces in a pincer movement. MacArthur’s Inchon operation turned out to be an unambiguous success. In just two weeks, tens of thousands of the trapped North Korean soldiers had been killed or captured, Seoul and all of the other South Korean cities were liberated, and U.S. forces redeployed near the thirty-eighth parallel, ready to march north if ordered. MacArthur and the JCS were in favor of crossing the thirty-eighth to deliver a knockout blow to the North. So was Secretary of State Acheson. But worried about provoking the Russians and/or the Chinese

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and triggering World War III, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, and Charles Bohlen (the administration’s most respected expert on the Soviet Union) were opposed. The president himself, recounts Truman’s biographer David McCullough, “appears to have been caught up in the spirit of the moment . . . If he hesitated or agonized over the decision . . . there is no record of it.”16 The Korea-oriented debates and decisions during the ensuing weeks were about implementation of this momentous postcontainment move. Truman again wanted a UN imprimatur, which, even though the Soviets had returned to the Security Council, Acheson was able to engineer via a UN General Assembly resolution endorsing “appropriate steps” to ensure conditions of stability throughout all of Korea. Secretary of Defense Marshall and the JCS were anxious, however, about Russian and Chinese reactions to a U.S. military occupation of the North. They cabled MacArthur that he was authorized to proceed north of the thirty-eighth parallel “provided that at the time of such operation there has been no entry into North Korea by major Soviet or Chinese communist forces, no announcement of intended entry, nor a threat to counter our operations militarily in North Korea.” And to restrain the general from forays across Korea’s northern borders with China and Russia they suspected he was itching to conduct, they firmly instructed that under no circumstances . . . will your forces cross the Manchurian or USSR borders of Korea and, as a matter of policy, no non-Korean ground forces will be used in the northeast provinces bordering the Soviet Union or in the area along the Manchurian border. Furthermore, support of your operations north or south of the 38° parallel will not include air or naval action against Manchuria or against USSR territory.17

On October 9, 1950, the first postcontainment operation of U.S. military forces, albeit flying the UN flag, began. With much fanfare, Commanderin-Chief Truman immediately flew to the U.S. Pacific base at Wake Island to confer with the commander of the Korean liberation mission. Official records of the Wake Island conference show the president and the general engaging in a brief discussion of the chances of Chinese or Soviet intervention, which MacArthur assured Truman were very low. The tone was upbeat, with MacArthur saying, “I hope to get the Eighth Army back by Christmas.” There was no discussion of the restrictive mandates MacArthur had received from Secretary Marshall and the JCS.18

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Just two weeks later, contrary to MacArthur’s confident predictions, tens of thousands of Chinese communist soldiers began pouring across the Yalu River, engaging U.S. troops who, in violation of the Pentagon’s instructions, MacArthur had deployed closer to the Chinese border than he was supposed to. MacArthur conceded it was an entirely new war and launched a Thanksgiving-week counteroffensive northward while bombing the Korean side of the Yalu River bridges (he was denied authority to bomb the Manchurian side as well). He continued to promise the boys would be coming home by Christmas. But by the end of the month, there were already at least a quarter of a million Chinese troops in North Korea, and MacArthur’s legions were moving rapidly southward in ignominious retreat toward the thirty-eighth parallel. His soldiers might be back by Christmas, but it would hardly be to celebrate. MacArthur’s solutions to the humiliating predicament? Untie the arms the Truman administration had tied behind its own back: Face the fact that we were at war with China; blockade them, bomb them (with atomic weapons if necessary); at least do not give the Chinese sanctuary in their Manchurian combat-staging and supply areas and lay down a band of radioactive wastes at the border to prevent reinforcements from getting through; unleash Chiang Kai-shek and allow him to cross the Taiwan Strait to reopen the Chinese civil war. We would not be in this predicament, he argued, if we had warned Mao in advance in no uncertain terms what would befall him he tried to intervene. But wouldn’t such an all-out state of belligerency against communist China provoke Stalin to come to Mao’s defense and thus catalyze World War III? MacArthur pooh-poohed such fears, arguing that the Russians were not about to commit national suicide to bail out their junior ally. The general’s growing penchant for challenging the administration’s strategies with such arguments—not only within the private councils of the government but also, ostensibly on background, to journalists and then (unforgivably in Truman’s eyes) in a letter read aloud in Congress by House minority leader Joseph Martin—finally led to the president firing him. Truman’s explanation to the general public focused on his differences with MacArthur over national strategy. The question we have had to face, said Truman in his address to the nation and the world on April 11, 1951, is whether the communist plan of conquest can be stopped without general war. Our government and other countries associated with us in the United

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Nations believe that the best chance of stopping it without general war is to meet the attack in Korea and defeat it there. . . . But you may ask why can’t we take other steps to punish the aggressor. Why don’t we bomb Manchuria and China itself? Why don’t we assist Chinese Nationalist troops to land on the mainland of China? If we were to do these things, we would be running a very grave risk of starting a general war. . . . If we were to do these things, we would become entangled in a vast conflict on the continent of Asia. . . . What would suit the ambitions of the Kremlin better than for our military forces to be committed to a full-scale war with Red China? . . . I believe that we must try to limit the war to Korea for these vital reasons: to make sure that the precious lives of our fighting men are not wasted; to see that the security of our country and the free world is not needlessly jeopardized; and to prevent a third world war.

It was only near the end of this long address, which was announced as a speech on U.S. policy in the Far East, that Truman revealed he was firing MacArthur. “A number of events have made it evident,” said the president, “that General MacArthur did not agree with that policy. I have therefore considered it essential to relieve General MacArthur so there would be no doubt or confusion as to the real purpose and aim of our policy.” Claiming deep personal regret for having to take this action, the president praised MacArthur as one of our greatest military commanders. But, he added, “the cause of peace is more important than any individual.”19 Meanwhile, the bad turn of events in Korea compelled the administration to consider again, at worst, giving up the whole peninsula and retreating to Japan and, at best, reorganizing its military resources in a last-ditch effort to reestablish the containment line at the thirty-eighth parallel. With the deft leadership of General Matthew Ridgway (MacArthur’s replacement) they were able to accomplish the latter by July, at which time the still so-called UN Command (actually the United States) and the Chinese agreed to enter into negotiations to restore the thirty-eighth as the dividing line and to end the fighting. The United States–China armistice negotiations sputtered on and off during the remainder of the Truman administration—floundering mainly on the issues of refugee and prisoner repatriation and punctuated by quite a number of bloody military encounters between U.S. and Chinese forces—with both sides accusing the other of bad faith in violating a succession of cease-fire agreements.

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“Containment” was restored—in fact, if not in the administration’s public rhetoric—as the animating concept of U.S. Cold War policy after the very costly and unsuccessful attempt to liberate a people from the SinoSoviet bloc. But the experience of the Korean War exacerbated disagreements within the policy community over the appropriate grand strategy for implementing containment. For some, the Korean War confirmed the thesis that the Western alliance needed permanent and large-scale conventional armies to deter the communists from further aggression. The war also stimulated advocates of an opposing doctrine: namely, that Korea was a model of how not to fight a war; that to allow the communists to engage the United States in conventional land warfare was to allow them to choose the grounds and weapons most favorable to them; that the superior mode of warfare for the technologically advanced West was strategic, relying mostly upon air power to strike deep at the sources of enemy power with weapons of mass destruction; that the way to preserve the balance of power (as the Soviets built up their strategic capabilities) was not to dissipate U.S. resources in an effort to redress the imbalance in armed manpower but to enhance our capabilities for strategic warfare. The resolution of these antithetical military doctrinal reactions to the Korean War had to await a change in administrations. Yet the Korean War—the way it was fought by the United States and the force posture planning decisions that were made at the same time—left a material and institutional legacy of programs in being not significantly different from those implied in NSC-68. And this legacy carried along with it a set of operational (though not necessarily intellectually held) premises. 1. The Soviet Union would resort to military expansion if not checked by visible countervailing military power. 2. Local imbalances of military power that favored the Soviets or a Soviet satellite would lead to further “Koreas.” 3. The most appetizing local imbalance to the Soviets was in Central Europe. 4. The global balance of power would shift in favor of the Soviets if they were able to swallow the rest of Central Europe, namely West Germany and Austria. No other area on the periphery of the communist world, except for the Greco-Turkish flanks (which were already being buttressed) had such a critical function for the balance of power. The next most critical area on the Soviet periphery was Japan.

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5. While attending to the power ratios in these primary regions, the United States must not neglect local imbalances in secondary and tertiary areas. The capability and clearly communicated will to defend whatever country the communist powers might choose to attack, regardless of its intrinsic geopolitical weight in the overall balance, was necessary to prevent the communists from picking and choosing easy targets for blackmail and aggression. And a number of small territorial grabs could add up to a critical alteration of the global balance. Moreover, the failure to defend one country would demoralize citizens in other countries in their will to resist the communists. Even in Western Europe people would wonder under what circumstances Washington might consider them dispensable. The overriding fear in the White House was not simply that the loss of the Korean peninsula would encourage the Soviets to embark on further aggressions. Rather, it was that the Soviets were now embarked on a pattern of military aggression to pin down the resources of the United States in peripheral battles until the right moment arrived and they could move virtually unopposed into Western Europe. In his Memoirs Truman elaborates how the strategic (U.S.-Soviet) situation limited his flexibility in the tactical (Korean) campaign. It was his intention, Truman recalls, to take all necessary measures to push the North Koreans back behind the thirty-eighth parallel. But he was unwilling to commit the United States so deeply in Korea that we would not have the resources to handle other situations.20 The strategic prize was still Western Europe, with its skilled manpower and industrial infrastructure. Truman was convinced that Europe was at the center of the Soviet design for world domination, and he for one was not going to allow Washington’s attention to be diverted from this dominant feature of the global power contest.21 When the communist Chinese armies intervened, the prospect of becoming bogged down in a huge war in Asia became more immediate, particularly in light of pressure from General MacArthur to attack the communist staging bases in Manchuria, even at the risk of a general war with China. The administration perceived the Soviet Union to be behind the Chinese communist and North Korean moves. Thus Korea was a global matter, not merely a regional one. Secretary of State Acheson presented this evaluation to Prime Minister Attlee of Britain. The central enemy was not China, stressed Acheson, but the Soviet Union. The aggression by the North Koreans was not a local,

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spontaneous maneuver. It was a part of the larger communist design to get us preoccupied in Asia so the Russians could have a free hand in Europe. The Europe-first emphasis was important for the British too, who were, if anything, afraid the United States might become overcommitted to an increasingly costly Asian conflict and might engage in rash action—such as nuclear bombardment of China. Attlee kept raising reservations about the value of attempting to defend Formosa. Acheson explained to the British leader that, apart from how they might feel about Chiang Kai-shek, they could not, for geopolitical reasons, allow Formosa to fall into communist hands. The fall of Formosa would raise severe problems for Japan and in the Philippines, contended Acheson, and these countries, being the sites of American bases for conducting operations in the theater, had become essential to U.S. survival as a Pacific power.22 General Marshall weighed in on the strategic evaluation of Formosa: it was of no particular strategic importance in our hands but would be of disastrous importance if it were held by an enemy.23 But the way the United States fought the Korean War—particularly the willingness to allow sanctuary status to communist China even after it became an active belligerent—confirmed and sharpened the premise that mainland Asia was of secondary weight in the balance of global power as compared with Western Europe. Even granting the priority of the European theater, the Korean War did mark a globalization of containment. The United States had “intervened” physically in the Chinese civil war, in one of Truman’s initial responses to the North Korean attack, by interposing the Seventh Fleet between Mao Zedong’s forces and Chiang’s last island fortresses. Also, despite U.S. protestations of anticolonialism, Washington now financially supported French efforts to suppress Ho Chi Minh’s communist-nationalist insurgency in Indochina. And although the United States formally intervened in Korea under a UN mandate, henceforth U.S. plans, public commitments, and material undertakings would no longer convey to global adversaries the impression that Washington would hesitate to act unilaterally. Article 51 (the self-defense provision) of the UN Charter now became the operative legal instrumentality of “collective security” arrangements in the secondary as well as the primary theaters. The globalization of containment—the notion that practically all pieces of territory now had significant, however marginal, weight in the power balance and that the reputation for being willing to defend each piece was a critical ingredient of America’s maintenance of allies and deterrence of enemies—rested on solid bipartisan support. The Republicans’ challenge

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was not to these fundamental assumptions. Rather, they charged that the Truman administration was first too late and then too restrained in countering the threat of communism in Asia. The forum for partisan rallying was the 1951 Senate investigation of Truman’s recall of General MacArthur from his command.24 Here, for the first time, the bipartisan Europe-first policy was made the subject of a great debate between the two parties. Secretary of State Acheson’s January 1950 statement omitting South Korea from the U.S. “defense perimeter” in the western Pacific was held up to scorn by the opposition (who neglected to note that General MacArthur had traced a similar line in March 1949). Republicans charged that Acheson’s statement constituted an “invitation” for Stalin to attack. It became a Republican Party article of faith that the Truman administration, out of nearsightedness as to the ultimate power stakes involved, “lost” China to the communists. But this was a retrospective charge. In 1948 no prominent U.S. politician or China expert rose to challenge Secretary of State Marshall’s assessment that China did not itself possess the raw material and industrial resources that would enable it to become a first-class military power within the foreseeable future. The country was then in the midst of a social and political revolution. Until this revolution was completed—and it would take a long time—there was no prospect that sufficient stability and order could be established to permit China’s early development into a strong state.25 Nor had the critics of the Truman administration’s China policies been willing to support U.S. combat operations against Mao in 1948 and 1949 when it became clear that military assistance alone would not suffice. Only marginal increments in aid were offered by members of Congress in the China Aid Act of 1948. The statement of Representative Walter Judd (one of Chiang’s staunchest supporters) was typical: “Not for one moment has anyone contemplated sending a single combat soldier in. . . . So it is important to make clear when we speak of military aid . . . it is supplies, training, and advice, nothing further.”26 This had been the period when the rapid postwar military demobilization was in high gear. It was the same atmosphere that led Truman to defer approval of the NSC-68 recommendations, even though he appreciated their strategic soundness. While the Korean War allowed Republicans and Democrats alike to loosen the purse strings a bit for rearmament, many in the opposition party now willing to follow MacArthur into a general war with China were ready to claim superior wisdom from having been Mao haters since the

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middle 1940s. This was virtue through hindsight only. For the Republicans in Congress, even more than the Democrats, had been advocates of global military retrenchment by the United States. General Marshall recalled how he had been pressed ad nauseam in the early postwar period to give the communists hell. “I am a soldier and know something about the ability to give hell,” he told a Pentagon audience. “At that time, my facilities for giving them hell . . . was [sic] 1⅓ divisions over the entire United States. That’s quite a proposition when you deal with somebody with over 260 and you have 1⅓.”27 Significantly, Marshall did not count among his hell-giving facilities the atomic bomb. If there was to be a military contest with the Chinese communists, the bomb apparently was of little military utility, nor would it be used as a threat to forestall counterintervention by the Soviets. This was also a part of the atmosphere of the time—especially with respect to any official contemplation in public of its use against Asians so soon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the Korean War eroded this constraint on U.S. calculations of usable power in conflict situations. Truman did not unequivocally rule out the use of the bomb.28 And the Eisenhower administration went further by hinting it would have to resort to nuclear weapons if a breakdown in peace negotiations led to a resumption of the war. In the view of the NSC-68 planners, Korea should have marked the transition to a new era of higher peacetime military budgets aimed centrally at rectifying local imbalances of power between the communist and noncommunist nations. The Eisenhower administration also felt it was beholden to a popular mandate against further Koreas, and that beefing up local military imbalances would be essential for preventing similar Soviet miscalculations. But the plans of the Truman administration for rearmament were seen to be incompatible with the conventional Republican philosophy of reduced government expenditures. The most appropriate kind of military power for implementing the now globalized containment policy was to remain the primary subject of policy-level debate. But for at least another ten years, the policy itself (however much the Republicans disliked associating themselves with the word “containment”) and the premise that an advantageous military balance of power was its essential prerequisite were taken as fact in official Washington. The weight of the noncommunist nations in the global balance of power was to be defined, predominantly, as the product of three variables: U.S. military forces in being, U.S. industrial and economic

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strength, and the ability of the United States to maintain a chain of military allies in Western Europe and the rimland of Eurasia surrounding the Sino-Soviet bloc.

DEALING WITH THE ARAB-ISRAEL CONFLICT The imperative of preventing the Eurasian rimland from being controlled by enemies of the United States and falling into the Soviet sphere of influence encountered major complications early in Truman’s tenure as his support of the partition of Palestine and recognition of the state of Israel could alienate many of the Arab nations of the Middle East. Most of the administration’s senior foreign policy and national security officials tried to dissuade the president from his determination, in the wake of Hitler’s genocidal Holocaust, to help the Jewish people establish their own sovereign homeland. The lineup against recognition in 1948 was formidable. It included, on this issue, both Secretary of State Marshall and Secretary of Defense Forrestal and their principal deputies. In the intense—often acrimonious—debates that ensued, Truman had to rely on a small circle of advisers led by White House counsel Clark Clifford.29 It was vitally important from the standpoint of national security, argued the pro-Arab faction, to keep especially the oil-producing Middle Eastern countries on the side of the United States and its European allies in the emergent bipolar world. Not only were European industries increasingly dependent on oil from the Middle East, but in a future war, more so than in past wars, access to the oil supplies necessary to fuel one’s prime military operations, would determine the winners and losers. Although cognizant of the geostrategic stakes, the president was also moved by other considerations: very important, according to Clifford, was his deep empathy with the anguish of his former co-owner of a haberdashery store in Kansas City, Missouri, Eddie Jacobson, over the plight of the Jewish refugees who escaped Hitler’s policy of racial extermination—an empathy, Truman was convinced, shared by millions of Americans with Jewish neighbors and coworkers. Moreover, Truman had his own cognitive appreciation, informed by his readings in world history and his intellectual admiration of Zionist leaders such as Chaim Weizmann, of the efforts of diaspora Jewry to reclaim a part of Palestine as their own land. He agreed with Weizmann that the time had come—legally and morally—for Britain to fulfill its promise, codified in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and

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subsequent regional treaties, to facilitate (in the area Britain controlled under a League of Nations mandate) “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” And he agreed with Weizmann that the qualification in the Balfour Declaration that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country” was compatible with the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab state.30 Accordingly, over the objections of Arab leaders—who were insisting on a singular multinational state encompassing all of Palestine—and their supporters in the administration, Truman instructed the U.S. delegation to the United Nations to support the UN General Assembly resolution to partition Palestine into two states.31 (Truman knew the Zionists would never accept a one-state solution, for the lopsided Arab majority would be sure to perpetuate its rule by restrictions on Jewish immigration and other devices.) As predicted by its opponents, the partition resolution precipitated a new round of violence in the region. This was still six months before the expiration of the British mandate, scheduled for May 14, 1948, at which time there could be either widespread international recognition and guarantees of the borders of the two new states or anarchy and outright full-scale war between the Palestinian Arabs and Jews. To avoid what seemed like an inevitable conflagration, Britain and most of the Arab states were now urging that Palestine be administered for a time under the UN’s trusteeship system to prepare the area for democratic self-governance. But Weizmann and his colleagues were adamant that this ostensible delay in the creation of the Jewish state would turn out to be in fact its denial, for the UN trusteeship system could readily be manipulated by the Arabs. Truman tried to reassure Weizmann that the United States would stand by its vote for the United Nations General Assembly resolution prescribing partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, and he was furious when the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, misreading confusing signals from the White House and State Department, gave a speech implying support for the trusteeship idea and an indefinite postponement of partition.32 The half year between the passage of the UN endorsement of partition and the U.S. recognition of the state of Israel immediately upon the expiration of the British mandate was an excruciatingly difficult period for President Truman, for it pitted him against the public official he admired most of all. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, World War II hero and

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Cold War statesman extraordinaire, was angrily accusing the president (in the councils of government and hinting at going public) of sacrificing U.S. geostrategic interests to the domestic political interest of winning the next election by catering to the demands of the Jewish community. Truman was stung by the allegation, which he and his point man on the issue, Clark Clifford, defensively denied, pointing to the fact that many American Jews were not Zionists and the community was itself fractionated on the question of what U.S. policy should be toward Palestine. Truman remained proud of the role he played in the creation of the state of Israel. He claimed that the votes this undoubtedly gained him and the Democratic Party were a side benefit of his actions in that struggle, not their motivation—which he continued to insist through the rest of his life was entirely humanitarian. And in response to the criticism that U.S. support of Israel had been a strategic gift to the Soviets, enabling them to pose as big brother protectors of the Arabs, Truman would contend that the United States had at least as many friends in the Muslim Middle East, if not more, than did the atheistic Soviet Union. Moreover, he would argue—and Marshall would confirm—that the U.S. political, economic, and military support for Israel and other partners in the region (such as Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon) was hardly unconditional and was based on the extent to which there was a confluence of their and American interests, situation by situation.

PA R T II THE EISENHOWER ERA Occasional pages of history do record the faces of the “Great Destroyers” but the whole book of history reveals mankind’s never-ending quest for peace, and mankind’s God-given capacity to build. It is with the book of history, and not with isolated pages, that the United States will ever want to be identified. —Dwight D. Eisenhower

I don’t expect other nations to love us. . . . But I do expect them to respect us. . . . This means that we abide by our commitments, that we speak only of what we can do and we do what we speak of. —John Foster Dulles

3

A NEW LOOK FOR LESS EXPENSIVE POWER We keep locks on our doors, but we do not have an armed guard in every home. We rely principally on a common security system so well equipped to punish those who break in and steal that, in fact, would-be aggressors are generally deterred. That is the modern way of getting maximum protection at bearable cost. —John Foster Dulles

foreign policy by giving the maintenance of a balance of power against the Soviet Union and China top spot among previously competing foreign policy objectives and according primacy to the military components of power. Yet the Truman administration left office without resolving the competing doctrines of effective military power put forward by the military strategists.

T

HE KOREAN WAR SIMPLIFIED U.S.

THE GREAT EQUATION Dwight Eisenhower’s search for a strategic concept that would satisfy the terms of what he liked to think of as the “great equation” (reduced government expenditures and military security in the face of expanding Soviet capabilities) had begun shortly after the 1952 election and continued with intensity at various levels in the administration until it emerged full-blown in January 1954.1 As explained by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in his famous “massive retaliation” address to the Council on Foreign Relations,

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It is not sound military strategy permanently to commit U.S. land forces to a degree that leaves us no strategic reserves. It is not sound economics, or good foreign policy, to support permanently other countries; for in the long run, that creates as much ill will as good will. Also, it is not sound to become permanently committed to military expenditures so vast they lead to “practical bankruptcy.” . . . We need allies and collective security. Our purpose is to make those relations more effective, less costly. This can be done by placing more reliance on deterrent power, and less dependence on local defensive power. . . . Local defense will always be important. But there is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty land power of the Communist world. Local defense must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power. A potential aggressor must know that he cannot always prescribe the battle conditions that suit him. Otherwise, for example, a potential aggressor, who is glutted with manpower, might be tempted to attack in confidence that resistance would be confined to manpower.2

The new grand strategy reflected Dwight Eisenhower’s determination to implement the philosophy of fiscal conservatism he shared with the Taft wing of the Republican Party (led by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, whom he had defeated for the party’s nomination). Many of Eisenhower’s top appointments were fiscal conservatives: George Humphrey at the Treasury Department, Charles Wilson at the Defense Department, Sinclair Weeks at the Commerce Department, Arthur Burns at the Council of Economic Advisers, and Gabriel Hauge, the president’s administrative assistant responsible for economic affairs. The programmatic expression of their economic philosophy included balanced budgets, fiscal and monetary checks to avoid inflation, tax reduction, and underlying these, a restoration of the “free market” economy with a minimum of government interference, which the Republicans claimed had stifled entrepreneurship during the previous two decades of rule by the Democrats.3 The notion that defense budget economies could be affected by concentrating on strategic airpower was being urged in Britain by the Churchill government during 1951 and 1952. The concept propounded was very similar to that advocated by the U.S. Air Force since 1948: namely, that strategic airpower was now the decisive element in warfare and deterrence, its function being to break the back of enemy power and will at their source. All other capabilities were subsidiary; and to the extent the other capabilities took away from the resources necessary to maintain strategic superiority

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over the Soviet Union, they were wasteful. Such strategic monism went against the grain of the balanced defense concepts developed in NSC-68 and implemented on an emergency basis during the Korean War; but they fit in handily with the Republican election campaign of exploiting popular discontent and confusion with the frustrating military stalemate in Korea. In a Life magazine article of May 19, 1952, John Foster Dulles, the Republican party’s most prominent foreign policy expert, presaged the doctrine (which was worked out more fully later) by writing of an “instant massive retaliation” capacity to provide the United States with the means of taking “action of our own choosing” in contrast to Korea-type engagements in which terrain and means were chosen by the enemy. Eisenhower, at this early stage still fresh from his NATO role of Supreme Allied Commander, where it was his job to convince the allies of the necessity for building a significant “forward defense” capability in Europe, did not take too readily to such strategic avant-gardism. However, the general was somewhat enamored of the idea of a mobile strategic reserve based in the United States as the U.S. contribution to alliance defense, with the forward positions being sustained initially by the other NATO countries. This hope for allied assumption of the major forward defense burdens had been somewhat dampened by his exposure to the economic difficulties the Europeans were encountering in raising and provisioning their armies. As yet, though, Eisenhower himself had propounded no discernibly coherent strategic concept that could serve as an alternative to the programs of the Truman administration. The initial approach to a new concept began in earnest in December, before inauguration, as Eisenhower assembled his new cabinet aboard the U.S.S. Helena, on his way back from a trip to Korea. Eisenhower posed the problem: a prolongation of the defense programs then under way would have serious consequences for the American way of life. A free economy with minimal government interference in the lives of its citizens would be supplanted by a “garrison state.” And the draw upon the resources and finances of the nation would likely lead to serious inflation that would do major harm to the economy. Admiral Arthur Radford (soon to be selected by Eisenhower as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Dulles offered suggestions for effecting savings by more efficient deployment and use of the technologies of atomic age warfare. Radford argued that U.S. military power was overextended—especially in Asia, where it could be pinned down. Instead, he favored a “mobile strategic reserve” based in or near the continental United States. Major reliance for initial local defense would be

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on indigenous forces. Dulles used the opportunity to argue the virtues of a U.S. posture based primarily on massive strategic striking power whose function would be to deter the Russians instead of trying to contain them all around their extensive perimeter. These ideas made an impact on Eisenhower, but they were not yet sufficiently gelled to constitute a base for resolution of budgetary issues in the spring of 1953. With a passion to effect dramatic slashes in the Truman holdover budget for fiscal 1954, budget director Joseph Dodge, with the president’s blessing, instructed all departments to make cuts in existing programs. The means by which the reductions were to be effected were apparently of little interest to the Bureau of the Budget—that was the business of the defense people; but reductions there must be. Not surprisingly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) reported back to the National Security Council (NSC) that reductions down to the contemplated ceilings would dangerously affect national security. The civilian officials of the Department of Defense thereupon took matters into their own hands; largely through not permitting any new contracts in 1954, they were able to effect paper reductions (actually deferred decisions) to a level more in line with White House requests. Clearly a continuation of such leveling off and reduction in expenditures would require a major revision in the concepts upon which the military were then basing their requirements. One of the earliest of the concepts developed at the White House-NSC level was announced by the president at the end of April 1953. This was the so-called long-haul basis for military planning, which presumably was to substitute for the previous administration’s method of planning toward some selected “crisis year” or “year of maximum peril.” A broad base for effecting mobilization when and if needed was to be substituted for high military manpower levels; and an industrial-technological base capable of supporting expanded production schedules was to be maintained along with research and development in new systems, instead of attempting to fulfill specific production goals tagged to some specific year, only to be faced with inventories of technologically obsolete weapons. The announcement of the long-haul concept deflated somewhat the determination in Congress to sustain existing defense budget levels. This was, of course, part of the effect intended. “It has been coldly calculated by the Soviet leaders,” explained Eisenhower, “ . . . by their military threat to force upon America and the free world an unbearable security burden leading to economic disaster.”4 The announcement was well received in

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Western Europe, where the NATO Council in April 1953 agreed to Dulles’s suggestions for a slowdown in the NATO buildup. This was merely a formal recognition of the slackening that had already been taking place in Europe during the previous year; but now their economy-mindedness was dignified as giving emphasis to long-term quality ahead of short-term quantity. A more drastic revision of strategic concepts was still needed, however, to legitimize the reduced national security expenditures made necessary by the goal of a balanced budget. This was the mandate of the broad examination of the grand strategy of the United States ordered by the president to be conducted during the spring and summer of 1953 by three task forces under the overall direction of Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith and Robert Cutler, the president’s special assistant for national security affairs. Each task force was to explore the implications of one of three alternative grand strategies: (1) continuation of “containment”; (2) global deterrence by the threat of nuclear punishment; and (3) “liberation” of communist-held areas through economic, paramilitary, and psychological warfare methods. In the resulting document, labeled NSC-162/2, the Soviet threat was painted as harshly as ever and as likely to continue over the long term. Accordingly, the policy of containing the Soviet Union—with essentially the kind of balanced forces recommended by the previous administration— was to be retained with somewhat greater reliance placed on strategic airpower for deterrence. And, “in the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions.” But recognizing, as did NSC-68, that the Soviets would soon have the capacity to hit the United States with a massive nuclear strike, NSC162/2 did not recommend the less expensive defense posture sought by the president’s economic advisers, which would have required an overall reduction in the so-called general purpose forces, ground troops included.5 Meanwhile, the newly selected Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Admiral Radford as chairman, had also been conducting a study under order of the president, who had made firm his expectation that they would give due weight to domestic economic considerations. Their paper more closely reflected ideas advanced by Dulles and Radford aboard the Helena the previous December. The Joint Chiefs were unanimous in their opinion that U.S. military forces were overextended and that the local defense of potentially threatened areas such as Korea and Germany should be the primary responsibility of indigenous forces backed by U.S. sea and airpower. United

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States force posture planning should concern itself primarily with two primary functions: defense of the continental United States against strategic bombardment and the maintenance of a massive retaliatory capability. Mobility, efficiency, and readiness should be stressed for the nonstrategic forces and reserves. Yet in attempting to translate these premises into substantial budgetary reductions for fiscal 1955, the JCS found little in their respective service programs that they could cut. In NSC meetings in the fall of 1953, Treasury Secretary Humphrey (very much a Taft Republican) and budget director Dodge indicated profound disappointment with the estimates presented by the Defense Department. Admiral Radford reacted by insisting that the only way substantial reductions could be effected would be as a result of a basic decision by the administration on the kind of war to be planned for. If the military planners knew that permission would be forthcoming to use nuclear weapons whenever it was militarily advantageous to do so, then there could be substantial dollar savings, since current planning required preparing simultaneously for brushfire and limited conventional wars, conventional wars on the Second World War model, limited nuclear wars, general nuclear wars, and various combinations of these. By the end of 1953 there was a consensus on the Radford line, emphasizing that military commanders could count on using nuclear weapons, tactical and strategic, when militarily required. The president would issue the appropriate weapons release orders upon request from the commanders in the field. Force posture planning was to proceed on this basis, and on the basis that the fundamental objective of national security was to deter Soviet aggression—primarily through the massive strategic retaliatory capability of the United States. Greater reliance would be placed on indigenous allied forces to counter local aggression; concurrent with these local buildups some U.S. overseas forces could return to the United States. Here, finally, was the set of premises that allowed the JCS to take their “New Look” at the overall level of military spending and the allocation of resources within the total military budget. The document they submitted in December 1953 therefore refined the ideas in NSC-162/2. The massive retaliatory power of the United States was seen as a deterrent to major aggression, and as a means of fighting general war. Local limited aggression was still a distinct possibility, for which the bulk of ground forces ought to be provided by our allies; but an “educational” effort was needed to convince the allies that such a specialization of functions would benefit everyone. United States ground forces in forward areas in Europe and

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Asia would eventually be reduced; and U.S. participation in local defense operations would be mainly through tactical air power and sea power and quickly deployable mobile ground units—their functions, presumably, to be built around the new concept of tactical atomic warfare. The recommended force posture implementations of these concepts were to begin on an interim basis with the fiscal 1955 budget and mature by fiscal 1957, resulting in a 25 percent drop in military manpower and a reduction in the nearly $50 billion annual defense bill to a level under $35 billion.6 The New Look was dressed up in a neat package for public display by the secretary of state and the president. However, the public statements— particularly those made by Dulles—provided a somewhat simplified set of the new findings and policy guidelines. The most noted and quoted were the secretary of state’s remarks of January 12, 1954, in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations. Under the previous policy, maintained the secretary of state, U.S. military leaders could not be selective in building military power: they needed to be ready to fight in the tropics, Asia, the Near East, and Europe, by sea, land, and air. Such a strategy, he insisted, “could not be continued for long without grave budgetary, economic and social consequences.” In order for the nation’s military planning to be put on a more rational basis, said Dulles, it was necessary for the president to make this basic policy decision that he, Dulles, was now announcing to the world: namely, that henceforth this nation would “depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing.” Now our military establishment could be shaped to fit our policy, instead of having to try to be ready to meet the enemy’s many choices: “That permits us a selection of means instead of a multiplication of means. As a result, it is now possible to get, and share, more basic security at less cost.”7 In one important respect, Dulles had seriously overstated the planning premises agreed upon within the administration. He had talked of the “great” retaliatory capacity (background briefings called it “massive”— the term that stuck—and indicated it would be nuclear) as if it were to be the primary military means of defense for the entire free community, neglecting to stress adequately the role of indigenous local forces in blocking aggressions during their initial stages. This led to the widespread impression that U.S. policy had narrowed the choices of the noncommunist world into either accepting local communist aggressions or turning every local aggression into general nuclear war. Dulles and other administration officials were hard pressed to explain that they had no

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such extreme policy in mind8 and that local defense capabilities would still be important to deny the enemy easy territorial grabs. Moreover, these local forces could be buttressed quickly by rapid deployments from the central mobile reserve here in the United States. The communist powers would now know, however, that they could not count on drawing the United States into a purely local encounter with a limitation on the weapons employed. The choice would be ours as to when and where to respond with weapons of mass destruction. Backing away from the denigration of a strategy of readiness to fight in all theaters that appeared in the Dulles speech, administration spokesmen explained that programmed reductions in U.S. military manpower levels were the result of improved local defense capabilities in NATO and the Far East and the development of tactical nuclear weapons, which it was assumed would reduce ground manpower requirements. Dulles believed in the virtues of alliance building for reasons that went beyond the purely military calculus of power. Unity of purpose and coordination of policy were in his view important attributes of strength. The cement for effecting such cohesion was generally thought to be a shared ideology and economic and military interdependence. But in the areas of the Eisenhower administration’s most feverish alliance building—the wide arc through the Middle East and Southeast Asia that connects Europe to Japan and surrounds the communist Eurasian heartland—there was thought to be little basis for cultivating strong economic ties.9 In the first place, the administration, determined to reduce all but the most essential expenditures, was in no mood to begin new programs of foreign assistance unless these could be shown to be directly related to crucial U.S. national security requirements. Second, the Eisenhower cabinet was skeptical of the ability of the new nations to make productive use of purely economic assistance. Consequently, the dominant basis of Eisenhower-Dulles appeals for military aid between 1953 and 1956 was the supposed comparative economic advantage for the United States of relying on indigenous local forces rather than U.S. military personnel to contain communist military expansion. This narrow basis for alliance building underlay Dulles’s offer of U.S. military assistance to Pakistan and Iraq in 1953–1954 in the face of outraged opposition from India and his fashioning of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) during a period of increasingly assertive neutralism in Asia.

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ALLIANCE BUILDING IN THE MIDDLE EAST The efforts to sign up military allies in the Middle East, particularly, illustrate that the policy of containment had become submerged in the effort to add overseas weights to the military balance—a departure from the pre–Korean War days when instances of military assistance to countries on the communist periphery were defined as stopgap emergency efforts, while the most important contributions expected from these peripheral countries were serious strides in their own socioeconomic development. The military balance of power emphasis to containment in the Middle East was, as in Western Europe, stimulated by the Korean War. The Truman administration had always regarded the Middle East as of strategic significance; and in the early 1950s its special attributes—the source of two-thirds of the West’s oil reserves, the Suez Canal, and the location of important British military bases—were seen as immediately vital to any global test of strength. The United States, joined by Britain, France, and Turkey, tried to induce the Arabs to participate in a Middle East defense command. But Egypt and the other Arab states saw the effort as a plot by the imperialist powers to reestablish control of the area. Their fingers burned in this attempt, Truman and Acheson had to fall back to a less ideological approach, offering technical assistance without “strings” in the hope of maintaining a basis for friendly association. Dulles, however, was not to be dissuaded by the past failures to fill the Middle Eastern military vacuum. The New Look gave a new imperative to the organization of indigenous military capabilities. The Middle East may be complicated but certainly not unmanageable to the skilled diplomatist. In 1953 Dulles made a trip to the area, sounding out, with offers of economic and military assistance, current receptivity to a Middle East defense command. Colonel Gamal Nasser’s unequivocal rejection of the scheme, on the grounds that the new nationalist leaders in the area would be committing political suicide if they entered into external defense alliances, only prompted Dulles to try an end run. In February 1954 the U.S. military assistance agreement with Pakistan was announced; it was defined only as an arrangement for handling arms aid without any formal alliance obligations. Paralleling these negotiations with the United States, Pakistan and Turkey entered into a treaty of friendship and cooperation for security, pledging to study means of cooperating to defend against external aggression and inviting other states in the area to become associated with this effort. Overt initiatives to bring Iraq into the

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“northern tier” arrangements were Turkey’s responsibility. The TurkishIraqi agreement signed at Baghdad in February 1955 was very similar in terms to the previous year’s agreement between Turkey and Pakistan; now, however, a more concerted attempt was made to draw in other states. The Iraqi leadership, openly competing with Egypt for influence among the Arab states, was anxious to increase its regional bargaining power by extracting the maximum assistance from the West. Britain accepted the invitation to transform its previously bilateral base agreements with Iraq into a part of this expanding regional security system—now called the Baghdad Pact. Pakistan’s adherence was a foregone conclusion. This only left Iran, in 1954 still politically unstable after the deposition of the anti-Western regime of Mohammad Mossadegh. Although obvious proWestern alignment might reignite the extremist fires, by the fall of 1955 the Shah felt more secure politically and was particularly anxious to qualify for the assistance benefits of pact membership in order to modernize his army. The result was a polarized Middle East, with the north organized into the Baghdad Pact, and the south dominated (through subversion and threat, as well as common ideology and friendship) by Egypt. Dulles was unwilling to become completely associated with his own handiwork. Financial and military support and participation in the work of pact subcommittees, yes; but full membership, no. Perceiving Soviet attempts to exploit the local bipolarization, Dulles felt the necessity of preserving some residue of U.S. influence with Nasser. Thus the simplification of U.S. diplomacy—attempting to maintain the balance of power by a somewhat indiscriminate adding of military allies—was beginning to produce its own complications.

AVOIDING INVOLVEMENT IN THE FRENCH-INDOCHINESE WAR The American-sponsored proliferation of alliances in the Middle East was a template for a similar effort in Asia. The deteriorating French position in Indochina provided stimulus to the effort to give a multilateral cast— a Southeast Asian “NATO”—to the existing pattern of special relationships between various of the local states and the United States, Britain, and France. Eisenhower and Dulles perceived that the support required from the region’s indigenous peoples in resisting the spread of Soviet-sponsored or Chinese-sponsored communism would not be forthcoming if that resistance bore the stigma of colonialism.

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To Prime Minister Churchill, in an urgent note requesting the British join in the ad hoc construction of a Southeast Asian collective defense force, the president wrote: “If . . . Indochina passes into the hands of the Communists the ultimate effect on our and your global strategic position with the consequent shift in the power ratios throughout Asia and the Pacific could be disastrous.”10 And to the American people, Eisenhower dramatized the strategic considerations underlying his desire to help the French by invoking what he called the “falling domino” principle: “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.”11 Various schemes for bringing U.S. military power into play were being advanced by Admiral Radford and Secretary Dulles. The leading option was an air strike from carriers of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Eisenhower tended to agree with the majority of the JCS that, in purely military terms, this would not significantly help the French situation on the ground. Although he did admit to feeling “there was some merit in the argument that the psychological effect of an air strike would raise French and Vietnamese morale and improve, at least temporarily, the entire situation.”12 The real barrier to a direct U.S. involvement, as far as the president was concerned, was the unwillingness of other countries to associate themselves in this or any other military intervention on the side of the French. Dulles, having failed to arrive at a common basis for action with British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, appears at one point to have been willing to go it alone.13 But Eisenhower claims to have maintained a consistent position throughout that “there would be no intervention without allies.” However disastrous the consequences of a communist victory in Indochina, Eisenhower felt that if the United States largely on its own took up the major military burden of saving the area, the consequences to the U.S. global power position would be even more disastrous.14 As he explained to General Alfred Gruenther, then NATO supreme commander: “No Western power can go to Asia militarily, except as one of a concert of powers, which concert must include local Asiatic peoples. To contemplate anything else is to lay ourselves open to the charge of imperialism and colonialism—or at the very least—of objectionable paternalism.”15 At the climax of the 1954 crisis, with the French under siege at Dien Bien Phu, a presidential choice between unpalatable alternatives—negotiation from a position of weakness or unilateral U.S. intervention—could no

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longer be postponed. Joint Chiefs Chairman Radford was the leading voice for intervention—which if it provoked the Chinese to counterintervene, well and good, as far as he was concerned; for that would give the United States justification for at last bombing China with nuclear weapons. But in response to the drumbeat for intervention, Eisenhower laid down a set of preconditions for U.S. military involvement (which in any event would be restricted to air support): The French had to commit themselves to grant independence to the nations of Indochina; the British, as well as our Asian allies, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines, had to agree to join the United States in a coalition operation that would not be under French command; and the U.S. Congress had to approve. Eisenhower’s biographers are convinced that this was a ploy by the president to ensure that the United States would not intervene, since he surely knew that none of these conditions could then be satisfied.16 On April 29, in a strategy huddle with his top advisers, Eisenhower interposed his own strategic judgment, stopping further discussions of U.S. military intervention: “I remarked that if the United States were, unilaterally, to permit its forces to be drawn into conflict in Indochina and in a succession of Asian wars, the end result would be to drain off our resources and weaken our over-all defensive position.”17 Dulles immediately committed the prestige of the United States to the construction of a Southeast Asian mutual defense pact to be based primarily on indigenous capabilities. The result was an agreement somewhat short on the provision of capabilities and somewhat unconvincing in its purpose of giving an indigenous, noncolonial cast to anticommunism. The Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, dated September 8, 1954, required only consultation among its signatories in case one of them were the victim of armed attack or subversion. Each member “recognizes that aggression . . . in the treaty area against any of the Parties . . . would endanger its own peace and safety,” but each member pledged no more than to “act in that event to meet the danger in accordance with its constitutional processes” (article IV). The list of signatories to the treaty was revealing in itself: the United States, France, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines, and Pakistan. At the most the treaty provided, as Eisenhower claimed, “a moral, legal, and practical basis for helping our friends of the region.” At the least, SEATO merely formalized existing power relationships in Asia without significantly altering the three-way balance between the communists, the anticommunists, and the nonaligned.

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Dulles and Eisenhower were beginning to shed any illusions they might have had that formally committed military allies were one of the most relevant factors in the global balance of power. If anything, SEATO was a face-saving monument to the obsolescence of that simpler conception. Yet along with the Baghdad Pact, it reinforced the “pactomania” stereotype of Dulles diplomacy. More significantly, these early solemn agreements would later constrain attempts to implement more flexible premises about the functions of nationalism and nonalignment in Asia.

CONFRONTING CHINA IN THE FORMOSA STRAIT The Eisenhower administration’s evolving premises about the ingredients of effective international power in Asia were reflected in the way the United States acted in the Formosa Strait crises of 1954–1955 and 1958. Not long after the signing of the SEATO treaty, the Chinese communists began bombarding islands still in the hands of the Chinese Nationalists, off the shore of the mainland, across the strait from Taiwan (Formosa)— the big unachieved prize the communists were determined to wrest from the Nationalists. SEATO was inapplicable to the defense of Taiwan and the offshore islands defined by the administration as contingently necessary to Taiwan’s defense, for Taiwan was neither a member of the treaty organization nor covered by the treaty provisions. And there was considerable disagreement among the SEATO signatories toward the whole China question. All U.S. moves in the two Formosa Strait crises, including the threat to go to war to counter China’s impending aggression, were undertaken under the authority of bilateral agreements between the United States and the Republic of China on Taiwan and of the January 1955 congressional resolution, authorizing the President of the United States . . . to employ the Armed Forces of the United States as he deems necessary for the specific purpose of securing and protecting Formosa and the Pescadores [the islands immediately adjacent to Formosa] against armed attack, this authority to include the securing and protecting of such related positions and territories of that area now in friendly hands and the taking of such other measures as he judges to be required or appropriate in assuring the defense of Formosa and the Pescadores.18 However, for the United States to once again go to war against communist China just a few years after the end of the Korean War, Eisenhower had to be convinced of three propositions: the issue was of major importance

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to the global position of the United States; Soviet Russia would refrain from direct involvement; and the objective of preventing the communists from taking over Taiwan could be accomplished without getting bogged down in another land war of attrition against a power with a virtually unlimited supply of military manpower. As he expressed in messages to Winston Churchill, he was apparently convinced that the first two of these propositions could be satisfied. But with respect to the means of defeating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the president, having ruled out a counterinvasion of the Chinese mainland, was bothered by the prospect of not being able to do so effectively with conventional airpower and sea power. In a key NSC meeting, according to the minutes of Robert Cutler, Eisenhower’s special assistant for national security affairs, the president said that if it became necessary for the United States to intervene militarily, “it should do so with conventional weapons,” but that “such intervention might not be decisive; that the time might come when the U.S. might have to intervene with atomic weapons, but that could come only at the end.”19 But in their early March 1955 public statements on the crisis, in order to intimidate China, Eisenhower and Dulles referred to the U.S. nuclear arsenal as if it were central to their strategy, bragging that it contained “new and powerful weapons of precision, which can utterly destroy military targets without endangering civilian centers” (Dulles)—weapons that could be “used just exactly as you would a bullet or anything else” (Eisenhower).20 Some of Eisenhower’s advisers feared that this talk of war in which nuclear weapons might be used was becoming too strident and could produce a backlash against the administration’s strategy on the part of their American public, the Congress, and U.S. allies. Moreover, it might embolden the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek to engage in his own aggressive moves that could provoke the outbreak of hostilities Eisenhower was striving to deter. The president was concerned about giving the dispute too much hype, for it could force the issue and reduce the flexibility he wanted to preserve by keeping his threats sufficiently ambiguous. So in preparing for his March 23 press conference, he told his press secretary James Hagerty, “Don’t worry, Jim. . . . If that question comes up, I’ll just confuse them.”21 Eisenhower’s mastery of the art (deliberate or inadvertent) of ambiguous rhetoric was quintessentially on display in his response at his news conference to the question of whether he conceived of using atomic weapons

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against the Chinese in the conflict over Quemoy and Matsu. “I cannot answer that question in advance,” he said, but proceeded to explain that the only thing I know about war are two things: the most changeable factor in war is human nature in its day-to-day manifestations; but the only unchanging factor in war is human nature. And the next thing is that every war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred, and in the way it is carried out. So that for a man to predict, particularly if he has the responsibility for making the decision, to predict what he is going to use, how he is going to do it, would I think exhibit his ignorance of war; that is what I believe. So I think you just have to wait, and that is the kind of prayerful decision that may some day face a President. We are trying to establish conditions where he doesn’t.22

For Dulles, the Chinese communist failure to go through with their threatened invasion of the offshore islands and acceptance instead of discussions in Warsaw about their status with representatives of the United States was proof of his premises of power and vindication of his strategic concepts. Emmet Hughes quotes the secretary of state as claiming, “Of all the things I have done, the most brilliant of all has been to save Quemoy and Matsu.”23 This pride was reflected in the controversial “brink of war” interview he gave late in 1955 to James Shepley of Life magazine. Dulles claimed that in all of these situations the ultimate decisions were the president’s, which is undoubtedly true. He also claimed that “the President never flinched for a minute on any of these situations. He came up taut.”24 Again, this may very well have been the case once the alternatives had been narrowed. But Dulles’s intended implication that he and Eisenhower had identical premises about the most effective means of dealing with the nation’s opponents bears further examination. The difference between the Dulles face of power and Eisenhower’s—at least while exploring alternatives but also in their public demeanor—was brought to the fore in the recrudescence of the Formosa Strait crisis in late August 1958, when the Chinese once again started shelling Quemoy and Matsu. The trigger was Chiang Kai-shek’s increased deployment of troops on the disputed islands from 30,000 to 100,000, in violation of the understandings that had been negotiated by Chinese and American diplomats in Warsaw. Eisenhower accepted Dulles’s advice to back Chiang by ordering the Seventh Fleet to escort the Nationalists’ ships supplying their forces on

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the islands, but he rejected the recommendation by Dulles and the JCS to authorize the naval commander to use tactical atomic weapons if the Chinese attacked the convoys. The president was adamant that any use of force against the Chinese mainland would have to approved by him; but he countenanced “backgrounders” to the press by the secretary revealing that U.S. pilots had been authorized to engage in hot pursuit of Chinese communist planes operating over the Strait and implying that the United States would intervene if the islands were invaded and might use nuclear weapons. Eisenhower also insisted, however, that Dulles should strongly pressure Chiang Kai-shek to substantially demilitarize the islands and that Dulles should indicate through diplomatic channels that the Warsaw discussions should be resumed. On September 6, Mao’s foreign minister Zhou Enlai agreed to a resumption of the talks and indicated a desire to settle the Taiwan problem peacefully. The next day, Khrushchev sent a letter to Eisenhower blustering that “An attack on the Chinese People’s Republic is an attack on the Soviet Union.” Eisenhower brushed off the Soviet threat— the crisis was already over—and chose not to dignify Krushchev’s tantrum with a reply.25 It remained for Dulles to credit the administration’s melding of military threats and conflict resolution diplomacy. As he put it to the Life magazine interviewer, We believe that if international Communism should penetrate the island barrier in the Western Pacific and thus be in a position to threaten the Philippine and Indonesia immediately and directly, all of us, including the free countries of Europe, would soon be in far worse trouble than we are now. Certainly the whole region would soon go. . . . There comes a point where constantly giving in only encourages further belligerency. I think we must be careful not to pass that point in our dealings with Communist China. We must show no lack of firmness in a world where our political enemies exploit every sign of weakness, and are constantly attempting to disrupt the solidarity of the free world’s intentions to oppose their aggressive practices.

And on the likelihood of Soviet intervention: I do not believe that Russia wants war at this time—in fact, I do not believe that even if we became engaged in a serious fight along the coast of China, Russia would want to intervene with her own forces. She would, of course,

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pour supplies into China in an effort to exhaust us and certainly would exploit the opportunity to separate us from your country. But I am convinced that Russia does not want, at this moment, to experiment with means of defense against the bombing that we could conduct against her mainland.26 The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink you are lost. We’ve had to look it square in the face—on the question of getting into the Indo-China war, and on the question of Formosa. We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action.27

4

WAGING PEACE The Eisenhower Face Quite naturally . . . [John Foster Dulles and I] agreed that a determined pursuit of peace with justice should be . . . the foremost objective of the American government. Such an objective . . . could reasonably be pursued, we knew, only if the United States spoke from a position of power. But the needed power would have to comprehend not only military strength, the age-old single criterion of civilizations long since reduced to rubble, but moral and economic strength as well. —Dwight D. Eisenhower

T

HE GREATEST SOURCE OF EISENHOWER’S power—in a personal sense—

was that he was so well liked. His inclination as a world statesman was to transfer his likableness to the nation that made him its leader, to make the personal style the national image. This contrasted with the haughty and rigidly uncompromising image of America projected by the stern face of John Foster Dulles. Undoubtedly, there was a marked difference in the public demeanor of the two men. But the claim of Emmet Hughes, one of Eisenhower’s speechwriters, that there was a “deep conflict of premises” between the president and his secretary of state is an unwarranted exaggeration.1 Both men were aware of their differences from the beginning of their relationship. Dulles put the matter deftly in a private conference before their official association began: “With my understanding of the intricate relationships between the peoples of the world and your sensitivities to the political considerations involved, we will make the most successful team in history.”2 And indeed, their teamwork was close to impeccable. The president, appreciative of Dulles’s diplomatic experience, gave the secretary of state considerable authority in the international dimensions of policy implementation, while Dulles, in awe of Eisenhower’s tremendous domestic popularity and international prestige, was scrupulously deferential and

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loyal to the president. With few exceptions, such as Eisenhower’s preferences for conflict-resolution summitry, and his questioning the abruptness of Dulles’s withdrawal of Aswan Dam assistance (see chap. 5), we are exposed to no crucial differences over policy. Eisenhower records the version of their relationship that he would like to stand: It was said . . . that he [Dulles] sought not only to be influential in the conduct of foreign affairs, but to be responsible only to his own convictions and inclinations. What his critics did not know was that he was more emphatic than they in his insistence that ultimate and personal responsibility for all major decisions in the field of foreign relations belonged exclusively to the President, an attitude he meticulously maintained throughout our service together. He would not deliver an important speech or statement until after I had read, edited, and approved it; he guarded constantly against the possibility that any misunderstanding could arise between us. It was the mutual trust and understanding, thus engendered, that enabled me, with complete confidence, to delegate to him an unusual degree of flexibility as my representative in international conferences, well knowing that he would not in the slightest degree operate outside the limits previously agreed between us. The association was particularly gratifying to me because of the easy partnership we developed in searching for the answer to any complex problem. But although behind closed doors we worked as partners, he in all our conversations lived his conviction that he was the adviser, recognizing that the final decision had to be mine.3

Sherman Adams also claims that “the Secretary of State never made a major move without the President’s knowledge and approval,” although Adams goes on to make the observation that “the hard and uncompromising line the United States government took toward Soviet Russia and Red China between 1953 and the early months of 1959 [was] more a Dulles line than an Eisenhower one.”4 This is a fair characterization. Dulles did view the power struggle between the communist and noncommunist worlds as a “zero-sum” game: that is, any plus for one’s opponents, such as an increase in their military power, general power potential, or even economic well-being, was a minus for oneself—and vice versa. Eisenhower, on the other hand—and this worried Dulles—was anxious to reduce the costs and risks of the contest to the United States by exploring opportunities, in face-to-face meetings with the Soviet leaders, for mutual gain: a “non-zero-sum” or “win-win” game.

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Also, what emerges from the memoirs and subsequently from memoranda of discussions in the White House and National Security Council confirms Princeton professor Fred I. Greenstein’s thesis of “the hiddenhand presidency”—that Eisenhower, contrary to the caricatures of him as an aloof, above-it-all, don’t-bother-me-with-the-details leader, more interested in playing golf and bridge than getting involved in the gritty political infighting over policy, was in fact very much a hands-on chief of state, insistent, especially on foreign policy and national security matters, that subordinates work out and debate with him the costs and benefits and possible unintended consequences of alternative policies. Moreover, Ike, as he was affectionately known, artfully cultivated this almost Janus-like face—showing the genial side in public and the tough political infighter side to those he had to deal with in the actual business of policy making and policy implementation.5 Where there were some differences between Eisenhower and Dulles, unless the secretary of state could convince the president of the political and moral wisdom of acting otherwise, it was Eisenhower who called the shots. Thus, each of the prominent “peace” initiatives of the period was generated and formulated by special assistants or staff aides to the president, not by Dulles. Eisenhower’s April 1953 “chance for peace” address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, for example, went against Dulles’s grain. But because the secretary of state knew how impatient the president was to follow through on a hunch with a dramatic peace probe in the wake of Stalin’s death, Dulles only objected obliquely and then characteristically fell into line.6 Eisenhower’s biggest frustrations at this time came from trying to reduce government expenditures. If only the huge burden of arms spending could be reduced significantly, then budgets could be balanced, taxes could be reduced, and private enterprise could flourish with less government interference! Eisenhower believed these effects would in turn lead to a revival of the American spirit of individual initiative, the basic source of the country’s national strength. Possibly the new Soviet leaders had analogous problems. Eisenhower recalls that his “hope” was that “perhaps the time had arrived when the Soviet leaders had decided, because of the discontent of their subjects, to turn their factories to producing more goods for civilian use and thus to raise the living standards of the Soviet population.”7 Dulles hoped for the opposite—that the gap between the desires of the Soviet people and the policies of the Soviet regime would become so wide

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that the Soviet Union would eventually collapse. But he went along with the peace probe in April 1953, still looking forward to an intensification of the gap between popular aspiration in the communist countries and politburo policy. His most optimistic view of the Eisenhower’s famous “chance for peace” speech seems to have been that it might be a good weapon of political warfare. But Eisenhower apparently meant it when he pleaded publicly with the Soviet leaders for “a few . . . clear and specific acts . . . of sincere intent” (such as a finalization of the Korean armistice and the conclusion of an Austrian peace treaty) so as to strengthen “world trust.” Out of this could grow “political settlements for the other serious issues between the free world and the Soviet Union” and, concurrently, “the reduction of the burden of armaments now weighing upon the world.” This last, Eisenhower truly wanted the Soviet leaders to realize, was his deepest aspiration. The core of the speech and the part to which Eisenhower gave greatest emphasis in his delivery tried to convey his appreciation of the mutual benefits to be derived from substantial disarmament: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labors, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school for more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.8

Similar hopes by Eisenhower to transcend the zero-sum aspects of the U.S.-Soviet relationship motivated his “atoms for peace” proposal, presented before the United Nations in December 1953. The idea appears to have been very much Eisenhower’s own. The Soviet hydrogen bomb explosion in August 1953 reinforced his conviction that some way had to be found to dampen the tensions and suspicion that had now evolved into an ever more lethal, expensive phase of the arms race. “I began to search

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around,” Eisenhower wrote to a friend, “for any kind of an idea that could bring the world to look at the atomic problem in a broad and intelligent way and still escape the impasse to action created by Russian intransigence in the matter of . . . inspection.”9 It occurred to him that the United States and the Soviet Union could each donate fissionable material to the United Nations from their respective stockpiles, with the donations being diverted to peaceful projects under international supervision. This would not be disarmament, but “my purpose was to promote development of mutual trust, a trust that was essential before we could hope for success in the . . . [major] disarmament proposals.” To generate such trust it was important to get the Soviet Union working with us in a noncontroversial phase of the atomic field. . . . If we were successful in making even a start, it was possible that gradually negotiation and cooperation might expand into something broader; there was hope that Russia’s own self-interest might lead her to participate in joint humanitarian efforts.”10 Eisenhower was to be disappointed again at the lack of a positive Soviet response to his proposals and nine months later turned “atoms for peace” into a project for joint Western cooperation in research on the peaceful uses of atomic energy. Eventually, Eisenhower could take credit for the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which the Soviets did join, for the exchange of nuclear information and limited inspection of the nuclear energy facilities of member nations without weapons programs. Eisenhower and Dulles found that other political leaders in the Western alliance (with the possible exception of Konrad Adenauer) felt compelled— partly for domestic political considerations—to make a convincing display of peace initiatives before asking their peoples to support major rearmament. From 1953 to 1955, Churchill, and then Eden, advocated a big-power summit meeting. The administration maintained its position that the Soviets would first have to show by deeds, not by promises, that they were interested in serious attempts to reduce tension. As an example of a sincere deed, Dulles and Eisenhower on a number of occasions mentioned Soviet agreement to an Austrian peace treaty. Suddenly, in the spring of 1955, the Soviets reversed their earlier intransigence on Austria and agreed to a mutual withdrawal of troops, demilitarization, neutralization, and a political system contemplating a noncommunist regime. Dulles suggested that the Soviets’ willingness to pay the entry price (the Austrian treaty) for a summit meeting was due to the success of the U.S. “negotiating from strength” diplomacy. “It is clear we are seeing the results of a policy of building unity and strength within the free world,” he said

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in his May 24, 1955, press conference. “This policy has produced a radical change in Soviet policy, illustrated by new Soviet attitudes toward Austria and Yugoslavia.”11 It is doubtful, however, that he really believed the Soviets had made a shift in grand strategy. If anything, the Austrian treaty was a tactical retreat, and Dulles was determined that it should be seen as such. He was skeptical of any important agreements occurring at the forthcoming summit, particularly with respect to the key question of Germany, but for that very reason Dulles felt it important to have the matter of Germany a prominent part of the agenda. Soviet rigidity over Germany and Berlin would be exposed.12 Eisenhower appreciated Dulles’s reluctance to being drawn into a high-level charade of mutual accommodation and cordiality with the Soviets, but once it was decided to go to the summit the president’s inclinations again found an opportunity for expression. Eisenhower wrote in confidence to his friend Swede Hazlett: “Personally, I do not expect any spectacular results from the forthcoming ‘Big Four’ conference.”13 But in contrast to Dulles, he was unworried about the possibility that the Soviets were engaged in a “Trojan horse” tactic to compel the West to let down its guard. If Soviet tactical considerations required a temporary reduction of tensions, Eisenhower seemed concerned only that the Soviets not take all the credit for the improved atmosphere, especially in the field of disarmament negotiations. Although not particularly hopeful of immediate results, the president was at least determined that this time the propaganda battle would not be won by the Soviets. Also, Eisenhower agreed with Dulles that in their attempt to convince world opinion that the United States was making a major effort toward peace, they should not create overly high expectations in the American people that would then be followed by extreme disillusionment. Even so, on the eve of his departure for the conference, the former general, addressing the nation, transformed his peace “probe” into a crusade; and this one, like the others he had led, he must win: If we look at . . . [the] record we would say, “Why another conference? What hope is there for success?” Well now the first question I ask you. “Do we want to do nothing? Do we want to sit and drift along to the inevitable end in such a contest of war or increased tensions?”

Pessimism never won any battle, he reminded his listeners. But also missing from the previous conferences, said Eisenhower, was “an honest

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intent to conciliate, to understand, to be tolerant, to see the other fellow’s viewpoint as well as we see our own.” We must change the spirit in which these conference are conducted, he urged. Finally, there was emerging “a terrific force”—the common desire for peace on the part of the people of all the world—“to which I believe all the political leaders of the world are beginning to respond.” Throughout the world prayers for peace were ascending. These prayers, said the president, could achieve “a very definite and practical result at this very moment”: Suppose, on the next Sabbath day . . . America, 165 million people of us, went to our accustomed places of worship and, crowding those places, asked for help, and by so doing demonstrated to all the world the sincerity and depth of our aspirations for peace. This would be a mighty force.14

This demonstrative, symbolic aspect of Eisenhower’s initiatives for peace also appears to have been the aspect that most appealed to him in the “open skies” plan he dramatically unveiled at Geneva. When USSR Chairman of the Council of Ministers Nikolai Bulganin tried to attract attention to Soviet disarmament proposals on the first days of the conference, Eisenhower sought the counsel of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who immediately saw the virtues of the proposal. It was decided that the president himself would present the idea to the conference. As if seized by an inspiration, in the middle of reading from his prepared remarks to the July 21 meeting of the conference, the president took off his glasses, placed them on the table, faced Bulganin and the communist party’s First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, and said extemporaneously: Gentlemen, since I have been working on this memorandum to present to this conference, I have been searching my heart and mind for something that I could say here that could convince everyone of the great sincerity of the United States in approaching this problem of disarmament. I should address myself for a moment principally to the delegates from the Soviet Union, because our two great countries admittedly possess new and terrible weapons in quantities which do give rise in other parts of the world, or reciprocally, to the fears and dangers of surprise attack. I propose, therefore, that we take a practical step, that we begin an arrangement, very quickly, as between ourselves—immediately. These steps would include:

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To give to each other a complete blueprint of our military establishments, from beginning to end, from one end of our countries to the other; lay out the establishments and provide the blueprints to each other. Next, to provide within our countries facilities for aerial photography to the other country—we to provide you the facilities within our country, ample facilities for aerial reconnaissance, where you can make all the pictures you choose and take them to your own country to study; you to provide exactly the same facilities for us and we to make these examinations—and by this step to convince the world that we are providing as between ourselves against the possibility of great surprise attack, thus lessening danger and relaxing tension. Likewise we will make more easily attainable a comprehensive and effective system of inspection and disarmament, because what I propose, I assure you, would be but a beginning.15

The Soviets, possibly sensing the gesture’s emotional impact, possibly caught off guard, and quite anxious to allow as much “relaxation of tension” as possible to emerge from the conference, held back their negative response. Contrary to their usual practice, the Moscow papers reprinted the text of the president’s speech. Even on the sensitive question of Germany, the Soviets accepted a rather ambiguously worded joint statement that could be loosely interpreted as willingness to accept the Western proposals as terms of reference for forthcoming detailed discussions to be held by the foreign ministers in October. In Eisenhower’s final statement at Geneva before the conference adjourned on July 23, he told the assembly, “It has been on the whole a good week.” In his judgment, he said, “the prospects of a lasting peace . . . are brighter. The dangers of the overwhelming tragedy of modern war are less.”16 Upon returning to Washington, the president told congressional leaders that the Russians seemed to be changing their tactics toward the United States. But at the fall conference of foreign ministers, the EastWest dialogue descended once again from the pleasant atmospherics of the summit to the bedrock of incompatible Cold War objectives. And the “open skies” proposal was flatly rejected by the Soviets as another Western scheme for espionage. The return to the more rigid level of East-West interaction was to Eisenhower a “disillusionment,” a “grievous disappointment,” which he attributed to “Soviet duplicity.” But he felt one of his purposes had been fulfilled. “The record was established: All could now see the nature of

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Soviet diplomatic tactics as contrasted with those of the Free World.” In addition, peoples had been given a glowing picture of hope and, though badly blurred by the Soviets, at least the outlines of the picture remained. Moreover . . . the cordial atmosphere of the talks . . . never faded entirely. Indeed, the way was opened for some increase in intercourse between East and West—there began, between the United States and Russia, exchanges of trade exhibitions, scientists, musicians and other performers; visits were made by Mikoyan and Kozlov to the United States, and returned, by Vice President Nixon and my brother Milton, to the Soviet Union and Poland. These were small beginnings, but they could not have transpired in the atmosphere prevailing before Geneva.17

The Geneva episode, more than any other event during the Eisenhower presidency, illustrated Eisenhower’s growing disenchantment with the coercive tools of the thermonuclear age and a diplomacy premised upon a readiness to use them. The kind of influence he wanted to wield personally and as the symbol of the nation was influence over others derived from their confidence in his and the country’s goodwill. If the people of the world could only know our sincere purposes they might come to trust and like us—and ultimately their rulers (even in communist countries) might follow suit.

5

CRISES AND COMPLICATIONS The cement of fear is not so strong to hold us together as it was to bring us together. —John Foster Dulles

HILE DULLES WAS POINTING WITH pride to his success in deterring the communists through the organization and skillful manipulation of the military ingredients of the balance of power, the Soviets and Chinese were pushing the competition into new channels. The administration, however reluctantly, would need to develop a more complex conception of the requirements for maintaining the balance. Since 1953 the Soviets had been quite openly expanding trade with other nations and offering them loans. (China was of course not yet as active in the economic field; but this was still the period when, in American policymaking circles, the “Sino-Soviet bloc” was thought to be practicing a largely coordinated strategy.) By 1956 the network of communist-bloc trade and credit agreements extended to practically every nonaligned country in the Middle East and Asia, and even to a few countries supposedly a part of the U.S. alliance system—namely, Pakistan, Iran, and Greece. The problem was not so much one of recognizing the shift in communist tactics as of what to do about it. There was pressure within the administration as early as 1953–1954, notably from mutual security administrator Harold Stassen and from Ellsworth Bunker, ambassador to India, to expand U.S. economic assistance to additional nations without making membership in an anticommunist military pact a qualification for assistance.

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However, in mid-1954, Stassen was replaced at the Mutual Security Administration by John Hollister, whose aim was to reduce foreign aid expenditures. And Dulles gave his newly appointed Under Secretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr., overall guidance of foreign economic policy. Innovation was effectively blocked. And orthodox assumptions were reasserted: namely, that economic aid to nations not militarily allied with the United States was an unaffordable extravagance; that such nations were essentially hostile, seeking to play off East against West for their own material gain; that many of these new nationalist regimes were more interested in following “socialist” models of development, and thus had ideological leanings toward the “other side” in the Cold War despite their protestations of nonalignment; and finally, that even discounting these ideological incompatibilities, most of the would-be beneficiaries lacked the administrative and technical talent, economic structure, and will to make significant gains with the additional capital.1 In late 1955 and early 1956, with Soviet salesmen in the underdeveloped areas becoming a familiar part of the international scene, Vice President Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller added their voices to Stassen’s in urging a dramatic response by the United States. The same orthodox wall was encountered again.2 But now the evidence of Soviet economic penetration, particularly in the Middle East, was more alarming. Dulles was especially worried, as he expressed to a cabinet meeting on September 30, 1955, over the extent to which the “commercial” transactions involved the provision of obsolete Soviet weapons to the Arab nations.3 This time Eisenhower and Dulles asked Congress to increase the foreign aid program— then running at about $2.7 billion annually—to $4.9 billion. They also asked for limited authority in the nature of contingency funds to support large projects such as Nasser’s Aswan Dam. Economic assistance was viewed primarily as an enticement to the reluctant to join “our side” in the bipolar struggle. However, the premise that the balance of power was essentially bipolar or ought to be organized on a bipolar basis was undermined drastically by the Suez and Hungarian crises in the fall of 1956.

THE SUEZ CRISIS By the time the Baghdad Pact efforts had reached their culmination in 1955, the United States had already begun to act on assumptions antithetical to those underlying its original sponsorship of this “northern tier”

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alliance system. The network of alliances in the region was based on the premise that the goal of preventing Soviet absorption of the Middle East was best served by building up the indigenous armies of those regimes willing to enter into formal alliance with the West. Nasser’s response—the organization of a pan-Arab alliance system and the bartering of Middle Eastern products for arms manufactured by Soviet satellites—shook the foundations of the existing U.S. approach to the Middle East. The Soviets were seen to be leapfrogging the northern tier with such success that the administration feared Soviet absorption of the area to the south (including the oil pipelines and the Suez Canal) without a single communist soldier crossing an international boundary. Ironically, this was happening through the very device the U.S. had fashioned: the establishment of military-dependency relationships between local regimes and external big powers. The administration was still not ready to throw its established orientation overboard. But its policies increasingly took on a posture of respect for the nationalisms of the area in order to avoid alienating them from the West and making them hospitable to Soviet penetration. This courtship of Third World nationalists involved a series of U.S. moves in 1955–1956 that alienated Britain and France and contributed ultimately to the split over Suez. The administration avoided formal identification with its own offspring, the Baghdad Pact. The British, who had joined the pact, felt betrayed by this turnabout, which Prime Minister Anthony Eden branded an American “failure to put its weight behind its friends in the hope of being popular with its foes.”4 (The British had recently agreed to liquidate their military base at Suez under the assumption that they could still focus military pressure on the area through the instrumentalities of the Baghdad Pact.) France had been disappointed throughout this period in U.S. unwillingness to demonstrate any sympathy for the French position in North Africa. And now, by offering financial assistance to Nasser’s billion-dollar construction of the Aswan Dam, the U.S. was aiding an Egyptian regime that openly supported the Algerian rebel movement. From Dulles’s perspective, the British and French were prisoners of their traditional colonial viewpoint as well as their current economic interests in the area. But the United States was responsible for managing the East-West balance of power. The struggle with the communists for influence in the Middle East was assuming a new form because of the growth of nationalism and the Soviet attempt to exploit it, and thus the United States was realistically adjusting its policies.

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To its European allies, the American “adjustment” was crude, unsophisticated, and ultimately disastrous. First, the United States demonstrated a magnanimity to Nasser that the wily politician could only define as New World gullibility. Then, Eisenhower and Dulles, having finally come to the conclusion that Nasser was playing off the United States against the Soviets on the Aswan Dam project, canceled their commitment to the project in such an abrupt, back-of-the-hand manner that Nasser was driven to nationalize the Suez Canal to finance the construction of the dam. In French and British eyes, this act—which led to their subsequent military intervention—was an overreaction; it could have been avoided had Dulles not been so anxious to humiliate Nasser for having taken the United States for a sucker. Eisenhower subsequently acknowledged that “we might have been undiplomatic in the way the cancellation [of Aswan financing] was handled”; and admitted that if the United States had “avoided a showdown on the issue, we would probably have deprived Nasser of a dramatic and plausible excuse for his subsequent actions affecting the Canal.” Still, Dulles maintained that Nasser got the treatment he was asking for.5 But then, when in response to Nasser’s canal grab, Britain, France, and Israel inflicted their own punishment on Egypt, Eisenhower and Dulles slapped them down. The motives of the administration in demanding that the three countries call off their military action were manifold and complex (indeed, the Europeans appear to have genuinely miscalculated that the United States would support them). The old policy of buying military allies through military assistance agreements had reached a point of diminishing returns: and now, competing with the Soviets for the remaining nonaligned areas required a willingness to back the national development efforts of strident, sensitive, and unpredictable charismatic leaders. The policies of the United States during the Suez crisis reflected the fact that such considerations had come into play at the highest levels of the Eisenhower administration but also that they had not been resolved. First, there was wooing the proud Egyptian nationalist away from the Soviet embrace by the offer to finance the Aswan Dam. Then came the U.S. retraction of the dam-financing offer, which provoked Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. And finally, to the chagrin of the British and French, here were the Americans slapping them down out of fear that toughly retaliating against Nasser for nationalizing the canal would drive Egypt and its allies irreversibly into the arms of the USSR.

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The British and the French also cast their case for military intervention in global balance-of-power terms but equated any exercise of allied restraint with the appeasement of Hitler prior to 1939. The Europeans were, of course, also thinking of their own economic well-being. But Eisenhower and Dulles felt that times had changed. Not only was the most intense U.S.-Soviet competition shifting to non-European areas, but the strength of the European economies in the face of a squeeze on their oil and commerce was not as enfeebled as the British and French were picturing it. “Foster felt that Anthony’s fears of being wholly deprived of Middle East oil were exaggerated,” explains Eisenhower.6 To assuage the fears of the Europeans, the administration worked out an emergency oil pool plan by which the French and British would be supplied by the United States and other nations whose resources were not cut off by the Middle Eastern crisis. Yes, a permanent blocking of the Suez Canal to French and British commerce and an indefinite denial to them of Middle Eastern supplies of fuel could well have serious consequences for the global balance. The president and Dulles assured the Europeans that this was a central consideration in U.S. policy. The question was how to avoid such a consequence, and of equal importance in U.S. calculations, how to do it without turning the entire Arab world against the West. “Obviously we were anxious to sustain our continuing relations with our old and traditional friends, Britain and France,” writes Eisenhower. “But to us the situation was not quite so simple as those two governments portrayed it.”7 The debate between the United States and its principal allies over the consequences of resorting to force against Nasser intensified during the weeks leading up to the British and French military intervention. On October 5, foreign ministers Selwyn Lloyd and Antoine Pinay met with Dulles and frankly urged the use of force, maintaining that only by bringing Nasser to his knees could Western prestige in Africa and the Middle East be restored. According to Eisenhower’s account, “Foster disagreed vehemently . . . setting forth our conviction that Africa, the Middle East, and Asia would be inflamed against the West if we resorted unnecessarily to force.”8 Exchanges of this nature continued between the three governments up to the last minute, when the British and French intervened with troops and planes, ostensibly to separate the Israelis and Egyptians three days after the Israelis attacked Egyptian positions in the Sinai. In the key National Security Council meetings at the end of October, Eisenhower’s and Dulles vented their fury at this duplicitous plot, which all three governments had kept secret from the U.S. administration.

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Eisenhower and Dulles speculated that the plotters must have convinced themselves that once the British and French combat units were actually involved in the military operation Eisenhower would have to support them. “We cannot be bound by our traditional alliances,” General Andrew Goodpaster quotes Eisenhower as fuming. “Nothing justified double crossing us” and violating the terms of the Tripartite Declaration among the United States, Britain, and France pledging to respect the international boundaries between Israel and her neighbors and not to supply any states in the region with offensive weapons. Indeed, it was Eisenhower’s conviction that the cabal’s military intervention could not be allowed to succeed, for their conspiracy carried the worst smell of colonialism. The United States instead would take a cease-fire resolution to the United Nations, demanding the withdrawal of the British, French, and Israeli forces.9 Since Britain and France were able to veto any such UN Security Council resolution, Dulles presented it to the General Assembly, where the U.S. démarche was met with overwhelming and enthusiastic approval—especially from Third World countries, most of them having recently won their independence from Britain or France. But Eisenhower knew he could not rely on moral opprobrium alone to compel his British and French friends to reverse themselves. To ensure their acquiescence he let them know that if they were denied access to Middle Eastern oil because of their intransigence, they could not count on the United States to provide for their needs. He also ordered the Treasury Department to constrict British access to dollar accounts.10 Reportedly, Eisenhower and Dulles speculated that the timing of the military assault on Egypt—during the last days of the U.S. presidential election—was selected by the perpetrators on the assumption that Eisenhower would feel the need to demonstrate solidarity with Israel. Goodpaster records the president insisting that in this matter he did not care in the slightest whether he was reelected or not.11 In the last days of his election campaign Eisenhower publicly and proudly defended his absolute refusal to support the British, French, and Israeli resort to force against Egypt and his sponsorship of UN cease-fire and peacekeeping efforts as required by the U.S. morally based adherence to the principle of nonaggression. In the councils of the government, Eisenhower had been additionally concerned that the Soviets might exploit the situation to enlarge their own military presence in the region. During the height of the crisis, Eisenhower ordered high-altitude reconnaissance flights over Israel and Syria to see whether Soviet planes and pilots had landed at Syrian bases. “Our people should be alert in trying to determine Soviet intentions,” he told

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CIA director Allen Dulles. “If the Soviets should attack Britain and France directly we would of course be in a major war.”12 The president also ordered the military to “progressively achieve an advanced state of readiness.” He regarded these measures as precautionary signals to the Soviets that the United States would not be taken by surprise.13 Eisenhower was worried that the Soviets, shaken by the fall 1956 uprisings against their rule in Poland and Hungary, might attempt some ruse in the Middle East to refurbish their superpower credentials. He therefore rejected the Soviet proposal for joint police action by the Soviets and the United States as “unthinkable.” The Soviets, Eisenhower told the White House staff on November 5, “seeing their failure in the satellites, might be ready to undertake any wild adventure . . . [they] are as scared and furious as Hitler was in his last days. There’s nothing more dangerous than a dictatorship in that frame of mind.”14 Eisenhower and Dulles had started out in 1953 believing the existing military balance of power, based on U.S. superiority in strategic nuclear strike capability and military alliances, could keep the conflicts in the Middle East under control—largely by deterring Soviet military moves. But the military balance, Eisenhower came to realize, was largely marginal to the political dimensions of the situation , and it was these political dimensions that could very seriously affect the regional as well as global distribution of power. The Suez crisis thus drove home and made operational the premise that in the power struggle with the Soviets the sentiments of the new nationalist regimes were of critical importance. But as yet the policy implications were drawn primarily in the form of guidelines concerning what not to do for fear of alienating the nonaligned nationalists. Policies for positive action—for programs to strengthen the ability of these regimes to counter the socioeconomic sources of communist subversion within their countries—required the adoption and wielding of a multifaceted concept of power the Eisenhower administration had not yet embraced.

EAST EUROPEAN CRISES The increasing diversity in the communist bloc also compelled the Eisenhower administration to alter its worldview. But again, the problem was what to do about it. The need for something more than the sloganeering rhetoric used to cover lack of usable options for responding to the East Berlin uprisings of 1953 was finally forced upon the administration

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in 1956 by the Hungarian uprising. Thus the events in Eastern Europe further exposed the inadequacy of the reliance by Dulles and Eisenhower in their grand strategy on a rather limited set of coercive tools as the primary weights on the Western side of the global power balance. It is technically correct that in the rhetoric of the 1952 election Dulles and Eisenhower had explicitly disassociated their “liberation” policy from any incitements to armed revolt. “The people [in Eastern Europe] have no arms,” said Dulles in a Chicago campaign speech, “and violent revolt would be futile; indeed it would be worse than futile, for it would precipitate massacre.”15 Yet implicit in Dulles’s call to “activate the strains and stresses within the communist empire so as to disintegrate it” was the expectation that the Soviets might be dissuaded from violent repression out of a fear that the United States might take coercive countermeasures. And this in turn was based on the premise that the balance of coercive power, on a global basis, was such that the U.S. implicit threat was credible. The standard Republican attack against the Roosevelt and Truman administrations was that the Democrats had been overly respectful of Soviet power. The Republicans contended that the Soviets could have been prevented from consolidating their control over the occupied countries of Eastern Europe if the United States had been willing to bring its superior power to bear. This, of course, was the Republican line in hindsight only; from 1945 to 1948 no prominent Republican had advocated that the United States be willing to fight the Soviets on the East European question. Republican campaigners around the country took a tough line in 1952 and pointed to their platform promise to “end the negative, futile, and immoral policy of ‘containment’ which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and Godless terrorism.”16 Campaign hyperbole or not, the implied promises of help to the captive peoples were carried over into the statements Dulles made early in his career as secretary of state. From his new position of responsibility, in his first public address (January 27, 1953), he again sounded the clarion: “To all those suffering under Communist slavery . . . let us say: you can count on us.”17 However, no pressure was brought to bear against the East Germans or the Soviets after their violent suppression of the workers’ uprisings in East Berlin and East Germany in June 1953. The allied commandants in Berlin protested “the irresponsible recourse to military force” by the communist authorities and demanded that “the harsh restrictions imposed upon the population be lifted immediately,” but there was no significant coercive sanction implied in these demands.18

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The secretary of state used the occasion of the Berlin uprising to reiterate his earlier opinion that “the Communist structure is over-extended, over-riding, and ill-founded. It could be shaken if the difficulties that were latent were activated.” But he also insisted he had been saying all along that “this does not mean an armed revolt which would precipitate a massacre.”19 Congress followed up with its Captive Nations Resolution of August 3, 1953, stating “the cause of freedom cannot be contained” and “the Congress commends and encourages the valiant struggle of these captive peoples for freedom.”20 But the only material assistance offered by the United States during the crisis was the distribution of extra food to the East Berliners who flooded into West Berlin. The pressing problem was whether the United States should prepare to act to greater effect in future contingencies of this sort, which according to Dulles, were only just beginning. The abandonment of “liberation” as an operational policy seems to have begun at this time. The grand-strategy task forces appointed by the White House in the spring of 1953 to explore the implications of alternative strategies and to come up with recommendations included one group specifically assigned to the liberation alternative. But when the reports of the groups were integrated into one document and presented to the president for approval in October 1953, there was no mention of liberation, or “rollback” as it was often called.21 And it does not seem to have appeared again as a premise for grand-strategy planning during the Eisenhower years. Yet the official and officially blessed propaganda agencies do not seem to have received the message clearly. Their role was critical in keeping alive and inflating expectations between 1953 and 1956 that the United States would somehow interpose itself against Soviet repressive measures during a period of major uprisings. But in the fall of 1956 the administration had no intention of intervening in Poland or Hungary, even though the nationalistic Polish communist Wladislaw Gomulka had announced that if Soviet troops were brought in as threatened, the whole nation would stand and fight, and even though the revolt in Hungary was of such magnitude that the Soviets felt the need to deploy 200,000 troops and 4,000 tanks to crush it. Eisenhower recalls his geostrategic appraisal of the situation at the time: The launching of the Soviet offensive against Hungary almost automatically had posed to us the question of force to oppose this barbaric invasion. . . .

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I still wonder what would have been my recommendation to the Congress and the American people had Hungary been accessible by sea or through the territory of allies who might have agreed to react positively to the tragic fate of the Hungarian people. As it was, however, Britain and France could not possibly have moved with us into Hungary. An expedition combining West German or Italian forces with our own, and moving across neutral Austria, Titoist Yugoslavia, or Communist Czechoslovakia was out of the question. The fact was that Hungary could not be reached by any United Nations or United States units without traversing such territory. Unless the major nations of Europe would, without delay, ally themselves spontaneously with us (an unimaginable prospect), we could do nothing.22

Dulles concurred, worrying that an American intervention, even if it were feasible, would risk a nuclear war with the Russians. Eisenhower even refused to let the CIA air drop military supplies to the Hungarian rebels.23 In the aftermath of the Hungarian crisis the tone of administration public statements on Eastern Europe changed, as did the tenor of U.S. diplomacy. There would be no more rhetoric from the State Department about activating stresses and strains in the Soviet empire so as to bring about its disintegration. And the agitational content of both the official Voice of America and the unofficial Radio Free Europe (which was thought to be the main culprit in arousing expectations of American intervention) was cut down. The most telling change was in the selective opening of economic relations with the European satellites. Using American experience with Tito since 1948 as the model, the new view was that trade and aid relationships advantageous to a particular communist regime could have the short-term result of lessening its need to be subservient to Moscow. In the longer term, greater economic independence in Eastern Europe might affect the global balance of power in our favor. Moreover, the side effects of demonstrating to the people of these areas that the United States had a concern for their well-being and the chance for increased exposure to Western values might indirectly act to moderate the totalitarian characteristics of these regimes. Loud talk and the stick gave way, at least on an experimental basis, to soft talk and the carrot as tools of power. The Soviets, as well as their satellites and Soviet-leaning neutrals, were to be approached in this vein. This orientation gain gave prominence to the Eisenhower face, as opposed to the Dulles face, of administration policy—the face associated with the president’s welfare-not-warfare speech to the newspaper editors

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in 1953; his atoms for peace proposal of the same year; and the smiles, handshakes, and open skies of Geneva 1955.

POST-SUEZ TURBULENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST Dulles and Eisenhower, in opposing the military moves of Britain and France against Nasser in 1956, had taken a very large step in the direction of a U.S. foreign policy that attempted to work with rather than against neutralist nationalism. They expected applause from the middle Eastern Nasserites but instead encountered jeers. Rather than interpreting U.S. restraint as respect for the Arab desire to be fully independent, the U.S. opposition to its allies’ use of force was seen by the Nasserites and the Soviets as the product of Washington’s fear of a Middle Eastern confrontation with the Soviets. Now with Britain and France thoroughly humiliated in the eyes of the Arabs and the Baghdad Pact allies more confused than ever as to U.S. objectives in the area, Dulles felt it essential to reassert the U.S. interest and intention of keeping the Middle East out of communist hands. So instead of translating the events of 1956 into an invitation to the Soviets to cooperate in a mutual Cold War “disengagement” from the Middle East, the administration redefined the area as critical to the bipolar balance and reaffirmed the nation’s resolve to do battle there if necessary. In his special message to Congress on January 5, Eisenhower went even further than had Truman in March 1947 in defining the U.S. interest in the Middle East as one of preventing this critical geopolitical region from falling under the control of the Soviets. Stressing its importance as a transportation and commercial link between continents and as a source of twothirds of the world’s oil reserves, the president painted the consequences of Soviet domination of the area in global terms: Western Europe would be endangered just as though there had been no Marshall Plan, no North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The free nations of Asia and Africa, too, would be placed in serious jeopardy. . . . All this would have the most adverse, if not disastrous, effect upon our own nation’s economic life and political prospects.24

With the stakes this high, said the president, “Nothing is more necessary . . . than that our policy with respect to the defense of the area be promptly and

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clearly determined and declared. . . . If power-hungry Communists should either falsely or correctly estimate that the Middle East is inadequately defended, they might be tempted to use open measures of armed attack.”25 The greatest insurance against the possibility of major war for control of the Middle East, contended the president, was a clear declaration by the Congress of its willingness to authorize the use of the armed forces of the United States to help Middle Eastern nations “requesting such aid, against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism.”26 The president’s address also contained requests for congressional authorization of economic and military assistance for regimes in the area. But these were subordinate in emphasis to the request for the declaration of intent to employ U.S. armed forces directly against communist encroachments. The urgency of the need for a clear commitment by the United States to defend the Middle East against communist aggression was presented in starkest outline by the secretary of state before the congressional committees handling the proposed resolution: Soviet ground, naval and air forces are stationed in the areas adjacent to the Middle East—Bulgaria, the Black Sea, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. These Soviet forces are of a size and are so located that they could be employed at any time with a minimum of warning. This fact is nothing new. But today it takes on new implications. There is ample evidence of Communist infiltration into certain areas, particularly organized labor; and there are plottings of assassinations and sabotage to gain Communist ends. Local Communists have recently obtained small arms. . . . Arab refugees . . . are a special target for Communist propaganda. Thus the Middle East area is at once endangered by potential military threats against which there is now no adequate deterrent, by a rapidly mounting financial and economic crisis, and by subversive efforts which seek advantage from exceptional opportunities arising out of recent events. This adds up to a new and grave danger.27

Dulles rejected charges that in focusing on the communist threat he was misdirecting American efforts, which should rather be directed at the underlying causes of instability and hatred of the West. He insisted that the administration’s approach to the Middle East was multifaceted and included an intensified program of economic assistance. The United

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States believed that no efforts should be spared to tackle the root causes of trouble in the area, said Dulles. “But we do not take the pessimistic view that, unless and until these problems can be solved, nothing can usefully be done to prevent the area from being taken over by international communism.”28 Congress passed the joint resolution, henceforth referred to as the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” essentially in the form requested by the administration, in which the President is authorized to . . . employ the armed forces of the United States as he deems necessary to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of any such nation or group of nations requesting such aid against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism.29

Under this grant of authority, the Sixth Fleet was ordered to the eastern Mediterranean in April 1957 as a display of U.S. support for King Hussein of Jordan, faced with political unrest following the dismissal of his pro-Nasser prime minister, Suleiman Nabulsi. Egypt and Syria abetted the antiroyalist rebels, and to this extent the conflict was more than a purely domestic affair. King Hussein claimed that the independence and integrity of Jordan were threatened by “international communism”; and the administration in Washington, conditioned to the sound of its own bell, poised itself to respond. In addition to the naval show of force, $10 million of emergency aid was promptly granted to Jordan.30 Egypt and Syria failed to intervene on the side of the rebels, nor did Israel move to preempt such intervention. In administration circles, the rapid quieting down of the Jordanian crisis was attributed to the swiftness with which King Hussein was brought under the protective cover of the Eisenhower Doctrine. A more plausible case of communist exploitation of Middle Eastern instabilities occurred in Syria. The Soviets, who were equipping the Syrian army, had announced large-scale credits for increased trade. The Damascus government, charging the United States with plotting a coup, expelled three U.S. embassy officials. The Syrian army’s chief of staff, whom Washington regarded as a political moderate, resigned, and his place was taken by a general thought to be a communist. “The entire action was shrouded in mystery,” recalled Eisenhower, “but the suspicion was strong that the Communists had taken control of the government.”31

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In the Jordanian crisis, the Eisenhower Doctrine was implemented simply; it involved symbolic military demonstrations and emergency aid to a regime begging to be saved from communist subversives. Now, with the communist threat less of a fiction, a failure to prevent Syria from falling within the Soviet sphere of influence could undermine the credibility of U.S. commitments all over the world. The problem was that purging Syria of its Soviet-leaning leadership was likely to be very costly and involve risking war. Direct U.S. intervention was avoided on the legal grounds that the Eisenhower Doctrine stipulated that U.S. intervention would come in response to a request from a threatened government, and also on the lack of sufficient information concerning the real loyalties of the Syrian regime. To demonstrate the availability of U.S. military power in case of need, the Sixth Fleet was again ordered to the eastern Mediterranean; U.S. aircraft were redeployed from Western Europe to Adana, Turkey; and the Strategic Air Command (SAC) was placed on alert.32 The Soviets were quick in attempting to turn the situation to their advantage. They accused the United States of planning, in collusion with Turkey, Israel, and others, to intervene militarily in Syria. And if there was indeed any danger of Syria taking aggressive action against neighboring states,” said the Soviet foreign minister on September 10, “why doesn’t the U.S. government raise this question in the U.N. Security Council if it has such fears?”33 The United States was clearly being outmaneuvered and had little recourse but to deflate a war scare that was partly of its own making. Dulles, as dexterous in backing away from the brink as approaching it, used his September 10 press conference to signal the administration’s realization that Syria would not be the arena for a superpower confrontation in the Middle East: “There has been as yet no determination that Syria is dominated by international communism within the meaning of the Middle East resolution.” The bluntness of the kind of power the United States was trying to apply in the Middle was revealed again during the Iraq-Lebanon crisis of 1958. The presidential decision in mid-July to intervene in Lebanon was precipitated by a bloody coup in neighboring Iraq that transformed the West’s only major Arab ally into a Soviet-leaning Nasserite regime and, it was feared at the time, possibly also a communist satellite of the Soviet Union. Yet the Eisenhower administration’s response—a Marine landing in Lebanon—was undertaken without any real hope that this could undo the coup in Iraq.

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In the president’s public announcement on July 15, 1958, his decision to dispatch U.S. Marines to Lebanon was presented as a means for preserving the “independence and integrity” of Lebanon against “indirect aggression.” The source of this indirect aggression was not identified, but there were strong suggestions that it was the United Arab Republic (UAR). There was no reference to “international communism” as the source of aggression, nor was the UAR painted as being “controlled by international communism.”34 The success of the rebel movement in Lebanon would not in itself have altered the balance of power materially or geopolitically. But if the United States were again seen as standing by helpless, as it had in Syria and Iraq, a profound psychological ingredient of the power of the noncommunist coalition—the reputation of its leader as willing to take potentially costly action—would be disastrously undermined. Without a clear concept of what the consequences of action might be, it was nevertheless essential to act. As it happened, the U.S. military intervention in Lebanon and the coordinated British intervention to help King Hussein of Jordan incurred lower costs than might have been contemplated by Eisenhower and Dulles. The Soviets made their usual protests, sent their usual warnings to the Western allies, and made their usual appeals for a summit conference. Nasser, not at all anxious to have a Soviet presence substituted for a Western one, apparently assured the Soviets there would be no requirement for Soviet military intervention unless the Western powers invaded Iraq or the UAR. Moreover, the Egyptian leader kept his assistance to the Lebanese rebels to a minimum and quickly threw his weight on the side of those who sought gains from a political compromise inside Lebanon. The United States and the Soviet Union had little choice but to fall in behind an all-Arab resolution in the General Assembly affirming the obligation of the Arab states to respect one another’s forms of government and asking the secretary general to help arrange the withdrawal of foreign troops from Lebanon and Jordan.35 The administration was able to claim a major success by retrospectively defining its aims in the Lebanon affair as directed primarily toward keeping Nasser from swallowing up yet another Middle Eastern country and by attributing Nasser’s reluctance to intervene in force to the U.S. preemptive intervention. Eisenhower maintained that one result of the American action was a “definite change in Nasser’s attitude toward the United States.” American behavior at the time of the Suez affair had presumably

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convinced the Egyptian that the United States would rarely, if ever, resort to force in support of friends or principles. Now “he certainly had his complacency as to America’s helplessness completely shattered.”36 Eisenhower also claimed that the Lebanon operation was a demonstration—particularly to the communists—of “the ability of the United States to react swiftly with conventional armed forces to meet small-scale, or ‘brush-fire’ situations.” But he makes the point—curious in light of the difficulty he had in identifying the source of the “indirect aggression” in Lebanon—that he was now more than ever convinced that “if ‘small wars’ were to break out in several places in the world simultaneously, then we would not fight on the enemy terms and be limited to his choice of weapons. We would hold the Kremlin—or Peking—responsible for their actions and would act accordingly.”37 However, beneath the surface self-congratulation and reassertion of old strategic doctrine, the Middle East crises of 1957–1958 exhibited to those at the helm of U.S. policy the inadequacy of the predominantly military approach to problems of subversion and “indirect aggression.” President Eisenhower’s address to the UN General Assembly on August 13, 1958, indicated that “we are living in a time when the whole world has become alive to the possibilities for modernizing their societies.” The United States looked with favor upon this trend since “only on the basis of progressing economies can truly independent governments sustain themselves.” The president proposed an Arab regional development plan, analogous to the Marshall Plan, to be formulated and managed by the Arab nations themselves but to be financially and technically supported by the advanced nations. He was ready to pledge U.S. support now, contingent upon the Arab nations’ ability to come up with a plan and willingness to devote their own resources to its implementation. But such an effort would not succeed, warned the president, unless there was simultaneously an elimination from within the area of the chronic fear of violence and of outside interference in the Arabs’ internal affairs. To this end, the United States would support the creation of a UN peacekeeping force so nations of the area “will no longer feel the need to seek national security through spiraling military buildups. These lead not only to economic impotence but to war.”38 Rather than focusing on a possible Soviet ground invasion of the Middle East, the new orientation was aimed toward productively exploiting the nationalist ambitions of the Arab world. Economic assistance would no longer be conditioned on membership in the anticommunist alliance system. Neutrality, and even overt anti-Western postures, would be viewed

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realistically in their own political contexts—as the necessary credentials for Third World political elites who would lead, rather than be swept away by, the mass demands, frustrations, and explosive anger that accompany the removal of colonial overlordship and the enfranchisement of the newly independent population. Logically, the recognition of the failure of past policies to harness the emotional steam of Third World nationalism, and the search for new tools, particularly economic ones, for channeling this energy toward tasks of internal development rather than external adventures, should have produced a revolution in U.S. policies toward Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, U.S. policies in each of these areas had yet to undergo a crisis of impotence before the Eisenhower rhetoric of August 1958 would become the operational premise of action programs on a global basis.

REACTIONS TO SPUTNIK The dramatic Russian space achievements in the fall of 1957 and attempts by the Soviets to exploit diplomatically their potential military significance39 riveted American public and official attention more than ever before on the military-technological factors of power. From 1957 to 1960 the administration was increasingly pressed to answer opposition-party charges that it was letting the nation fall behind the Soviets in strategic military power and in the domestic economic and technological foundations for such power. The prospect of losing the socioeconomic competition to influence the developing nations had also become a part of the policy dialogue and was reflected in the Mutual Security Administration’s renewed emphasis on economic assistance. However, the major controversies surrounding administration decisions for the allocation of resources had to do with the best means of preventing the Soviets from surpassing the United States in strategic military power. The administration’s first public reaction to the Soviet orbiting of their 184-pound Sputnik I on October 4, 1957, was a model of studied nonchalance. The Soviets were congratulated for their scientific achievement, but its military implications were publicly deprecated. But when only a month later the Soviets launched Sputnik II, which carried a dog and many instruments and was more than five times heavier than Sputnik I, the tremendous strides the Soviets had been making in technology required something more than sanguine recognition.

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The White House announced the appointment of James R. Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as special assistant for science and technology—a new post described by the president as carrying “active responsibility for helping me to follow through in the scientific improvement of our defense.” In addition, Eisenhower gave personal attention to the administrative bottlenecks in the missile program. He directed secretary of defense, Neil McElroy “to make certain that the Guided Missile Director is clothed with all the authority that the Secretary himself possesses” and announced other changes designed to eliminate overlapping and conflicting service jurisdictions in the rocket and missile programs. These actions were revealed in a major television address on science and defense. The president’s main message was one of reassurance. It was right that the nation should feel concern in light of the Soviet accomplishments; otherwise, we might become complacent and fall behind. But there was every reason for confidence that existing programs, with only marginal modifications, would continue to provide the nation with “both a sound defense and a sound economy.” The president was certain that “although the Soviets are quite likely ahead in some missile and special areas, and are obviously ahead of us in satellite development, as of today the over-all military strength of the Free World is distinctly greater than that of the Communist countries.” He based this conclusion, said the president, on a number of important facts: the United States was ahead of the Soviet Union in the nuclear field, both in quantity and quality. Our stock of nuclear weapons was sufficiently dispersed, so if we were attacked first, “ample quantities would be available for instant retaliation.” The U.S. missile program was well under way, with test shots ranging 3,500 miles already accomplished; and because of our forward system of bases ringing the Soviet Union, an intermediate-range missile would be “for some purposes, as good as an intercontinental missile.” In addition to these offensive components, the nation was protected from direct attack by “a complex system of early warning radars, communication lines, electronic computers, supersonic aircraft, and ground-to-air missiles, some with atomic warheads.” The president also expressed confidence in the combined strength of the ground and naval forces of the United States and its allies. The essential approach of the so-called New Look for serving the nation’s security was reaffirmed. It was important to maintain “selectivity” in defense spending, cautioned the president, so as not to neglect priorities and “ride off in all directions at once.”40

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The president’s expressed confidence in the adequacy of existing military programs was not shared at all by one group of prestigious advisers, the Security Resources Panel of the president’s Science Advisory Council, chaired by Horace R. Gaither. Although the Gaither committee report was classified top secret, its findings and recommendations were leaked to the press and were widely discussed in the policy community.41 The report painted the United States as increasingly vulnerable to Soviet strategic power unless significant corrective action was taken. The most critical problem was how to maintain an effective strategic retaliatory capability when, in the early 1960s, the Soviets would have an operational Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) arsenal. If no corrective action was taken, the Soviets, if they struck first, would be able to destroy the SAC forces. The vulnerability of SAC, rather than its initial destructive capability, was the matter that should be receiving priority attention. Missiles with intercontinental ranges would have to become the foundation of the strategic force. This would have to be primarily designed as a “second-strike” force capable of surviving a first strike. But the implications of such strategic planning had to be faced: namely, with survivable strategic capabilities on both sides, the noncommunist world would also need to be prepared to fight limited wars. However, for the limited-war capability to be significant, as opposed to that maintained by the communists, the United States would have to maintain much larger ground forces and airlift capacity than planned for under the New Look.42 These publicly leaked proposals, given the dramatic context of Sputnik I and Sputnik II and Soviet claims of an operational ICBM, could not have come at a worse time for the administration. Eisenhower had failed during his first term to keep military expenditures under the New Look ceiling of $34 billion annually. Reluctantly, for the second term, a more realistic ceiling of $38 billion had been agreed upon. But the second term began amid general price inflation, with the costs of goods and services purchased by the Defense Department rising faster than those of the economy as a whole. Defense Department officials were now telling Eisenhower that even without new programs, military expenditures during fiscal 1958 would rise to about $42 billion.43 Rather than being able to balance the budget, the president would have to ask Congress to raise the statutory limit on the national debt. In these circumstances Eisenhower was not at all pleased with the recommendations of the Gaither report and looked more kindly on arguments showing that with only marginal improvements in existing programs and

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a more selective approach, the U.S. could preserve the existing balance of strategic power against the Soviet Union. He also renewed his interest in the Mutual Security program as a means of saving U.S. defense expenditures by providing for local defense capabilities with the cheaper-to-provision armies of allies. Unlike 1950, when Secretary of State Acheson helped provide the president with a grand-strategy rationale for devoting a larger portion of the nation’s resources to military programs, the post-Sputnik period found the secretary of state most effective in buttressing the president’s effort to quiet the chorus of demands for greater military outlays. Dulles now joined Eisenhower in deprecating those who would overemphasize military factors in the balance of power. In a top-level meeting that considered the Gaither report, Dulles noted that the committee had confined itself to military problems. “But the international struggle,” he observed, “is not just military.” By overdevoting its resources to defense, the United States could lose the world economic competition. And in a comment with significance for a whole set of New Look premises, Dulles pointed out that the Soviet Union had made its greatest seizures of territory and people “when only the United States had the atomic bomb.”44 The implied denigration of the utility of U.S. military-strategic superiority in these remarks was more than polemical. Administration defense planners, fending off pressure to spend more to keep ahead of the Russians in strategic striking power, had as early as 1956 accepted the essentials of mutual strategic deterrence as an operational guideline. As explained by Secretary of the Air Force Donald A. Quarles in August 1956, looking a few years ahead: [The] build-up of atomic power [on both sides of the Iron Curtain] . . . makes total war an unthinkable catastrophe for both sides. Neither side can hope by a mere margin of superiority in airplanes or other means of delivery of atomic weapons to escape the catastrophe of such a war. Beyond a certain point, this prospect is not the result of relative strength of the two opposed forces. It is the absolute power in the hands of each, and the substantial invulnerability of this power to interdiction.45

Eisenhower was responsive to suggestions, from the Gaither committee and other experts, that the U.S. maintain at least this minimum deterrent against a massive Soviet strategic strike, and that hardening, mobility, and dispersal were important components of a survivable deterrent. However,

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he accepted the counsel that this could be done within existing expenditure levels. The president bristled at suggestions that he was sacrificing national security to economic considerations. But he adamantly refused to be stampeded by those whom he saw as translating every international crisis into a larger appropriation for their pet projects—a concern he later expressed most emphatically in his farewell address on the “military-industrial complex.” Although Eisenhower’s first reaction to the Soviet space shots was to maintain that we were not in a space race with the Soviets, the U.S. space effort, centered on the Vanguard project, was accelerated on an emergency basis. By the summer the race was in full swing, with successful U.S. launches of Vanguard I, Explorer III, and Explorer IV. The Soviets launched heavier satellites (Sputnik III, May 15, 1958, weighed 2,900 pounds), but the United States could claim greater sophistication. In the more immediately critical field of long-range ballistic missiles, the competition also began to be equalized by the end of 1958. The solid-propellant Minuteman ICBM entered its development phase, and the Polaris program for submarinelaunched missiles was begun in earnest. Yet the administration had a difficult time during its last year and a half in office as a growing number of intellectuals, journalists, and politicians were circulating and repeating the phrases “delicate balance of terror” and “missile gap.” The thrust of the criticism directed at the administration was that it was overly complacent about the ability of the United States to maintain a retaliatory capability that was not vulnerable to destruction by a Soviet first strike. Journalists, claiming their reports were based on the estimates of high Defense Department officials, predicted a Soviet missile lead of three-to-one by the early 1960s. Administration spokesmen refused to talk “numbers” in public. They insisted that numerical estimates were not as important as the fact that there would be no “deterrent gap”—a vague concept meant to convey the notion that the United States, while constructing its advanced ICBM force, would maintain a diversified capacity (based in part on manned bombers) to inflict unacceptable damage on the Soviet Union in a strategic exchange. The administration’s confidence, which Eisenhower in particular exuded, even in response to the barrage of criticism the president got in reaction to Sputnik, was based on intelligence of persisting U.S. strategic superiority. Eisenhower did not want to disclose what he knew—the ICBM “missile gap” was in favor of the United States—because the information

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was based on the surveillance of Soviet missile capabilities being obtained by high-altitude U-2 flights, which if publicly revealed would provoke Khrushchev to demand their cessation. (Actually, the Soviets knew of the overflights and had filed a formal protest with the U.S. Department of State. But Khrushchev did not want to openly protest their existence, since that would be an admission of the inability of the Soviets to stop them.)46 Science, technology, the rate of economic growth, and the esoteric calculus of strategic nuclear deterrence were the dominant terms in which national power was evaluated by administration defenders and critics during the later Eisenhower years. But underneath this dialogue, forces stubbornly resistant to such material factors of power continued to brew and erupt and undermine the peace on which the American pursuit of happiness depended.

THE LATIN AMERICAN “PROBLEM” When the administration faced the prospect of a communist takeover of Guatemala by political means in 1954, Dulles’s diplomatic strategy had been to get the Latin Americans to make an exception to mutual pledges of nonintervention in the case of communist regimes. The result of his efforts was the “Declaration of Solidarity for the Preservation of the Political Integrity of the American States Against International Communist Intervention,” adopted at the Tenth Inter-American Conference in Caracas, Venezuela, in March 1954. (Guatemala voted against; Mexico and Argentina abstained.) The Caracas declaration condemned “the activities of the international communist movement as constituting intervention in American affairs,” and declared that the domination or control of the political institutions of any American State by the international communist movement, extending to this Hemisphere the political system of extra-continental power, would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and political independence of the American States, endangering the peace of America.47

Dulles wanted an expansion of the concept of “intervention” to cover political subversion, and this much he got. But he also wanted specific commitments for collective action against the Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán regime in Guatemala, and with this the Latin treaty partners would not go

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along. They were not ready to define the situation in Guatemala as one in which the “international communist movement” had taken over a country. Nor were they willing to commit themselves to direct counterintervention when and if such a contingency materialized. Unable to make use of the hemispheric collective security system to topple the Arbenz regime, the Eisenhower administration took unilateral action—rather unconvincingly cloaked as aid to Honduras and Nicaragua under the bilateral mutual defense assistance pacts just negotiated.48 The June 1954 invasion of Guatemala from Honduras by Castillo Armas with an army of 1,000 men, obviously encouraged and assisted by the U.S. government,49 was so successful from a tactical point of view that no fundamental reassessments in the White House of its approach to the growing militancy of the democratic left in Latin America seemed necessary. The United States apparently had adequate power at its disposal to handle communist insurgency or subversion in the hemisphere, as long as the Dulles example in the Guatemalan affair was followed unsqueamishly. This being the perception at the highest levels in the administration of the dimensions of the Latin American “problem,” only pro forma attention was given to the appeals of others with ties to the president (such as Milton Eisenhower, Douglas Dillon, and Nelson Rockefeller) that we pay greater attention to the socioeconomic conditions creating a fertile field for communist cultivation. The shock of recognition that there was need of a deep reappraisal of U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America came with Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the Batista regime on January 1, 1959, and the rapid transformation of revolutionary Fidelismo into a harsh totalitarianism as known communists were given increased responsibility in the Cuban government. Before the year was out, the United States had subscribed $450 million to the new Inter-American Development Bank, and Washington had begun a sweeping policy review.50 By early 1960, recalled Eisenhower, the outcome of this policy review was still questionable, but there was “one thing we did know: Fidel Castro was a hero to the masses in many Latin American nations. They saw him as a champion of the downtrodden and the enemy of the privileged who, in most of their countries, controlled both wealth and governments.” To counter the Castro charisma and the appeal of his expropriation of foreign interests, land reform, and redistribution of wealth, the United States would have to demonstrate its concern for hemispheric development and reform in a more dramatic and convincing manner than heretofore. The

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personality and prestige of the president would have to be closely identified with these efforts. “I decided by early 1960,” writes Eisenhower with cryptic understatement, “that the time had arrived for a presidential journey to South America.”51 Eisenhower’s consultations during his trip made him an ally of those within his administration, led by Douglas Dillon and Milton Eisenhower, who saw the dangers in a failure by the United States to identify itself with the forces of social reform. The views of this group now came to the fore and provided U.S. policy with the first manifestation of the orientation that was to receive fuller elaboration and commitment in Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. At Newport, on July 11, 1960, Eisenhower revealed this new orientation: change is the law of life, he said. “Latin America is passing through a social and political transformation. Dictatorships are falling by the wayside. Moderate groups, seeking orderly reform, are contesting with dictators of both right and left who favor violence and authoritarianism.” The choice had narrowed. It was now “social evolution or revolution.” The president listed those matters requiring the urgent attention of “every American nation”: land reform, housing, and a wider share of the national product for the poor majority of the population; the strengthening of institutions for mobilizing resources and promoting economic growth; and greater respect for human rights and the will of the people as expressed in democratic elections. “The United States will not, cannot stand aloof.”52 These ideas were given expression in a new program drafted by Under Secretary of State Dillon and presented to the special meeting of the economic ministers of the Organization of American States (OAS) at Bogotá, Colombia, September 5–13, 1960. Dillon conveyed the offer of the president, backed by congressional authorization, of an immediate loan of $500 million for the purpose of inaugurating “a broad new social development program for Latin America.” The Inter-American Development Bank would administer the allocation of subscribed funds and evaluate projects in conformity with agreed criteria. As progress was made through joint and cooperative efforts, the United States would maintain its support with additional funds.53 The Act of Bogotá, adopted by the conference on September 13, 1960, incorporated the essential ideas of the Dillon proposal as they appeared in the detailed U.S. draft. As characterized by President Eisenhower: “Non-intervention” had given way to a new idea—the idea that all American nations had an interest in ending feudalism, the vast hereditary gulf between rich and poor, the system that assured to a handful of families

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opulence without labor and condemned millions to near starvation without opportunity.54

In six short months the White House had moved a long way from its charge that such insidious ideas were “fomented by Communists” and from its insistence that social reform was “purely an internal matter.” Meanwhile the administration’s policy toward Cuba, in reaction to Fidel Castro’s increasing intransigence, was becoming steadily more rigid. Repeated attempts by the United States to engage his regime in diplomatic discussions concerning such matters as compensation for expropriated U.S. companies met with repeated rebuffs and harangues. A year after Castro’s takeover in Havana, with evidence of increasingly close economic and political relations between Havana and Moscow, Eisenhower was ready to seriously consider plans that had been hatching in the CIA to overthrow the Castro regime. On March 17, 1960, President Eisenhower agreed to a CIA program for the training of Cuban exiles in Guatemala for a possible insurgency operation.55 In July, the new anti-Castro policy was exhibited in the reduction and subsequent suspension by the United States of the importation of Cuban sugar. And just two weeks before relinquishing the presidency to John F. Kennedy, President Eisenhower broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in retaliation for Castro’s demands that the U.S. embassy in Havana drastically reduce its staff. Even serious critics of the Eisenhower administration concede that the deterioration of relations after the Castro takeover was not by U.S. design but in reaction to Castro’s increasing pugnacity, concomitant with the solidification of his ties to the Soviet Union. The White House apparently believed its own words about the necessity of opposing dictators of the right as well as the left in Latin America. On August 20, 1960, the United States took a leading role at the San José, Costa Rica, meeting of OAS foreign ministers in passing a resolution condemning the Trujillo government’s actions against Venezuela and calling for a total blockade on the shipment of arms to Trujillo and a partial economic blockade. The United States promptly cut most of the Dominican Republic’s sugar quota and broke diplomatic relations with Trujillo. When the Eisenhower administration left office, Latin America, the area in which the appreciation of revolutionary nationalism as a significant factor in the global power balance was most delayed, had become the field for the greatest experimentation with new tools and a new ideological stance for influencing global alignments.

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THE BERLIN CRISES OF 1958–1959 Throughout the spring and summer of 1958, while the United States was embroiled in the Lebanon crisis in the Middle East and a brief renewal of the offshore island confrontation with communist China, the Soviets were gradually beginning to tighten the screws in Europe—combining administrative harassments of Western traffic to the city of Berlin with calls for a new summit conference to reduce tension.56 The Warsaw Pact countries also renewed their campaign for mutual East-West military disengagement from Central Europe. American reactions were initially no more than a rehearsal of old positions: the United States would maintain its rights of access to Berlin; it would not be forced into a summit conference. If the Soviets were serious about reducing tension in Europe, they should be willing to undertake serious negotiations to reduce the sources of such tension—the most outstanding being the unnatural division of Germany. A summit conference would be useless unless substantial progress were made toward a resolution of the German problem at the working diplomatic level. A basis for serious negotiations over the German question had been provided by the Geneva heads of government communiqué of July 1955—namely, reunification on the basis of free elections. But the Soviets had thus far not shown any willingness to negotiate on those terms. It seemed that the Soviets were anxious to test the degree of new diplomatic leverage they had gained as a result of their space success and missile claims.57 Khrushchev announced on November 10, 1958, that the Soviet Union was committed to put an end to the Western occupation of Berlin and was ready to renounce its Potsdam Agreement obligation unilaterally if the West was unwilling to negotiate an end to the occupation status of Germany and Berlin. Then on November 27, the Soviet Union, in formal notes to the United States, Great Britain, and France, set a time limit of six months for the West to accept its proposals for a termination of the military occupation of Berlin and the “conversion of West Berlin into an independent political unit—a free city . . . demilitarized . . . that . . . could have its own government and run its own economic, administrative, and other affairs.” The status of the “free city” of West Berlin, according to the Soviet note, should be guaranteed by the four powers, and possibly by the United Nations. But this free city would lie within the German Democratic Republic. Thus, in order to guarantee unhindered communications between the free city and the outside

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world, negotiations would have to be undertaken by the four powers with the GDR. The State Department’s response to the Soviet proposals was, of course, negative. But this meant the United States had to face the likelihood that the Soviets, in six months, would carry out their threat to abrogate, unilaterally, their Berlin obligations; this would mean, in turn, that the West would have to deal directly with the East German authorities on all questions of access to Berlin. By such a maneuver, the Soviets apparently hoped to force the West to “recognize” the authority of the GDR, thereby legitimizing the division of Germany and presumably demoralizing the Federal Republic. Dulles attempted to provide some basis for sidestepping a confrontation by hinting in his November 26 press conference that the United States might have to deal with the GDR official as “agents” of the Soviet Union.58 If a confrontation were to arise on this issue, if after the expiration of the six-month deadline the East German authorities were to attempt to control the access routes to Berlin and not let Western traffic through until their authority was recognized, what would be the response? Would the United States use force? Until now, whenever the West had threatened a physical challenge to Soviet administrative harassments on the access routes, the Soviets were able to cease the application of the particular procedure at issue without losing face. The Soviets would usually cover their retreat in advance by claiming that the procedures were made necessary by road repairs or some other temporary technicality. But in the context of the Soviet ultimatum, a confrontation might be forced on both sides by political considerations. The very real possibility that this time the East German officials backed by the Soviets would not retreat under U.S. threats to resort to physical means compelled the administration to reassess the balance of locally applicable force. Assessing the local military situation, Eisenhower observed that it was “so lopsided as to be ridiculous.” He was convinced that if the conflict entered a phase of actual military engagement, “our troops in Berlin would be quickly overrun, and the conflict would almost inevitably be global war.” In a White House meeting with congressional leaders, he maintained that an attempt to balance Soviet ground troops in Europe was a senseless policy. He had no intention of opposing with ground troops only a fullscale attack by a couple of hundred of Soviet divisions. There were other means of dealing with the situation. He was talking of a third world war, he explained, for which U.S. nuclear forces were more than adequate.59

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It was obviously necessary to put a determined and confident face on the capability to best the Soviets if it ever came to nuclear war; for if the United States had no capabilities or intention of fighting a limited engagement for control of Berlin, the Soviets would win the diplomatic confrontation unless Washington could appear less fearful than they of a general nuclear war. “Possibly, we were risking the very fate of civilization on the premise that the Soviets would back down from the deadline when confronted by force,” Eisenhower reflected in his memoirs. “Yet this to my mind was not really gambling, for if we were not willing to take this risk we would be certain to lose.”60 Journalists, historians, and graduate students in political science have scoured the archives of the unclassified, classified, and declassified records of National Security Council meetings to determine whether Eisenhower at the moment of truth (if it ever materialized) when the Soviets made an intolerable move on Berlin would have in fact authorized the start of nuclear hostilities (that he granted could mean the end of civilization). No one—members of his family, his closest associates, scholars who have done serious research on Eisenhower—has found the answer. The recent thoroughly researched book by Evan Thomas, on the basis of its title— Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World—seems to promise a new finding that Eisenhower would not have taken the step across that fateful threshold and that he was simply a master bluffer, understanding he could never reveal his true intentions to anyone or his bluff might be called. But Thomas, although entertaining this hypothesis, does not finally embrace it, and remains agnostic.61 An alternative hypothesis is that Ike was steeling himself and ordering nuclear war preparations against the possibility that deterrence might fail, but was confident that the unequivocal threat to escalate to all-out war plus deft conflict-control diplomacy could induce both sides to swerve off their collision course without serious loss of face.62 Indeed, Eisenhower was very careful to provide himself with alternative courses of action and to keep the reins of escalation in his own hands in the case of a Soviet refusal to back down. The basic contingency plan the president approved in late January 1959 included these steps: (a) A refusal to acquiesce in any substitution of East Germans for Soviet officials in checking the Western occupying powers movement to and from Berlin . . . ; (b) A decision to begin quiet military preparations in West Germany and Berlin prior to May 27, sufficient to be detected by Soviet

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intelligence but not sufficient to create public alarm; (c) Should there be any substitution of East German officials for Soviets, a small convoy with armed protection would attempt to go through, and if this convoy were stopped, the effort would be discontinued and the probe would fire only if fired upon; (d) transit would then be suspended and pressure would be brought to bear on the Soviets by publicizing the blockade and taking the matter to the United Nations Security Council and, if necessary, to the General Assembly. In these circumstances our further military preparations would be intensified by observable means such as the evacuation of dependents from West Berlin and possibly from all Germany; (e) In the event that this moral and other pressure was not sufficient, use of additional force would be subject to governmental [meaning Eisenhower’s] decision.63

Meanwhile the West would agree, assuming the Soviets would drop their ultimatum, to engage in high-level discussions, but at the foreign ministerial level and not at the summit. These discussions, according to the administration, were to provide the Soviets with the opportunity to back away from their November 1958 demands without seeming to. The White House and State Department denied any intention to compromise Western rights in Berlin or to review their refusal to accord the Ulbricht regime any formal or symbolic recognition. Yet they did agree to the attendance of the GDR and the FRG at the forthcoming conference, although not as full participants. Between January and May 11, 1959, the date of the convening in Geneva of the foreign ministers’ meeting, the Soviets gave many indications of backing away from their rigid six-month deadline. This made it easier for the West to agree to participate in the foreign ministers’ meeting, as it diluted the image of the United States being dragged to the conference table under the grip of an ultimatum. At the May meeting most of the significant compromises were made by the Western nations. The draft agreement handed by the Western foreign ministers to Gromyko on June 16 provided that (1) the United States, Britain, and France would limit the combined total of their forces in Berlin to 11,000 and would “continue to arm these forces only with conventional weapons”; (2) the “procedures” for controlling access to West Berlin “without prejudice to existing basic responsibilities . . . may . . . be carried out by [East] German personnel” (it was stated that the access should be “free and unrestricted” and that “basic” responsibilities should remain in the hands of the four powers; but the legitimizing of

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operational control by the GDR was a major concession by the West); (3) measures should be taken “to avoid in both parts of Berlin activities which might either disturb public order or seriously affect the rights and interests, or amount to interference in the internal affairs, of others” (this curb on propaganda and intelligence activities cut hardest against Western operations and gave in to one of the persistent Soviet complaints against the West Berliners).64 Paradoxically, the administration was saved the embarrassment of a Soviet acceptance of the Western proposals by Khrushchev’s assumption that he could press his advantage to get even more. The Soviet leader had let the six-month “deadline” pass without turning over major Soviet responsibilities to the East Germans, explaining to Ulbricht that “conditions are not ripe as yet for a new scheme of things.” Finding the West surprisingly malleable at the June sessions in Geneva, and waiting for the results of the U.S. presidential election, the Soviets extended their deadline for a year but meanwhile intensified their intransigence at the conference to see if there was even more give in the Western position. This reduced the immediate risks to the Soviets of pressing the West too far too soon while allowing for the possibility of greater rewards later. Khrushchev must have been encouraged in the assumption that the West believed it was negotiating from a position of weakness when, before the close of the foreign ministers’ conference, he received a formal invitation from President Eisenhower to visit the United States. Eisenhower had been consistently trying to deflect the growing popular clamor for a summit (considerably amplified by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s entreaties) with which the Soviets had identified themselves. As the prospect increased of a collapse of negotiations at the foreign ministers’ meeting, Eisenhower reminded Macmillan of their agreement that substantive accomplishments at the foreign ministers’ level would have to precede a summit conference. The president confided to his British colleague his fear that “if I surrendered on this point I would no longer have any influence with Khrushchev, who would, thereafter, consider me a ‘pushover.’ Indeed . . . I would myself interpret such an agreement as an exhibition of weakness.”65 As Khrushchev pushed his campaign for a summit, Eisenhower thought he found “a device to break the stalemate” in an invitation for the Soviet leader to visit the United States on an “informal basis.” This would be no “summit,” there would be no “negotiations”; but an opportunity might arise for an informal conversation on matters of mutual concern.66

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This “informal conversation,” held at Camp David, Maryland, on September 25 and 26, 1959, produced an agreement by Chairman Khrushchev to withdraw his time limit for a Berlin settlement in return for Eisenhower’s agreement to a Big Four summit conference in 1960 during which the Berlin issue could be discussed. To purists in the delicate area of German-issue diplomacy, this was an American blunder. Clumsier yet was Eisenhower’s press conference remark on September 28 that the Berlin “situation is abnormal.”67 The standard Western formulation was supposed to be that the division of Germany was abnormal. The total breakdown of the 1960 summit, ostensibly over the U-2 reconnaissance issue (Khrushchev walked out in anger over Eisenhower’s refusal to apologize for the violation of Soviet airspace in which a U-2 was shot down), and the diplomatic hiatus produced by the impending change in U.S. leadership saved the Eisenhower administration from further negotiations on the Berlin issue. Significantly, the Democrats, watching from the wings, resolved they would not let themselves be caught in a similar diplomatic confrontation without some redressing of the balance of local military capabilities in Europe.

PA R T

III THE KENNEDY-JOHNSON YEARS Too long we have fixed our eyes on traditional military needs, on armies prepared to cross borders, on missiles poised for flight. Now it should be clear that this is no longer enough—that our security may be lost piece by piece, country by country, without the firing of a single missile or the crossing of a single border. —John F. Kennedy

We still tend to conceive of national security almost entirely as a state of armed readiness: a vast, awesome arsenal of weaponry. We still tend to assume that it is primarily this purely military ingredient that creates security. We are still haunted by this concept of military hardware. —Robert S. McNamara

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ENHANCING THE ARSENAL OF POWER Power is not a matter of arms alone. Strength comes from education, fertile acres, humming workshops and the satisfaction and pride of peoples. —Dean Rusk

HE STATE OF THE UNION leaves a lot to be desired, the new president informed the nation on January 30, 1961. “Our problems are critical. The tide is unfavorable. The news will be worse before it is better.” With the help of more than twenty-five specialized task forces assembled during and after the election campaign, he had been taking a close inventory of “our whole arsenal of tools,” and had discovered serious gaps—gaps that if not corrected would leave the nation with a deficiency of power for meeting the coming challenges to its very survival. And certainly without attention to the neglected components of our national power, we could not hope to advance beyond these immediate security needs and apply our resources to reducing the misery of others. The Kennedy foreign policy was centered on the premise that the competition between the Soviet Union and the United States was shifting to a new arena—the competition for influence over the direction of development in the poorer half of the globe; and it was with respect to this competition that the United States was in greatest danger of falling behind. Kennedy’s view that the Third World had now become the decisive field of engagement was shared by most of the international relations experts in the camp of Adlai Stevenson (Kennedy’s liberal rival for the Democratic nomination), by Senate foreign policy leaders such as J. William Fulbright

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and Michael Mansfield, and by ever-renewable Averell Harriman. But the Europe-first emphasis remained strong among Truman State Department alumni, led by Acheson—still the idol of many seasoned top-level career diplomats in the State Department who had survived the Dulles years. The burden of proof would fall on those arguing for programs allocating a larger proportion of the country’s human and material resource to “containment” in the underdeveloped world. Two weeks before the inauguration, the supporters of the new orientation received their most effective ammunition from an unexpected source. Premier Khrushchev, in his historic foreign policy speech of January 6, 1961, displayed the Soviet grand-strategy rationale for focusing Soviet efforts on the Third World: due to developments in the technology of warfare, “world wars” and “local wars” had become obsolete and, since they would lead to a nuclear holocaust destroying the workers as well as the capitalists, also “unjust.” The “just wars” of the contemporary period, the inevitable and necessary wars according to the Marxist-Leninist appraisal of the relation between social and material forces, were “wars of national liberation.” The phrase was a catchall for anticolonial agitation, popular uprisings against established indigenous regimes, and actual guerrilla wars. Examples were the campaign of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Algeria for independence from France, the Castro takeover in Cuba, general efforts to mobilize the leftist forces in Latin America, and the insurgency in South Vietnam. “The Communists support just wars of this kind wholeheartedly and without reservations,” said the Soviet leader.1 Here, in Kennedy’s view, was an eminently realistic appraisal by the Soviets themselves of where their best opportunities for expansion lay. It conformed to the strategy shift attributed to the Soviets particularly by Walter Rostow—one of the first in Kennedy’s circle of foreign policy advisers to make a serious pitch for a major U.S. counterinsurgency program. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalls that Khrushchev’s January 6 speech “made a conspicuous impression on the new President, who took it as an authoritative exposition of Soviet intentions.”2 He sent copies of it to members of the National Security Council, attaching a note instructing them to “Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” and alerting them to his conviction that “our actions, our steps, should be tailored to meet these kinds of problems.”3 The president was familiar with Mao Zedong’s aphorism that power grows out of the barrel of a gun. But he knew there was more to guerrilla warfare than forming new commando-type units. He appreciated

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and liked to quote Mao’s equally important aphorism: “Guerrillas are like fish, and the people are the water in which the fish swim. If the temperature of the water is right, the fish will thrive and multiply.”4 It was critically important to tend the temperature of the water—and as far in advance as possible. The preventative aspects of counterinsurgency provided the link between those in Kennedy’s advisory entourage who saw the balance of power primarily in terms of the distribution of coercive capabilities and those who emphasized the more benign components of international influence. When it was put in this frame of reference, Paul Nitze, Generals Maxwell Taylor and James Gavin, Walt Rostow, Roger Hilsman, Chester Bowles, Averell Harriman, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Adlai Stevenson could all agree on the necessity for a much larger program of long-term development aid to the many potential targets for communist insurgency in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Having agreed that the purpose of foreign assistance was to affect the “temperature of the water” in the recipient countries—to assure economic, social, and political conditions inhospitable to the growth of communist movements—the next step was to assure application of foreign aid criteria designed by those with the appropriate expertise. The dominant standard that had prevailed during the Eisenhower period, the degree of overt acquiescence on the part of regimes in power to the anticommunist orientation of U.S. diplomacy, was now seen to be hopelessly inadequate. Kennedy accepted the need for a much more “technical”—and complicated—analysis for determining the utility of the kinds and amounts of assistance to go to any particular country. As senator and president-elect he sought the counsel of professionals, and they were not to be found within the government. He found them, mainly New Deal–Fair Deal exiles (and professional economists all), encamped along the banks of the Charles River: Galbraith, Carl Kaysen, Edward S. Mason, David Bell, and Lincoln Gordon at Harvard; Rostow, Max Millikan, and Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan at the MIT Center for International Studies.5 Here, during the 1950s, were developed the propositions on economic assistance that would become official government policy in the 1960s: namely that operational criteria for evaluating the worth of any particular foreign aid program must be stated in terms of socioeconomic modernization and that the explicit objective of measures sponsored by the United States should be self-sustaining economic growth for each recipient nation. It should be noted that the new president considered the lack of such a concept and objective for determining the

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flow of foreign assistance to the poorer nations as probably the most critical deficiency in the arsenal of tools by which he hoped to influence the international environment. Kennedy’s economist friends were contending that modernization, the development of greater constitutional democracy, human rights, and social justice could go hand in hand; that indeed, economic development required national planning and reliable administration, and these required the kind of political stability that was best sustained in a constitutional system providing for responsible government with the consent of the governed. But Kennedy was also sensitive to the potential gap between the rational political economics of his advisers and their Western-trained counterparts in the developing countries and the combustible character of the “revolution of rising expectations,” particularly when exploited by demagogues. He understood that part of the weakness of the United States in trying to influence the poorer nations from succumbing to totalitarian models for modernization was the lack of passion in the U.S. commitment to egalitarian aspects of social justice. U.S. officials—even under Eisenhower’s belated emphasis on economic and political development—had only halfheartedly supported the kind of land reforms and tax reforms that would bring about the structural economic changes necessary for modernization. Their view was that an open advocacy of such reform measures would constitute an interference in the domestic affairs of those smaller nations—that it was up to those nations, in their own way, however gradually, to initiate such social reform themselves without outside pressure. The effect of this self-denying ordinance, however, had been to identify the United States with the status quo in these countries and to confirm the suspicions of social revolutionary elements that the State Department was in cahoots with U.S. private interests that profited from privileges extended by entrenched local oligarchies. This had to change. As the president put it on the first anniversary of the launching of the Alliance for Progress: For too long my country, the wealthiest nation on a poor continent, failed to carry out its full responsibilities to its sister Republics. We have now accepted that responsibility. In the same way those who possess wealth and power in poor nations must accept their own responsibilities. They must lead the fight for basic reforms which alone can preserve the fabric of their own societies. Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.6

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These were strong words—words that might arouse expectations of U.S. action in support of social reform that outran the ability of the United States to influence “those who possess wealth and power in poor nations.” But in Kennedy’s view of where the stakes in the global struggle for power then lay, he had little choice but to re-identify the United States with the rising demands of the poor and the disenfranchised. However, the president worried that the lagging state of the U.S. economy in the early 1960s reduced both the capacity and will of Congress to provide direct help to the poorer nations. The economic stagnation was damaging an important aspect of U.S. influence: the reputation for successful management of a largely free economy for the well-being of all its people. “We must show the world what a free economy can do,”7 admonished Kennedy, in recommending a set of economic measures to take up the slack. The United States found itself in a vulnerable diplomatic position with respect to other industrialized nations because of its adverse balance of international payments, which Kennedy felt was partly the result of the sluggishness of the U.S. economy in comparison with the dynamically expanding economies of Western Europe. “Our success in world affairs has long depended in part upon foreign confidence in our ability to pay,” he said.8 And to intimates he confided his anxiety that the payments deficit was “a club that [Charles] de Gaulle and all the others hang over my head. Any time there’s a crisis or a quarrel, they can cash in all their dollars and where are we?”9 For Kennedy, programs to “get the country moving again”—his antirecession measures of 1961, the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, and the tax cut of 1963—were as much required by global balance of power considerations as they were by considerations of domestic economic well-being. The continued productive growth of the United States was a value in itself, to be pursued in the basic national interest. But it was also regarded as a means toward the more vigorous exercise of power internationally. The preceding administration seemed to view the requirements of domestic economic productivity as competitive with, and therefore a constraint upon, overseas commitments (we could not raise additional conventional forces because that might bankrupt us). The New Frontier view was that any gap between overseas commitments and the existing domestic economic base needed to sustain them was only an argument for expansion of the domestic economy, not an argument for reduced defense spending. A contraction in commitments or an unwillingness to provide the widest

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array of diplomatic and military tools to sustain these commitments would further reduce America’s ebbing global leadership and in the long run would endanger U.S. security. Similarly, continued reliance on protectionist policies in order to defend the home market from growing foreign competition would have adverse consequences for America’s overall power on the international scene. “Economic isolation and political leadership are wholly incompatible,” asserted Kennedy in urging Congress to grant him the broad tariffreducing authority requested in the administration’s trade expansion bill of 1962.10 Pervading most of President Kennedy’s major recommendations to Congress for domestic as well as specifically foreign programs was this notion of the power of movement itself. The key to leadership on the international scene was a creative exploitation of the currents of change. The surge by the new nations, the social and economic egalitarianism of the newly enfranchised masses across the globe, and the unconquerable assertion that the object of government is to protect and extend the exercise of free choice—this was the very stuff of the new international politics. Leadership in this arena called for a renewal of the American experiment in freedom. The prestige of the United States abroad, its influence upon others—that is, its power—were seriously weakened by the squalor of its cities, the crime on its streets, the overcrowding and low standards in many schools, the shortages of adequate health facilities and medical professionals, and most of all (at least as emphasized in the president’s rhetoric), by the “denial of constitutional rights to some of our fellow Americans on account of race.”11 Kennedy sought to regenerate that national pride and nerve to explore uncharted frontiers, without which the country “would trend in the direction of a slide downhill into dust, dullness, languor, and decay.”12 As much as to help in the spread of literacy and technical know-how in the developing countries—and to improve the American image around the world—the Peace Corps, through the experience its volunteers gained abroad, was supposed also to energize the quality of life in the United States. The Peace Corps typified Kennedy’s approach to the maintaining and enhancing the nation’s power, a challenge to the coming generation of leaders, no less than his own, that they be willing to pay a price to secure the blessing of liberty: “A price measured not merely in money and military preparedness, but in social inventiveness, in moral stamina, and physical courage.”13

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President Kennedy’s decision, after some hesitation, to stress the competitive nature of the space race with the Soviets, not just the potentials for cooperative scientific exploration, was very much a part of his concern for the national fiber. The potential scientific or military payoffs from being “first” in space seem to have impressed him less than the intangible effects on the national spirit. Many of the welfare liberals who supported him down the line on other planks in his program cried “Moondoggle.” His reply, best articulated in his September 1962 address at Rice University, reflected the New Frontier’s search for that vein of adventuresomeness which had once been and could again be a special source of national strength: But why, some say, the moon? . . . And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? . . . We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. . . . Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it, and he said, “Because it is there.” Well, space is there, and . . . the moon and planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.14

ATTENDING TO THE MILITARY BALANCE President Kennedy’s emphasis on a variegated arsenal of power did not in any way lead him to the conclusion that short of a major political settlement with the communists, the United States could substantially reduce the amount of destructive power in its arsenal. In fact, the thrust of his remarks on the nation’s military posture during his years in the Senate and during his presidential campaign was that U.S. forces were insufficient; if anything, a greater proportion of the national effort and product needed to be devoted to strengthening and maintaining our military tools than had been the case under Eisenhower. Kennedy’s general premises about the nation’s military requirements were well developed before he assumed the presidency and reflected the “conventional wisdom” of Democrats involved in foreign policy matters.

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A number of strains of strategic thought had now converged: the ideas generated by Paul Nitze and the Policy Planning Council in NSC-68, the Truman administration document reflecting on the military planning implications of the soon-to-come Soviet intercontinental nuclear capability (see chap. 4); U.S. Air Force–RAND Corporation arguments for a survivable (“invulnerable”) strategic retaliatory force (also favored by the navy as the major rationale for the Polaris submarine-fired missile); the doctrine of “flexible response” put forward within the Eisenhower administration by Army chiefs of staff Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor in opposition to the strategic monism of Secretary of State Dulles and Admiral Radford;15 the analysis of the possibilities for limited war in the thermonuclear age by scholars such as William Kaufmann, Robert Osgood, Albert Wohlstetter, Henry Kissinger, and Bernard Brodie;16 and the recommendations for a balanced defense posture in the reports of the Gaither committee and panel II of the Special Studies Project of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.17 Most reputable American analysts of military policy at the time of Kennedy’s election were in agreement on at least the following premises: 1. The temptation of the Soviets and the Chinese communists to expand into new areas, and otherwise to impose their will on the noncommunist nations, would correlate inversely with their belief in the likelihood of effective counteraction by the leading noncommunist nations. 2. Effective counteraction would impose costs on the Soviets and Chinese clearly disproportionate to their anticipated gain. 3. The Soviets and Chinese would determine the probability of such counteraction on the part of the leading noncommunist nations by attributing to them essentially the same calculus: counteraction would be taken by the noncommunists to the extent that the cost of such action would be less than the cost of acquiescence in the communist moves. 4. Deterrence being the product of these mutual assessments of one another’s anticipated costs and gains, an effective strategy and military posture for the United States would comprise an ability to respond to each provocation with a degree of violence commensurate with the value thought to be immediately at stake. 5. The willingness to incur the amount of destruction to the nation that would accompany total war would not be a very believable deterrent threat unless posed as a counter to the threat of major direct aggression against U.S. home territory.

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6. To deter provocations short of direct aggression, the United States therefore needed to be prepared to respond effectively at levels of violence well below total war; and/or to judge the costs of submitting to such provocations as being at least as intolerable as the costs of total war. The latter might work for some extraterritorial interests—for example, keeping Western Europe from falling to the communists; but the communists were unlikely to believe that every inch of territory in the noncommunist world had a comparable value. Conflicts over territorial objectives that had developed a high emotional content for each side during the Cold War might be seen as involving essential psychological components of the overall balance of power. Berlin was one of these conflicts and with less clarity so were the Chinese offshore islands. But even with respect to these values, the degree of the nation’s psychological commitment could fluctuate; and the contested objectives might have to be surrendered to the communists if the United States lacked effective capabilities for at least initial counteraction at lower levels of violence. 7. If military capabilities were not available for measured application relating to the value at stake and the initial intensity of a provocation, firm diplomatic commitments might ultimately have to be restricted to that class of extraterritorial objectives clearly vital to the country’s national security. The opportunities for enemy probes beneath the threshold of clearly defined U.S. vital interests would grow accordingly. The noncommunist world would feel increasingly insecure as a result of the uncertainty of U.S. commitment to their defense. The noncommunist world, including the United States, would become increasingly demoralized because of the recognition of the fickleness of these guarantees. The balance of power itself—composed in large measure of the credibility of the threats by the leading nations to defend their interests by force if necessary—would be seen to be shifting drastically against the United States. Such a situation would be ready-made for the kinds of miscalculation and irrationality that could bring on the dreaded thermonuclear holocaust. Two crucial concrete policy implications were drawn from these general strategic premises: U.S. capabilities for limited war were to be expanded considerably and U.S. strategic nuclear capability was to be seen primarily, if not exclusively, as a last resort, an instrument of retaliation for a direct attack upon the United States. But any number of questions remained unanswered: Would the downgrading of the function of the strategic nuclear forces for deterrence of

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limited conflicts mean there would be no contingencies in which the United States might be the first to use these weapons? If the strategic forces were to be primarily retaliatory weapons, what should be their targets? Under such concepts, what should be done in advance to deal with the possibility of strategic attack despite American capabilities for retaliation? Did the United States want to limit “limited war” to nonnuclear weapons? If so, how would such limitations be enforced? Did the concept of limiting war mean also localizing it? How would the European allies respond to strategies that seemed to reduce the possible costs to the superpowers of a future war over Europe in Europe? The president’s early statements on his defense policies skirted many of these complicated issues. President Kennedy’s March 26, 1961, special message to Congress on the defense budget contained several explicit and definitely stressed pledges “not to strike first in any conflict.” These statements were coupled with recommendations for improving the ability of U.S. strategic nuclear forces to survive any attack and strike back with devastating retaliation. The president came closer in this message than did any official spokesperson before or afterward to enunciating a doctrine of no first use of strategic nuclear weapons, but he stopped just short of an absolute unilateral inhibition. In light of subsequent statements by him and other members of his administration, the presumption is that this was deliberate. Kennedy undoubtedly understood the disadvantage to the West of pledging not to use its strategic nuclear forces unless the opponent did so first. If the opponent was the Soviet Union, and the battlefield was Central Europe or, say, Iran, the Soviets would then be accorded military superiority, since the applicable forces would only be the local theater forces in which the United States by its own admission was inferior. The view that Kennedy was deliberately ambiguous on the matter of whether the United States would ever launch a preemptive strategic nuclear strike on the Soviets is sustained by his insistence in the same early message that “our strategic arms and defense must be adequate to deter any deliberate nuclear attack on the United States or our allies—by making it clear to any potential aggressor that sufficient retaliatory forces will be able to survive a first strike and penetrate his defenses in order to inflict unacceptable losses upon him.”18 How the United States might respond to a nonnuclear attack on friends or allies was left similarly vague. Clearly, the president was recommending a major increase in airlift and sealift capacities and in army and marine corps personnel in order to “increase our ability to confine our response

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to non-nuclear weapons.” The ability to fight “limited wars” should be the “primary mission” of U.S. overseas forces, he told the Congress. But a potential opponent must know that “in the event of a major aggression that could not be repulsed by conventional forces,” the United States would continue to be prepared “to take whatever action with whatever weapons are appropriate” and that action would be “suitable, selective, swift, and effective.” Not unexpectedly, the emphasis on limited war was not received with enthusiasm by some other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Since the mid-1950s, NATO military doctrine, planning, and programs had been based on the premise that any war in response to Soviet aggression upon Western Europe would be general nuclear war; there would be no serious attempt to repulse a major aggression by conventional means. To be sure, under the leadership of the NATO supreme commander, General Lauris Norstad, the automatic nuclear “trip wire” concept had been abandoned as too dangerous, and in its place was put the concept of the “pause”—an initial response with nonnuclear weapons to an enemy probe to demonstrate a determination to resist and to provide the enemy with time to decide that it had miscalculated; but this new doctrine of a flexible and measured response, coupled with budgetary recommendations for increasing nonnuclear capabilities, immediately aroused suspicions in Europe that in the face of the Soviet intercontinental strategic reach the Americans would regard even a war over Europe as a local war to be fought and won (or lost) in Europe without the United States being subject to devastation.19 To the Europeans, quite naturally, a war for Europe was total war, and they wanted the Soviets to know in advance that an attack upon Europe would be just as certainly an act of suicide as an attack upon the United States. The Kennedy administration sought for ways to reassure its NATO allies that nuclear weapons would continue to be available for the defense of the entire treaty area. The administration’s main fear was that Germany would attempt to follow the lead of Britain and France and develop its own nuclear capability—one too weak to serve as a convincing deterrent to the Soviets while nonetheless making virtually certain that no war over German soil would remain a limited war. Kennedy appreciated the concerns of his alliance partners and regarded their leaders as patriotic men conscientiously pursuing their national interests. But his responsibility was to pursue U.S. national interests, and that seemed to require that the United States maintain control over the dimensions of conflict in the NATO area.

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The campaign to reassure the European members of NATO was waged on two fronts: doctrinal elaborations of “flexible response” by McNamara and his subordinates to show that with its adoption by NATO, deterrence of Soviet provocations in Europe would be increased; and offers by the White House to “share” ownership and control of a part of the U.S. strategic arsenal. The Berlin crisis of the spring and summer of 1961 (see chap. 9) provided the opportunity for the administration to demonstrate that a buildup of nonnuclear capabilities did not lessen Soviet fears of a general war but, on the contrary, reinforced those fears by increasing expectations that the United States would in fact resist a Soviet attack with whatever force was necessary to do the job. To deflect the growing suspicion that the United States was, however, moving toward a “denuclearization” of Europe, the president, in his May 17, 1961, address before the Canadian Parliament, announced the United States was now committing five Polaris nuclear missile submarines to the NATO command “subject to any agreed NATO guidelines on their control and use.” But anticipating that this would be insufficient—the submarines would still be under the operational command of the U.S. Navy and direct political control of the president—Kennedy took advantage of his Ottawa address to explicitly hold out “the possibility of eventually establishing a NATO sea-borne force, which would be truly multi-lateral in ownership and control, if this should be desired and found feasible by our Allies, once NATO’s non-nuclear goals have been achieved.”20 The purpose may have been reassurance, but imbedded as it was in the precondition of European increases in conventional fighting capabilities, the proposal for a multilateral force (MLF), from its first mention, merely served to reinforce European anxieties. This early statement probably was one of the most forthright on the issue of nuclear sharing by the administration, representing its real position that flexible intra-alliance arrangements for the management of strategic nuclear weapons were possible as long as there was close agreement on strategy and tactics—presupposing that such close agreement would be in terms of the Kennedy-McNamara doctrine, which would shift the burden of coercion in the most likely contingencies to locally applicable nonnuclear capabilities. The European members of NATO found such an ordering of priorities uncongenial: in their view, if there was to be a reorientation of NATO plans, deployments, and administrative arrangements, priority should be given to the issue of who manages the “deterrent.” First, the political control and military

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command arrangements of alliance strategic nuclear forces must be such as to give prior assurance that when these forces were needed for the defense of European soil the required decisions would be made. Then and only then could the Europeans agree that current arrangements for nearly automatic strategic retaliation should be supplanted by a flexible tactical fighting capability.21 The MLF was a political control device and an arms control device. It was to be designed as a nonuse military system with “fifteen fingers on the safety catch.” From a military point of view, it could be considered an irrelevancy, costing only a small fraction of the U.S. contribution in vessels and weapons and in no way compromising the essential vast arsenal of strategic nuclear power that would still remain under U.S. command and control. Because of its presumed political virtues for holding Europe together, the project generated much enthusiasm with State Department officials responsible for NATO affairs. Following de Gaulle’s veto of British entry into the European Economic Community, the State Department began more and more to use the promise of U.S. nuclear sharing with Europe under the MLF scheme to encourage European efforts to form themselves into a true political union. Statements by Secretary Rusk and Under Secretary Ball hinted at an eventual relinquishing of the U.S. absolute veto on any decision to use the weapons in the MLF after the Europeans had made “impressive strides” toward political unity, but this condition was never elaborated in detail.22 The president, while never very enthusiastic about the MLF as a military instrument or as a prod to European integration, evidently did see value in the offer of the NATO nuclear fleet, or anything similar anyone could come up with, as a way of deflecting or at least deferring West German desires to follow France into the nuclear club.23 As it turned out, only the Germans were seriously interested; but the White House was sensitive to the domestic and international political sentiment against anything hinting of an exclusive military partnership between the United States and Germany, especially involving weapons of mass destruction. Yet in the absence of an alternative for diverting the Germans and symbolizing the ideal of an “indivisible” strategic nuclear deterrent for all of NATO, the president stayed with it. The greatest pressure was directed toward the British. If they would join the scheme, it would stimulate other members of NATO to join and, if coupled with a renunciation by Britain of its independent nuclear force, might reverse the trend toward the spread

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of nuclear weapons. Simultaneously, the independent nuclear weapons programs of France and Britain were deprecated by Washington, and the “credibility” of U.S. pledges to use nuclear weapons on behalf of NATO’s vital interests was affirmed. As put by Secretary of Defense McNamara, “relatively weak national nuclear forces” operating independently are “dangerous, expensive, prone to obsolescence, and lacking in credibility as a deterrent.” Such a force was likely to be vulnerable to destruction before being launched, and thus, “if a major antagonist came to believe there was a substantial likelihood of its being used independently, this force would be inviting a pre-emptive first strike against it.” In the event of war, the secretary contended, “the use of such a force against the cites of a major nuclear power would be tantamount to suicide, whereas its employment against significant military targets would have a negligible effect on the outcome of the conflict.”24 By contrast, affirmed McNamara, “the United States nuclear contribution to the alliance is neither obsolete nor dispensable.” And the United States would continue to make this power available to the defense of NATO interests on a global basis. Moreover, U.S. strategic forces were sufficiently protected, powerful, and accurate to allow them to be used in a controlled and deliberate fashion against military targets at the outset of a general war, thus providing decision time for both sides before engaging in the ultimate folly of mutual population destruction. By spelling out this strategic concept, McNamara was able to drive home his basic argument on behalf of centralized control of the nuclear capabilities of the alliance. To a June commencement audience, the secretary of defense explained: The U.S. has come to the conclusion that to the extent feasible, basic military strategy in a possible general nuclear war should be approached in much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. That is to say, principal military objectives, in the event of a nuclear war stemming from a major attack on the Alliance, should be the destruction of the enemy’s military forces, not of his civilian population. The very strength and nature of the Alliance forces makes it possible for us to retain, even in the fact of a massive surprise attack, sufficient reserve striking power to destroy an enemy society if driven to it. In other words, we are giving a possible opponent the strongest imaginable incentive to refrain from striking our own cities.

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In such a strategy, explained McNamara, there cannot be conflicting strategies on the part of the NATO allies nor can there be more than one list of targets. The nuclear campaign would have to be based strictly on centralized direction and control.25 The United States was ready, and would continue to be ready, to fulfill its commitments to the alliance, reiterated the secretary of defense, and a controlled strategic response “gives us some hope of minimizing damage” in the event of general nuclear war. But there should be no avoiding the fact—“the almost certain prospect”—that severe damage would be suffered in such a war. Thus everything possible should be done to insure that lesser conflicts were controlled and stopped short of the commitment to battle of major force by either side. Because of the strength of the alliance, and the enunciated strategy, it was unlikely that any power would attempt to launch a massive attack, nuclear or conventional, on NATO. But for the kinds of conflicts, political or military, most likely to arise in the NATO area, it was inappropriate, indeed unbelievable, that the United States should respond at the outset with nuclear weapons. The Soviet superiority in nonnuclear forces “is by no means overwhelming.” Moreover, the NATO countries possessed a potential for successful defense even against the full Soviet nonnuclear potential. “We do not believe that if the formula, E = mc2, had not been discovered, we should all be Communist slaves.”26 These public remarks and private assurances by the secretary of defense hardly erased European doubts. General de Gaulle’s most apocalyptic visions were seen to be not entirely fantastic (“who can say that if the occasion arises the two [the Soviet Union and the United States], while each deciding not to launch its missiles at the main enemy so that it should itself be spared, will not crush the others? It is possible to imagine that on some awful day Western Europe should be wiped out from Moscow and Central Europe from Washington”).27 McNamara’s Ann Arbor address may well stand in the history of official strategic thought as a document of seminal theoretical importance, but as an effort at political persuasion it was crude, to say the least. It was as if a husband and wife were to try to solve some difference over household management by discussing what they would do in the event the two were lost at sea in a lifeboat with enough food for only one to survive.28 Kennedy avoided detailed discussion in public of remote future contingencies, but he was compelled to do so by the ensuing intra-alliance debate over nuclear control. In his news conference of February 14, 1963, he was asked by a reporter whether the government was yet at the stage of making

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the actual decision to share command and control of nuclear forces with its European allies. It is a very difficult area because the weapons have to be fired in five minutes, and who is going to be delegated on behalf of Europe to make this judgment? If the word comes to Europe or comes any place that we’re about to experience an attack, you might have to make an instantaneous judgment. Somebody has to be delegated with that authority. If it isn’t the President of the United States, in the case of the strategic force, it will have to be the President of France or the Prime Minister of Great Britain, or someone else. And that is an enormous responsibility. The United States has carried that responsibility for a good many years. . . . . Now, it is quite natural that Western Europe would want a greater voice. We are trying to provide that greater voice through a multilateral force. But it is a very complicated negotiation because, as I say, in the final analysis, someone has to be delegated who will carry the responsibility for the alliance.29

Both Kennedy and McNamara had come too close for their own equanimity to making decisions in a real and terribly immediate context, rather than in the hypothetical world of strategic theory. The Cuban missile crisis had confirmed and refined their premises on the necessity for very tight and unified command arrangements under absolute political control, on the multiplication of risk of miscalculations accompanying a spread of nuclear weapons to additional powers, and on the importance of denuclearizing the U.S.-Soviet competition. The president hoped that having come so close to the fire over the issue of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the United States and the Soviet Union could cooperate in establishing a fresh tone to the language of diplomacy, pushing the strategic nuclear balance into the background, where it would still be a restraint-inducing factor but not a visible element of everyday international discourse. He looked forward to the December 1962 meeting with Prime Minister Macmillan at Nassau as an opportunity to engage in a wide-ranging dialogue in this mood of the Cuban aftermath. Undoubtedly, he would have liked the discussion of U.S. relations with Europe to get back to economics—the British role in the Common Market and a more open trading relationship—rather than defense. But out of the blue came Skybolt, a seemingly technical matter in McNamara’s defense budget. Skybolt, a 1,000-mile missile to be carried and launched from a manned aircraft, had been under close scrutiny by McNamara’s economists and

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engineers, who found it wanting on “cost-effectiveness” grounds. Its $2.5 billion development costs would be better invested in other weapons system improvements. The U.S. Air Force would be aggrieved at being denied its best hope of extending the role of manned strategic bombers into the missile age, but McNamara was confident of his ability to manage the generals. However, the Royal Air Force was also banking heavily on extending the life of its V-bombers through purchase of the American-produced missile as agreed to by Macmillan and Eisenhower in 1960. McNamara’s confidence that he could placate the British as well as the U.S. Air Force was a gross political miscalculation. The president, evidently unaware of the extent to which the prestige of the British Ministry of Defense and the prime minister himself was staked on maintaining their “independent deterrent” with Skybolt, gave McNamara the go-ahead to work out some adjustment with British defense minister Peter Thorneycroft.30 The “agreement” produced by the Nassau conference was a logical monstrosity and almost worthless as a military planning instrument for either government. But as a diplomatic communiqué meant to give the appearance of unity on fundamental issues where there was none, it was a masterpiece. By the time Secretary McNamara appeared before the cognizant congressional committees in the early months of 1963 to defend his department’s budget request for the coming fiscal year, de Gaulle had blasted the Anglo-American relationship and had vetoed British entry into the Common Market. Macmillan was on the defensive for his handling of the Skybolt affair and for perpetuating the fiction of nuclear independence while in fact agreeing to become even more dependent upon U.S. components for England’s still-to-be-developed submarine force. Kennedy and Macmillan were both subjected to the charge that their ineptitude at Nassau provoked de Gaulle into excluding Britain from the Common Market. Journalists portrayed the alliance as being in “disarray.” Many in Congress were ready to attribute all of these difficulties to the attempt by McNamara and Kennedy to shift NATO policy, against the will of the Europeans, away from deterrence through the threat of all-out war to a posture that would allow substantial fighting to take place on European soil while the homelands of the Soviet Union and the United States were spared. The standard European argument that this would reduce the risks to the Soviets of an attack upon Western Europe and thereby increase their temptation to attack was reflected in questions thrown at the secretary—particularly by senators and representatives who were staunch defenders of budgetary requests of the U.S. Air Force.

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In defending administration policy and doctrine McNamara went further than any previous spokesperson in elucidating official premises about the state of the existing military balance of power and about intentions for applying U.S. power in future military conflicts. Under questioning, the secretary of defense maintained that “[our] current strategic superiority . . . does give us a war-winning nuclear capability, in the sense that we are confident that we can completely crush the Soviet Union if forced to do so.” But he also warned of the “increasing capability of the Soviet Union to make the United States pay a heavy price for such victories in terms of tens of millions of casualties.”31 Thus when he used the word “win,” he meant it only in a technical sense, which should be clearly understood: “We would win in the sense that their [the Soviet Union’s] way of life would change more than ours [if the strategic forces of both sides were unleashed against each other] because we would destroy a greater percentage of their industrial potential and probably destroy a greater percentage of their population than they destroyed of ours.” Yet if the calculation also included the destruction inflicted on Western Europe, the total amount in the West “would exceed that of the Soviet Union.” His personal opinion, whichever calculation was made, was that “we cannot win a nuclear war, a strategic nuclear war, in the normal meaning of the word ‘win.’ ”32 Members of Congress wanted to know if the secretary’s opinion that there could be no real winners in a strategic nuclear war meant he was operating under a doctrine of “nuclear stalemate” or “mutual deterrence.” If so, they pressed him to show how the United States could still deter the Soviets from attacking, especially in Central Europe, where the prize was big and the West was presumably still inferior on the ground. McNamara rejected the terms “nuclear stalemate” and “mutual deterrence” as inaccurate descriptions of U.S. operating strategy, which he kept insisting was to use whatever force was necessary to defend its vital interests. But he was not willing to depend upon strategic forces to deter all Soviet provocations nor was he sufficiently certain that the Soviets would always get the message in advance which U.S. interests were so vital as to make it risk millions of fatalities in their defense. As to what enemy actions U.S. strategic forces would deter, and what enemy actions might require other kinds of ready responses to make deterrence work: Now I feel quite certain that if the Soviets are rational, our strategic forces program will deter the Soviets from launching a first strike against this country.

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I say that for the very simple reason that, if they did, we would utterly destroy them, and I mean completely destroy . . . the Soviet Union as a civilized nation. U.S. strategic nuclear capability, however, is not a deterrent force in the sense that it will deter all political and military aggression by the Soviets. It did not deter them from putting pressure on Berlin when we had a nuclear monopoly in the early part of the 1950s. It did not deter the Communists from invading Korea. It did not deter them from building a wall in Berlin. It did not deter the Communist . . . attempt to subvert Southeast Asia. . . . It did not deter their attempt to move offensive weapons systems into Cuba.33

By the time the Kennedy administration took office, “it was clear that, unless we were willing to live under a constant threat of having to choose between nuclear holocaust and retreat, we required major improvements in our less-than-all-out war capabilities.”34 The “general purpose forces,” consequently, were being rapidly improved at an annual cost of over $19 billion. This included an expansion in manpower (the army went from 11 divisions in the Eisenhower years to 16 divisions); improved equipment and munitions; mobility of the “tactical” forces of all three services; and new, more flexible, and functionally integrated command structures like the multiservice strike command.35 These programs, McNamara explained, would provide the country with forces that “could, by non-nuclear means alone, counter a wide spectrum of Sino-Soviet bloc aggressions in regions other than Europe.” However, in Europe, “the programmed U.S. forces, together with present forces of other NATO countries, would not be able to contain an all-out conventional Soviet attack without invoking the use of nuclear weapons.” 36 This reliance on nuclear weapons for balancing Soviet military power in Europe continued to give the administration trouble diplomatically and doctrinally. Even if the Europeans were to accept the validity of flexible response and the “conventional option,” even if they were to conscientiously fulfill their existing pledges to increase their manpower and equipment levels, NATO would still not be able to contain and repulse a determined Soviet attempt to forcibly absorb Western Europe unless the United States was prepared to redress the local imbalance by turning the war into a global strategic war. If this was indeed the situation in Europe, asked various senators, then why all the emphasis on strengthening nonnuclear capabilities in Europe?

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If the Soviets could win an all-out contest of nonnuclear forces, were the Europeans not right in regarding the American stress on the conventional option as a futile use of the West’s resources? Reiterating the arguments Paul Nitze had used in connection with the Berlin buildup, McNamara explained that “the purpose of the increase in conventional forces is to deter certain low-scale forms of Soviet political and military aggression which they might be tempted to carry out were they not opposed by the type that are being strengthened.”37 The secretary’s congressional interrogators were not entirely convinced. Suppose the Soviets did try to overwhelm admittedly inferior local forces: If we were fighting a conventional war and we were about to lose it, we would use tactical nuclear weapons, wouldn’t we? SECRETARY MCNAMARA: I think a large-scale assault by the Soviet Union and its satellites’ forces against Western Europe would rather quickly require the use of tactical nuclear weapons in order to preserve the control of Western Europe in the hands of the West. Whether that could be limited to the use of tactical nuclear weapons is an open question in my mind. SENATOR THURMOND:

McNamara’s point was that NATO needed to be prepared to fight in this middle range of conflict between conventional war and strategic nuclear war, particularly to deter the Soviets from escalating to strategic nuclear war: to that end the United States already had “thousands” of nuclear weapons in Europe. But it was important to discourage inflated expectations for the potential role of these tactical weapons in deterring or repelling a Soviet nonnuclear attack. As he explained to the House Armed Services Committee in his prepared remarks on the fiscal 1964 budget: Nuclear weapons, even in the lower kiloton ranges, are extremely destructive devices and hardly the preferred weapons to defend such heavily populated areas as Europe. Furthermore, while it does not necessarily follow that the use of tactical nuclear weapons must inevitably escalate into global nuclear war, it does present a very definite threshold, beyond which we enter a vast unknown.38

Some senators pointed to what seemed to be an underlying premise of the whole strategy of flexible response, from its stress on a delayed resort

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to nuclear weapons through its notion of a city-avoiding nuclear exchange: namely, the premise of a similarly restrained Soviet Union, the notion that the opponent would accept the rules of warfare the United States wanted to impose. McNamara was careful not to answer categorically these questions of likely Soviet behavior in a military conflict. Indeed, the very reason the United States was maintaining such a strong nuclear arsenal in Europe was to deter the Soviets from taking it upon themselves to cross the threshold into nuclear war. With respect to the city-avoidance “option” in strategic nuclear war, again, the hope for Soviet restraint was not based on faith in their willingness to “play fair.” It was based entirely on the premise that at the moment of truth, despite previous Soviet protestations to the contrary, they would still want to save their country from complete devastation. By holding in reserve the vast American potential to wipe out cities, the United States would be saying: you have not yet lost everything, but whether you do depends on your next move. McNamara was not willing to predict Soviet behavior, only to provide Soviet leaders with an incentive to act more rationally. But this would take advance planning, and he had to admit that under present circumstances, neither the Soviets nor the United States had the kind of forces in being that would allow them to fight a controlled strategic nuclear campaign. McNamara’s most careful discourse on this complicated strategic problem was in response to a question by Congressman Leslie Arends before the House Committee on Armed Services: I do think we should separate the discussion into two parts: one related to circumstances today and the other related to possible circumstances in the future. Today we know that the great majority of the Soviet strategic forces, both their bombers and their missiles, are in soft [i.e., highly vulnerable] configurations. Under these circumstances it seems almost inconceivable to me that were the Soviets to attack the United States they would attack other than our cities, because they have no possibility of holding in reserve forces for later use against our cities with any expectation that those forces would survive a U.S. attack. . . . Now, turning to the future, it is possible, although I think not probable, that . . . Soviet attack might be directed primarily against our military installations. And were that to be the case, it might be advantageous to direct our

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retaliatory attack primarily against their military installations, thereby giving them an incentive to avoid an attack on our major urban areas.39

The point was not lost on the congressmen that McNamara’s preferred strategic context seemed to be one in which both the Soviet Union and the United States possessed highly invulnerable “reserve” strategic weapons. He had abandoned as desirable, let alone feasible, a U.S. first-strike capability powerful enough to destroy the Soviet capability to inflect unacceptable damage upon the United States. This was precisely the premise of McNamara’s statement to Stewart Alsop in an interview published shortly after the Cuban missile crisis. A nuclear exchange confined to military targets seemed more possible, not less, he emphasized, “when both sides have a secure second-strike capability. Then you might have a more stable ‘balance of terror.’ This may seem a rather subtle point, but from where I’m sitting it seems a point worth thinking about.”40 Senator Stuart Symington, secretary of the Air Force during the Truman administration, was somewhat disturbed by McNamara’s interview with Alsop: “I presume that means the sooner they [the Soviets] have a second strike capability the better. That was the impression I got from the article.” McNamara denied that this was a correct interpretation of his remarks. But it was necessary to adjust to the new emerging strategic situation in which the Soviets were moving toward a relatively invulnerable missile force. The point of his comment to Alsop, he explained, was that “we should not assume that our position is worsening as they do that. As a matter of fact, it will put less pressure on them to carry out a pre-emptive strike in a period of crisis, and this is to our advantage.”41 Senator Margaret Chase Smith was worried that the suggestion that the United States resign itself to eventual essential strategic parity with the Soviets was likely to have “serious long-term effects on our national will, our courage and our determination to resist attacks on our way of life.” McNamara granted that the questions raised by his predictions and by the administration’s response to this new strategic reality did go “straight to the fabric of national will and determination.” But what was it that sustained this national will and determination and, most important, the perception by the Soviets of the willingness of the United States to stand by its commitments? It was the total power of the United States as a nation and not simply the measurement of strategic nuclear effectiveness in all-out war (the ultimate unlikely contingency, which would be disastrous to both

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sides regardless of relative “margins of superiority”). The overall balance of power was what really mattered, and “I don’t believe that any time in our lifetime they will reach parity with us in the total power of their system versus ours; particularly, I believe that if you include as an element of that power, the attraction and influence and effectiveness of our political system, but even for the moment excluding that and dealing only with their economic and military power, I don’t foresee any situation in which they will reach parity with us.”42 As it turned out, McNamara soon dropped his effort to persuade the Soviets to enter into a tacit agreement with the United States not to target each other’s cities at the outset of a strategic war.43 The Soviets ridiculed the idea, and the NATO allies considered it an intolerable indication that the Americans were getting cold feet in their deterrent posture of defining any major Soviet attack on Europe as total war. Chastened by these rebuffs, he returned to the view that nuclear war had to be absolutely avoided, and this required that both superpowers possess a nuclear arsenal capable of surviving the worst attack the enemy could mount and retaliating with a society-destroying blow: mutual assured destruction (MAD).44 The secretary of defense spoke in precise terms about the military balance and elaborated the sometimes esoteric strategic doctrine that guided his budgetary decisions on the military posture. But his discussions of those matters were often revealingly matter-of-fact and drily abstract, far removed from the everyday crisis preoccupations of the administration. Yet the military planning was an essential background to diplomacy, and on occasion the president himself brought it into the public discourse as a reminder to friends and foes that Americans were prepared, if driven to it, to pay the highest price in defending their values. The address the president proposed to deliver before the Dallas Citizens’ Council on November 22, 1963, was to be one of these occasions. He was going to talk in detail about the various components of the nation’s power, “ranging from the most massive deterrents to the most subtle influences.” The need to remain militarily powerful was only a part of the role, thrust upon the United States “by destiny rather than by choice,” to be “the watchman on the walls of world freedom.” But, the president was going to tell his audience at Dallas, to be truly worthy of this power and responsibility, Americans must “exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint,” never in the pursuit of aggressive ambitions and always in the pursuit of peace and goodwill toward men. “For as was written long ago: ‘Except the Lord keep the city/the watchman walketh but in vain.’ ”45

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THE THIRD WORLD AS A PRIMARY ARENA OF COMPETITION We live in a very special moment in history. The whole southern half of the world—Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia—are caught up in the adventure of asserting their independence and modernizing their old ways of life. . . . Without exception they are under Communist pressure. . . . But the fundamental task of our foreign aid program in the 1960s is not negatively to fight Communism. Its fundamental task is to help make a historical demonstration that . . . economic growth and political democracy can develop hand in hand. —John F. Kennedy

A

NALYSTS WITH AN ORIENTATION TOWARD military affairs are prone to

pay most attention to the so-called Kennedy-McNamara “revolution” in military policy, as if it were the centerpiece of the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy. But this is to confuse immediacy with high value. At the center of the Kennedy foreign policy was the premise that the competition between the Soviet Union and the United States was shifting to a new arena: competition for influence over the direction of development in the poorer half of the globe; and it was in respect to this competition that the United States was in greatest danger of falling behind. In his pre–White House years, Kennedy turned much of his fire on the Eisenhower-Dulles approach to the Third World. The Middle East, particularly, had been the scene or “grave errors”: We overestimated our own strength and underestimated the force of nationalism. . . . We gave our support to regimes instead of to people—and

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too often we tied our future to the fortunes of unpopular and ultimately overthrown governments and rulers. We believed that those governments which were friendly to us and hostile to the Communists were therefore good governments—and we believed that we could make unpopular policies acceptable through our own propaganda programs. . . . We must talk in terms that go beyond the vocabulary of the Cold War— terms that translate themselves into tangible values and self-interest for the Arabs as well as ourselves. It is not enough to talk only in terms of guns and money—for guns and money are not the basic need in the Middle East. It is not enough to approach their problems on a piecemeal basis. It is not enough to merely ride with a very shaky status quo. It is not enough to recall the Baghdad Pact or the Eisenhower Doctrine—it is not enough to rely on the Voice of America or the Sixth Fleet. These approaches have failed.1

For “terms that go beyond the vocabulary of the Cold War” Kennedy went to his “Charles River” (Harvard and MIT) economist friends. They were putting together a doctrine on the relationship between the structure of societies, the availability of external capital, and the modernization process. Most of these economists either had been government officials or were now consultants to the government or were participants in overseas technical assistance programs of private foundations. There were the expected intellectual disagreements among learned men of an inexact science; but there was a notable convergence on a set of propositions with important implications for concrete policy. As put in one of their papers, The objective of assistance to the underdeveloped nations should be to help them achieve a condition in which economic growth is a normal and selfsustaining process within a democratic political system.2 The attainment of a condition of self-sustaining growth for most of the underdeveloped nations will require fundamental modifications of the economic and sociopolitical structures of their societies. Putting off the fundamental societal modifications until popular demands for change have risen to a high pitch would likely lead to violent upheavals followed by totalitarian rule. The required structural modifications can be accomplished peacefully if they are begun early, and are translated into carefully coordinated attacks on the particular roadblocks to modernization found in each nation. Frequently occurring roadblocks are: (1) a lack of sufficient agricultural productivity beyond the subsistence level (sufficient productivity is an

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important source of investment capital formation); (2) a lack of sufficient investment in social overhead projects (transportation and communication networks especially); (3) the lack of indigenous specialists able to administer these development tasks and to train the rural population in modes of greater productivity; (4) the lack of literacy, which does not allow for the absorption of new values and techniques (including population control) by the population; and (5) the lack of sufficient commitment on the part of elites to greater economic egalitarianism and political democracy. Since the need for various expensive projects will arise in advance of the market for them, the governments in these countries, not the free market, will have to be the major determiners of investment during the early stages of economic growth. But in many of these countries these people who run the government, who would be responsible for formulating and carrying out national development plans and negotiating for foreign assistance, are themselves very much attached to the existing social structure. Even in those nations where the top political leadership is personally committed to basic structural alterations of their societies (particularly in the new postcolonial societies where mass nationalist parties were the instruments of the independence movements), their continued authority may rest on the support of those groups in the society who still command the bulk of resources in the countryside, and who continue to staff the civil and military bureaucracies. These latter groups, for material and psychological reasons, may be reluctant to bring on the restructuring that would have to accompany true modernization. As a source of desired investment capital and foreign exchange, the United States, other developed nations, and international development authorities can exercise some leverage over the otherwise sluggish pace of structural change by making performance in attacking the critical roadblocks to modernization the foremost criterion for continued economic assistance. Military or ideological alignment with the United States should not be a prominent criterion for the flow of assistance.3

Many of the scholars involved in generating these propositions were now brought into the government—on the White House staff, into the State Department, and as ambassadors to important underdeveloped countries (John Kenneth Galbraith as ambassador to India, Lincoln Gordon as ambassador to Brazil). From their point of view and from Kennedy’s, they had practically a carte blanche opportunity to reorganize the entire

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foreign assistance program, its personnel as well as its operational guidelines. A large new foreign aid program for Latin America was to be funded, one in which the new premises would have a proving ground unencumbered by existing programmatic commitments. President Kennedy’s appreciation of the highly insecure political base of the leaders of the developing nations led him to expunge cold war rhetoric, as much as possible, from the public rationale for foreign assistance. He responded positively to suggestions from Walt Rostow, David Bell, and others to tone down the anticommunist appeals appearing in the first draft of his March 1961 foreign aid message.4 From the outset, however, he was the focal point of the tension between two “constituencies” of the foreign assistance program: the overseas recipients of assistance (whose Washington champions were the development economists in Kennedy’s advisory entourage); and opposing them, the neo-isolationist elements in the American electorate, in portions of the business community, and in segments of organized labor whose congressional brokers have traditionally coalesced to prune administration foreign assistance requests not carrying a simple “essential for national security” rationale. The president did have a basic national security rationale, but it was far from simple. He did see the need to ride with rather than against a good deal of the political turbulence in the recipient nations, even when it assumed anti-American, quasi-Marxist overtones; but he was too shrewd a domestic politician to assume that his tactical international apoliticism would get the needed appropriations out of Congress. These often contradictory political requirements underlay the observed ambivalence in Kennedy’s public-expressed rationale of his foreign assistance program— with one tendency represented in his socioeconomic case for the Alliance for Progress, and the other in the geopolitical orientation of the Clay Report.

THE ALLIANCE FOR PROGRESS To be sure, the Alliance for Progress was very much a part of the grand strategy of the Kennedy administration for frustrating communist penetration of the Third World. But this aspect of the Alliance’s rationale was consciously underplayed in the public rhetoric. As revealed by Harvard history professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (who was heavily involved as a consultant to Kennedy on Latin American affairs),

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the Cold War was a pervasive part of the discussions in the White House on the Latin American aid program. Kennedy’s interregnum task force on Latin America (chaired by Adolph Berle)5 emphasized the communist threat, describing it as “more dangerous than the Nazi-Fascist threat [to Latin America] of the Franklin Roosevelt period.” The objective of the communists, said the task force report, was “to convert the Latin American social revolution into a Marxist attack on the United States itself.” With revolutionary change in Latin America having become “inevitable and necessary,” the way to counter the communist threat was to “divorce” the Latin American social transformation “from connection with and prevent its capture by Communist power politics.” The United States needed to put itself clearly on the side of the indigenous “democratic-progressive movements . . . pledged to representative government and economic reform (including agrarian reform) and resistance to entrance of undemocratic forces from outside the hemisphere.” The truly democratic social reform groups “should be known to have the good will and support of the United States, just as every Communist group in Latin America is known to have the support of Moscow or of Peiping [Beijing].” It was also necessary for the United States to develop its capabilities for paramilitary and military counterinsurgency operations and to be prepared to offer effective military support to progressive regimes such as Rómulo Betancourt’s in Venezuela. But the United States should not try to “stabilize the dying reactionary situations.”6 The aspect of the Berle report that surfaced in the full-blown Alliance for Progress was the insistence that the United States offer a hemispherewide, long-range economic development plan based on the kind of coordinated national planning urged by the Harvard and MIT economists. This was the type of action required to avoid the spread of violent insurrectionary movements in Latin America and also to give credibility to U.S. professions of being on the side of those working for social justice and democracy. After the Kennedy inauguration the momentum for a new departure in Latin American policy accelerated. Berle was appointed to head a reconstituted task force on Latin America in the Department of State, where he and Thomas Mann, the new assistant secretary for inter-American affairs, labored to give the earlier ideas operational content. One of their recommendations was that the president make a major address on U.S. policy toward Latin America, proposing a ten-year program of continental development. Richard Goodwin, Kennedy’s staff man on Latin America during

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the campaign and now a member of the White House staff, was given primary responsibility for drafting the address. The problem was how to sell the economic propositions at home and in Latin America without injecting the Cold War rationale, which would alienate the reformist elements in Latin America with whom the administration was trying to align itself. The “solution,” as exhibited in the president’s proposal of March 13, 1961, for “a vast new ten-year plan for the Americas,” was a coupling of the structural approach to economic development that had been advanced by the Charles River economists with the revolutionary idealism of Thomas Jefferson and Simón Bolívar. Kennedy christened the Alianza the contemporary expression of the American revolution (North and South) for the rights of man: Our nations are the product of a common struggle—the revolt from colonial rule. . . . The revolutions which gave us birth ignited, in the words of Thomas Paine, “a spark never to be extinguished.” . . . we must remember that . . . the revolution which began in 1776 and in Caracas in 1811 . . . is not yet finished. Our hemisphere’s mission is not yet completed. For our unfulfilled task is to demonstrate to the entire world that man’s unsatisfied aspiration for economic progress and social justice can best be achieved by free men working within a framework of democratic institutions.7

The concrete steps “to complete the revolution of the Americas” were to be presented in detail at a ministerial meeting of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council. But the president’s speech gave a preview of the criteria his administration would insist be applied in evaluating a potential recipient’s commitments to the ideals of the unfinished hemispheric revolution. Political freedom, said the president, had to accompany material progress, but political freedom must be accomplished by social change: “For unless necessary social reforms, including land and tax reform, are freely made, unless we broaden the opportunity of all our people, unless the great mass of Americans share in increasing prosperity, then our alliance, our revolution, our dream, and our freedom will fail.”8 This approach was a product of the analysis of the New Frontiersmen that the weakest chink in the armor of the noncommunist world was the phenomenon of the entrenched oligarchy holding on to privilege in the face of rising demands for social justice. Identifying the United States with the current of social revolution would give it a legitimacy in these

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countries that would draw responsible professional and middle-class elements into the reform movements and thereby channel pressures into practical demands and nonviolent modes of agitation. Furthermore, by providing an agenda of practical reforms and insisting that governments in these countries make discernible progress in this direction in order to qualify for development loans, the United States would be providing significant pressure from above to complement and reinforce the popular pressures it was encouraging from below. Progressive regimes would be strengthened against conservative elements in their societies; and oligarchical regimes would be squeezed in an ever-tightening vise. Opportunist leaders would at least know where their bread was to be buttered. If the Latin American nations took the necessary internal measures, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon told his fellow delegates at Punta del Este in August, they could reasonably expect their own efforts to be matched by an inflow of capital during the next decade amounting to at least $20 billion. The problem, he said, did not lie in a shortage of external capital but “in organizing effective development programs so that both domestic and foreign capital can be put to work rapidly, wisely, and well.” There were underlying principles to be adhered to: the loan recipients would have to dedicate larger proportions of their domestic resources to national development projects; integrated national programs for economic and social development would have to be formulated, setting forth goals and priorities to insure that available resources were used in the most effective manner, and such national development programs would have to be in accord with the right of all segments of the population to share fully in the fruits of progress. To implement these principles, said Dillon, difficult and far-reaching changes would have to be instituted by many of the Latin American nations: It will require a strengthening of tax systems so that would-be evaders will know they face strict penalties and so that taxes are assessed in accordance with ability to pay. It will require land reform so that under-utilized soil is put to full use and so that farmers can own their own land. It will require lower interest rates on loans to small farmers and small business. It will require greatly increased programs of education, housing, and health.9

The assembled delegates at Punta del Este, except for Cuba’s Che Guevara, responded with enthusiasm to the U.S. initiative. But it turned out

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to be an Alianza mainly at the level of verbalized aspiration. According to Theodore Sorensen, the president, after a year or so of little progress, was disappointed. What disturbed Kennedy most “was the attitude of that 2 percent of the citizenry of Latin America who owned more than 50 percent of the wealth and controlled most of the political-economic apparatus. . . . They saw no reason to alter the ancient feudal patterns of land tenure and tax structure, the top-heavy military budgets, the substandard wages and the concentrations of capital.”10 Moreover, even when there was the will to reform, the targeted 2.5 percent per capita rate of annual economic growth just did not conform to the facts. With population growth running at 2.5 to 3 percent, even that increase would be all but wiped out. The lack of Latin American economists with experience in integrated national economic planning was another factor making for sluggishness. By the end of 1962 only five countries were able to submit national development plans for review, and of these only those submitted by Mexico and Venezuela were competently done and within the spirit of the Alianza. Consequently, the U.S. government was able to disburse only two-thirds of the $1.5 billion it had already pledged for the first year and a half of the program.11 Nor was the picture brightened by the worldwide drop in basic commodity prices—the major source of national income for most of the Latin American countries. Was it all worth the effort anyway? Kennedy continued to think so but without the earlier euphoria. He admitted that the Alliance for Progress “has failed to some degree because the problems are almost insuperable.” In some ways, he said, “the road seems longer than it was when the journey started. But I think we ought to keep at it.”12 Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment, said the president on the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, had been the dramatic shift in thinking and attitudes. “For the first time in the history of interAmerican relations our energies are concentrated on the central task of democratic development. This dramatic change in thought is essential to the realization of our goals.”13 The problem was that the dramatic change in thought, if unaccompanied by meaningful changes in government programs in these countries, could create an even larger gap between popular demands and government responsiveness, with governments in turn attempting to stifle demand and the discontented turning in their frustration to insurgency. The strategy for effecting a divorce between communist and noncommunist social reform movements, and making the latter more powerful by tangible evidence of the success of their programs, was based

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on the assumption that governments, under prodding by the United States, would respond to the mounting political pressure more quickly than they had in the past. The prod around which the Alliance for Progress was built was the longterm, low-interest loan program for development projects administered in accord with the guidelines set forth in the Charter of Punta del Este. But the diffusion of responsibility to internationally appointed technical experts for implementing the conditions in the charter made it difficult to use this tool as an instrument of reform. Governments could too easily blame their failure to gain the new external capital promised in the Alliance on the bureaucracy and red tape of the inter-American machinery rather than on their own procrastination. And the United States could be accused of insisting upon complicated technical standards precisely for the reason that it would reduce the projects requiring U.S. financial support. Before the end of 1962 the governments of the Americas, through their delegates to the Inter-American Economic and Social Council, were recommending that “in order to prevent disappointment both on the part of the countries seeking assistance and of the financing institutions, both national and international, it will be advisable to make the conditions and operations of these institutions more flexible.”14 Latin American diplomats also began to press with greater fervor for international commodity price stabilization agreements, arguing that the instability of their countries’ foreign earnings more than anything else prevented the amount of domestic capital available for investment in development from being increased. This case was not entirely convincing to the administration, since there was a good deal of “surplus” domestic Latin American private money drawing interest in American and European banks. The people receiving money from the export of basic commodities were very often the same elements least interested in the social reform that would have to accompany true economic development in their countries. The more conservative Latinos, and U.S. interests unsympathetic to the national planning approach and the emphasis upon public investment in the original conception of the Alliance, pointed to the decline in the flow of private capital to Latin America since Punta del Este. The obvious implication was that all the talk of dramatic social change, including drastic land and tax reforms, had raised the specter of confiscation of private holdings without sufficient compensation, harassment of foreign-subscribed private enterprise, and political instability leading to unpredictable radical economic experiments. “Taking into account the limitations to the availability

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of public funds,” said the first-year evaluation report of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council, “it is clear that the objectives of the Alliance cannot be achieved without the full participation of the private sector and adequate measures must be taken to assure maximum contribution to growth by the private sector.”15 The forces for stability, recovering from the first shock of seeing the White House seriously identifying itself with the forces for change, had begun to regroup. The president’s response to the conservative counterattack was to show as much favor as possible to reformist leaders like Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela and Adolfo López Mateos of Mexico and to point an admonishing finger at those Latin American forces that in his view constituted an alliance against progress. The latter should know, Kennedy affirmed four days before his death, that he was fully committed and prepared for a long struggle. “Nothing is true except a man or men adhere to it—to live for it, to spend themselves on it, to die for it,” he declaimed, quoting from a poem by Robert Frost.16

THE CLAY REPORT: REVIVAL OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY RATIONALE President Kennedy, believing the United States was most effective internationally when its posture combined realism with idealism, was initially disinclined to emphasize the U.S. national security rationale for foreign aid. But he soon was heard stressing this aspect of the case for it almost exclusively as Congress returned to its habit of trimming the “fat” from foreign aid requests. Congress went along with the essentials of the administration’s program in 1961, creating the Agency for International Development, authorizing the Alliance for Progress and the funds requested for this new venture, and increasing the proportion of foreign assistance appropriations devoted to economic as opposed to military projects. But the next year, the counterattack was in full swing, led by Congressman Otto Passman, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Aid. In 1962, as Congress began to axe the administration’s economic development programs, Kennedy continued to appeal to the legislators in the terms of his preferred public rationale: if we were truly for a world of independent self-reliant nations, if we really believed that weakness and dependence for national societies was not a proper environment

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for the development of political liberty and individual well-being, then in good conscience we could not reduce these foreign assistance programs any further.17 Congress was insufficiently impressed and trimmed a full billion dollars off the president’s $4.9 billion foreign assistance request. Schlesinger portrays Kennedy as keenly disappointed. But determined to get the aid bill through Congress in 1963, he resorted to the stratagem of appointing “a blue-ribbon panel of bonded conservatives set up to cast a presumably cold eye on the aid effort and then to recommend its continuance as essential to the national interest.”18 Designated “the Committee to Strengthen the Security of the Free World,” the panel was chaired by General Lucius D. Clay, highly respected in banking and financial circles and famed for his cold war toughness toward the Soviets over Germany and Berlin. Fiscal responsibility was represented by Robert B. Anderson, Eisenhower’s last secretary of the treasury, and before that secretary of the navy. Robert A. Lovett, a secretary of defense under Truman and the man most identified in the public mind with the New York “establishment,” could never be accused of fuzzy liberalism. Organized labor was represented by the militantly anticommunist George Meany. Edward S. Mason, of the Harvard-MIT economists circle, was added as an afterthought, but largely as a concession to some of the development economists who may not have appreciated the political gamesmanship of the president. The main economic development aura was provided by Eugene Black of the World Bank. The Clay committee was more than willing to provide the truest blue ribbon, in the form of a return to the strict national security–only criterion that had kept economic development assistance to a trickle since the Korean War, and in its insistence that the “private sector” rather than government-owned enterprises should be the favored recipients of assistance. But rather than squaring the circle by arguing that the nation’s security interest and interest in expanding overseas private investment would be best served by a long-term continuation of the level of effort the president was recommending, the committee, to Kennedy’s great disappointment did just the opposite: We believe that we are indeed attempting too much for too many and that a higher quality and reduced quantity of our difficult aid effort in certain countries could accomplish much more. We cannot believe that our national interest is served by indefinitely continuing commitments at the present rate

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to the 95 countries and territories which are now receiving our economic and/or military assistance. Substantial tightening up and sharpened objectives in terms of our national interests are necessary. . . . For the present . . . we are convinced that reductions are in order in present military and economic assistance programs.19

The administration released the report reluctantly, in the knowledge that Clay’s support was politically indispensable, even if only to salvage the 1963 bill after it was torn apart by Representative Passman and his friends. The Louisiana Democrat could not have been more pleased by the Clay report. And now cautious Republicans like Everett Dirksen and Charles Halleck could vote for cuts in the administration’s aid program while wrapped in the mantle of establishment patriotism. The “national security” standard as wielded by Congress, applying narrower concepts of security and the global balance of power, was in 1963 a keener instrument for whittling down than building up. The actual appropriations bill of $3.2 billion, a slash of $1.7 billion from Kennedy’s original request, was the lowest since 1958 and the smallest percentage of U.S. gross national product allocated to foreign assistance since the start of the Marshall Plan. In an administration that defined the Third World as the major arena of competition, this congressional action was interpreted as a severe curb on the diplomatic power of the United States. The president, however, was not one to take such defeats without fighting back. If the case for foreign aid had to be made in terms of national security, then that was the way he would make the case. But the connection would have to be more clearly set forth than previously. In a westward swing through the United States with Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall in the fall of 1963, the president frequently departed from his major theme—the conservation of natural resources—to talk about the preservation of the nation as a whole. Except for his address during the Cuban missile crisis, probably the hardest-hitting basic national security speech of the president’s career was made at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. It was the last week of September 1963. The Senate had ratified the nuclear test ban treaty. There was talk of détente with the Soviet Union. The president, aware that the audience to whom he spoke would translate their mood of increasing isolationism into a disapproval of foreign economic assistance, drove home the connections between the security concerns of

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his audience, the global balance of power, and the array of U.S. foreign commitments. This largely extemporaneous address merits liberal quotation: I know that many of you in this State and other States sometimes wonder where we are going and why the United States should be involved in so many affairs, in so many countries all around the globe. . . . I realize that the burdens are heavy and I realize that there is a great temptation to urge that we relinquish them, that we have enough to do here in the United States, and we should not be so busy around the globe. From the beginning of this country . . . we had believed that we could live behind our two oceans in safety and prosperity in a comfortable distance from the rest of the world. . . . I can well understand the attraction of those earlier days . . . but two world wars have shown us that if we . . . turn our back on the world outside . . . we jeopardize our economic well-being, we jeopardize our political stability, we jeopardize our physical safety. . . . Americans have come a long way in accepting in a short time the necessity of world involvement, but the strain of this involvement remains and we find it all over the country. . . . We find ourselves entangled with apparently unanswerable problems in unpronounceable places. We discover that our enemy in one decade is our ally the next. We find ourselves committed to governments whose actions we cannot often approve, assisting societies with principles very different from our own. . . . The world is full of contradiction and confusion, and our policy seems to have lost the black and white clarity of simpler times when we remembered the Maine and went to war. . . . The United States has rightly determined, in the years since 1945 under three different administrations . . . that our national security, the interest of the United States of America, is best served by preserving and protecting a world of diversity in which no one power or no one combination of powers can threaten the security of the United States. The reason that we moved so far into the world was our fear that at the end of the war, and particularly when China became Communist, that Japan and Germany would collapse, and these two countries which had so long served as a barrier to Soviet advance, and the Russian advance before that, would open up a wave of conquest of all Europe and all of Asia, and then the balance of power turning against us we would finally be isolated and ultimately destroyed. That is what we have been engaged in for 18 years, to prevent that happening,

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to prevent any one monolithic power having sufficient force to destroy the United States. For that reason we support the alliance in Latin America; for that reason we support NATO . . . for that reason we joined SEATO. . . . And however dangerous or hazardous it may be, and however close it may take us to the brink on occasion, which it has, and however tired we may get of our involvements with these governments so far away, we have one simple central theme of American foreign policy which all of us must recognize, because it is a policy which we must continue to follow, and that is to support the independence of nations so that one block cannot gain sufficient power to finally overcome us. There is no mistaking the vital interest of the United States in what goes on around the world. . . . If we were to withdraw our assistance from all governments who are run differently from our own, we would relinquish the world immediately to our adversaries.20

The New Frontier tried to transcend the vocabulary of Cold War diplomacy but found it often had to return to this vocabulary when addressing the American public in order to be granted the resources to develop more flexible programs for the Third World.

8

KENNEDY’S CUBAN CRISES If at any time the Communist buildup in Cuba were to endanger or interfere with our security in any way, including our base at Guantanamo, our passage to the Panama Canal, our missile and space activities at Cape Canaveral, or the lives of American citizens in this country, or if Cuba should ever attempt to export its aggressive purposes by force or the threat of force against any nation in this hemisphere, or become an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union, then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies. —John F. Kennedy

Kennedy spoke in support of the Miami Cuban exiles’ determination to liberate their homeland from Castro’s rule. This was in large measure a bid for support from the politically active Cuban American community in Florida. Also, by supporting the overthrow of Fidel Castro, Kennedy could demonstrate his opposition to tyrannies of the left and the right. Early in his presidency he authorized, with some modifications, going ahead with the plan developed in the Eisenhower administration to land a brigade of exiles trained and armed by the Central Intelligence Agency to knock out the Castro regime, with the proviso that no U.S. forces would be involved in the operation. The battle would be between Cubans opposed to Fidel’s installation of a Sovietsupported communist regime in their country and Castro loyalists—not another instance of the “colossus to the north” imposing its will on a defiant Latin neighbor. Kennedy’s response to the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba in 1962 was an entirely different matter. The global balance of power presumably was suddenly and dangerously destabilized, and therefore the missiles would have to be withdrawn by diplomacy or by U.S. military action.

D

URING HIS CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENT,

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Yet as the resolution of the crisis again demonstrated, the Castro regime itself, however repugnant, was not so totally intolerable that it had to be removed.

THE BAY OF PIGS President Kennedy hesitated, reversed himself, and was embarrassingly unsure of his footing during the effort to topple Castro in the spring of 1961. But from the outset he was constant in his basic premise that fundamental U.S. interests would be ill-served if that effort were to directly involve U.S. military power. This premise was a part of the ground rules for CIA contingency planning as originally approved by the Eisenhower administration.1 No U.S. military intervention was explicitly a part of the understanding between the White House and the CIA and was reiterated and stressed during the secret meetings in March and April between the new president and his chief military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisers.2 This determination not to apply U.S. military power was reinforced in a public pledge by Kennedy on April 12, 1961, just five days before the exile landing at the Bay of Pigs: There will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces. This government will do everything it possibly can, and I think it can meet its responsibilities, to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba. The basic issue in Cuba is not one between the United States and Cuba. It is between the Cubans themselves. I intend to see that we adhere to that principle and as I understand it this administration’s attitude is so understood and shared by the anti-Castro exiles from Cuba in this country.3

This prohibition, in the moment of truth when he saw what would be required to make the exile operation succeed, led Kennedy to accept the terrible embarrassment and pain of allowing the 1,400 invading Cubans to be killed or captured by Castro’s forces. As the facts came in, the president realized that the principal agencies and individuals involved in the planning and direction of the venture had jointly constructed a grossly uninformed view of the situation in Cuba. Different pictures of Castro’s political and military strength were available from British intelligence, the State Department, and American

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newspaper reporters. Yet even from those within his inner circle, the president received no thoughtful dissent to the premises sustaining the consensus to go ahead, except that offered by Arthur Schlesinger. By Schlesinger’s own account, he was ineffectual in advancing counterarguments at meetings when they might have done the most good. Moreover, Schlesinger seems to have overlooked what later, in the midst of the operation, faced the president: namely, there was no way of avoiding a direct and obvious and substantial U.S. military involvement if the objective was to take Cuba away from Castro’s forces.4 In everything that has been divulged about the Bay of Pigs crisis, the evidence is that the president thought he had approved an operation whose success would not require the direct use of U.S. military forces (initial air strikes would be delivered by U.S. B-36 aircraft flown by members of the Cuban Expeditionary Force). He accepted the intelligence of the CIA that Castro’s hold over the people of Cuba was very unstable and the implication that the majority of the people, including presumably Castro’s own army, would rise against him once a small force of exiles had established a beachhead. The president and his military advisers also accepted the CIA’s intelligence on Castro’s military forces and the derived evaluation by the JCS that an insurrectionary beachhead could be established by the Cuban exiles without direct U.S. military support. In the unlikely chance that the operation did not succeed militarily, it would have been conducted in such a low-key manner that the exiles could disappear into the hills and reorganize themselves for a longer-term guerrilla operation without having to call on the United States to rescue them. Barely three days into the assault (which began on April 17th), the president discovered that all of these critical intelligence and military operational premises were wrong. The masterminds of the plan—the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, his deputy director Richard Bissell, and the chairman of the JCS General Lyman Lemnitzer—brilliant and experienced professionals all—what were they thinking? Although Kennedy blamed himself for not sufficiently challenging and probing beneath the bottom line of the operation, he now also believed that he had been set up: The exile brigade did not have the capability to topple Castro on their own. The exiles should have known this; so too should have Dulles, Bissell, and Lemnitzer; but they did not tell this to the president. The evidence is circumstantial, but weighty, that the rebel exiles as well as those in the CIA and the Pentagon who designed it undertook the venture with the expectation that at least U.S. fighter aircraft would provide air

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support and, if needed, even U.S. Marines would join the fray. But didn’t Kennedy rule out such involvement? The plan’s impresarios appear to have calculated that no U.S. president—especially not a Kennedy—once having committed the country to such a forcible regime-change operation could not, at the moment of truth, allow it to fail.5 That moment arrived on April 18. Informed that the exile brigade was about to be slaughtered by Castro’s forces, the president was pressured by the chief of naval operations Admiral Arleigh Burke to authorize a U.S. air strike. In response to Kennedy’s reiteration that he did not want the United States involved, the admiral snapped back, “Hell, Mr. President, but we are involved,” and pleaded to be able to send in just a few planes, even with their numbers being painted out so they could not be identified. Kennedy conceded to this very limited intervention, with the proviso that the jets were only to escort a B-26 airdrop of supplies and would not attack any of Castro’s forces on the ground.6 This, of course—and the president knew it—would not be enough to save the operation from ignominious defeat. Looking back at the situation he found himself in, Kennedy told a friend, “I know damn well that they didn’t have any intention of giving me the straight word on this thing. They just thought that if we got involved in the things, that I would have to say ‘Go ahead, you can throw all our forces in there, and just move into Cuba.’ ”7 The president’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy some years later called it for what in retrospect, it appeared to be: “entrapment.”8 The president was well aware that he, personally, would be subjected to charges of cowardice, of callous disregard for the lives of the exiles on the beach, and of downright political ineptitude; and that overseas these charges would be directed at the nation as a whole. But he was able to separate his personal interest from what he believed to be in the national interest. During those critical hours, Kennedy confided to Arthur Schlesinger that “we will be kicked in the can for the next couple of weeks, but that won’t affect the main business,” which was tending to the “substance of power.”9 The main business was still, as it had been since the days of the Truman Doctrine, preventing extensions of communist control that would constitute a significant change in the global balance of power, while containing communism, if at all possible, without a major war. The United States would risk war, even the survival of the United States itself, if that were necessary to prevent an imbalance of power. But Kennedy, on this score, belatedly found himself in complete agreement with Senator Fulbright, who during the planning stages of the Bay of Pigs operation had

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protested, “The Castro regime is a thorn in the flesh; but it is not a dagger in the heart.”10 If the thorn could not be extracted with a tweezer it was surely not worth hacking to pieces the tissue of hemispheric relations being nurtured in the Alliance for Progress nor worth a major diversion of military resources when trouble was brewing in Laos, the Congo, and Berlin. To allow the United States to be panicked into a military intervention in the Americas would be playing the stereotyped role of the hated colossus to the north. The real issue, Castro’s betrayal of the ideals of the Cuban revolution, would be submerged in the escalation of battle and emotions. And the fragmentation between left and right, giving the communists their biggest opportunities for exploiting indigenous revolutions, would block the new lines of communication Kennedy was trying to open with progressive reformists in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In his address before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 20, the president, while taking full responsibility for the disastrous outcome at the Bay of Pigs, tried to direct the nation’s attention to the lessons of the episode. It was clearer than ever, he said, that the United States faced a relentless struggle in every corner of the globe “in situations which do not permit our own armed intervention.” Too long, he said, the United States had fixed on traditional military tools for maintaining the balance of power—on armies prepared to cross borders, on missiles poised for flight. “Now it should be clear that this is no longer enough.”11

THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS The biggest test during Kennedy’s presidency was to occur in 1962, again in the Caribbean and still within the sphere of control claimed by the United States, but now, according to the Soviets, part of the environment of dynamic change. From the Kremlin’s point of view, as understood by U.S. Sovietologists, there was no reason why a communist regime aligned with the USSR should be regarded as an illegitimate penetration into the Western Hemisphere. Khrushchev probably did fear that Kennedy would deliver on his threat to take countermeasures if the global balance of power was being threatened and therefore decided to keep his missile deployments to Cuba clandestine until he could present the United States with a fait accompli that would equalize the strategic balance. As it turned

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out, Kennedy had a different notion than Khrushchev of the components of the balance of power. To Kennedy the Soviet deployment of strategic missiles to Cuba was an effort to materially change the balance of power . . . not that they were intending to fire them, because if they were going to get into a nuclear struggle, they have their own missiles in the Soviet Union. But it would have politically changed the balance of power. It would have appeared to, and appearances contribute to reality.12

Khrushchev must have thought the president would be constrained from taking action once the missiles became operational, and this continued to bother Kennedy after the crisis was resolved: What is of concern is the fact that both governments were so far out of contact, really. I don’t think that we expected that he would put the missiles in Cuba, because it would have seemed an imprudent action for him to take, as it was later proved. Now, he obviously must have thought that he could do it in secret and that the United States would accept it.13

But Khrushchev had not merely penetrated the U.S. sphere of control; he had done so in a manner that had it been allowed to stand, would tip the global balance of power—politically, if not militarily. Kennedy had insisted publicly that the United States could not allow Cuba to become a base for Soviet “offensive” weapons. The drawing of this red line in public, as much as the actual military situation created by the Soviet deployments, underlay Kennedy’s definition of the deployment of the strategic missiles as intolerable. To allow Khrushchev to defiantly step over the line would have been to appear impotent against the Soviets’ attempts to do as they pleased. This “appearance,” as Kennedy explained, would have “politically changed the balance of power.” The president and his advisers feared that the consequences of such a change in the balance of power would be felt first in a new Soviet squeeze on Berlin. Khrushchev had lessened the pressure on Berlin the previous year at a time when it became generally known that Soviet missile claims had been greatly inflated and the United States still possessed overwhelming superiority in intercontinental strategic striking power. The deployment of missiles to Cuba might well appear to redress the balance by extending the Soviet strategic reach, reviving that margin of insurance

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against a U.S. strategic response to a Soviet probe in Berlin. Throughout the crisis, Kennedy was very much on edge in expectation of Soviet retaliation in Berlin—that the symmetry of a blockade for a blockade would appeal to the Russians. His anxiety was eased somewhat when Khrushchev clearly indicated he would not reopen the Berlin issue until after the November congressional elections, which suggested that Khrushchev did not feel confident enough to move on Berlin until the strategic missiles in Cuba became operational. Nonetheless Kennedy felt it necessary to warn the Soviets in his October 22 speech that “any hostile move anywhere in the world against the safety and freedom of peoples to whom we are committed, including in particular the people of West Berlin, will be met by whatever action is needed.”14 Whether or not the Soviet missile deployment was a geopolitical maneuver or simply an effort to deter another U.S. effort to overthrow Castro, there was no question in the president’s mind but that the missiles would have to be removed. The question was how to attain their removal at the lowest cost in U.S. and Cuban lives without bringing on a major war with the Soviet Union. One consideration the president would not ignore, but which was easier for some of his advisers to bypass, was the moral character of U.S. actions. The case for restraint because of moral considerations was presented by Under Secretary of State George Ball in opposing an air strike against the missiles—the option favored at first by most of Kennedy’s speciallyconvened executive committee (EXCOM) and throughout the crisis by the JCS and their chairman General Maxwell Taylor. Ball and reportedly also John McCone, Alan Dulles’s successor as head of the CIA, argued that regardless of the military outcome, a surprise attack would be against U.S. national traditions. “It is my strongly held view,” argued Ball, “that we cannot launch a surprise attack against Cuba without destroying our moral position and alienating our friends and allies.”15 And Attorney General Robert Kennedy was quoted in EXCOM minutes as saying that it would be “very, very difficult indeed for the President if the decision were to be for an air strike, with all the memory of Pearl Harbor. . . . For 175 years we had not been that kind of country. A sneak attack was not in our traditions.”16 However, the younger Kennedy was willing to support an air strike if it could be shown to be in retaliation for an actual use of force, even hinting that the United States might covertly try to provoke such an attack, as happened during the Spanish-American War. He suggested thinking of “some other way we can get involved in this through, uh, Guantanamo Bay, or

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something, er, or whether there’s some ship that, you know, sink the Maine again or something.”17 The Kennedy brothers were searching for a response to the missile deployment consistent with the presumed moral expectations of others, as well as the U.S. public. It rested on the premise that the reputation for moral restraint by a great power is an important element of political influence. But the president was not willing to completely rule out an air strike or even an invasion of Cuba, if that were what it would take to effect a removal of the “offensive weapons.” His position seems to have been that these more costly actions (calculated in part in moral terms but also strategically in terms of their potential for catalyzing a full-scale U.S.-Soviet war) should not be taken until less costly alternatives had been exhausted. He ultimately settled on the naval blockade of weapons-carrying vessels as the least costly alternative, one that would not, as the first move, prevent him from resorting to the higher-cost and higher-risk alternatives later. He patiently pursued the objective with means least destructive of human life, while not taking more destructive options off the table. Although moral and ethical questions were taken very seriously by the president, it would be a distortion to suggest they trumped other considerations that weighed heavily upon him. These considerations can be grouped under his general concern for controlling the risks. One of the unacceptable risks was to do nothing, to accept the presence of Soviet strategic weapons in Cuba as the new status quo. The Soviets would achieve a tremendous victory on which they would then surely capitalize in Berlin or anywhere their objectives and those of the United States came into conflict. They would be prone to miscalculate the strength of U.S. commitments and be tempted to take reckless actions that might compel a response in force, possibly at a level where the ability to keep things under control on either side would be severely destabilized. If there were high risks in doing nothing, there were also high risks in reacting too massively. The White House was not afraid of a “rational” Khrushchev, but a Khrushchev forced to eat humble pie in public was a dangerous unknown. It was important to show the Soviets that the United States had the capability and the will to forcibly remove their local threat to U.S. security if necessary, as well as to provide the Kremlin with a less humiliating option than retreat under a public ultimatum. Nor was it desirable to put Khrushchev’s pledge to protect Castro to the test by actually invading Cuba. The choices, therefore, narrowed rather quickly to either air strikes to destroy the missiles or a naval blockade around Cuba

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to prevent further Soviet assistance unless and until the missiles were dismantled and removed. The president was informed by Secretary McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), that they could not guarantee an air strike would take out all the Soviet missiles—some three dozen medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) and some two dozen intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs)—at one stroke. Optimistically, 90 percent could be destroyed before they could be fired off in retaliation; but a clean surgical operation was a military impossibility.18 The surviving MRBMs could hit targets in the eastern third of the United States; the IRBMs could reach anywhere in continental United States, except the far Northwest. Moreover, the nuclear warheads carried on the missiles were anywhere from fifteen to seventy times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.19 Accordingly, air strikes were abandoned by the president as an initial response, although not ruled out as the next step if the blockade failed. The blockade (called a “quarantine” to avoid automatically defining the maneuver as an act of war), by contrast, would offer Khrushchev the choice of avoiding an immediate military clash by merely keeping his ships away. This would not settle the matter of the missiles already in Cuba, but it would, without a direct engagement, establish firmly the U.S. intention to maintain control in the Caribbean. Khrushchev could stall when it came to actually removing the missiles, but once he failed to challenge the blockade, the reality of U.S. power would have been recognized. If Khrushchev under these circumstances were to make concessions—and Kennedy’s principal advisers on Soviet affairs, Charles Bohlen and Llewellyn Thompson, conjectured that he would—he could define them as a temporary acceptance of present realities, a tolerable posture for a Bolshevik; not a humiliating and irreversible defeat. The strongest public remarks to Khrushchev were made in the president’s dramatic October 22 radio-television address, divulging the fact that he knew the Soviet missiles were in Cuba and outlining his initial low-level response. The only specific reference to a higher-level military response was in connection with the hypothetical contingency of an actual launching of nuclear missiles from Cuban soil: “It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”20 Kennedy made a deliberately vague reference to further action

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in addition to the blockade if the missile preparations in Cuba continued, but nothing even approaching an ultimatum. Only through private channels was an ultimatum offered; and only in conjunction with public acceptance of the formula: you remove the weapons under UN supervision and we will give assurances against invasion. When Robert Kennedy, at the request of the president, handed a copy of this formula to the Soviet ambassador, he accompanied it with a very tough oral message: the point of escalation was at hand. Unless the president received immediate notice that the missiles would be withdrawn, the United States was in a position to take strong and overwhelming retaliatory action.21 That was on Saturday, October 27, six days after the president’s address demanding the removal of the missiles; one day after the receipt of an emotional and surprisingly contrite secret letter from Khrushchev; and only hours after a second, stronger Khrushchev letter was broadcast to the entire world. There had still been no real confrontation. The installation of the missile sites in Cuba, from components already there, continued at a rapid pace. The naval quarantine was in force, but both sides had avoided a clear test: the president had taken his time in actually implementing the blockade. Thursday morning, October 25, the navy hailed a Soviet tanker and Kennedy ordered it to be passed through without inspection, allowing for the possibility that the ship had not yet received its instructions from Moscow. The Soviet cargo ships with their submarine escorts were to arrive Friday. The navy was urging the president to intercept the Soviets far out into the ocean before they reached the Caribbean. But backed by McNamara, Kennedy insisted that Khrushchev be given all possible time to communicate with his ships. The president did, however, order a ship to be stopped so as to symbolically show his resolve: a dry-cargo freighter owned by a Panamanian company, Lebanese registered with a Greek crew but sailing under a Soviet charter, was halted and boarded at dawn Friday, found to be carrying only trucks and spare parts, and allowed to pass. The Soviets stopped the progress of their own cargo ships and had actually turned them back toward home port.22 But would the Soviets stop work on their missiles already in Cuba? And once these were operational, would the Soviet navy sail toward Cuba more confidently? Or would the communists invoke a counterblockade around Berlin, where they had tactical superiority? As the president dispatched his brother with his final private ultimatum to Khrushchev, these doubts remained intense. Still, Kennedy stood his ground and refused to

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be stampeded into the tempting chest-thumping postures urged by some advisers. Nor would he allow an unforeseen development—the shooting down with a surface-to-air missile (SAM) of a U-2 reconnaissance plane over Cuba—to waylay his desperate efforts to induce Khrushchev to back away from the brink. Despite his standing authorization to the military to take out any SAMs that fired on U.S. aircraft, he called off such retaliation just when the choice between quid pro quo and war was coming to a head. Even when the Soviets agreed to dismantle the missiles in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba and, secretly, to dismantle U.S. missiles in Turkey (which in the emergent era of ICBMs had become obsolete anyway),23 Kennedy insisted, as Ted Sorensen describes it, that there was to be “no boasting, no gloating, not even a claim of victory. We had won by enabling Khrushchev to avoid complete humiliation—we should not humiliate him now. If Khrushchev wanted to boast he had won a major concession [no U.S. invasion of Cuba] and proved his peaceful manner, that was the loser’s prerogative.”24 It is tempting to overdefine the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis as having reestablished clarity concerning the spheres in which each superpower exercised effective control. The Soviets were kept from establishing an offensive military base in the Western Hemisphere. But Castro was not about to accept anything like “normalization” of relations with the neighboring superpower. Castro would not even allow the UN to verify the dismantling of the Soviet missile sites, a condition of the U.S. no-invasion pledge. For three weeks Castro balked at returning to the Soviets their Ilyushin IL-28 bombers, which were within range of the United States. This, not the inspection issue, became the outstanding problem between the United States and the Soviets. When the Soviets finally persuaded Castro to give up the bombers, Kennedy lifted the naval quarantine and talked in public with the Soviets as if the crisis were completely resolved. Thus the Soviets could portray the outcome as establishing the legitimacy of the Castro regime, thanks to the Soviet missile ploy. The United States never issued an explicit public affirmation of the noinvasion pledge, but neither did it deny feeling bound by it as a tacit agreement. Indeed, many U.S. actions and statements henceforth suggested that if only Castro would pledge not to export his revolution to other Latin American countries, the United States would be prepared to establish normal relations with Cuba again, despite the fact that it was a communist regime and an ally of the Soviet Union.

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Ambiguity remained, but the lines held and had weathered their most serious threat. Future attempts at interpenetration of one another’s sphere would be more subtle and far below the threshold of direct challenge to the other’s military dominance in areas of traditional hegemony. Also—as would materialize in the context of the nuclear test-ban negotiations—there could be mutual agreement to refrain from actions, symbolic or material, designed to significantly alter the existing balance of coercive power.

9

BERLIN AGAIN West Berlin . . . has now become—as never before—the great testing place of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments, stretching back over the years to 1945, and Soviet ambitions now meet in basic confrontation. —John F. Kennedy

N THE ISSUES OF BERLIN and the missiles in Cuba, President Kennedy displayed most clearly his appreciation of the central function played by military power as an arbiter of conflicting goals and wills in international relations. These two crises also indicated the gap between the reality of a bipolar organization of effective power in the international system and the hope for a pluralistic world based on self-determination. Berlin and Cuba compelled Kennedy, at least temporarily, to renew the bipolar basis for coping with the fierce conflicts in a world armed with nuclear power and without a central system of law and order. He could still hope that such a two-sided balance of power, sustained by each superpower’s fear of the other’s military prowess, could become the basis for a more peaceful phase of competition between the communists and noncommunists. A period of peaceful competition based on well-defined and mutually respected spheres of control might eventually lead to depreciation of military power as the currency behind most international transactions and to a less rigid international order. The few U.S. official statements on Berlin in early 1961 conveyed a stiffer posture on Berlin and Germany than had been displayed by the Eisenhower administration during the previous round of negotiations in 1959. Visiting West Berlin on March 8, 1961, Averell Harriman, the president’s

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roving ambassador, explicitly disassociated the new administration from the Eisenhower administration’s concessionary proposals. “All discussions on Berlin,” he said, “must begin from the start.”1 At the same time Kennedy, through Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, sent a personal note to Premier Khrushchev suggesting a meeting between the two leaders to clear the air—not for purposes of negotiation but rather for each side to better understand the other’s basic commitments so as to remove any chance of miscalculations that might lead to war. At the Vienna Summit (June 3–4, 1961), the Soviet premier was very tough on Berlin, using language close to the tone of an ultimatum: a peace treaty recognizing East German jurisdiction over access to Berlin would be signed in December and wartime occupation rights would be ended. If the West tried to violate the sovereign rights of the Ulbricht regime, force would be met with force. It was up to the United States to choose whether there would be war or peace.2 “It’s you, and not I, who wants to force a change,” Kennedy responded. Despite their back and forth on the Germany and Berlin issues, as they were about to adjourn, Khrushchev reiterated in no uncertain terms that his decision to turn full authority over Berlin to the East German government by December was irrevocable. “If that is,” retorted Kennedy, “it’s going to be a cold winter.”3 At the close of the Vienna conference Kennedy was handed an official Soviet aide-mémoire, somewhat less belligerent in tone but clearly heralding the frigid months ahead. The aide-mémoire called for the immediate convening of a peace conference to “formally recognize the situation which has developed in Europe after the war, to legalize and consolidate the inviolability of existing German borders, [and] to normalize the situation in West Berlin.” In the interests of achieving rapid agreement, it would not be necessary to tie the conclusion of a peace treaty to the formal recognition of the German Democratic Republic or the Federal Republic of Germany by all parties to the treaty. If the United States was not prepared to sign a joint peace treaty with the two Germanys, a settlement could be achieved on the basis of two separate treaties. But the peace treaty, or treaties, would have to contain the same kind of provisions on the most important points of a peaceful settlement. The most important points, the Soviets made clear, involved the status of West Berlin. At present, “the Soviet Government does not see a better way to solve the West Berlin problem than by transforming it into a demilitarized free city.” This “free city” of West Berlin (East Berlin by implication would remain under the complete control of the GDR) “would have

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unobstructed contacts with the outside world and . . . its internal regulations should be determined by the freely expressed will of its population. . . . Token troop contingents of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the U.S.S.R. could be stationed in West Berlin as guarantees of the free city.” This would mean “putting an end to the occupation regime in West Berlin, with all its implications”: namely, the peace treaty or treaties that provided for the new status of West Berlin would establish clearly that any questions relating to “communication by land, water or air within the territory of the G.D.R. would have to be settled solely by appropriate agreements with the G.D.R.”4 The Soviets were proposing, in short, an agreement to legitimize the division of Germany, with East Berlin under the complete authority of the Ulbricht regime and West Berlin an international city. The Soviets and their allies would be given as much control over the administration of West Berlin as the United States and its allies. Access to this international city—located within East Germany—would be controlled by the East German government. Agreement would have been to capitulate to the essence of the demands Khrushchev had been making with respect to Germany since 1958. Why was Khrushchev renewing these demands with such vigor and confidence now? This question bothered President Kennedy and his associates in their postmortems on the Vienna conference. Were the Soviets emboldened by perceptions that the strategic nuclear balance was such as to make communist local military superiority in Central Europe the only relevant factor of power? Had the Bay of Pigs adventure and Kennedy’s backing away from a superpower showdown over Laos given Khrushchev the impression that the United States would be the first to swerve off a collision course? President Kennedy’s instincts were to open up the Berlin issue to a wide set of alternatives and for the United States to set the terms of reference rather than always reacting to Soviet proposals. But he was unwilling to enter into negotiations with only the increasingly unbelievable “trip wire” military posture in Western Europe to back him up. Accordingly, he put his foreign policy advisers, including elder statesman Acheson, to work on developing an expanded list of political options while he put the Defense Department to work on increasing his military options. His advisers found it easier to be creative when proposing military measures than when proposing political approaches. The State Department,

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designed more to implement and reiterate established policy premises than to generate new ones, responded characteristically: it took exasperatingly long, but it came up eventually with a statement of the U.S. position on Berlin that turned out to be little more than a marginally updated amalgam of positions developed in the 1950s. Acheson’s proposals had more substance but were also designed primarily for strengthening the U.S. hand in the status quo rather than changing the status quo. Backed by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Acheson urged a presidential proclamation of national emergency accompanied by an immediate expansion of military manpower, including the calling up of reserves, a $5 billion increase in the defense budget, plus new taxation and standby controls on wages and prices. Openly preparing the nation for the worst and visibly making the economy ready for war would demonstrate to Khrushchev, more starkly than any manipulation of U.S. military capabilities in the vicinity of Berlin, that current Soviet threats were merely stimulating the United States to enhance its commitments and to more thoroughly involve the national honor in those commitments. Acheson’s national emergency package was opposed by powerful voices within the administration. Walter Heller and the Council of Economic Advisers were strongly against a tax increase and argued that there was a real danger of serious inflation resulting from the scare buying that would accompany the proclamation of emergency. Heads of the domestic departments were wary of the effects on civilian welfare programs. Secretary of Defense McNamara, Secretary of State Rusk, and even reputedly “tough” advisers like Henry Kissinger warned against unnecessarily bellicose reactions that rather than indicating unflinching resolve, might convey hysteria. Others were concerned that an overemphasis on the Berlin confrontation by measures such as the proclamation might induce Khrushchev, for considerations of his own prestige, to respond in kind with arms increases and menacing postures in preparation for a showdown. Kennedy rejected the suggestion for an immediate declaration of national emergency but incorporated some of the major premises underlying the Acheson proposals into his own planning. He knew that words were not enough to dissuade the Soviets. The military increase that the president had already ordered as part of his program for remedying the nation’s military deficiencies would be accelerated under the impetus of the Berlin crisis to convince Khrushchev that his bluster could lead only to the firming up of U.S. resolve. The president did not unequivocally reject the more extreme suggestions of a large-scale mobilization and a

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declaration of national emergency. These might yet have to be used, but not so early in the crisis. The grand strategy should be the classical one of arming to parley; the United States wanted the parley in an atmosphere conducive to calm deliberation on terribly complicated conflicts of interest. Showdowns could only revive the simplifications of the Cold War and possibly lead to hot war. The president’s television address on July 25 was designed to be both very tough and more reasonable than previous U.S. statements on the Berlin issue. The noncommunist presence in West Berlin, and access thereto, could not be ended by any act of the Soviet government, the president told the world. It would be a mistake to consider Berlin, because of its location, as a tempting target: “I hear it said that West Berlin is militarily untenable. And so was Bastogne. And so, in fact, was Stalingrad. Any dangerous spot is tenable if men—brave men—will make it so.” The city had become “the greatest testing place of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments . . . and Soviet ambitions now meet in basic confrontation.” Berlin was no less protected than the rest of the West, “for we cannot separate its safety from our own.” He warned the Soviets not to make the dangerous but common mistake of assuming that the West was too soft, too divided in the pursuit of narrow national interests, to fight to preserve its objectives in Berlin. Too much was at stake for the alliance as a whole: “For the fulfillment of our pledge to that city is essential to the morale and security of Western Germany, to the unity of Western Europe, and the faith of the entire Free World . . . in . . . our willingness to meet our commitments.” Accordingly, in addition to the supplementary defense buildup the president had asked the Congress to approve in March, he was now asking for $3.25 billion more—most of it to be spent on the capability in being to deploy rapidly to the Central European front without weakening the U.S. ability to meet commitments elsewhere. The measures included a tripling of the draft calls for the coming months, the ordering up of certain reserve and National Guard units, the reactivation of many deactivated planes and ships, and a major acceleration in the procurement of nonnuclear weapons. The president wanted to make it clear that “while we will not let panic shape our policy,” he was contemplating still more dramatic steps if the situation required them: In the days and months ahead, I shall not hesitate to ask the Congress for additional measures, or exercise any of the executive powers that I possess

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to meet this threat to peace. . . . and if that should require more men, or more taxes, or more controls, or other new powers, I shall not hesitate to ask them.

He did, however, request one additional item, separated from the others in his text and related more to the overall preparedness of the nation than to the Berlin crisis. This item—his request for a special appropriation of $207 million for a civil defense shelter program—came close to creating that national atmosphere of “panic” and overreaction likely to interfere with his efforts to direct attention toward political alternatives and away from military posturing. Most of what followed this section in the July 25 address was anticlimactic—reversing the emphasis he had intended. The press played up the military measures, including the civil defense program, but gave scant attention to his offer “to consider any arrangement or treaty in Germany consistent with the maintenance of peace and freedom, and the legitimate security interests of all nations.” The very carefully worded elaboration of this offer was all but ignored in news summaries: We recognize the Soviet Union’s historical concern about their security in Central and Eastern Europe, after a series of ravaging invasions, and we believe arrangements can be worked out which will help to meet these concerns, and make it possible for both security and freedom to exist in this troubled area.

He had said that he was “ready to search for peace in quiet exploratory talks—in formal or informal meetings,” but the noisier measures got the headlines in the United States.5 And these measures dominated Khrushchev’s reaction to the president’s speech. Khrushchev, discussing disarmament issues with John J. McCloy, told Kennedy’s influential confidant in emotional tones that he was angered by the president’s speech and professed to find in it only an ultimatum akin to a preliminary declaration of war. By this time, however, the flow of refugees from East Berlin to West Berlin was seriously damaging Soviet prestige and the manpower resources of East Germany. Khrushchev may have welcomed an atmosphere of imminent explosion as the context for his sealing of the boundary between East and West Berlin just three weeks after the Kennedy address. On August 7, the Soviet premier delivered one of the most belligerent speeches of his career, linking “military hysteria” in the United States with

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an “orgy of revanchist passions” in West Germany and warning the West against any intervention under the illusion that there could be a limited war over Berlin. Khrushchev, bestowing honors on Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, used the occasion to make pointed allusions to the strategic power of the Soviet Union. “Any state used as a springboard for an attack upon the Socialist camp will experience the full devastating power of our blow.” The territory of the United States would be crushed. Intervention, an act of war by the West, would be a suicidal act, spelling “death to millions upon millions of people.”6 When the Soviets sealed off East Berlin six days later, the specter of thermonuclear holocaust had already been projected. The next move was up to the United States. The United States could accept the Soviet claim of acting to stabilize and bottle up the combustible passions on both sides of the boundary to within controllable confines. Or the United States could define it as a unilateral abrogation of established four-power responsibility for the city as a whole and a shameless denial of free choice to the Berliners, thus placing it into that category of action the president insisted had to be resisted. Khrushchev was gambling on the vividness of the nuclear backdrop as the main barrier to Western action. The “wall” at first consisted of double strands of barbed wire and other light barricades, backed up by elements of a motorized division of the East German Army at critical crossing points. Western counteraction could have taken the form of a symbolic cutting of the wire, or pushing over some obstacles. It need not have involved anything as dramatic as a bulldozing operation with tanks and cannon; and the next move would have been up to the Soviets. Khrushchev still had many options. His gamble, of course, was that the West would not “overreact.” On the afternoon of August 13, the U.S. secretary of state, after checking with the president, who was vacationing at Hyannisport, issued a statement that, however caustic, signaled that the United States had gotten the message: Having denied the collective right of self-determination to the peoples of East Germany, Communist authorities are now denying the right of individuals to elect a world of free choice rather than a world of coercion. The pretense that communism desires only peaceful competition is exposed: the refugees . . . have “voted with their feet” on whether communism is the wave of the future. Available information indicates that measures taken thus far are aimed at residents of East Berlin and East Germany and not at the Allied position in West Berlin or access thereto.7

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Rusk did claim that restrictions on travel between East Germany and Berlin directly contravened the 1949 four-power agreements (signed at the conclusion of the Berlin blockade) and indicated that diplomatic protests would be forthcoming. But there was no hint that the unilateral imposition of barriers across the city might constitute a fighting issue. Although many in the West were shocked and outraged at the communist action, the West Berlin leaders who had foreseen the wall in the writing, as it were, felt themselves helpless and suddenly demoralized. Kennedy, seeking advice from advisers at home and abroad, found a solid consensus that there was not much he could do apart from issuing verbal protests. Sorensen recounted that “not one responsible official in the country, in West Berlin, West Germany, or Western Europe— suggested that allied forces should march into East German territory and tear the Wall down.”8 And even if they did recommend such a response, Kennedy would most likely have ruled it out. He regarded the continued allied access to and presence in West Berlin as worth risking war to sustain and had communicated this to Khrushchev in their Vienna meeting and in his July 25 speech on the defense budget. However, as McGeorge Bundy characterizes the president’s thinking at the time: “Could Kennedy have regarded the whole of Berlin, in 1961, as a vital interest for which he could ask his countrymen to fight? He never thought so.”9 Also—perhaps remembering how the Soviet blockade of Berlin 1948 turned out to be a huge embarrassment for the Kremlin—Kennedy observed, “The other side panicked—not us.” 10 But the mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt, in a personal letter to Kennedy, demanded some retaliatory actions—such as a selective ban on imports from East Germany, a refusal to issue travel permits to East German officials, and the takeover of the portion of the elevated railroad system in West Berlin that was still administered by the East. He also called for special actions to demonstrate renewed support by the United States for the West Berliners, many of whom felt that the West’s failure to prevent the erection of the wall meant that the balance had been tipped in the Soviets’ favor and it was only a matter of time before the noose was tightened around the entire city. From these largely symbolic actions suggested by Brandt, four were adopted by the White House during the next few days: t
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DJUZ Yet the president worried, along with Mayor Brandt, just as Eisenhower had worried, that if the Kremlin did decide to tighten the noose around West Berlin and the transportation arteries leading to it, the local balance of military power would favor the Soviets; and that in such a moment of truth he would have to choose between negotiating from weakness or escalating the conflict to strategic nuclear war. But the nuclear scenarios he was presented with, derived from the Pentagon’s Single Integrated Operating Plan (SIOP) 62, in which centers of industry and population would be among the prime targets, envisioned up to over 100 million fatalities on each side.11 Shaken, he instructed his advisers to provide him with alternative targeting options, such as only military systems and facilities, whereupon Secretary of Defense McNamara came up with the so-called no cities doctrine. But the president remained skeptical that nuclear weapons could be used at all without escalation to all-out war.12 Kennedy could only speculate that perhaps Khrushchev was also fearful of confrontations over Berlin exploding out of control; for West Berlin remained Western and the allies continued to exercise their rights of access to the city while refusing to grant recognition to the East German regime. December 1961 came and went without the Soviets carrying out the unilateral actions threatened in their July aide-mémoire. The situation seemed to be settling down to an uneasy but basically stable equilibrium based on what now could be tacitly recognized as more clearly defined spheres of effective control. Meanwhile, the “search for peace—in quiet exploratory talks” that Kennedy had called for in his July address got underway in the form of periodic meetings between Secretary Rusk and Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, and the Soviet and American ambassadors. Kennedy was coming to the realization that a major global settlement was probably the necessary correlate of significant “movement” on the German question. As he put it to President Urho Kekkonen of Finland, “Let the Soviet Union keep Germany divided on its present basis and not try to persuade us to associate ourselves legally with that division and thus weaken our ties to West Germany and their ties to Western Europe.”13 Berlin and the other diplomatic crises of Kennedy’s first year could be viewed as tests of the ground rules for coexistence that the president

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propounded to Khrushchev during their conversations in Vienna: no action by either superpower to alter the existing balance of power and no attempt by either to interfere within the other’s sphere of control. At Vienna there seemed to be mutual agreement to these ground rules in principle but considerable differences over how they might apply in practice: there was no objective definition of the balance of power, nor could the president and the chairman assent unequivocally to the other’s definition of legitimate spheres of control. The Berlin conflict was the product of these differences, not the cause. Neither side could agree simply to a maintenance of the “status quo.” Moreover, with so many new nations experimenting with various types of regimes and still determining their international interests and inclinations, there was not even a de facto status quo in the Third World. Consequently, a series of tests in a volatile environment would determine who had effective power over what, and where, at any one time, the spheres of control lay.

10

THE VIETNAM QUAGMIRE The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one. —Robert McNamara

and sympathetic biographer of the Kennedys and a critic of President Johnson’s policies in Vietnam, claimed that “Kennedy had no intention of dispatching American ground forces to save South Vietnam.” Schlesinger argued that President Kennedy’s 1962 instruction to Secretary of Defense McNamara to start planning for a phased withdrawal of U.S. military personnel from Vietnam, originally only a precautionary contingency plan, “was turning in 1963 into a preference.”1 This was consistent with the recollection of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy—who at the time was a supporter of direct U.S. military involvement—that from as early as 1961 “Kennedy firmly and steady refused to authorize the commitment of ground combat troops.” In that “quite decisive sense,” reflected Bundy, “he [the president] never made Vietnam an American war.”2 Nor did Kennedy regard keeping any other part of Indochina out of communist hands worth “an American war.” Indochina was no longer strategically vital—as it had been when invaded by Japan in 1941—as a source of rubber and tin, both now supplanted by synthetics. And although near the East-West maritime choke point of the Strait of Malacca, the Indochina peninsula itself did not abut the strait; Malaysia did, and that country, as a

A

RTHUR SCHLESINGER JR., ADVISER TO

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result of the British counterinsurgency effort, had been and could continue to be defended against a communist takeover. Thus Kennedy, no believer in the “domino theory” articulated by Eisenhower, did not consider the prospect of the Laotian communists, the Pathet Lao insurgents, taking power in Vientiane as worth a major war to prevent. He did, however, regard the prospect of a Pathet Lao victory in Laos as a potential reputational loss for the United States in its rivalry with the Soviet Union for influence in the Third World and consequently, like Eisenhower, decided to bluff the Kremlin as to his willingness to commit U.S. forces to Laos—in reality, a bargaining ploy to get Khrushchev to accept a neutral government in Vientiane.3 Kennedy’s serious contemplation of a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was the product of his growing disillusion with the policies of the Diem regime in Saigon—especially Ngo Dinh Diem’s ruthless suppression of the civil liberties of opponents, including the jailing of prominent Buddhist leaders. “In the final analysis it’s their war,” said Kennedy publicly, in September 1963, reserving his option to scale U.S. assistance up or down depending upon the extent to which the Diem government demonstrated the political as well as the military capability of sustaining its counterinsurgency effort. “We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men there as advisers, but they have to win it—the people of Viet Nam—against the Communists.”4 The option of withdrawal, however, was effectively removed three weeks before Kennedy’s death when the U.S. ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, and other U.S. officials in Saigon conspired with anti-Diem elements in the South Vietnamese military who engineered the November 1, 1963, coup in which Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were deposed and murdered.5 Kennedy and the other top officials who plotted the coup now felt, like traditional imperialists, implicated in the fate of their wards. After the coup there could be no U.S. pullout before the new regime was given a chance, with augmented U.S. aid, to put the counterinsurgency effort back on track. Still, according to Robert McNamara, the president was determined that “in the end, the South Vietnamese must carry the war themselves; the United States could not do it for them.”6 In any event, however, a pullout would have to await the conclusion of the 1964 U.S. presidential election. As Kennedy told his political adviser Kenneth O’Donnell, “If I tried to pull out completely [before then] . . . I’d be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser . . . we would have

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another Joe McCarthy red scare . . . but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better be damned sure that I am reelected.”7 This too was the predicament Lyndon Johnson perceived he inherited on November 22, 1963, as he assumed the presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Although he asked for briefings on Vietnam right away and lectured his aides on the absolute necessity of making sure his opponents could never say that the Johnson administration lost Vietnam like the Truman administration was accused of losing China, Johnson left the direction of Vietnam policy largely in the hands of Secretary of Defense McNamara until the Gulf of Tonkin crisis of August 1964. Yet during the spring of 1964, well into the election season, LBJ worried about the slide to war that seemed to be inexorably occurring. Anticipating that whether and how the United States got more involved could become an issue in the campaign, and also that as president he would rightly be held responsible for harms suffered by the country either by staying out or more actively intervening, he anxiously probed the foreign policy experts in the administration and the Congress as to what he should do. Typically, they tossed the hot potato back at him. His old Senate colleague Richard Russell of Georgia admitted in a phone conversation with Johnson that if the president were to authorize him to deal with the situation as he saw fit, “I would respectfully decline to undertake it. . . . It’s the damned worse mess I ever saw. . . . I just don’t know what to do.” Johnson’s response: “Well, that’s the way I’ve been feeling for six months.” The president’s telephone exchange with his national security adviser Bundy is particularly revealing: I just stayed awake last night thinking about this thing—the more I think about I, I don’t know what in the hell . . . it looks like we’re getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don’t see that we can ever hope to get out of there once we’re committed. I believe the Chinese Communists are coming into it. I don’t think that we can fight them 10,000 miles away from home and ever get anywhere in that area. I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess I ever saw. BUNDY: It is, it’s an awful mess. . . . LBJ: What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country? . . . Now, of course if you start running [from] the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen. LBJ:

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Yup. That’s the trouble. And that is what the rest of that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us, That’s the dilemma. That’s exactly the dilemma. . . . LBJ: What action do we take, though? BUNDY:

In response to that question, Bundy only offered to prepare some briefings and “folders” for the president, whose frustrated comment was, “It’s damned easy to get into a war, but it’s going to be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in.”8 Still, LBJ’s own principal preoccupation was with America’s domestic social and economic problems.9 He resisted as long as he could, yet as he put it, he was forced to leave “the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world.”10 The president did, however, approve National Security Action Memorandum 288, authorizing preparations by the U.S. military “to be in a position on 72 hours’ notice to initiate . . . Retaliatory Actions against North Vietnam, and to be in a position on 30 days’ notice to initiate the program of ‘Graduated Overt Military Pressure’ against North Vietnam.”11 Johnson also approved, on McNamara’s recommendation, stepped-up covert operations under Operations Plan 34-A, including intelligence collection and graduated “destructive undertakings” against North Vietnam. The 34-A operations, conducted with increasing intensity during the spring and summer of 1964, included commando raids by mercenaries hired by the South Vietnamese to blow up rail and highway bridges and coastal installations north of the seventeenth parallel, raids by Laotian-marked T-28 fighter-bombers on North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao troop concentrations in Laos, and U.S. naval intelligence-gathering patrols off the coast of North Vietnam.12 The clash in the Gulf of Tonkin in the first week of August 1964, which resulted in the first overt U.S. military action in the Vietnam War and the famous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that set the stage for the subsequent heavy U.S. intervention, was precipitated by the 34-A covert operations. At the time of a South Vietnamese amphibious commando raid against a group of coastal North Vietnam islands, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was in the area on an electronic intelligence-gathering mission, and the North Vietnamese evidently believed it to have been part of the coastal harassment operation. According to Pentagon testimony, on August 2 the Maddox was 23 miles from the coast and heading further into international

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waters, when three North Vietnamese torpedo boats began a run at her. The Maddox sunk one of the PT boats with a direct hit from its five-inch guns, and the other two were damaged by aircraft from the carrier Ticonderoga, cruising to the south of the encounter. President Johnson ordered another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy, to accompany the Maddox back into the Gulf of Tonkin up to 11 nautical miles from the North Vietnamese coast and ordered a second aircraft carrier, the Constellation, to join the Ticonderoga to provide additional air cover. Plans were readied to bomb North Vietnam in the event of another attack on U.S. ships, and the administration dusted off a draft congressional resolution that it had prepared in May to gain legislative support for a commitment of U.S. armed forces to the Indochina conflict. On August 4, North Vietnamese torpedo boats again made a run at the U.S. naval deployments. In response, in missions approved by the president, U.S. fighter-bombers from the Ticonderoga and Constellation struck four torpedo boat bases and an oil storage depot in North Vietnam. Johnson met with leaders of Congress to inform them of his decision to retaliate against North Vietnam for what he claimed was an unprovoked attack against U.S. ships and to enlist their support in passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.13 On August 7, by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 416 to 0 in the House, Congress resolved to “approve and support the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” and declared that “the United States is . . . prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”14 The ingredients were now in place for major, direct U.S. military intervention into the war in Southeast Asia. Detailed scenarios for systematic bombing of North Vietnam had been developed in the Pentagon. All that was needed was another attack on U.S. forces, either at sea or upon U.S. military bases in South Vietnam, or a formal request for military intervention from the government of South Vietnam, for the president to feel he was acting legitimately—with the advice and consent of the Congress—in making the United States an active fighting ally of South Vietnam. Although many of Johnson’s political-military advisers were unhappy with the presidential restraint, he was not about to be stampeded into a war that now looked almost inevitable, until he had first validated his own

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mandate in the presidential elections of 1964—particularly as his election victory would be best assured by making his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, appear to be the “warmonger.” It was the Republicans, he charged, who were “eager to enlarge the conflict.” “They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do.”15 As far as he was concerned, said the president, I want to be very cautious and careful, and use it only as a last resort, when I start dropping bombs around that are likely to involve American boys in a war in Asia with 700,000,000 Chinese. So just for the moment I have not thought that we were ready for American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys.16

During the windup of the election campaign, he reiterated unequivocally, “We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”17 Even when the Vietcong, on November 1, 1964, in a surprise attack on the Bien Hao air base, killed five Americans, wounded seventy-six, and destroyed six B-57 bombers, Johnson continued to adhere to the escalation restraints, despite the view of principal administration foreign policy experts that the Bien Hao attack was at least as serious as the Gulf of Tonkin incident and therefore deserved a military reply. But Johnson’s overriding concern was to keep the Vietnam conflict from pushing him into taking any action that could complicate how people thought of him when they entered the voting booths.18 Only after the 1964 election did Johnson embrace the premise that the Vietnam conflict was the current flash point of the global conflict between the communist and noncommunist worlds—the major corollary being that as leader of the noncommunist side the United States had to assume full responsibility for ensuring the communists did not win. The American commitment, the price the nation would be willing to pay, was unqualified and open-ended. The implications began to be revealed in a series of events and decisions during the first half of 1965. On February 7 U.S. fighter-bombers made a reprisal raid on North Vietnamese military barracks north of the seventeenth parallel in response to Vietcong mortar attacks on U.S. installations earlier in the day, including the Pleiku airstrip, where 7 Americans were killed, 109 wounded, and at least 20 aircraft were destroyed or damaged. The United States had every reason to believe, Secretary of Defense McNamara explained to reporters,

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“that the attack on Pleiku, Tuyhoa, and Nhatrang was ordered and directed and masterminded directly from Hanoi.” Under Secretary of State George Ball backed him up in the joint press conference on the day of the raids. There is no question, said the diplomat (reputed to be the leading administration “dove” on Vietnam), that “this was a deliberate, overt attempt by the regime in Hanoi to test the will of the South Vietnamese Government . . . and the Government of the United States.” This was a situation in which “we could not fail to respond without giving a misleading signal to the . . . regime in Hanoi” as to the strength of American purpose.19 The basis for the administration’s conviction that Hanoi was masterminding the campaign in the South was further elaborated on February 28, when the State Department issued its white paper entitled “Aggression form the North: The Record of North Vietnam’s Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam.”20 The sixty-four-page text, released to all news media, claimed to contain “massive evidence of North Vietnamese aggression.” It did document an increase, especially during 1964, of military aid from the North in the form of weapons and key advisory personnel; but it was certainly no more massive than the increase in U.S. “supporting assistance” to Saigon during the same period. Hanoi used the increasing American involvement as its justification for increasing its infiltration into the South. And the U.S. government pointed to the evidence of this increasing infiltration as the reason for bringing coercive pressure upon Hanoi and dispatching more men and materials to South Vietnam to redress the deteriorating military balance. At Kennedy’s death Johnson had inherited an American “advisory” force in Vietnam numbering somewhat short of 16,500. By August 1965, before the impact of the major increments ordered that year had been felt, there were already about 125,000 U.S. troops in the field. And decisions made in 1965 and 1966 meant that barring a political settlement the number of U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam could exceed half a million sometime in 1967. The shift in the mission of these U.S. troops from “advisers” to the main offensive force also occurred between 1963 and 1966. U.S. advice to the South Vietnamese to make extensive use of helicopters for reconnaissance, troop support, and troop transport required, at the outset, training and maintenance bases staffed by Americans. But these bases also required protection (they were obvious targets for the Vietcong). When the South Vietnamese proved incapable of providing the kind of security needed, contingents of U.S. Marines were called in to help and eventually to take

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over the base security role. The United States became, willy-nilly, an active co-belligerent, albeit only in “defensive” situations. The next step, as communist military units and firepower increased, was to expand the perimeters of security of U.S. bases, and the operations this involved were the same as they would be in offensive combat missions. What was indistinguishable in operations easily became indistinguishable in purpose, as the United States drifted into full participation in “clear and hold” missions designed to reduce the proportion of South Vietnamese territory controlled by the Vietcong. Finally, as political instability in Saigon diverted the South Vietnamese military to political tasks, including the suppression of Buddhist civil disobedience, the United States found itself the dominant combat force in the Vietnam War. When Johnson took the situation under intense scrutiny in late 1964, he found the commitments already entered into and the deployments already underway. To fail to approve the increased deployments then being asked for by the secretary of defense would be to fail to rectify the deteriorating military situation—it would mean accepting a humiliating military defeat. On the other hand, the increases in infiltration from North Vietnam, which paralleled the increased U.S. involvement during the previous year, gave little hope that the increases in American troops would accomplish anything more than drive the ground war to higher levels of intensity. From what is known of Johnson-the-political-animal, it would be surprising to find that he would allow himself to be trapped into presiding over a slow war of human attrition on the Asian mainland and the long test of endurance it required. For one thing, the United States was likely to be hurt more than its adversaries, who (assuming China was drawn in) had a practically unlimited supply of expendable manpower. For another, the 1964 election results convinced Johnson that he embodied the great American consensus for getting on with the job of tending to the national welfare. The people were tired of the foreign entanglements the country had been sustaining since 1947, particularly those like Vietnam, where the connection with U.S. security was complicated and tenuous. Some means would have to be found for bringing a rapid conclusion to this war. Yet Johnson also sensed that the majority of voters were overwhelmingly against Goldwater because he embodied the pugnacious aspect of American nationalism that risked further expenditure of blood and treasure in “confrontations” with adversaries around the globe. Goldwaterism, as the election showed, was just not the dominant temper in 1964.

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But here was LBJ, after having successfully made political capital out of Goldwater’s pugnacity, ordering the very escalation strategies that Goldwater had been advocating. The contradiction is at least partially resolved by attributing to Johnson-the-electioneer the very real belief that bombing North Vietnam would lead to the larger war (possibly through the entry of the Chinese) that he knew the American public did not want; whereas Johnson the commander in chief, looking in detail at the developing military situation in late 1964, saw that the United States was already heavily implicated in a rapidly expanding ground war that could easily lead to the intolerable and larger Asian land war. Marginal increments to U.S. forces in the South then being recommended by the military command in Saigon and endorsed by McNamara in Washington might not be sufficient to convince North Vietnam and China, and possibly even the Soviet Union, that an expansion of their commitments to Vietnam would involve them in a “deeply dangerous game.” But the way the decision to bring the North under aerial attack was announced and implemented obscured the underlying rationale and possibly interfered with its utility as a signal to the communist powers. The bombing raid across the seventeenth parallel following the Vietcong attack on Pleiku—like the air strike in response to the Tonkin incident—was defined as a reprisal. The implication was: do not do what you just did or we will bomb again. But three days later, on February 10, the Vietcong again found their mark. This time a U.S. billet at Quinhon was blown up, killing twenty-three Americans. Now three times as many aircraft were used in retaliation, and the targets were further north, but still in the southern part of North Vietnam. It might appear as if the United States were trying to establish a let-the-punishment-fit-the-crime pattern, with the crime being attacks on American installations. However, the White House attempted to blur this impression in its communiqué of February 11, which cited, in addition to the Quinhon incident, Vietcong ambushes, raids, and assassinations against South Vietnamese personnel and installations as well as against Americans. These “continued acts of aggression by communist Vietcong under the direction and with the support of the Hanoi regime,” said the statements issued from Washington and Saigon, were the reason for the current air strike. This came a bit closer to displaying the central strategic rationale for commencing the bombing—namely, at least an “equalization” of the pain suffered by the North as compared to the suffering caused by their agents in the South, as a way of convincing Ho Chi Minh that if he continued the insurgency the price would henceforth

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be much higher than it had been. The selection of targets further north and the increase in intensity were also supposed to communicate that the first blows were only a harbinger of much more damaging blows to come. Yet the full explicit announcement of this rationale was evidently thought to sound too much like an “ultimatum,” with all the risks that would involve of provoking counterthreats, even by parties not yet involved. Consequently, in the coming months, as bombing of the North became a regular feature of the war, it was increasingly justified on the narrower grounds of its usefulness in “interdicting” the transport of men and material from the North to the South. As the insurgency and terror in the South continued and the infiltration from the North increased, the administration was criticized heavily by domestic and foreign opponents of the bombing. The United States had expanded the war, putting pressure on the Soviet Union to aid Hanoi with at least air defense equipment, and incurring the risk of an even greater direct clash with the giant communist powers, and what did it have to show for it? An even higher level of warfare in the South. The argument that the United States had to bomb the North to buttress the shaky authority of each successive military junta in Saigon was even less convincing. Meanwhile, with no discernible moves by the communists to scale down their insurgency, the frequency, scale, and type of target the United States was bringing under aerial bombardment were increasing. In this phase of the conflict the United States was also using up its fresh options and settling into a pattern of mutual injury at a higher level of destruction than that of a few weeks before. Hundreds of thousands of American boys were being sent overseas to fight Asian boys, the casualty lists were growing, the costs were in the billions, and still the end was no closer in sight. Johnson’s instinct to break out of the pattern now resulted in a series of flamboyant peace moves. Up to the spring of 1965 it had been his stance (in reply to promptings from de Gaulle, the UN secretary general, Asian neutrals, and academic polemicists in this country) that there was nothing to negotiate except the cessation of the violent insurgency by the communists, and—in any case—negotiations would have to follow a bona fide cease-fire. In April 1965 the White House appeared to change its tune, or at least to be willing to play the counterpoint of negotiations and planning for peace against the continuing din of bombs and mortar and the calls from hawks to expand the list of targets to be hit in the North. Some pundits suspected this was another Johnsonian ploy of playing off the hawks against the doves to preserve his options for tactical maneuver in the long and

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messy conflict that now seemed to stretch endlessly ahead. But the ring of sincerity in his Johns Hopkins University address lends greater plausibility to the “breakout” hypothesis. The case for “why we are there” was reiterated, with considerable eloquence, by the president at Johns Hopkins on April 7. There were references to the “deepening shadow of Communist China,” presumably the real stage manager of the insurgency in Vietnam. “It is a nation which is helping the forces of violence in almost every continent. The contest in Viet-Nam is part of a wider pattern of aggressive purposes.” He invoked the promises made by “every American President” since 1954 “to help South VietNam defend its independence.” If the United States failed to honor these promises now, around the world, “from Berlin to Thailand,” the confidence of people “in the value of an American commitment and in the value of America’s word” would be shaken. “The result would be increased unrest and instability, and even wider war. . . . To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next. We must stay in Southeast Asia—as we did in Europe—in the words of the Bible: ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.’ ” And there was the posture of unflinching resolve: “We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of meaningless agreement.” But once this is clear, said the president, “it should also be clear that the only path for reasonable men is the path of peaceful settlement.” In a surprise formulation, he suggested an acceptable outcome and a range of flexibility in negotiating formats—both a thawing from what seemed to be his preexisting frigid stance. The “essentials of any final settlement,” he said, were “an independent South Viet-Nam—securely guaranteed and able to shape its own relationships to all others—free from outside interference— tied to no alliance—a military base for no other country.” This was a considerable departure by the White House from its scornful response to de Gaulle’s suggestions for a “neutralization” solution. Moreover, “there may be many ways to this kind of peace: in discussion or negotiation with the governments concerned; in large groups or in small ones; in the reaffirmation of old agreements or their strengthening with new ones. And we remain ready with this purpose for unconditional negotiations.” The peace he wanted, insisted the president, ought not to be incompatible with the desires of the North Vietnamese. “They want what their neighbors also desire . . . progress for their country, and an end to the bondage of material misery.” Their communist ideology and alignment with China

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were evidently not a bar to their peaceful association in regional economic development schemes: “We would hope that North Viet-Nam would take its place in the common effort just as soon as peaceful cooperation is possible.” Meanwhile, work could begin on projects for regional economic development with those nations among whom peaceful cooperation was now possible. The president would ask Congress to contribute a billion-dollar investment to a program of Southeast Asian economic development to be organized initially by UN secretary general Thant. United States’ participation would be inaugurated by a team headed by Eugene Black. “And I would hope,” said Johnson, “that all other industrialized countries, including the Soviet Union, will join in this effort.” These hopes for development and his dreams for an end to war, claimed the president, were deeply rooted in his childhood experiences. Rural electrification had brought cheer to the ordinary people along the Pedernales— was there any reason why it should not bring cheer to the sufferers along the Mekong? That vast river could provide food and water and electricity “on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA.” We often say how impressive power is. But I do not find it impressive at all. The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure. They protect and cherish. But they are witness to human folly. . . . Electrification of the countryside—yes, that . . . is impressive. A rich harvest in a hungry land is impressive. The sight of healthy children in a classroom is impressive. These—not mighty arms—are the achievements which the American nation believes to be impressive. And if we are steadfast, the time may come when all other nations will find it so.21

Meanwhile, the arms, symbols of human failure and witnesses to human folly, had to be fully committed to “protect what we cherish.” During the month of April the pounding of the North intensified, with 1,500 air sorties against military targets recorded.22 And in the month following the peace overture at Johns Hopkins, 15,000 additional U.S. combat troops disembarked in South Vietnam, the largest increase yet for any month. The buildup was proceeding apace. This was precisely the wrong way to get Hanoi to the negotiating table, charged critics at home and abroad. To bargain while under increasing

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bombardment would look like surrender. Lester Pearson of Canada, Senator Fulbright, and a number of newspaper editors argued for a bombing pause to convince the communists of America’s sincerity. The administration took counsel and decided to give this gambit a try. From May 12 to May 18 the bombing raids ceased. Hanoi was informed in advance via diplomatic channels that the United States would be watching to see if there were “significant reductions” in actions by the communist military units in South Vietnam. The message suggested that such reciprocal action would allow the United States to halt its bombing and thus meet what was assumed to be the essential North Vietnamese precondition for beginning peace talks. When the air attacks on the North were resumed on May 18, the administration claimed disappointment that there had been no reaction from the other side. But the critics were not silenced. Surely six days was not long enough to give Hanoi an opportunity to make a considered assessment of U.S. intentions and arrange for an appropriate response. In June, Secretary Rusk told the Foreign Service Institute that all that the U.S. government received from Hanoi and Peking were denunciations of the pause as a “wornout trick” and a “swindle.” Recent reports, he said, contained clear proof that “Hanoi is not even prepared for discussions unless it is accepted in advance that there will be a Communist-dominated government in Saigon.”23 Only in November did the State Department admit it had received a negotiating offer from Hanoi via the French government just a few hours after the six-day May pause ended. The French government is reported to have suggested that the bombings should cease again after the message had been received but apparently the U.S. government did not regard the response as a sufficiently serious negotiating offer. The administration was now subject to the charge of being deficient in its credibility.24 The failure of the North Vietnamese to give a satisfactory response to peace overtures in the spring of 1965 was stressed by the president in his July 28 “this is really war” speech, announcing an immediate 75 percent increase to U.S. fighting strength in Vietnam. Fifteen efforts with the help of forty nations, he said, had been made to attempt to get the “unconditional discussions” started. “But there has been no answer.” The United States would persist in its efforts to bring about negotiations, but meanwhile it would also persist on the battlefield, if need be, “until death and desolation have led to the same conference table where others could now join us at much smaller cost.”25

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The president was speaking at a time of extremely low morale in Saigon. Another civilian government had fallen on June 11, and Air Vice Marshal Ky had assumed the reins of power in the face of increasing antigovernment and pro-neutralism agitation by the Buddhists. Support for neutralism, the new military junta announced, would be punishable by death. It was the beginning of a new time of political troubles in Saigon that would consume the energies of the South Vietnamese military while the United States began to assume the major combat functions. “We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate,” said the American president, “but there is no one else.”26 Thus, by the summer of 1965, the full character of the U.S. politicalmilitary involvement in Vietnam had matured, and its underlying assumptions were revealed. 1. Global balance of power considerations demanded that the United States do all that was required to prevent the communists from taking over South Vietnam. Failure to honor U.S. commitments to South Vietnam would weaken resistance to communist expansion all around the globe—a resistance critically dependent upon the belief by the noncommunist societies that the United States, when called upon, would help them to prevail in their anticommunist struggles. 2. If the communist insurgency in South Vietnam were not defeated now, the communist expansionary drive in the less developed countries would likely require a bigger war, possibly closer to America’s shores. Vietnam was a test case for the communist strategy of expanding through “wars of national liberation” in place of a strategy of direct military aggression. If this strategy of disguised aggression by paramilitary means were allowed to succeed, those within the communist camp who favored the coercive modes of expansion would be vindicated. If this “war of national liberation” were convincingly defeated, however, those within the communist world who believed in peaceful forms of competitive coexistence would be strengthened. 3. Those directing the insurgency in Vietnam could be induced to call it off only if they were convinced it would cost them too dearly to continue it and that even with the higher-cost efforts, they would not succeed. The U.S. strategy in Vietnam, therefore, despite its turns and twists, had an underlying consistent objective: to increase the enemy’s costs and diminish their prospects of success. Previous failures to adequately convince them (with only support for South Vietnam) that their costs would be excessive

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and their prospects of success very low led to the direct U.S. involvement, and this at increasingly higher levels of violence. The administration had no desire to have American soldiers again fight Asians or to widen the war to include the North, but as lower levels of conflict failed to convince the communists that the United States was determined to frustrate their designs, the administration was compelled to make its determination even clearer. 4. The strategy of steadily increasing the costs to its opponents carried with it the need to increase U.S. human and material costs; thus, American staying power demanded a national consensus without which the president could not get the congressional majorities needed to provision the war. Consequently, domestic dissent on the involvement in Vietnam became an ingredient in the test of strength and endurance with the enemy. Hanoi, it was feared, would exploit America’s desires to negotiate an end to the violence with a view toward maximizing dissent in the United States. And the Vietnamese communists would interpret such dissent as an indication that further persistence by them on the battlefield would soon bring about a condition in the United States wherein a majority could not be found to approve the continued high costs of the war.

THE EROSION OF DOMESTIC SUPPORT As the buildup in Vietnam by the United States was met by increased Northern infiltration into the South, domestic criticism intensified. Students and professors held stop-the-war “teach-ins,” and artists, intellectuals, and religious leaders joined with standard peace groups in petitioning the government or marching on Washington to demonstrate against the bombing and for negotiations. Hanoi cooperated with hints through third parties that it might be willing to negotiate; these hints were picked up in the press, sometimes months after they had been made, and thrust at the administration as proof of official dishonesty in saying that it was constantly seeking to induce Hanoi to come to the conference table. American leaders were uninterested in negotiations, charged the critics. The administration’s response to domestic criticism was at first testy and tight-lipped. But in the second half of 1965 the White House changed tactics and began to talk back to the critics, to take them seriously—some observers thought too seriously—and to send administration representatives to the teach-ins to present the administration’s case. The case included

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the major premises summarized above, including the one about the danger of too much dissent. This was a tactical blunder on the part of the administration, as it would be for any administration in the American democracy, particularly as the argument was only valid if all of the other premises were valid. And serious critics disputed them all. The president’s worst fears of being driven to higher levels of warfare abroad without a sufficient consensus at home to support the greater resource drain seemed to be materializing. But at the end of 1965, he resorted again to a break out of the pattern move. This time it was a peace offensive the likes of which the diplomatic community had never seen. Prominent American officials made a whirlwind tour of world capitals while the military campaign was dramatically toned down. Responding to a Vietcong initiative for a Christmas Eve cease-fire, the United States halted air action over North Vietnam simultaneously with the start of a twelve-hour truce on the ground. A similar “natural” truce would be coming up on the Buddhist Lunar New Year (Tet), January 20–24. The administration used the month-long interval of military de-escalation to press its diplomatic offensive, meanwhile not resuming the air attacks. This time the critics could not say the pause was too short for Hanoi to make serious contacts. Secretary Rusk publicly issued Washington’s fourteen points for negotiation in response to Hanoi’s four points, with the claim that the two positions were really not so far apart. Certainly there was reason for negotiation on the basis of both positions. But the administration’s credibility with its domestic critics, already seriously undermined by its past policy ambivalence and rhetorical excesses, was now injured even further by its frantic efforts, probably wholly sincere, to build international support for unconditional discussions between the belligerents. Doubts were raised as to the “unconditional” nature of the discussions as it became clear that the United States was quite sticky on the point of who was a legitimate spokesman for the other side. “If the Vietcong come to the conference table as full partners,” said Secretary Rusk, “they will . . . in a sense have been victorious in the very aims that South Vietnam and the United States are pledged to prevent.”27 Claiming again to have received no serious offer from Hanoi to negotiate, the administration resumed air attacks with even greater force at the end of January 1966. Domestic critics, if they were patriotic in motive, would have to finally realize there was no alternative but to rally behind their country’s military efforts. And certainly, if American boys had to be over there to hold the ground, who could criticize efforts to negate as much

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of the danger as possible by destroying enemy power while it was still on the trails in Laos, on the bridges above the seventeenth parallel, or in the storage depots near the factories? But the new jingoism in the administration’s statements accompanying the resumption of bombing , particularly the implication that anything less than enthusiastic support was unpatriotic, provoked patriotic men in the president’s own party, like Senators Fulbright, Hartke, and Church, to an even greater attack on administration policies. Senator Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee became the staging ground for this new phase of the domestic debate. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in February 1966 provided respectability for the serious criticisms—as distinguished from the emotional harangues of the so-called New Left. Convened for the purpose of requiring the administration to justify its requests for supplemental foreign assistance monies (needed to finance the military and economic assistance to Vietnam over and above the amounts previously authorized in the fiscal 1966 budget), these hearings exposed the nation and the world to the profound doubts about U.S. Vietnam policy held by some of the country’s most experienced former diplomats and military leaders and some of its most respected scholars. General James Gavin testified before the Fulbright committee that he feared “the escalation in southeast Asia . . . [will] begin to hurt our world strategic position.” This might have “tremendous significance” in the long run, he said. “When we begin to turn our back on what we are doing in world affairs . . . to support a tactical confrontation that appears to be escalating at the will of an enemy we are in a very dangerous position in my opinion.”28 This policy, George Kennan told the committee (and the world; the hearings were broadcast live on television), “seems to me to represent a grievous misplacement of emphasis in our foreign policies as a whole.” Not only were great questions of world affairs not receiving the attention they deserved, said the author of the containment policy, but “assets we already enjoy and . . . possibilities we should be developing are being sacrificed to this unpromising involvement in a remote and secondary theatre.” Elaborating, Kennan claimed that our relations with the Soviet Union have suffered grievously . . . at a time when far more important things were involved in those relations than what is ultimately involved in Vietnam. . . . And more unfortunate still, in my

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opinion, is the damage being done to the feelings entertained for us by the Japanese people. . . . As the only major industrial complex in the entire Far East, and the only place where the sinews of modern war can be produced on a formidable scale, Japan is of vital importance to us and indeed to the prospects generally of peace and stability in Asia. There is no success we could have in Vietnam that would warrant . . . the sacrifice by us of the confidence and good will of the Japanese people.

And challenging a central pillar of the administration’s case, Kennan contended that even a situation in which South Vietnam was controlled exclusively by the Vietcong, while regrettable, would not present dangers great enough to justify our direct military intervention, for given the Soviet-Chinese conflict, “there is every likelihood that a Communist regime would follow a fairly independent course.” Conceding that “a precipitate and disorderly withdrawal” would be “a disservice to our own interests, and even to world peace,” Kennan nevertheless opined that “there is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant and unpromising objectives.”29 The president, anticipating what was in store in the February sessions of the Fulbright committee, felt it necessary to reassert once more his peace aims as well as his war aims for Vietnam. It was time to show that he meant business about the greater importance of agricultural productivity, rural electrification, and schools than strike aircraft, flamethrowers, and the tremendous military logistics networks. The testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee of the administrator of the Agency for International Development, David Bell, was interrupted on February 4 for President Johnson’s announcement of his trip to Honolulu to meet with Prime Minister Ky and President Thieu of South Vietnam. To emphasize that the main purpose of the meeting was to explore plans for the peaceful reconstruction of Vietnam, the president announced he was taking along John Gardner, secretary of health, education and welfare, and Orville Freeman, secretary of agriculture. There would of course be strategy huddles with General William Westmoreland and the Vietnamese military, but the theme was to be socioeconomic development. And this was the emphasis in the Declaration of Honolulu issued by both governments from Hawaii on February 8. The government of South Vietnam pledged itself to “a true social revolution,” to policies

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designed to “achieve regular economic growth,” and to “build true democracy” through the formulation of a “democratic constitution” to be ratified by popular ballot. The United States pledged itself to full support of these aspirations. And to demonstrate their seriousness of purpose, President Johnson persuaded the Vietnamese leaders to extend an immediate invitation to Secretaries Gardner and Freeman to survey the social and economic situation and suggest practical courses of action. On the evening of February 8, the president announced that Vice President Hubert Humphrey was leaving immediately for Saigon to join the other cabinet members and to meet with South Vietnamese officials to discuss these matters. The White House would be represented directly by McGeorge Bundy and Averell Harriman, both of whom would be going along with the Vice President.30 The president did get the headlines and the television coverage with this swoop into Asia with Health, Agriculture, and the idealism of Humphrey. But the image came across somewhat differently from what he had hoped. The tone of the television commentators and journalists who covered the event suggested rather strongly that this was Johnson hucksterism more than substance. Juxtaposed against the good works backdrop was the indelible picture of LBJ embracing Prime Minister Ky as if he were a Democratic Party loyalist in the Texas statehouse. Ky, who had been installed recently by a military coup, was cracking down with authoritarian methods on the Buddhist agitators and had been making asides to the effect that any negotiations with the communists would be useless. Rather than Ky’s endorsement of the Great Society, Saigon-style, the picture that critics chose to display was that of Johnson’s committing himself to support Ky’s irresponsible brand of jet-set militarism. Lyndon Johnson could legitimately claim that the resort to force to move men and nations was the exception, not the norm, of his foreign policies. His preferred mode of influence was that of the prophet Isaiah: “Come now and let us reason together.” It was reason, Johnson would insist, that brought about the resolution of the Panama Canal crisis of 1964–1965, and not simply the reason of the weak in accepting the dictates of the strong. The U.S. government under Johnson went further toward recognizing Panama’s sovereignty over the Canal Zone and in according Panamanians equitable treatment in U.S. zone installations than had any previous administration.

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It was reason, the objective consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of alternative courses of action, that Johnson could claim to have brought to bear upon the Greeks and Turks to forestall their impending war over Cyprus, and upon the Indians and Pakistanis to persuade them to cease their war over Kashmir. The fact that the United States was in a position to affect the anticipations of advantage and disadvantage of the involved parties (the perquisites and protections of NATO membership to Greece and Turkey, the flow of military and economic assistance to the South Asian countries) was, of course, at the heart of the president’s appeals to substitute reason for passion. Johnson had also shown an ability to practice restraint in situations of extreme local instability, such as in Indonesia, Rhodesia, and the Middle East, where it might have been tempting for a great power to intervene. Rather than attempting to play the world policeman, he prudently allowed events to take their course in response to lesser influences. The U.S. support for the Alliance for Progress had been extended indefinitely. Constructive development schemes had been sponsored from the Amazon to the Mekong. The Peace Corps continued to receive the wholehearted support of the White House. A nonproliferation treaty and other arms control accords had been spurred by the personal solicitude of the president. New economic and cultural bridges were being built to Eastern Europe. West Germany had been encouraged to depart from its rigid legalisms vis-à-vis the East. And not a harsh word had been heard from the president against the Soviet regime, despite the many opportunities to retaliate for anti-U.S. diatribes from the Kremlin. The arts of conciliation and compromise, in the Johnson administration’s self-image, were the facts of power now, more so than at any time since the start of the Cold War. Yet an administration cannot escape the massive impressions created on domestic and foreign observers by its most dramatic actions. Regardless of intention, large doses of force in the international environment create a noise level that distorts the sound of other signals. And the effort to get conciliatory messages through the uproar of violence was virtually drowned out by a revival of the more histrionic aspects of postwar U.S. foreign policy—the resort to ideological hyperbole, to moralizing about the basis of U.S. overseas commitments, to lecturing neutrals about their vital interests, and to threats of more violence to come if the enemy persisted in its course.

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SECRETARY MCNAMARA JUMPS OFF THE VIETNAM ESCALATOR By the middle of 1966, the military strategy for getting North Vietnam to call off the war in the South seemed to be producing just the opposite results. The more U.S. forces were deployed into South Vietnam, the more units the North poured down the Ho Chi Minh trail and across the seventeenth parallel. Sustained bombing of the North only appeared to stiffen the will of Hanoi to persist. The studies Secretary of Defense McNamara called for deeply shocked him: although the bombing had destroyed major weapons storage sites, the flow of men and material into the South was undiminished. There was no feasible level of effort, concluded the studies, that would achieve the air war objectives. The only new proposal McNamara’s experts could come up with was to build an electronic barrier across Vietnam below the seventeenth parallel. McNamara’s memoranda to the president began to reflect pessimism and the beginning of despair, especially in view of the continual requests from General William Westmoreland for reinforcements that were pushing the number of U.S. troops in South Vietnam up to the 500,000 mark. The president in turn became more and more suspicious of McNamara. The parting of the ways came in the spring of 1967 and was reflected in the secretary of defense’s draft memorandum to the president of May 19 on the latest troop and air war requests from General Westmoreland. The substance of McNamara’s arguments played a pivotal role in crystallizing opposition to the war within the U.S. government. The next steps in the military escalation recommended by Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were likely to be “counterproductive.” McNamara advised: Mining the harbors would . . . place Moscow in a particularly galling dilemma as to how to preserve the Soviet position and prestige. . . . Moscow in this case should be expected to send volunteers, including pilots, to North Vietnam; to provide some new and better weapons and equipment; to consider some action in Korea, Turkey, Iran, the Middle East or, most likely, Berlin, where the Soviets can control the degree of crisis better; and to show across-the-board hostility toward the U.S. (interrupting any on-going conversations on ABMs, non-proliferation, etc.). . . . To U.S. ground actions in North Vietnam, we would expect China to respond by entering the war with both ground and air forces.

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Instead, McNamara recommended that the president “limit force increases to no more than 30,000; avoid entering the ground conflict beyond the borders of South Vietnam; and concentrate the bombing on the infiltration routes south of 20º.” With respect to one of the principal purposes of the bombing of North Vietnam—pressure on Hanoi to end the war—McNamara contended that it is becoming apparent that Hanoi may have already “written off ” all assets and lives that might be destroyed by U.S. military action short of occupation or annihilation. They can and will hold out at least so long as a prospect of winning the “war of attrition” in the South exists. And our best judgment is that a Hanoi prerequisite to negotiations is significant retrenchment (if not complete stoppage) of U.S. military actions against them. And with respect to interdiction of men and matériel, it now appears that no combination of actions against the North short of destruction of the regime or occupation of North Vietnamese territory will physically reduce the flow of men and materiel below the relatively small amount needed by enemy forces to continue the war in the South. . . . Our efforts physically to cut the flow meaningfully by actions in North Vietnam therefore largely fail. Moreover, McNamara argued, in words surely designed to compel a full reassessment of the purposes and means of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one. It could conceivably produce a costly distortion in the American national consciousness and in the world image of the United States—especially if the damage to North Vietnam is complete enough to be ‘successful’. 31

The president and his national security adviser, Walt Rostow, henceforth categorized McNamara as a dove, which meant that he had to be effectively cut out of the most sensitive deliberations on the conduct of the war, since his rejection of the fundamental premises of the Vietnam strategy meant that he was no longer loyal to basic administration policy. In mid-October 1967, President Johnson informed McNamara that he was nominating him for the presidency of the World Bank, a post that had fallen vacant upon the retirement of the bank’s previous president, Eugene Black. Despite his deep misgivings about the war, McNamara did not go public with them until almost 30 years after he had expressed his basic

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reservations to President Johnson personally and in his then top-secret memorandum. (That seminal memorandum was published in 1971—in the Pentagon Papers.) Finally, in his memoir, McNamara revealed to the world what he believed were the “major causes for our failure in Vietnam.” These included misjudging the intentions of the North Vietnamese, China, and the Soviet Union, and exaggerating the geopolitical dangers to the United States of their actions; attributing to the South Vietnamese a desire to fight for freedom and democracy; underestimating the power of nationalism to motivate the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to fight and die for their values; being profoundly ignorant of the history and culture of the people of Vietnam; overestimating the effectiveness of modern, high-technology military equipment in confronting an unconventional insurgency; underestimating the importance, yet difficulty, in winning the hearts and minds of the people; arrogantly assuming that we know what is in another people’s best interest and have the right to shape their nation in our own image; and failing to draw the Congress and the American people into a full and frank debate over the U.S. involvement.32 To succeed McNamara as secretary of defense, LBJ appointed his friend Clark Clifford, the distinguished Washington lawyer and adviser to presidents since Truman. Johnson was confident Clifford would work well with him, Rostow, and Secretary of State Rusk to reunify the administration (and hopefully also Congress) behind the Vietnam policy. But Clifford, to Johnson’s surprise and eventual despair, soon turned out to be an even more effective mobilizer of dissent within the policy establishment against continuing the escalation policy than McNamara.

1968: LBJ BESIEGED Early in 1968 three developments converged and reinforced one another, culminating in Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race simultaneous with a change in grand strategy for ending the war in Vietnam, and less visibly, in a willingness by some administration officials to challenge the heretofore sacrosanct premises about the U.S. world role. The first development was the upsurge of violence in the ghettos of America, stimulated by and in turn stimulating popular discontent because more resources were being devoted to the war in a small Asian country than to the war on poverty at home. The second development was the transference of student militancy from civil rights to the issues of the war and the

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draft and the ability of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy to convert student protest into the energizing force of a powerful anti-administration movement within the Democratic Party. The third development was the ability of Clark Clifford, succeeding McNamara as secretary of defense on March 1, 1968, to reach and move the president with evaluations of the military campaign in Vietnam that called into question critical assumptions under which the United States was fighting the war. Clifford’s eyes were opened further during his first week on the job, as the president’s chairman of an interagency task force to evaluate the latest request from General William Westmoreland, American commander in South Vietnam, for 205,000 additional troops in the wake of the communist Tet offensive.33 Clifford was stunned by the magnitude of the request and accordingly decided to broaden the task force’s frame of reference to include the basic question of whether or not the United States was operating under a sensible strategic concept in Vietnam. Although the formal task force report to the president reaffirmed the existing policy, Clifford’s doubts had deepened during its deliberations, and in presenting the report to the president at the White House on March 4, he felt impelled to express his own newfound reservations. The latest troop request “brings the President to a watershed,” he ventured. Do you continue down that same road of more troops, more guns, more planes, more ships? Do you go on killing more Viet Cong and more North Vietnamese? As we build up our forces, they build up theirs. The result is simply that we are fighting now at a higher level of intensity. . . . We are not sure that a conventional military victory, as commonly defined, can be achieved. . . . If we continue with our present policy of adding more troops and increasing our commitment, it may lead us into Laos and Cambodia. . . . We seem to have gotten caught in a sinkhole. We put in more and they match it. . . . I see more and more fighting with more and more casualties on the U.S. side, and no end in sight.34

Clifford recommended further study before implementing the task force recommendations. The president granted his new secretary of defense this delay; but as Townsend Hoopes, the under secretary of the Air Force, recalls, “the longstanding friendship between the two men grew suddenly formal and cool.”35 The president’s insecurities were increased by the results of the March 12, 1968, New Hampshire Democratic primary, which gave antiwar critic

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Senator Eugene McCarthy 42.2 percent of the vote, just a few percentage points behind Johnson’s 49.2. And when on March 16, Robert Kennedy announced that he too would seek the presidency, LBJ’s worst fantasies about the Kennedy clan’s desire to recapture the White House seemed to be materializing. Recalling these days for his biographer Doris Kearns, Johnson confessed that I felt . . . that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions. On one side, the American people were stampeding me to do something about Vietnam. On another side, the inflationary economy was booming out of control. Up ahead were dozens of danger signs pointing to another summer of riots in the cities. I was being forced over the edge by rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets. The whole situation was unbearable for me. After thirty-seven years of public service, I deserved something more than being left alone in the middle of the plain, chased by stampedes on every side.36

It was not only dovish intellectuals and the people who had no knowledge of foreign affairs who were now challenging the wisdom of Johnson’s Vietnam policies. Even veteran cold warriors with impeccable loyalty were calling for a fundamental reassessment. Johnson was particularly shaken by former secretary of state Dean Acheson’s judgment, which he voiced to the president privately on March 15, that the administration was operating under the grossest of illusions about what was possible in Vietnam, that no one believed Johnson’s speeches any more, and that Johnson had lost touch with the country, which as a whole was no longer supporting the war.37 But the president only dug in his heels. On March 17, speaking to the National Farmers Union convention in Minneapolis, he said in a high pitch of emotion, “Your President has come to ask you people, and all the other people of this nation, to join us in a total national effort to win the war. . . . We will—make no mistake about it—win.” 38 The speech created an uproar, Clifford recalls. “My God, I thought, after only eighteen days in office, am I in such fundamental disagreement with the

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man who appointed me?” There was no avoiding the fact that he was now engaged in “a tense struggle for the soul and mind of Lyndon Johnson.”39 Clifford decided to reassemble Johnson’s senior advisory group on Vietnam to meet with the president on March 26. Present were Dean Acheson, George Ball, McGeorge Bundy, Douglas Dillon, Cyrus Vance, Arthur Dean, John J. McCloy, General Omar Bradley, General Matthew Ridgway, General Maxwell Taylor, Robert Murphy, Henry Cabot Lodge, Abe Fortas, and Arthur Goldberg. According to Townsend Hoopes’s account of this meeting, the president was “visibly shocked” and “stung” by the magnitude of the defection from the existing policy, and especially by the fact that sophisticated pragmatists like McGeorge Bundy and Cyrus Vance were now among those pressing for de-escalation, negotiations, and disengagement ahead of being able to ensure against a communist takeover in South Vietnam.40 It was at this crucial meeting that the president revealed to all of his key advisers the depth of his anguish at what a toll the war in Vietnam was taking on the nation—and him personally—saying, “I don’t give a damn about the election.” If prosecuting the war continued to take more and more resources away from what was needed domestically, “I will have overwhelming disapproval at the polls. I will go down the drain.” But he was going to do what was right, he insisted, even in an election year: more troops, more taxes, more cuts in the domestic budget. “And yet I cannot tell the people what they will get in Vietnam in return for these cuts.”41 The president was still operating under the assumption that the right thing to do was to give the military what they needed to continue the necessary fight in Vietnam. Yet when Johnson went around the table at the March 26th meeting of what he liked to call the “Wise Men” to get each of their views, he appeared shocked at the responses he got from most of them. McGeorge Bundy summed up the emerging consensus: “Mr. President, there has been a very significant shift in most of our positions. . . . We can no longer do the job we set out to do . . . and we must begin to take steps to disengage.” Clifford, in retrospect, comments on the immense significance of what was happening: “The men who had helped lay down the basic line of resistance to the expansion of communism in the world, the statesmen of Berlin and Korea, had decided they had had enough in Vietnam. The price was not commensurate with the goal.”42 At Clifford’s urging, Johnson’s speechwriter Harry McPherson was able to persuade the now-demoralized LBJ to plan to announce in his

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forthcoming speech on Vietnam, scheduled for March 31, a unilateral deescalation of the bombing and to imply there was more of the same to come if Hanoi would enter into serious negotiations. Clifford was gratified to see on his television screen the president finally coming around to the proposals he had been urging over the past weeks. What neither he nor the rest of the nation expected, however, was Johnson’s dramatic closing remarks on March 31 that in order to devote all his time and energies to the quest for peace, “I do not believe I should devote an hour or a day of my time to partisan causes. . . . Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”43 The president’s personal renunciation of further electioneering and of another term for himself evidently was interpreted in Hanoi as a more credible bid for peace than past efforts by the United States. Accepting the partial bombing halt as a basis for preliminary talks, the North Vietnamese also reciprocated with a temporary cessation of their shelling of cities in the South and a substantial reduction of large-unit operations in the demilitarized zone at the seventeenth parallel. Clifford and his associates felt vindicated in their belief that a U.S. posture looking very serious about de-escalating the conflict was better than muscle-flexing for getting Ho Chi Minh to the bargaining table. Johnson remained skeptical, however, still wanting to believe that the real reason for Hanoi’s willingness to negotiate was that they had been hurt by the bombing more than they were willing to let on, and that a credible threat to resume full-scale bombing was therefore essential to induce them to accept an independent South Vietnam. Once again, in late October 1968, against his own instincts he ordered a total bombing halt, yielding to the insistences of Clifford and the two U.S. negotiators in the Paris talks with the North Vietnamese, Cyrus Vance and Averell Harriman. LBJ left office chafing at the bit and full of self-doubts about whether he had shown weakness or strength at the last.44 There still were numerous unreconstructed Vietnam interventionists in top policy-making posts in the fall of 1968, not the least of whom were Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the national security adviser Walt Rostow. The change—which Clark Clifford was instrumental in bringing about—was that it was now legitimate within the administration to debate the basic policy premises underlying the Vietnam involvement. And the now debatable premises, it would emerge, were part and parcel of the Weltanschauung of forward containment of communism that had dominated official Washington’s thinking since the late 1940s.

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A fundamental tenet from Truman to Johnson was that the irreducible national interest (“securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”) required that the communists not be allowed to extend their sphere of control. This policy was based on a set of interrelated assumptions that for the first time in nearly two decades were now up for serious reconsideration at the highest level of the government—namely: t
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area the communist powers might choose to attack, regardless of its intrinsic geopolitical weight in the overall balance, was necessary to prevent the communists from picking and choosing easy targets for blackmail and aggression. Moreover, America’s failure to defend one area would demoralize other such localities in their will to resist the communists. Even Western Europe and Japan, whose advanced industrialization made them critical weights in the global balance of power, would wonder under what circumstances the U.S. might consider them dispensable. t
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from unsatisfied aspirations for betterment provide easy opportunities for communist takeover of subversive and insurrectionary movements; thus U.S. economic and political development programs, no less than counterinsurgency capabilities, must be prominent parts of the grand strategy of preventing adverse changes in the global balance of power. (An assumption prominent during the Kennedy-Johnson years). Any questioning of the nature of U.S. security interests in Vietnam, or even questioning—as Clifford did—whether the protection of U.S. interests there was worth the high expenditures of human and material resources, would call into question the assumptions just enumerated. The consensus underlying the constancy in foreign policy from Truman to Johnson appeared to be fatally weakened. Was there no basic foreign policy to be handed over intact on January 20, 1969, to the incoming Nixon administration?

PA R T

IV STATECRAFT UNDER NIXON AND FORD Power used with good intentions, but ineptly, can be as destructive as power used with bad intentions. The greatest tragedy of all, however, occurs when those who have power fail to use it, and because of that failure lives and even freedom itself are lost. —Richard M. Nixon

The most ominous change that marked our period was the transformation in the nature of power. . . . As power had grown more awesome, it had also turned abstract, intangible, elusive. —Henry A. Kissinger

11

AVOIDING HUMILIATION IN INDOCHINA Our defeat and humiliation in South Vietnam without question would promote recklessness in the councils of those great powers who have not yet abandoned their goals of world conquest. —Richard M. Nixon

Y THE TIME RICHARD NIXON assumed the presidency, few Americans still believed that communist domination of the Indochinese peninsula would pose an intolerable threat to U.S. security. The main question was no longer whether the United States should slough off responsibility for preventing the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong from taking over South Vietnam, but how to liquidate this costly commitment. Like Lyndon Johnson at the end of his presidency, the new president and his principal national security adviser believed the prestige of the United States still was heavily at stake in Vietnam, and they discerned a popular mandate that the U.S. exit from Vietnam “with honor.” There were differences, however, between the administration and its critics, and even within the administration, over the ingredients of national honor. To Nixon and Kissinger, as to Johnson, the nation’s honor was bound up closely with its “credibility”—its reputation for keeping promises—and its refusal to be coerced by other nations. “The commitment of 500,000 Americans has settled the issue of the importance of Vietnam,” wrote Kissinger in 1968. “For what is involved now is confidence in American promises. However fashionable it is to ridicule the terms ‘credibility’ or ‘prestige,’ they are not empty phrases; other nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness.”1

B

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But in the view of many other Americans the United States was being dishonored in Vietnam by its stubborn attempt to keep its promise to stop a communist takeover. A growing chorus of religious leaders, academics, students, media commentators, and politicians in both parties tried to convince the administration of its folly. It was dishonorable, they argued, for the United States to compel its young men to kill and be killed in a small, faraway country in the vain hope of helping a repressive and corrupt regime defeat the communists in a civil war. It was dishonorable for the United States to persist in trying to bomb North Vietnam into a submissive withdrawal of its forces in the face of clear evidence that the North Vietnamese were deeply and unequivocally committed to the “liberation” of the South. According to various accounts, Nixon and Kissinger both recognized even before taking office that the honor of the United States was being sullied by its military involvement in Vietnam. They understood that the war was unwinnable and the United States was being made to look foolish before the rest of the world as it wasted more and more of its substance in a country of relatively minor strategic importance. The trick was to withdraw from the war without having it appear that the United States was giving up. “The basic challenge to the new Administration,” wrote Kissinger in The White House Years, “was similar to de Gaulle’s in Algeria: to withdraw as an expression of policy and not as a collapse.”2 The policy had two essential features: “Vietnamization” and a negotiated settlement with Hanoi. The fighting itself was to be turned over to the South Vietnamese to continue on their own. Meanwhile, Hanoi would agree to pull its forces back into North Vietnam and to support political arrangements that would give the South Vietnamese communists (the National Liberation Front) a share in the governance of South Vietnam. The negotiating agenda and process were outlined by Kissinger in a January 1969 article in Foreign Affairs written in consultation with the president-elect before the new administration took office. The negotiations would take place on two tracks: North Vietnam and the United States to effect military disengagement, the National Liberation Front and the Thieu regime in Saigon to decide the political arrangement for South Vietnam. As this became the Nixon administrations’ public posture, Hanoi presumably would see that what was being asked for was a “decent interval” to allow the United States to pull out with its honor intact, after which the North and South Vietnamese could settle the fate of their country without outside interference. Hanoi’s maximum demand was for an even larger

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capitulation by the United States and Saigon involving full withdrawal of U.S. forces, without a reciprocal pullback of the North Vietnamese, and the resignation of the Thieu government—prior to a cease-fire in South Vietnam and the start of processes to reconstitute a new government. But Kissinger apparently believed that Hanoi would understand Washington’s need to avoid a humiliating exit and therefore could be persuaded to cooperate in choreographing an elaborate finale of mutual concessions. Only a few days after Nixon’s inauguration, the president and Kissinger moved to present their scheme directly to the North Vietnamese through Henry Cabot Lodge, the newly appointed head of the team negotiating with the North Vietnamese in Paris. The proposal Lodge carried to Paris was in essence the two-track process outlined in Kissinger’s Foreign Affairs article, with the first step being a simultaneous mutual withdrawal of U.S. and North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam—a change from the Johnson administration’s position, which had held out for a withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops and a reduction of the level of violence in the South as the preconditions for U.S. troop withdrawal. Nixon and Kissinger were determined that the secret Paris negotiations initiated by the Johnson administration should stop being a charade, and accordingly they pulled out all the stops so as to maximize the incentives that would induce North Vietnam to come to the negotiating table with an equally serious intent to conclude a settlement. They set in motion a series of phased, unilateral reductions in U.S. ground forces in Vietnam but simultaneously revealed a capability and will to bomb North Vietnam and North Vietnamese staging areas in Cambodia and Laos with less inhibition than the previous administration had shown. Meanwhile, they intensified pressure on Moscow and Beijing to persuade Hanoi to negotiate an end to the war. The administration pursued this multipronged strategy relentlessly for four years—continuing to make concessions in the U.S. negotiation position, gradually accelerating unilateral troop withdrawals, applying larger doses of military coercion against North Vietnam, and attempting to thicken the links between Soviet and Chinese constructive influence on their North Vietnamese ally and U.S. responsiveness to Soviet or Chinese interests in other fields. With the signing of a mutually acceptable settlement in 1973, the strategy appeared to have worked, at least in the sense of providing an “honorable” cover for the U.S. military exit. However, it took only two years for the cover itself to disintegrate completely. In the spring of 1975, with the Cambodian communists (the Khmer

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Rouge) marching on Phnom Penh and the North Vietnamese armies closing in on Saigon, President Ford and Secretary Kissinger struck one last pose of support for their now-abandoned allies in Indochina. Knowing full well that the majority in Congress, reflecting a broad popular consensus, had no intention of diverting further national resources to a lost cause, the administration nevertheless publicly asked for, but did not get, a supplemental military aid package for the anticommunists in Cambodia and Vietnam. As the Vietcong raised their flag over Saigon and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City, the lack of any substantial popular interest in the outcome was, ironically, at least a partial vindication of the administration’s strategy.

THE INVASION OF CAMBODIA: NIXON’S “SEVENTH CRISIS” The invasion of Cambodia by U.S. troops on April 28, 1970, marked the end of the administration’s ability to convince wide segments of the policy community that the White House really did have a workable game plan for ending the war. Nixon and Kissinger, no less than their predecessors, had little control over the significant events and actors in Indochina and were beginning to lose even the conceptual control over the situation they thought they had in 1969. Nixon called his own agonizing over the invasion decision his “seventh crisis.”3 Kissinger found himself the object of intense animosity on the part of former academic colleagues and members of his own staff, four of whom resigned. From the point of view of Nixon and Kissinger, the opposition to the U.S. foray into Cambodia was a typical expression of the naïveté and spinelessness of the liberal establishment. Cambodia’s neutral status had already been systematically violated for more than a year by the belligerents on both sides: North Vietnamese soldiers had been using Cambodian territory over the South Vietnamese border as a base for troops and supplies for their operations in South Vietnam, and U.S. B-52s had been bombarding these staging areas since March 1969 with the acquiescence of the Cambodian ruler, Prince Sihanouk. The bombing had been concealed from the American public and even from many national security officials in the administration. William Beecher, the Pentagon correspondent of the New York Times, broke the story in early May; however, it was not until after the spring 1970 invasion of Cambodia that the bombing was officially acknowledged.4

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Frustrated by the continuing refusal of Hanoi to discuss a mutual withdrawal of “foreign” forces from South Vietnam even as the United States began a good faith withdrawal of its own forces, and genuinely worried that the North Vietnamese might pounce on the South as soon as U.S. force levels got low enough, Nixon and Kissinger evidently felt by the spring of 1970 that they had no alternative but to break out of the pattern of weak signals they were transmitting to Hanoi. Their opportunity came in March 1970 with the sudden right-wing coup in Phnom Penh that deposed Prince Sihanouk while he was out of the country. Marshal Lon Nol, the leader of the military coup, not only turned against the Cambodian communists but also attempted to force the North Vietnamese contingents out of his country. The North Vietnamese, no longer constrained to respect the independence of Cambodia, now openly and vigorously supported the Cambodian communists, who were building up their forces around Phnom Penh in preparation for a countercoup. Lon Nol’s desperate plea for U.S. help could not be refused if the North Vietnamese were to be prevented from taking over Cambodia and completely outflanking South Vietnam. “If, when the chips are down,” said Nixon, announcing the decision to attack the North, “the United States of America, acts like a pitiful helpless giant, .  .  . all other nations will be on notice that despite its overwhelming power the United States, when a real crisis comes, will be found wanting.”5 Although the foray into Cambodia, like most of the dramatic escalations ordered by Nixon, was designed in part to shock Hanoi into willingness to compromise, the official public explanations stressed a limited military objective. “This is not an invasion of Cambodia,” insisted the president. “The areas in which these attacks will be launched are completely occupied and controlled by North Vietnamese forces. Our purpose is not to occupy the areas. Once enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw.”6 Two months later, on June 30, 1970, the president proclaimed the Cambodian operation a complete success and announced that all American troops had been withdrawn from Cambodia on schedule. He reeled off the indicators of enemy material and human losses with a curious exactitude: “22,892 individual weapons . . . 2,509 big crew-served weapons. . . . More than 15 million rounds of ammunition. . . . 14 million pounds of rice. . . . 143,000 rockets, . . . Over 199,552 antiaircraft rounds, 5,482 mines, 62,022 grenades, and 83,000 pounds of explosives, including 1,002 satchel

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charges. . . . Over 435 vehicles . . . over 11,688 bunkers and other military structures . . . 11,349 men killed and about 2,328 captured and detainees.” The “deeper meaning” of these “impressive statistics,” said Nixon, was that “we have eliminated an immediate threat to our forces and to the security of South Vietnam—and produced the prospect of fewer American casualties in the future. . . . We have ended the concept of Cambodian sanctuaries, immune from attack, upon which the enemy military had relied for five years. . . . We have dislocated supply lines and disrupted Hanoi’s strategy in the Saigon area and the Mekong Delta. . . . We have effectively cut off the enemy from resupply by the sea.”7 President Nixon understandably chose not to refer to the fact that after the sixty-day U.S. incursion into Cambodia North Vietnam moved its forces in greater numbers and now occupied about half of the country. Some critics of the Nixon-Kissinger policies invoke this fact in attempting to show that the U.S. bombing and incursion into Cambodia caused its ultimate takeover by the communists and the bloody decimation of its culture and population. Kissinger strongly disagrees, arguing that Hanoi’s insatiable quest for hegemony—not America’s hesitant and ambivalent response—was the root cause of Cambodia’s terrible ordeal.8 The principal purpose of the operation was to shock the North Vietnamese into facing up to the costs of continuing its military occupation of the South. The president revealed his penchant for the strategy to the White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. “I call it the Madman Theory,” Nixon explained. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.” He would have his aids leak to the enemy: “You know Nixon is obsessed with communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button.” And “Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”9 But Nixon and Kissinger were themselves shocked by the domestic reaction to the invasion of Cambodia. The invasion had the boomerang effect of severely diminishing whatever popular faith remained in the United States in the ability of the administration to arrange for an honorable end to the war; and the North Vietnamese leadership only stiffened its intransigence at the negotiating table while intensifying its military efforts throughout Indochina. Moreover, the student protest movement, somewhat dormant since the election of Nixon, had been revived overnight by the news of the invasion

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of Cambodia. The animosity toward the administration for its sluggish exit from Vietnam ignited into a firestorm of anger when four demonstrating students at Kent State University were killed by a trigger-happy Ohio National Guard unit. Efforts were intensified in Congress to limit the executive’s war powers. The Cambodian operation, conceived as a means of widening U.S. options and limiting those of the North Vietnamese, had the opposite effect. Washington, not Hanoi, once again made the next concessions in the diplomatic arena—this time coming almost all the way toward the maximum demands of Hanoi. Nixon now gave the go-ahead to Kissinger to propose a cease-fire, even though the U.S. military and the U.S. embassy in Saigon believed this would put the Thieu regime in great physical jeopardy and in an untenable political position. “Cease-fire in place” was a euphemism for what was in effect an agreement to allow Hanoi to keep its forces in South Vietnam and to legitimize their hold on the territory they had already conquered. Here, finally, was the abandonment of the U.S. insistence on a mutual withdrawal of U.S. and North Vietnamese forces from the South. “The decision to propose a standstill cease-fire in 1970,” admits Kissinger, “implied the solution of 1972.”10 The U.S. forces alone would leave, being the only “foreign” forces there—a complete capitulation to Hanoi’s insistence that the conflict in the South was a continuation of the civil war to liberate Vietnam from imperialism. The North Vietnamese, more contemptuous than ever of their opponents, would settle for nothing less than an American renunciation of the legitimacy of the Thieu regime. This demand, from the administration’s point of view, was surely irrational, for the cease-fire in place and accompanying interim political arrangements proposed to the North Vietnamese were clearly only face-saving mechanisms to allow the United States to get out before the final deposition of Thieu and the participation of the communists in the government in Saigon. Kissinger’s military-diplomatic strategy from here on out was designed to convince Hanoi that (1) no matter how sick the United States was of the war, there was no possibility of persuading President Nixon to cooperate in the final humiliation of Thieu; and (2) the United States was fully committed to a withdrawal of its own forces from Vietnam, and the cease-fire in place and interim political arrangements were not any kind of trick to put the North Vietnamese off balance.

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THE MINING OF HAIPHONG HARBOR: ATTEMPTS TO WORK THE MOSCOW CONNECTION From the summer of 1970 through the spring of 1971, terrible pessimism pervaded Washington over the capacity of Nixon and Kissinger to gain that “peace with honor” that would allow the administration to finally get out of Vietnam. With the failure of both the Cambodia invasion and the post-Cambodia negotiating concessions to Hanoi, Nixon and Kissinger appeared to have used up most of their available carrots and sticks. The U.S. air support for the South Vietnamese army’s 1971 incursion into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail network was a comparatively insignificant increment of coercion (Nixon was prevented by the Cooper-Church Amendment passed by the Senate in 1970 from using U.S. ground forces in Laos, as he had in Cambodia). The South Vietnamese troops were beaten back without accomplishing their mission. Kissinger once again reached deep into his bag for two further initiatives in his secret negotiations with Le Duc Tho during the spring and summer of 1971: a promise that President Thieu would resign prior to internationally supervised elections under comprehensive peace arrangements, and assurances to Hanoi that all U.S. troops would be out of Vietnam within six months following the signing of the peace agreement. Le Duc Tho countered with his own nine points as the basis for continuing to negotiate in detail. By the fall of 1971, after six intense negotiating sessions in Paris, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were still deadlocked over details—in essence, the inability of Kissinger and Nixon to agree to an unconditional surrender of South Vietnam.11 Meanwhile, events along the great power nexus had been maturing. During the summer and fall of 1971 Kissinger had arranged for Nixon’s 1972 summit visits to Moscow and Beijing; and it might now be possible to induce the communist giants, both of whom were competing for U.S. favor, to lean hard on their Vietnamese comrades to compromise with the United States. But Hanoi began to lay the groundwork for a massive new invasion of the South. The U.S. and South Vietnamese military commanders braced for an enemy offensive in February to coincide with the president’s trip to China. Instead, Hanoi launched a major spring offensive across the demilitarized zone at the seventeenth parallel on March 31, a month after the Beijing summit and seven weeks before the Moscow summit. Nixon and Kissinger now moved to turn the screws on the Russians, to compel them to face the consequences for U.S.-Soviet relations of their

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continued support of the North Vietnamese war effort. State Department and Defense Department spokespersons began complaining publicly about the major role of Soviet military supplies in the new North Vietnamese offensive. And North Vietnam was brought under heavy and sustained air bombardment for the first time since the Johnson administration. The port of Haiphong and storage depots around Hanoi were raided by B-52s. Four Soviet merchant ships in Haiphong harbor were damaged by the bombings. The U.S. officials hinted of still more destructive escalations to come, including even the mining of North Vietnamese ports, which by putting Soviet supply convoys in jeopardy, would force the issue with the Kremlin. While the risks of a direct U.S.-Soviet confrontation over Vietnam rose to dangerous levels during April 1972, Kissinger traveled secretly to Moscow to firm up preparations for the May summit between Leonid Brezhnev and Nixon. The evident progress in strategic arms limitation talks and commercial talks gave both sides reason to hope for a major breakthrough in U.S.-Soviet relations to be unveiled at the summit as long as Vietnam did not ruin it. Each side sensed that the other was most anxious for the summit to take place. But as Kissinger was to find out in Moscow, since both were aware of the other’s real priorities, neither could use the threat of postponing or canceling the summit as leverage on the other’s role in Vietnam. Kissinger returned to Washington with plans for the May NixonBrezhnev meeting intact but with no meaningful Kremlin assurances to bring pressure on the Vietnamese to sign a compromise peace. Two days after Kissinger returned from Moscow, Nixon went on nationwide television and radio to vent his frustration at the lack of progress in the peace negotiations and to explain the reasons for the resumption of the systematic bombing of North Vietnam. The Easter weekend military offensive by the North, argued Nixon, had stripped away “whatever pretext there was of a civil war in South Vietnam. . . . What we are witnessing here, what is being brutally inflicted upon the people of South Vietnam, is a clear case of naked and unprovoked aggression across an international border.” And he promised to continue U.S. air and naval attacks on North Vietnam “until the North Vietnamese stop their offensive in South Vietnam.” Other officials hinted that more and more targets in the North would come under attack. Yet at the same time Nixon pledged to continue withdrawing American troops. He claimed to be able to do this because, according to reports he had received from the American commander in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams, the South Vietnamese forces had demonstrated their ability to defend themselves on the ground against future enemy attacks.

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“I have decided,” said the president, “that Vietnamization has proved itself sufficiently that we can continue our program of withdrawing American forces without detriment to our overall goal of insuring South Vietnam’s survival as an independent country.”12 However, the military reports from the field did not support the president’s optimistic assessment of the fighting capabilities of the South Vietnamese army. Abandoning Quangtri City, south of the seventeenth parallel, the South Vietnamese forces virtually turned and ran southward to avoid the advancing North Vietnamese. Hue would be next, and the resulting demoralization of Saigon would bring on a humiliating collapse of the South’s effort before the 1972 presidential elections in the United States. Something had to be done to break the downhill slide. Kissinger, again meeting with Le Duc Tho in Paris, offered to accelerate the U.S. withdrawal (all U.S. troops would be removed before the November elections) if Hanoi would agree to a cease-fire and a return of U.S. prisoners of war. In effect, he was saying: Just give us a decent interval to get out under the cloak of an apparent compromise, and you can have the whole country. But riding high now, the North Vietnamese appeared more confident than ever that they could have it entirely their way: the Americans would have to cooperate in immediately deposing the Thieu regime or else there would be no deal. Nixon and Kissinger, still hoping to avoid wholesale capitulation to the communist demands, now attempted to use their incompletely exploited indirect leverage on Hanoi through the Moscow connection. The navy was authorized to implement one of the favorite options of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: mining Haiphong harbor and other ports in order to drastically increase the risks and costs to the Soviets of supplying North Vietnam. Presumably, this would compel the Kremlin to lean hard on Hanoi to bring the war to an end through diplomacy instead of attempting to win a total military victory. The order to execute the operation was issued on May 8, 1972, only two weeks before Nixon was scheduled to meet with Brezhnev in Moscow. In so forcing the issue of Vietnam with the Russians, Nixon and Kissinger clearly were risking Kremlin postponement, if not cancellation, of the summit. It was a gamble, but Nixon claimed that his back was against the wall and he was left with no alternatives. In his May 8, 1972, address explaining this decision, Nixon painted his options starkly: “immediate withdrawal of all American forces, continued attempts at negotiation, or decisive military action to end the war.” The first course, he contended, “would mean turning 17 million South Vietnamese

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over to Communist tyranny and terror. It would mean leaving hundreds of American prisoners in Communist hands with no bargaining leverage to get them released.” And it would “encourage . . . smaller nations armed by their major allies . . . to attack neighboring nations at will in the Mideast, in Europe, and other areas.” The alternative of negotiating an honorable settlement was his preferred course, said Nixon. But after four years during which “we have made every reasonable offer and tried every possible path for ending this war at the conference table, . . . the North Vietnamese arrogantly refuse to negotiate anything but an . . . ultimatum that the United States impose a Communist regime on 17 million people in South Viet-Nam.” It was plain, Nixon concluded, “that what appears to be a choice among three courses of action for the United States is really no choice at all. . . . There is only one way to stop the killing. That is to keep the weapons of war out of the hands of the international outlaws of North Vietnam”—in other words, a return to the first alternative, decisive military action: He was ordering all entrances to North Vietnamese ports to be mined to prevent access to these ports and North Vietnamese naval operations from these ports. He was also directing U.S. forces to take appropriate measures within the internal and claimed territorial waters of North Vietnam to interdict the delivery of any supplies. Rail and all other communications were to be cut off to the maximum extent possible. Air and naval strikes against military targets in North Vietnam would continue.13 These acts of force would stop, promised the president, once U.S. prisoners of war were released by Hanoi and once an internationally supervised cease-fire had begun. At such time the United States would proceed to completely withdraw all its forces from Vietnam within four months. Pointedly, Nixon began his address with special reference to the Soviet role. The present massive invasion of South Vietnam, he maintained, “was made possible by tanks, artillery, and other advanced offensive weapons supplied to Hanoi by the Soviet Union and other Communist nations.” And he closed with remarks directed at the Soviet leadership: We expect you to keep your allies, and you cannot expect us to do other than help our allies. But let us . . . help our allies only for the purpose of their defense, not for the purpose of launching invasions against their neighbors. . . . Our two nations have made significant progress in recent months. We are near major agreements on nuclear arms limitation, on trade, on a host of other issues. Let us not slide back toward the dark

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shadows of a previous age. . . . We, the United States and the Soviet Union, are on the threshold of a new relationship. . . . We are prepared to build this relationship. The responsibility is yours if we fail to do so.14

In this tough rhetoric as well as in the military action, the May 1972 escalation was the biggest gamble Nixon took in Vietnam, for it could have severely alienated the Russians on the eve of the Moscow summit and thereby in one blow shattered the larger diplomatic mosaic the administration was attempting to construct. The talk around Washington at the time, possibly inspired by Kissinger himself, was that “Henry opposed the President on this one,” and it was the vigorous intervention of Secretary of the Treasury John Connally that stiffened the president’s determination to up the ante despite the risks.15 It is not at all implausible that Kissinger, in order to keep his diplomatic channels open, felt that it was tactically necessary to separate himself somewhat from the administration’s new belligerent posture. Kissinger would be the one who would have to reconstitute the summit plans if they were to fall apart temporarily, and it was Kissinger who still would have to meet face to face with his North Vietnamese counterparts when the negotiations resumed. The basic escalatory ploy, however, was fully consistent with the Kissinger mode of coercive diplomacy linked to a bunch of carrots. While his domestic critics were expressing outrage at his willingness to risk a major confrontation with the Soviets, Kissinger was meeting secretly with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, briefing him on a major breakthrough in the offing on divided Germany, one that the Russians wanted.16 In any event the gamble worked, at least insofar as the Kremlin chose not to scuttle the larger détente relationship, and—to the surprise of most of the Washington policy community—the Russians indicated that the NixonBrezhnev summit was still on. Defenders of the Haiphong mining operation claimed not only that it broke the back of North Vietnam’s spring offensive but that in driving up the risks to the Soviets themselves of a prolongation of the war in Southeast Asia it was the key to a significant Kremlin decision to reduce arms deliveries to North Vietnam and to President Nikolai Podgorny’s visit to Hanoi of June 15, presumably to tell the North Vietnamese that they must now negotiate seriously to end the war instead of banking on a total capitulation by their opponents.17 If the Soviets did indeed intercede with Hanoi in the spring and summer of 1972 on behalf of the United States, they

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probably did so in order to continue the momentum of détente expressed at the Nixon-Brezhnev summit. There is no evidence or logic in the argument that they did so because of the Haiphong mining. Moreover, it has been reported that at the summit Kissinger and Nixon inched even closer to Hanoi’s maximum demands, reaffirming their acceptance of a North Vietnamese military presence in South Vietnam, endorsing a tripartite electoral commission that would include neutralists and the Vietcong, and conveying their willingness to call off the bombing of the North prior to a release of American prisoners.18 During the summer and fall, Kissinger exhibited great optimism that the long-sought agreement with Hanoi to end the war was imminent. In retrospective interviews he attributed the intensification of constructive negotiations with Le Duc Tho to the success of his leverage diplomacy in putting pressure on both Moscow and Beijing (each afraid the other would be favored by the United States) to persuade Hanoi to allow the Americans to leave Vietnam “with honor.”19 The sequence of events supports a contrary explanation—namely, that Nixon and Kissinger, fearful of being outflanked in the coming U.S. presidential elections by a Democratic peace candidate, conveyed to the communist powers—more convincingly than ever before—their willingness to give in to Hanoi’s demands on virtually all points. This interpretation is supported particularly by the evident reluctance of the White House to let the Thieu regime in Saigon know how completely the United States was now prepared to abandon South Vietnam. During the months following the Moscow summit, the problem of how to persuade Thieu to accept the inevitable became Washington’s central preoccupation. White House military aide General Alexander Haig was dispatched to Saigon to persuade Thieu, while Kissinger and Le Duc Tho labored through August, September, and October to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of what was now a basic Washington-Hanoi accord on most of the essential provisions of the peace agreement.20

THE FINAL BRAVADO . . . AND DENOUEMENT The hopes of Nixon and Kissinger to successfully conclude the peace negotiations on the eve of the November 1972 elections were dashed by Thieu’s refusal to accept the terms agreed upon by Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. The South Vietnamese had numerous objections to the draft agreement,

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but their deepest grievances were over the establishment of a South Vietnamese coalition regime including the communists and over the failure to provide for a withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam. Kissinger urged the president to authorize a separate peace between the United States and North Vietnam; but Nixon needed Saigon’s acquiescence to preserve the fiction of an “honorable peace.” Accordingly, he had Kissinger delay the final signing. Hanoi thereupon unilaterally disclosed the terms of the draft agreement, probably in an effort to force the issue between Washington and Saigon. Kissinger maintained a public air of optimism by insisting that “peace is at hand,” but he surely feared a last-minute disintegration of all his painstaking labors. When Kissinger and Le Duc Tho met again a few weeks after the November 1972 election in which Nixon defeated George McGovern by an overwhelming margin, the North Vietnamese negotiator seemed to have toughened his stance. Not only did he reject all the points Kissinger presented on behalf of President Thieu, but according to Kissinger’s subsequent press briefings he made additional demands to alter the texts he and Kissinger had agreed to in October. In retrospect the new intransigence on the part of the North Vietnamese is understandable, for they could easily have interpreted Nixon’s procrastination prior to the elections as a cover for the massive military reinforcements the United States flew into South Vietnam immediately after the election. Although the White House’s purpose in this new military infusion may have been to buy off Thieu rather than to alter the military balance of power in South Vietnam before the cease-fire took effect, the North Vietnamese could well have suspected a ruse and decided to stall while engaging in their own reinforcements. Nixon and Kissinger were more frustrated than ever. Had they slipped back onto a reverse track just as the opening at the end of the tunnel was immediately in front of them? Determined to break out at last, they tried one more dramatic set of moves. They now informed Hanoi that Nixon was ready to agree to a separate peace with North Vietnam if Thieu failed to agree to the October terms. They also informed Thieu of this decision and threatened to cut off all assistance to South Vietnam if Thieu persisted in being obstructionist. Simultaneously, they delivered a seventy-two-hour ultimatum to Hanoi that unless serious negotiations were resumed immediately they would bomb North Vietnam again with even less restraint than before. With the expiration of the ultimatum on December 18, U.S. bombers commenced a twelve-day round-the-clock devastation attack on

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North Vietnam, including massive attacks on “military” targets in heavily populated areas of Hanoi and Haiphong.21 The 1972 Christmas bombing operation was nothing less than an effort to terrorize the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table. Not incidentally, it would also impress President Thieu. After suffering a rain of bombs for nearly two weeks, the North Vietnamese indicated they were ready to resume serious negotiations. On December 30 Nixon ordered a halt to the attacks north of the twentieth parallel and dispatched Kissinger to Paris for the diplomatic anticlimax. On January 23, 1973, the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring the Peace in Vietnam was initialed in Paris by Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. (On January 27 it was formally signed by Secretary of State William Rogers and the North Vietnamese foreign minister, Nguyen Duy Trinh, with the foreign minister of the Thieu regime and the foreign minister of the communist Provisional Revolutionary Government in South Vietnam separately countersigning special copies so that their two names would not appear together on one document.) “The people of South Vietnam have been guaranteed the right to determine their own future without outside interference,” announced President Nixon. “Throughout these negotiations we have been in closest consultation with President Thieu and other representatives of the Republic of South Vietnam. This settlement meets the goals and has the full support of President Thieu and the Government of the Republic of Vietnam, as well as that of our other allies who are affected.22 Neither the history of the negotiations nor the text of the 1973 agreement and attached protocols nor the subsequent fate of South Vietnam supported these claims by Nixon. The Paris agreement and protocols were transparently a conditional surrender of the noncommunists to the communists in Vietnam.23 Coequal status was henceforth to be given in South Vietnam to the “two parties”—the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the Thieu regime) and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (the communists). The cease-fire would accordingly legitimize, at least for the time being, all communist military gains to date and their continuing military-administrative control of these areas, pending the establishment of a new government of South Vietnam. The new government was to be established through “free and democratic general elections,” but the two parties would each have a veto in all transitional processes and institutions leading toward the establishment of the new government. 24

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Meanwhile, the armed forces of the United States were to be totally withdrawn, regardless of whether the political-governmental provisions of the agreement were working. There was no requirement, however, for the North Vietnamese to remove their forces. This huge concession on the part of the United States was what made the war termination agreement possible. Yet Kissinger and Nixon in their public presentations of the Paris accords avoided talking about it—and the press, reflecting the national mood of relief that the war was over at last—did not press them on it. Kissinger, however, knowing he would have to answer to “history,” provides at least a partial answer in his 2003 book on ending the war: “There was, admittedly,” he writes “no provision for the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from the South.” But he and Nixon had in fact “abandoned this demand” much earlier. It was not part of their cease-fire proposal of October 7, 1970, nor in their peace offerings since. And the unilateral withdrawals of U.S. troops, begun in 1969, had been continuing. Thus, By October 1972 [when the parameters of the final agreement were being shaped in earnest], our forces had been reduced from 543,000 to 25,000. On the basis of what balance of forces could we insist on mutual withdrawal? The modification of the concept of mutual withdrawal . . . was imposed on us by the unilateral withdrawal judged necessary to maintain any effort to save Vietnam. Once the unilateral withdrawal started in 1969, it created its own momentum. . . . Hundreds of thousands of Americans and billions of dollars of equipment had been sent to South Vietnam, and we had endured social upheaval for ten years. We had bought time while strengthening South Vietnam’s capacity to defend itself. But, finally, we had a moral obligation as well as to our own people: not to prolong their division beyond the point demanded by honor and international responsibility; to end the war in a manner that would heal rather than divide.25

Some weak and ambiguous controls were provided on the military reinforcement by North Vietnam and the United States of their respective South Vietnamese allies, but the interpretation and enforcement of these controls would also be subject to the veto of both parties. Kissinger did succeed in getting the North Vietnamese to concede to most of the U.S. demands for the prompt return of all captured military personnel and foreign civilians; the quid pro quo was a U.S. concession on the return

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of captured Vietnamese civilians, stipulating that the question “will be resolved by the two South Vietnamese parties.”26 To the surprise of no one who knew the situation in Indochina, the paper peace began to crumble before its ink was dry. Both Vietnams violated the strictures against new military buildups; each blamed the other for the renewed outbreak of fighting and for the failure to set up institutions to govern the transition to free elections. The military balance of power in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia continued to determine the future of these countries, given the prevailing political anarchy in each. Kissinger, realpolitik statesman that he was, could not have expected anything else. Yet in the first volume of his memoirs he insists that “I believed then, and I believe now, that the agreement could have worked.” It reflected, he said, “a true equilibrium of forces on the ground. . . . We believed that Saigon was strong enough to deal with guerrilla warfare and low-level violations.”27 This assessment proved ephemeral (as Kissinger must have known it would). During the early months of 1973 there was heavy infiltration from the North of military personnel and equipment down the Ho Chi Minh trail and across the demilitarized zone, including tanks and surface-to-air missiles. Witnessing this augmentation of the communist forces and claiming to have been prevented by U.S. domestic pressures from redressing the growing imbalance, Kissinger recalls in his second volume that “in my bones I knew that collapse was just a question of time.”28 Kissinger denies any naïveté whatsoever about Hanoi’s intentions. “I never believed,” he recalls, “that Hanoi would reconcile itself to the military balance as it emerged from the Paris Agreement without testing it at least once more.” However, Hanoi would be discouraged from actually attempting to topple the military balance because of its fear of U.S. retaliation. “American air power was thus always seen as an essential deterrent to the resumption of all-out war. Nixon gave assurances on this score to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to persuade Thieu to accept the Paris Agreement.”29 The miscalculation in the White House, then, if we are to take Kissinger’s published recollections at face value, was over the ability of the American political process to deliver on the military commitment that Nixon and Kissinger gave to Thieu and that Hanoi was supposed to have heard and believed. But how could Nixon and Kissinger have made such a gross miscalculation? Surely, by the fall of 1972, when the basic deal was being struck with Hanoi, the evidence was clear that the majority of the

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American people wanted an end to the sacrifice of American blood and treasure in Indochina, and that such sacrifice was not warranted to preserve a U.S. client state in South Vietnam. Kissinger still insists that “the people never chose abdication.” He cites Nixon’s huge electoral victory over George McGovern in November 1972 and opinion polls as endorsements of the basic policy of “peace with honor.” It is true, says Kissinger, that a majority of the American people came to believe that it had been a mistake to get involved in Vietnam in the first place and that that involvement should be brought to an end, “but an even larger majority rejected the peace movement’s policy of immediate and unconditional withdrawal.” This larger majority, claims Kissinger, was looking to the nation’s executive for the leadership that would be crucial in managing the transition to full peace in Indochina in a way that preserved the reputation of the United States as a country that honored its commitments and did not tempt adversaries to engage in new aggression.30 But the required executive leadership was not to emerge. The principal reason, according to Kissinger, was Watergate. During March and April 1973 Kissinger urged Nixon to order a threeor four-day sustained bombing of the North Vietnamese bases and trails in Laos and on both sides of the demilitarized zone separating North and South Vietnam. It was important “to give Hanoi a jolt,” to make it clear to the enemy that “we may do something totally unexpected” if it continued to violate the Paris agreement. Kissinger could not get a clear and consistent set of orders out of his chief, however. He portrays Nixon during this period as “uncharacteristically indecisive,” as “a distracted man.” It was only later, when examining the records, that Kissinger found out the extent of Nixon’s preoccupation with the Watergate investigations at the very time that it was most urgent to get him to act decisively to prevent the complete unraveling of the Indochina peace.31 Kissinger offers, “The normal Nixon would have been enraged beyond containment” at the mid-April reports that 35,000 fresh North Vietnamese troops had entered South Vietnam and nearby border sanctuaries; “but Watergate Nixon continued to dither.”32 The president did approve U.S. limited bombing of targets in Laos in a two-day retaliation for the North Vietnamese seizure of the Laotian town of Tha Vieng, and he also ordered the suspension of mine-clearing operations around North Vietnamese ports. The “turning point” for Kissinger—the recognition that it would be futile to expect the beleaguered president to take the retaliatory actions

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required to deter Hanoi from further violations—came on April 14, 1973, when he heard from one of Nixon’s legal advisers that Watergate was beginning to implicate the president himself. “I was appalled by the knowledge, seeing, for the first time clearly, how the Watergate challenges could reach to the heart of the Presidency and destroy all authority,” recalls Kissinger. He could no longer urge Nixon to put his diminishing prestige behind a resumption of systematic bombing; the president no longer had the authority or the will to focus his energy on beating down the congressional opposition that was sure to be crystallized by such a renewal of coercive diplomacy.33 In the following months, antiwar measures that had previously been blocked in the House of Representatives began to pass both houses, culminating in the “nail-in-the-coffin” legislation of June barring all further U.S. military action in Indochina. At the time, Kissinger railed against Congress for denying him any significant sanctions to apply against Hanoi; but in his Years of Upheaval memoir he is more candid, admitting that “the ‘window’ we had in those few months of early 1973 was closed by Watergate’s enfeeblements.”34 Revealingly, Kissinger’s repeated invocation of his advice to Nixon in 1973 and 1974 to unleash new bombing campaigns against North Vietnam in retaliation for Hanoi’s violations of the Paris peace accords continued to divert attention away from the political as well as the military substance of the accords, which even if faithfully respected gave the communists (North and South) all they really needed to ultimately subvert and take over South Vietnam anyway. Not only could the North’s troops remain in the South for an indefinite time, but the South Vietnamese communists were given coequal status with the existing government in Saigon and throughout the country south of the seventeenth parallel for the design and operation of the transitional political regime. Nixon and Kissinger were realists. They were fully aware that the “balance” of power they were leaving in South Vietnam was tilted decisively in favor of the communists. They could only hope that North Vietnam would exploit the situation in slow motion so as to provide the “decent interval” for the collapse of the South that would disguise the fact that the “peace with honor” they had negotiated was a cover for America’s capitulation in Indochina. During that end game, Nixon and Kissinger, although in agreement over the grand strategy of surrender, privately and bitterly bad-mouthed one another for being self-protective in defining to the world what was happening.35

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The Soviets, witnessing the collapsing American commitment to shape what was happening in Indochina, enlarged their flow of military supplies to the Vietnamese communists over the next two years. Kissinger and President Ford made the obligatory pleas to a reluctant Congress to match the Soviet effort. But even as the final panic spread in South Vietnam in the spring of 1975, there were few Americans in political life who would define the raising of the Vietcong flag over Saigon as sufficiently harmful to vital U.S. interests to justify a further sacrifice in treasure, let alone lives (over 55,000 U.S. fatalities from 1963 to 1973) to try to undo the tragedy. The humiliating outcome drove home a sobering lesson about U.S. power to a generation of strategists and policy makers: namely, that even the balance of military power cannot be calculated mainly in terms of raw destructive capabilities; for the capacity to employ those capabilities effectively is strongly determined by the will on each side to endure pain and material sacrifice, which in turn is determined by the value to each side of the interests being fought over. And as had been shown 200 years before in the U.S.-British conflict, the side that is convinced it is fighting for its national existence (though less equipped with physical destructive power) can ultimately overcome even a superpower for whom the local conflict is a marginal episode in the overall contest for global ascendancy.

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THE INSUFFICIENCY OF MILITARY CONTAINMENT What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these numbers? What do you do with it? —Henry A. Kissinger

ÉTENTE WITH THE SOVIET UNION, rapprochement with China—both of these démarches of the Nixon administration were to a large extent prompted by the realization that Soviet military power could now neutralize the ability of U.S. military power alone to deter objectionable Soviet behavior short of direct threats to the United States itself. New means for affecting Soviet behavior were required to supplement military deterrence. Military power was still considered necessary to induce the Soviet Union to respect the range of U.S. interests abroad, for if the Soviet Union, but not the United States, were able and willing to resort to force when the secondary interests of the two superpowers clashed, the Soviets could face down the United States in situation after situation and ultimately achieve a position of global dominance. But U.S. military power was no longer deemed sufficient for containing the Soviet Union within its current sphere of dominance, for military containment was based on confidence that the United States would prevail in any major U.S.-Soviet war—a belief that was eroding by the later 1960s.1 Confidence that the United States would prevail rested in some important cases on the credibility of U.S. threats to escalate a conflict to strategic levels—for example, in Berlin—where the Kremlin enjoyed a

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preponderance of locally applicable force. But now that the Soviet Union as well as the United States was supposed to have a strategic arsenal capable of assuring virtually total destruction of the attacker, no matter how large and well executed its first strike, it was highly unlikely that either superpower would seriously contemplate attacking the other for any purpose except retaliation for a direct attack on itself. With strategic deterrence thus restricted to the ultimate holocaust, lesser Soviet aggressive moves, even against loyal allies of the United States, could not be reliably prevented unless the United States and its allies developed other weighty levers on Soviet behavior. The raw materials for fashioning such levers were sought by Nixon and Kissinger in the mutual paranoia between the Russians and the Chinese and in the Kremlin’s desire to increase the Soviet Union’s participation in the international economy. It was uncertain, however, that the contemplated triangular relationship—assuming that both communist powers for their own reasons would latch on—would indeed operate to dissuade the Russians and the Chinese from attempting to take advantage of the new mood of isolationism growing in the United States. And the expectation that expanded commercial contacts would provide substantial U.S. leverage on the Soviets was also still only a hypothesis. Meanwhile, congressional efforts to reduce U.S. defense expenditures were intensifying, and this, if successful, could shift the global military balance in favor of the Soviets. Nixon and Kissinger, neither of whom had been enthusiasts of arms control before 1969, now felt compelled to seriously negotiate limitations on the arms race. Arms control thereupon was added to expansion of commercial relations with the USSR and normalization of relations with Beijing as the cornerstones of the “structure of peace” that President Nixon spoke of in his 1969 inaugural address. For Kissinger they became essential elements of global order that otherwise—owing to the inherent weakness of containment based mainly on military deterrence—would become dangerously unstable.

THE ARMS CONTROL DILEMMA Putting a cap on the strategic arms race proved to be the most difficult of the international restructuring tasks that Nixon and Kissinger set for themselves. It required that both sides abandon the goal of strategic

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superiority and that each give up attempting to protect its population against the other’s nuclear attack. The concepts of parity and mutual deterrence went against the grain of many of the influential military and foreign policy elites in both countries. Moreover, the esoteric strategic doctrine that mutual deterrence required both sides to protect their missiles but not their people was hardly likely to be popular with the general public. Nixon himself, having frequently rejected strategic parity as an acceptable context for conducting U.S.-Soviet relations and having promised during the 1968 election campaign to restore “clear-cut military superiority” as a planning objective, was not about to frontally contradict hopes in the Pentagon (now free from the planning constraints of the McNamara years) to once again pull well ahead of the USSR. The new presidential assistant for national security affairs, however, provided just the right conceptual finesse. At his first presidential news conference, Nixon was asked by a questioner to distinguish between the planning goal of superiority over the Soviet Union being propounded by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and a notion being advanced by Kissinger called “sufficiency.”2 Nixon’s answer, while leaving much to later elaboration, deftly chalked out the middle ground: I think the semantics may offer an inappropriate approach to the problem. I would say, with regard to Dr. Kissinger’s suggestion of sufficiency, that that would meet, certainly, my guideline and, I think, Secretary Laird’s guideline with regard to superiority. Let me put it this way: When we talk about parity, I think we should recognize that wars occur usually when each side believes it has a chance to win. Therefore, parity does not necessarily assure that a war may not occur. By the same token, when we talk about superiority, that may have a detrimental effect on the other side in putting it in an inferior position and therefore giving great impetus to its own arms race. Our objective in this administration . . . is to be sure that the United States has sufficient military power to defend our interests and to maintain the commitments which this administration determines are in the interests of the United States around the world. I think “sufficiency” is a better term, actually, than either “superiority” or “parity.”3

The new strategic planning concept, as elaborated in subsequent statements by the administration, was supposed to accomplish a number of purposes—not all of them compatible.

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Sufficiency first and foremost required enough well-protected strategic forces to be able to inflict a level of damage on the Soviet Union that would deter the Soviet leaders from attacking. In this respect the Nixon administration incorporated the “assured destruction” criterion of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Assured destruction, however, was deemed insufficient as a force planning concept, for as interpreted by Nixon, it was “limited to the indiscriminate mass destruction of enemy civilians as the sole possible response to challenges.” This would be an incredible response insofar as it involved “the likelihood of triggering nuclear attacks on our own population.” As such, it was an inadequate strategic basis for preventing the Soviets from coercing the United States and its allies.4 It was also essential, explained the president, to maintain “a flexible range of strategic options.” Given the variety of possible political-military situations that could conceivably confront the United States, “our strategic policy should not be based solely on a capability of inflicting urban and industrial damage presumed to be beyond the level an adversary would accept. We must be able to respond at levels appropriate to the situation.”5 The Nixon administration had three essential reasons for continuing such potentially destabilizing programs. 1. Deterrence could fail, and in such situations—however low their probability—the United States would want to disable as much of the Soviet war-fighting capability as possible and reduce the Soviet capacity to kill Americans. 2. The Soviets were building an impressive counterforce capability that by the late 1970s or early 1980s might be able to destroy most of the U.S. land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); the clear strategic asymmetry that would be produced by the presence of such a Soviet capability and the absence of a comparable U.S. capability could be politically exploited by the Soviets in crisis confrontations between the superpowers. 3. The United States would be more effective in bargaining with the Soviets to alter and reduce the counterforce features of their strategic force programs if the United States also had counterforce elements that would need to be sacrificed; moreover, the existence of such U.S. programs would dramatize for the Soviets the consequences of a failure to agree to counterforce limitations—namely, a strategic arms race with the United States, whose technological abilities in this field were still far ahead of the Soviets.

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The Department of Defense seized upon Nixon’s ambiguous concept of sufficiency to establish elastic definitions of what would constitute an adequate military balance of power vis-à-vis the Soviets. During the Kennedy-Johnson years Secretary of Defense McNamara had held down the U.S. strategic force posture with an increasingly strict application of the “assured-destruction” criterion, which he defined as being able to destroy 20 percent of the Soviet population and 50 percent of Soviet industry. No matter what the Soviets might deploy, it was sufficient to be able to inflict this level of damage in retaliation for a Soviet first strike in order to deter the Kremlin from launching a strategic attack. Now, under Secretary of Defense Laird, the military planning objectives were broadened to ensure (1) that Soviet forces could not inflict substantially more damage on the United States than U.S. forces could inflict on the USSR; (2) that each leg of the strategic “triad” (bombers, land-based ICBMs, and sea-based strategic missiles) would be independently able to survive a surprise Soviet attack and strike back with a society-destroying level of destruction; and (3) that in addition to these war outcome criteria, the number of weapons deployed on each side should not appear to give the Soviet Union an advantage. Ambiguous rhetoric might obscure the contradictions between the Nixon-Laird notion of sufficiency as a defense planning concept and the Nixon-Kissinger concept of sufficiency as an armament-limiting concept; but when it came to actually negotiating a strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviets, one or the other had to be given the presidential nod. During the first Nixon administration, 1969–1972, Kissinger— through persuasion, deft bureaucratic infighting, and by setting the proper international events into motion—was able to gain Nixon’s endorsement of his version at critical junctures.6 The climax of the first phase of the U.S.-Soviet strategic arms limitation talks (SALT), culminating in the Moscow agreements of 1972—the treaty limiting antiballistic missile (ABM) systems and the interim agreement on offensive strategic systems—came very close to institutionalizing a “mutual assured destruction” relationship, dubbed MAD. According to Article I of the ABM treaty, “Each party undertakes not to deploy ABM systems for a defense of the territory of its country.”7 The limited deployments allowed by the treaty (Article III) restricted each side to two sites of 100 launchers each, one site to protect an offensive missile field and the other to protect the country’s capital.8 Clearly, the populations of both countries were to remain unprotected, consistent with the doctrine

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that if one’s population were exposed to nuclear attack from one’s enemy one would not dare to start a nuclear war. The five-year interim agreement on offensive weapons allowed the Soviet Union to build up its ICBM force to 1,618 while the United States would keep its existing level of 1,054. The Soviets were allowed 950 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and 62 submarines, while the United States was confined to 710 SLBMs and 44 submarines. Important weapon systems left out of the agreement—bombers, land-mobile ICBMs, forward-based forces of less than intercontinental range, and multiple warheads—were to be the subject of more comprehensive negotiations that were supposed to produce a completed treaty by October 1977.9 The allowance of a Soviet numerical advantage in ICBMs and SLBMs was not yet of serious concern to the U.S. Defense Department, for in the items not covered by the agreement the United States was well ahead of the Soviets. But the military preparedness coalition in Congress and the administration was determined to make the subsequent SALT negotiations more responsive to their interpretations of sufficiency. Senator Henry Jackson formulated a Senate resolution that the administration accepted, insisting that in any future strategic weapons agreements with the USSR the United States not accept provisions, such as those in SALT I, that would leave the United States with numerical inferiority. Kissinger’s achievement in satisfying Nixon’s political need for a dramatic démarche in U.S.-Soviet relations was made possible by his ability to accelerate the U.S.-Soviet détente process by fueling Brezhnev’s anxieties over the Nixon-Kissinger rapprochement with Mao and Zhou Enlai.10 The temporarily suppressed contradictions in the administration’s sufficiency concept (and in the Soviets’ analogous dilemma) of simultaneously agreeing to stabilize the arms race while continuing to deploy strategic forces with impressive war-fighting characteristics, were bound to surface again even before the ink was dry on the SALT I agreements. In the summer of 1972, the Defense Department asked Congress to provide funds for the development of strategic warheads with “hard-target kill capabilities,” and programs were accelerated for installing accurate, multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) on U.S. ICBMs and submarine-launched strategic missiles. In a series of candid news conferences in 1973 and 1974, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger revealed the administration’s intention to acquire “precision instruments that would be used in a limited counterforce role” and disclosed that it was refining its strategic targeting doctrine

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to give the president a “broader range of options.” In addition, the administration was prepared to balance any Soviet attempt to obtain a major counterforce option (“We cannot permit the other side to have a relatively credible counterforce capability if we lack the same”).11 Schlesinger’s annual defense posture statement to Congress for fiscal year 1975 provided a carefully worded justification for the renewed emphasis on counterforce options: To enhance deterrence, we may want . . . a more efficient hard-target kill capability than we now possess: both to threaten specialized sets of targets (possibly of concern to allies) with a greater economy of force, and to make it clear to a potential enemy that he cannot proceed with impunity to jeopardize our own system of hard targets. . . . To stress changes in targeting doctrine and new options does not mean radical departures from past practice. Nor does it imply any possibility of acquiring a first strike disarming capability. As I have repeatedly stated, both the United States and the Soviet Union now have and will continue to have large, invulnerable second strike forces. . . . We would be quite content if both the United States and the Soviet Union avoided the acquisition of major counterforce capabilities. But we are troubled by Soviet weapons momentum, and we simply cannot ignore the prospect of growing disparity between the two major nuclear powers. We do not propose to let an opponent threaten a major component of our forces without being able to pose a comparable threat. We do not propose to let an enemy put us in a position where we are left with no more than a capability to hold his cities hostage after the first phase of a nuclear conflict. And certainly we do not propose to see an enemy threaten one or more of our allies with his nuclear capabilities in the expectation that we would lack the flexibility and resolve to strike back at his assets.12

Particular stress was now accorded to “essential equivalence” with the Soviet Union in all the basic force characteristics (“throw-weight, accuracy, yield-to-weight ratios, reliability and other such factors”) for reasons of military effectiveness and political appearances. The requirement was for “a range and magnitude of capabilities such that everyone—friend, foe, and domestic audiences alike—will perceive that we are the equal of our strongest competitors.”13 This meant that even though the Soviets might be exercising bad strategic logic in building forces that could destroy a large portion of the U.S. land-based ICBMs (bad logic in that the Soviet Union

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could still be destroyed by U.S. submarine-launched missiles and bombers), the United States—to preserve the appearance of symmetry—should also build such a counterforce capability. Soviet defense programs were even more blatantly at cross-purposes with mutual strategic arms limitation. Consistent with the letter but not the spirit of the 1972 Moscow accords, the USSR continued to deploy heavypayload ICBMs with substantial counterforce potential, and their military doctrine stressed the requirements of fighting and prevailing in a strategic war more than deterrence. Evidence of continued Soviet reliance on heavy counterforce capabilities spurred U.S. defense planners to go ahead with new systems as a “hedge” against Soviet attempts to achieve strategic dominance. The major consequences were a full-speed-ahead program of retrofitting U.S. missiles with MIRV warheads, efforts to enhance the accuracy of all U.S. strategic systems (including submarine-launched missiles), and “next generation” bomber programs (the B-1 bomber and long-range cruise missiles for the modernized bomber force). Kissinger and others who hoped to translate the 1972 interim agreement on offensive systems into a solid treaty by its expiration date of October 1977 were dismayed at the continued “qualitative” technological race proceeding on both sides. Not only was that race making a mockery of the quantitative limits agreed to in SALT I, but it was virtually precluding reliable verification of these or future limits. Kissinger’s anxiety to put a cap on the accelerating competition before it was too late was reflected in his complaint at a Moscow press conference in connection with Nixon’s 1974 visit that “both sides have to convince their military establishments of the benefits of restraint.”14 The secretary of state hastily arranged for Brezhnev and President Ford to commit themselves at their 1974 Vladivostok meeting to negotiating a treaty that would at least freeze their arsenals at a specified number of strategic missile launchers (2,400 for each side), of which only a subset (1,320) could be MIRVed. Within the overall ceiling of 2,400, each side could deploy its own preferred mix of ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or bombers; and there was no specified limit on missile throw weight.15 The Vladivostok accord was a political holding action at the top to keep the objective of a mutual-deterrence treaty from being totally subverted by the combined pressures of technology and military doctrine, which in the United States as well as in the Soviet Union, were tending more and more toward legitimating strategic counterforce and other warfighting capabilities.

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When it came to converting the Vladivostok principles into a stable and verifiable treaty, however, the military experts on both sides—even those dedicated to arms control—continued to be baffled by the increasing difficulty of distinguishing offensive from defensive deployments, strategic from tactical weapons, nuclear from conventional munitions, and single from multiple warheads, and by the virtual impossibility of determining (in advance of its actually being used) whether a given weapon had a city or a missile complex as its primary target. Kissinger’s skepticism about the stability over time of technical limitations on military hardware led him to concentrate as much on the symbolic benefits of negotiating constructively with the Soviets in the SALT arena as on the presumed military effects of any agreements that might be concluded. And his doubts that close attention to the military balance itself would be sufficient for the purpose of preventing the Kremlin from using military coercion against U.S. interests reinforced his belief in the necessity of nonmilitary levers on Soviet behavior. The China connection and the economic aspects of détente diplomacy were supposed to compensate for the shortfalls in military containment.

THE CHINA ANGLE The Nixon-Kissinger construction of a new relationship with China preceded and gave impetus to the rapid elaboration of the U.S.-Soviet détente relationship in the early 1970s. The China connection, conceived of primarily as a means of pressuring the Kremlin to be more accommodating to U.S. demands, was also designed to serve other objectives of the administration: an early end to the Vietnam War; a reduction in overseas deployment of American troops; a dismantling of military commitments to Asian regimes that might be unstable or reckless; abandonment by Beijing of any plans it might have to absorb Taiwan into the People’s Republic by force; and simply the need to do something dramatic to convince the American public and international audiences that the government under Nixon’s leadership did have the capacity to act impressively on the world stage. The new China policy, not incidentally, also could give concrete substance to Kissinger’s vague concept of an emerging multipolar world. However much administration spokespersons might publicly deny that gaining leverage on the Soviet Union was the central purpose of the China connection, this geopolitical result of the new triangular relationship was

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undeniable and was never really denied. But Nixon and Kissinger apparently calculated that the leverage would be just as great if it were kept implicit and that the Soviets might not be able to bring themselves to be accommodating toward the United States in various fields if it looked to the world as if they were negotiating under coercive pressure. As Washington and Beijing drew toward each other across the hypotenuse of the triangle from 1969 to 1972, the theatrics of the démarche began to eclipse the geopolitics, but the former in no way undermined the latter. The show business staging of the Nixon visit seemed only to convince the Soviets of the need to stage a more impressive summit spectacular of their own. Historians will long debate whether this turn in U.S.-China policy was mainly the brainchild of Nixon or of Kissinger (not to mention Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.) Resolution of this controversy matters little for the present analysis. More important is the fact that both men came to believe by early 1969 that a movement toward normalizing relations with Beijing might now mesh with Chinese calculations and significantly reinforce the Soviets’ incentive to explore their own common interests with the United States.16 China experts in and out of the government had been picking up signs during the late 1960s that Mao and Zhou might be reading the tea leaves similarly. The Chinese condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and especially the doctrine of “limited sovereignty” of countries in the socialist camp by which the Soviets justified their invasion. Tension was heightening along the Sino-Soviet border in the aftermath of Czechoslovakia. In November 1968 the Chinese foreign ministry proposed reconvening the Sino-American ambassadorial talks in Warsaw, which had been suspended since January.17 The Nixon administration, while indicating its willingness to resume the heretofore sterile exchanges in Warsaw, was searching for fresh ways to convince the Chinese that the White House might be open to an exploration of some fundamental improvements in the relationship. Early in 1969 Nixon began to hint strongly through French, Romanian, and Pakistani intermediaries that he would like to visit China. Meanwhile, an informal coalition of liberal members of Congress and China experts—perhaps sensing that the administration was exploring a shift in policy—tried to create public support for normalizing relations with the communist regime. Senator Edward Kennedy, speaking on March 20, 1969, to a conference sponsored by the National Committee on United States–China

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Relations, urged the Nixon administration to take new initiatives, such as the elimination of U.S. military bases on Taiwan and an offer to reestablish consular offices in the People’s Republic. (The conference, chaired by former U.S. ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer, took place two weeks after the outbreak of military conflict between Soviet and Chinese forces over a disputed island on the Ussuri River. China experts at the conference speculated that this development might provide an opportunity for a breakthrough in U.S.-China relations.)18 Starting in the summer of 1969, the Department of State began to announce various unilateral gestures of reconciliation. In July many travel and trade restrictions that had been applied to China since 1950 were relaxed. Americans traveling abroad would be permitted to bring back $100 worth of items produced in the People’s Republic. Members of Congress, journalists, teachers, scholars, university students, physicians, and Red Cross representatives would automatically be cleared by the department for travel to China. These moves were an effort to “relax tensions and facilitate the development of peaceful contacts,” explained State Department spokespersons. The particular actions were chosen because they did not require Chinese reciprocation.19 Over the next year the administration continued to signal its intent to put U.S.-China relations on a new basis: in November 1969, U.S. naval patrols in the Taiwan Strait (deployed by Truman at the start of the Korean War) were terminated, removing the most visible symbol of U.S. support for the Nationalist Chinese exiles. In December, the U.S. government partially lifted the embargo on trade by foreign subsidiaries of U.S. firms between China and third countries, again stating that the move was “strictly unilateral.” In January 1970, the U.S. and Chinese ambassadors to Poland resumed their suspended talks in Warsaw and explored in a preliminary way the possibility of exchange visits by journalists, students, and scientists. On February 18, in the first of his four annual “state of the world” messages to Congress, President Nixon reiterated that “the Chinese are a great and vital people who should not remain isolated from the international community” and revealed that it was administration policy to “attempt to define a new relationship” for the future. “We have avoided dramatic gestures which might invite dramatic rebuffs,” explained the president. “We have taken specific steps that did not require Chinese agreements but which underlined our willingness to have a more normal and constructive relationship.”20 Two days later, at the ambassadorial talks in Warsaw, both sides discussed the possibility of moving the talks to

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Beijing, and the Chinese hinted that they would welcome a high-ranking official to head the U.S. delegation.21 This delicate courtship was set back somewhat during the spring and summer of 1970 as U.S. troops invaded Cambodia, while in China a struggle was played out between the Lin Piao faction, which favored a hard line toward Washington as well as Moscow, and the Zhou Enlai faction, which favored a moderate policy at home and abroad, including better relations with the United States in order to put pressure on the Soviets. Early in the fall of 1970 the atmosphere was suddenly alive with possibility. Mao evidently had thrown his weight decisively behind Zhou and seemed to be sending his own signals to Washington that a new era in Sino-American relations might now be appropriate. Official Washington attached significance to Mao’s having asked the prominent American chronicler of the Chinese communist revolution, Edgar Snow, to join him on the reviewing stand for the National Day celebrations on October 1. Nixon and Kissinger intensified their efforts to communicate with the Chinese leaders via the Romanians and Pakistanis. Secret notes, presumably dealing with the possibility of a high-level U.S. visit to China, were carried back and forth through the winter months, except for a six-week hiatus in February and early March surrounding the invasion of Laos by South Vietnamese troops with U.S. air support.22 Nixon and Kissinger used all available diplomatic channels to reassure Mao that the Laos operation was not meant to threaten China in any way. And in the second annual state of the world address to Congress, the president reiterated his objective of drawing China into “a serious dialogue.” He invited the “People’s Republic of China to explore the path of normalization of its relations with its neighbors and the world, including our own country.” During the coming year, promised the president, “I will carefully examine what further steps we might take to create broader opportunities for contacts between the Chinese and American peoples, and how we might remove needless obstacles to the realization of these opportunities. We hope for, but will not be deterred by a lack of, reciprocity.” This effort, the president explained, was part of the main foreign policy approach of his administration “to create a balanced international structure in which all nations have a stake. We believe that such a structure should provide full scope for the influence to which China’s achievements entitle it.”23 The breakthrough occurred on April 27, 1971, when the Pakistani ambassador to the United States delivered a handwritten note from Beijing, with no signature, inviting an “American envoy” to come to China for high-level

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talks. The note suggested either Kissinger or Secretary of State Rogers.24 The invitation and the decision to send Kissinger were closely held secrets. The public was allowed the fantasy that the U.S. Ping-Pong team, touring China in April 1971 at the sudden invitation of Zhou Enlai, was the vehicle through which the inscrutable Chinese made known to the White House their willingness to explore an improvement in relations. While the PingPong team was still in China, Nixon announced further relaxation of the twenty-year embargo on trade with the People’s Republic. A Chinese PingPong team was, of course, invited to tour the United States. And at the end of April Nixon began to hint unsubtly to journalists and foreign diplomats that he himself would like to be invited to visit China. The Chinese cooperated in keeping under wraps Kissinger’s secret July 1971 mission to Beijing to arrange for the Nixon visit so that the president himself could make a surprise announcement of the dramatic development. Nixon and Kissinger apparently felt they needed a fait accompli to overcome opposition to such a move from the Taiwan government and its U.S. supporters. In the playing out of this surprise, they knew they would cause anxiety in the Kremlin. The stratagem also shocked and angered the Japanese and other allied governments, but the affronts to established friends were presumed to be ultimately retrievable costs well worth the benefits of the new shift in global power relationships. It was more than mere coincidence that Nixon’s July 15 announcement that he would visit China was followed by his revelation in an August 4 press conference that he and the Soviet leaders had agreed that there should be a U.S.-Soviet summit meeting when there was something substantive to discuss that could not be handled in other channels. Nixon indicated that ongoing discussions with the Soviets were making progress in a number of fields—Berlin, SALT, the Middle East—and added pointedly that “if the time comes, as it may come, and both sides realize this, then the final breakthrough in any one of these areas can take place only at the highest level, and then there will be a meeting. But as far as the timing of the meeting before the visit to Peking, that would not be an appropriate thing to do.”25 The Kremlin got the message and picked up on the cue. The early fall of 1971 was a particularly congenial season at various U.S.-Soviet negotiating tables. Agreements were reached on procedures for preventing nuclear accidents and on improving the emergency hotline between Washington and Moscow. And most significant, a preliminary accord was reached on the outlines of a Berlin settlement. President Nixon announced on

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October 12 that he had accepted Chairman Brezhnev’s invitation to visit Moscow in May. Kissinger again traveled to Beijing at the end of October—this time in the full glare of news media—to firm up plans for Nixon to visit China in February. It was more than coincidental that Kissinger would be in Beijing while the issue of China’s representation in the United Nations was brought to a vote in New York. The latest U.S. position—ending twenty years of opposition to China’s membership in the world organization but still refusing to countenance the expulsion of Taiwan—was announced by Secretary of State Rogers on August 2 and stoutly defended in UN debates by Ambassador George H. W. Bush in the face of clear indications that the majority would take an unequivocal pro-Beijing stand. In the key resolution on October 25, the General Assembly decided (by a vote of 76 to 35, with 17 abstentions) to recognize the representatives of the People’s Republic as “the only legitimate representatives of China” and to “expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place which they unlawfully occupy at the United Nations and in all the organizations affiliated with it.” The White House immediately issued a statement accepting the will of the majority but regretting the expulsion of Taiwan. The year 1972 was to be, in effect, the Year of the Triangle: the year of maximum exploitation by the Nixon administration of its new China connection to pressure the Kremlin on SALT, European security issues, and the conflict in Southeast Asia; the year of maximum exploitation of the growing U.S.-Soviet détente to induce the Chinese to be patient with the United States for continuing to recognize the government of Taiwan and for its slow-paced disengagement from Southeast Asia; and the year of maximum exploitation of Nixon’s popularity in both Moscow and Beijing to induce the North Vietnamese to seriously negotiate an all-Indochina peace agreement with the United States. Not incidentally, the simultaneity of all this with the U.S. presidential election campaign was exploited to the hilt. Uncertain of the strength of the incentives for either Moscow or Beijing to put good relations with the United States ahead of their other international and domestic objectives, the White House was anxious not to appear too blatant in playing on the Machiavellian triangle. Repeatedly, in statements preceding and following the president’s trip to China, Nixon and Kissinger insisted that “our policy is not aimed against Moscow. The United States and the USSR have issues of paramount importance to resolve; it would be costly indeed to impair progress on these through

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new antagonisms.” To attempt to use the opening to Beijing “to exploit Sino-Soviet tensions . . . would be self-defeating and dangerous.”26 The Chinese were more candid with respect to their own reasons for seeking a rapprochement with the United States. The official Beijing journal Hungchi reprinted a 1940 article by Mao propounding the wisdom of “uniting with forces that can be united while isolating and hitting the most obdurate enemies.”27 The Americans succeeded, however, in keeping direct anti-Soviet statements out of the communiqué issued by President Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai in Shanghai at the conclusion of the Nixon visit. In the language of the communiqué, “The two sides state that . . . neither should seek hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region and each is opposed to efforts by any other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony.” And in a stroke of studied ambiguity, “Both sides are of the view that it would be against the interest of the peoples of the world for any major country to collude with another against other countries, or for major countries to divide up the world into spheres of interest.”28 Even in the parts of the communiqué reserved for unilateral statements by each side, the Chinese, deferring to U.S. sensitivities, threw their barbs in clever general formulations that could be applied to either the Americans or the Soviets. Thus, the Chinese side stated: Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. Countries want independence, nations want liberation and the people want revolution—this has become the irresistible trend of history. All nations, big or small, should be equal; big nations should not bully the weak. China will never be a superpower and it opposes hegemony and power politics of any kind. The Chinese side stated that it firmly supports the struggles of all the oppressed people and nations for freedom and liberation and that the people of all countries have a right to choose their social systems according to their own wishes and the right to safeguard the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of their own countries and oppose foreign aggression, interference, control and subversion. All foreign troops should be withdrawn to their own countries.29

For the most sensitive issue between the United States and China—the problem of Taiwan—the device of including two separate statements in the communiqué was indispensable. The Chinese reaffirmed their longstanding position that “Taiwan is a province of China . . . ; the liberation

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of Taiwan is China’s internal affair in which no other country has a right to interfere; and all U.S. forces and military installations must be withdrawn from Taiwan.” The Americans attempted to finesse the issue, declaring, in one of the most carefully crafted statements in the annals of diplomacy, that the United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves. With this prospect in mind, it affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.30

By granting the legitimacy of even this thin line of disagreement, Mao and Zhou had made a substantial concession in the service of the higher goal they shared with Nixon and Kissinger of normalizing U.S.-China relations in order to gain new leverage on the Kremlin. The most candid public exposition by a U.S. official of the connection between U.S. policies toward the Soviet Union and U.S. policies toward China was made by Winston Lord, director of the State Department’s policy planning staff (and Kissinger’s closest aide on China policy). In a statement to a House subcommittee in March 1976, later published in a Department of State Bulletin under the title “The Triangular Relationship of the United States, the USSR, and the People’s Republic of China,” Lord put “improved prospects for global equilibrium” at the top of the list of benefits accruing to the United States from positive relations with China, and “a hedge against Soviet diplomatic and military pressures” as first among the advantages to be derived by the Chinese. Lord’s testimony reiterated the standard official position that an attempt by the United States to manipulate the Sino-Soviet rivalry, to meddle in it, or to take sides, would be dangerous and self-defeating. “At the same time,” he observed, “in a triangular relationship it is undeniably advantageous for us to have better relations with each of the other two actors than they have with one another.” The United States has no desire to see the Sino-Soviet rivalry escalate into military conflict, said Lord, but “neither can we genuinely wish to see the two major communist powers locked once again in close alliance.” In a meticulously formulated qualification, he granted that

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“a limited thaw in Sino-Soviet relations, however, would not automatically redound to our disadvantage, provided it was not based on shared opposition to the United States.” An almost humorous understatement summed up the essence of the approach: “The record to date suggests that improvement in our ties with one does not harm our ties with the others.”31 Kissinger himself would insist on this public rationale for the China rapprochement through the last days of his tenure as secretary of state. In an interview with the New York Times on the eve of Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, he again stressed that “it is a mistake to define the Sino-Soviet relationship in terms of our exploiting their differences. . . . We didn’t create them, we can’t exploit them.” But he went on, in a characteristic circumlocution, to place the triangular relationship at the center of his basic geopolitical strategy: I believe it is important that the People’s Republic of China continue to perceive us as interested in maintaining a world equilibrium. If they feel we have lost our interest in it or our comprehension of it, or our willingness to preserve it, then they will draw the inevitable conclusion, which will be to make whatever accommodation they can get [with the Soviet Union], or they will try to find some other means of protection, such as organizing the third world against both of us.32

THE COMMERCIAL LEVER During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations policy makers flirted with the idea of affecting Soviet behavior through commerce. The hope was to eventually stimulate consumer demand that would make it more difficult for the Kremlin to sustain high military budgets. Some champions of greater East-West commerce thought it might also encourage the Soviets to experiment with economic liberalization measures. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson each asked Congress to approve the sale of wheat to the Soviet Union as a step toward opening up limited commercial relations in other sectors. But such moves were tentative and peripheral to the main thrust of U.S. policy until the Nixon-Kissinger years. It was not until well into the third year of the Nixon administration that the attempt to construct a commercial relationship between the two superpowers became an integral part of U.S. policy. As with the change in policy toward China, the premises of this policy shift were only partly

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revealed to the public. Signs that the grounds of U.S. policy on East-West trade were being altered were picked up in the fall of 1971 by American firms, which suddenly began to obtain previously denied licenses to export their products to the Soviet Union. The coincidence of the export license liberalization with the firming up of plans for Nixon to visit China and collateral progress toward a Nixon-Brezhnev summit was hardly accidental. In the fall of 1971, the Soviets, woefully short of wheat for the coming winter as a result of a dismal harvest, were allowed to purchase $1 billion of American surplus food grains. The State Department indicated its readiness to reduce various discriminatory shipping regulations on Soviet vessels visiting U.S. ports. The secretary of commerce took a highly publicized trip to the Soviet Union surrounded by background stories from government ministries in both countries on the possibilities of pushing U.S.-Soviet trade to the $5 billion-a-year level by the mid-1970s. Appetites on both sides were whetted by visions of cooperative efforts to develop the oil, gas, and hard-mineral riches of Siberia. By the spring of 1972, progress on numerous bilateral commercial negotiations between subordinate levels of the governments was sufficiently advanced for the subject of a general U.S.-Soviet commercial rapprochement to be included as a major item on the agenda for the May summit meeting. Indeed, the Soviets appeared to be more enthusiastic about normalizing economic relations than about any other aspect of détente, and this probably was the reason that they refrained from canceling the 1972 summit in the face of highly coercive U.S. actions against North Vietnam in the spring of 1972 (including the mining of Haiphong harbor, which not incidentally interfered with Soviet shipping). The “basic principles” signed by President Nixon and General Secretary Brezhnev on May 29, 1972, affirmed that “the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. regard commercial and economic ties as an important and necessary element in the strengthening of their bilateral relations and will thus actively promote the growth of such ties. They will facilitate cooperation between the relevant organizations and enterprises of the two countries and the conclusion of appropriate agreements and contracts, including long-term ones.”33 By the end of the year the accomplishments under this accord included an agreement by the Kremlin to pay back $722 million on its wartime LendLease debt by the year 2001, in return for which President Nixon would authorize the Export-Import Bank to extend credits and guarantees for the sale of goods to the Soviet Union; a commitment by the Nixon administration to seek congressional extension of most favored nation tariff rates to the Soviet Union; the delivery of 440 million bushes of wheat to the

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Soviet Union; a maritime agreement opening forty ports in each nation to the other’s shipping; provision for the United States to set up governmentsponsored and commercial offices in Moscow to facilitate the work of U.S. business executives seeking contracts, and similar provisions for the Russians in Washington; and the establishment of a Joint U.S.-Soviet Commercial Commission charged with developing and guiding the elaboration of additional arrangements to encourage U.S.-Soviet commerce. The new policy rested on a number of publicly stated assumptions, as well as some premises that remained unarticulated, apparently for fear of embarrassing the Kremlin. The openly articulated assumptions underlying the expansion of U.S.-Soviet commerce were: t
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SALT and the status of Berlin) made it possible to initiate discussions on a wide range of projects for bilateral cooperation in nonpolitical fields. t
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with continuing progress on arms control and other political issues, there would be created on each side “a vested interest in restraint and in the preservation of peace.”34 The most elaborate statement of the key premise that a growing web of economic arrangements could reduce political hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union was contained in a report to the president by Secretary of Commerce Peter Peterson, released to the public in August 1972: Closer economic ties bear both cause-and-effect relationships to relaxation of political tension. Improvement in political relationships is a prerequisite for improved economic relationships, but, once in place, economic ties create a community of interest which in turn improves the environment for further progress on the political side.

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Once set in motion, the cause-and-effect process can portend a downward spiral in political tension, a mutually beneficial economic foundation of the new relationship and tangible increases in the welfare and safety of the peoples of both countries. . . . Our purpose is . . . to build in both countries a vested economic interest in the maintenance of an harmonious and enduring relationship. A nation’s security is affected not only by its adversary’s military capabilities but by the price which attends the use of those capabilities. If we can create a situation in which the use of military force would jeopardize a mutually profitable relationship, I think it can be argued that our security will have been enhanced.35

One who read between the lines of the public rationale and had occasion to discuss with U.S. policy makers their considerations at the time could ascertain a set of tougher assumptions underlying the effort to open up commerce with the Soviet Union—namely: t
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dictum that capitalists would sell the hangman the rope to be used in their own executions, only a fully credible Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence would stimulate the noncommunist countries to extend sufficient credits, to liberalize their strategic lists, and otherwise let down their political barriers to East-West commerce. t
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economic need to open up commerce with the industrial countries was greater than these countries’ need for commerce with the USSR; therefore, if the United States and its allies

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wisely bargained with the Soviet Union from this basic position of economic strength, the Kremlin, if not openly backed into a corner, might be willing to pay a political price for an expansion of East-West commerce. Such, undoubtedly, were the unvarnished assumptions beneath the Kissinger gloss that “we have approached the question of economic relations with deliberation and circumspection and as an act of policy not primarily of commercial opportunity.”36 Apparently, the main political price Nixon and Kissinger wanted the USSR to pay was to stop aiding the North Vietnamese war effort in Indochina and to bring pressure on Hanoi to negotiate seriously with the United States to wind down the war. The U.S. mining of Haiphong harbor took place just two weeks before President Nixon was due in Moscow for his first summit conference with General Secretary Brezhnev. Nixon and Kissinger doubted that the Moscow summit would be allowed to proceed on schedule, but they continued to remind the Russians of what was at stake. Kissinger’s May 9 briefing to reporters on the Haiphong mining included a pointed reference to the negotiations in progress with the Soviet Union: “We are on the verge of a new relationship in which, on both sides, whenever there is a danger of crisis, there will be enough people who have a commitment to constructive programs so that they could exercise restraining influences.”37 During the next few years, when the president or Kissinger publicly observed that détente itself was in jeopardy as a result of Soviet actions— for example, the threat to land Soviet paratroops in the Middle East in 1973 or the Soviet transport of Cuban forces to Angola—they clearly meant to play upon the Kremlin’s presumed high motivation for commercial relations with the West. They did not, however, believe that the Kremlin’s motivation for commercial relations was so high that U.S. credits and trading privileges could be used as a lever to directly induce changes within the Soviet system. This was their objection to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Reform Act of 1974, which sought to deny most favored nation trading status and credits to the Soviet Union if the Kremlin did not substantially remove restrictions on Jewish emigration. The administration claimed to be effectively representing the attitudes of the American people toward the denial of human rights in the USSR, but it regarded the Jackson-Vanik Amendment and the Stevenson Amendment (setting a $300 million limit on Export-Import Bank credits to the Soviet Union) as at best unhelpful and at worst likely to revive the bitterness of the Cold War.

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“We have accomplished much,” claimed Kissinger in 1974, “but we cannot demand that the Soviet Union, in effect, suddenly reverse five decades of Soviet, and centuries of Russian, history.”38 The administration did, however, cooperate with the West Europeans in linking East-West economic cooperation to “basket three” human rights issues at the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Soviets probably found it tolerable to go along with such linkage, since the Helsinki language was ambiguous and not explicitly directed at them, nor did the accords themselves contain any sanctions for noncompliance. From the standpoint of the administration, overuse or premature application of economic sanctions (denial of credits and trade) was in any case undesirable, for it would reduce the leverage the United States might obtain from ongoing arrangements. On the other hand, the administration also belatedly came to the realization that in the process of attempting to make the Soviet Union more dependent on the noncommunist world by removing political barriers to East-West trade, it may have been creating some cumbersome interdependencies. This problem surfaced most clearly in the concession by both parties’ 1976 presidential candidates to demands by U.S. agricultural interest groups that there be no further imposition of embargoes on grain shipments to the Soviet Union. The Ford administration’s growing appreciation of the difficulty of operating a policy of economic leverage was reflected in the complaint by a high State Department official that “there has been a tendency in Western countries to let the legitimate quest for commercial advantage in Eastern markets overshadow the need to develop and pursue a purposeful strategy. This has tended to undercut the influences which the economic strength of the industrialized world could exert.”39 All in all, Kissinger left office on January 20, 1977, with the nonmilitary levers on the Soviet Union that were central to his grand strategy having become objects of growing skepticism in the U.S. policy community. His own doubts about their efficacy, if not supported by a domestic consensus, were reflected in his renewed heavy emphasis in late 1976 (and in subsequent statements as a private citizen) on local balances of military power as essential for containing the Soviets.

13

THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE REASSERTION OF AMERICAN COMPETENCE ABROAD We could not sit on the sidelines if the Middle East should rage out of control; the world would view it as a collapse of American authority, whatever alibi we might put forward. We had to protect our country’s ability to play an indispensable role as the guarantor of peace and the repository of the hopes of free peoples. —Henry A. Kissinger

liquidation of the Vietnam war was the precondition for the restoration of American international power. They regarded détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China as conducive to the revival of domestic and foreign beliefs in America’s dedication to peace and world order and in its “vision” (a favorite Kissinger word). It was in the Middle East, however, that Nixon and Kissinger could prove the capacity and will to use American power effectively during crises in the service of peace and order and by so doing, re-create international respect for the United States as a constructive and competent superpower. Their principal Middle Eastern challenges—countering the Soviet buildup of Egyptian military power, controlling the Jordanian crisis of 1970, and stage-managing the termination of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war— provided both men with opportunities to manipulate the most awesome components of American power. In the 1973–1974 crisis period, as Nixon became more preoccupied with Watergate, Kissinger himself had to direct the major military as well as the political moves; and by all accounts he loved it.

F

OR NIXON AND KISSINGER THE

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THE ROGERS PLAN The Nixon administration inherited the basic dilemma of U.S. Middle Eastern policy: by guaranteeing Israel’s security against Arab aggression, the United States had driven many countries into the arms of the Soviet Union and made it more difficult for pro-U.S. regimes in the area to sustain themselves in the face of radical domestic movements. But if the United States were to reduce its support for Israel, the Arabs, with Soviet backing, might soon come to believe they could overpower the small Jewish state. Yet preventing Arab attempts to crush Israel could require U.S. countermoves that would increase the likelihood of a U.S.-Soviet military clash. Upon assuming the presidency, Nixon tried to transcend this dilemma by making the United States the active catalyst of the peace process in the Middle East. New initiatives were taken on two levels simultaneously: (1) intense U.S.-Soviet consultations designed to lock the Russians into a joint approach toward an Arab-Israeli settlement and (2) a new “evenhanded” posture toward the demands of the Israelis and the Arabs. Both were reflected in what came to be known as the Rogers Plan—the U.S. draft outline of an Arab-Israeli settlement presented by Secretary of State William P. Rogers to the Soviets for Kremlin endorsement as agreed-upon terms of reference for more specific peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt. The starting point for the proposed negotiations was UN Resolution 242, an ambiguous set of principles passed by the Security Council on November 22, 1967, that both Israel and Egypt said they accepted. Resolution 242 called for a settlement based on “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent June 1967 conflict” and “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”1 Implementation of Resolution 242 had stalled during the last fourteen months of the Johnson administration, primarily over differing interpretations of the sequence of Israeli withdrawals and the full recognition of Israel’s legitimacy by the Arabs. The Arabs, backed by Soviets, insisted on withdrawal first, then peace. The Israelis, supported at least implicitly by the United States, regarded Arab acceptance of Israeli statehood as the necessary precondition for relinquishing territories Israel conquered during the last round of the war. The two sides also disagreed over how much of the conquered territory Israel was obligated to give back.

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The most fully worked out version of the Rogers Plan,2 as presented to the Soviets on October 28, 1969, provided for indirect negotiations between Israel and Egypt and outlined the key provisions of the agreement that should ensue: (1) a timetable, to be agreed on during the negotiations, for withdrawal of Israeli forces from Egyptian territory occupied during the 1967 war; (2) a formal end to the state of war; (3) specification of the precise locations of the agreed-upon “secure borders” and the establishment of demilitarized zones; (4) freedom of navigation through the Strait of Tiran and an affirmation of its status as an international waterway; (5) nondiscriminatory navigation for the ships of all nations, including Israel, through the Suez Canal; (6) a final settlement of the Gaza Strip issue; (7) participation in a process for resolving the Palestinian refugee problem; (8) mutual recognition of each other’s sovereignty, political independence, and right to live in peace within secure boundaries free from threats of force; and (9) submission of the final document to the UN Security Council for ratification, and to the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France, which would promise to help both sides adhere to the agreement.3 But Israel flatly rejected the “attempt to impose a forced solution on her . . . [and] appease them [the Arabs] at the expense of Israel.”4 The Soviets, unable to deliver the Egyptians, also rejected the Rogers Plan. In retrospect, Nixon claimed to have known that the provisions for returning the occupied territories to the Arabs meant that the Rogers Plan had absolutely no chance of being accepted by Israel. “I knew that the Rogers Plan could never be implemented,” wrote Nixon, but I believed that it was important to let the Arab world know that the United States did not automatically dismiss its case regarding the occupied territories or rule out a compromise settlement of the conflicting claims. With the Rogers Plan on record, I thought it would be easier for the Arab leaders to propose reopening relations with the United States without coming under attack from the hawks and pro-Soviet elements in their own countries.5

THE SAM CRISIS In January 1970, the Israeli air force began to step up its raids on Egypt in retaliation for persisting Egyptian forays across the canal. Raw balance of power calculations once again dominated the Middle Eastern scene and

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the deliberations in the White House. On January 31 Nixon received what Kissinger termed the “first Soviet threat” of his administration—a letter from Premier Aleksei Kosygin stating that “we would like to tell you in all frankness that if Israel continues its adventurism, to bomb the territory of the UAR and other Arab states, the Soviet Union will be forced to see to it that the Arab states have the means at their disposal, with the help of which a due rebuff to the arrogant aggressor could be made.”6 Nixon’s reply to the threatening Kosygin letter was firm but by his own characterization “carefully low-keyed.” He warned that increased Soviet arms shipments would draw the major powers more deeply into the conflict, but also proposed U.S.-Soviet discussions on limiting arms supplies to the Middle East.7 Meanwhile, he postponed responding to Israel’s requests for new jet aircraft deliveries. But in the spring of 1970 the situation was deteriorating too rapidly both on the superpower level and on Israel’s border to be arrested by benign pleas for cooperation. In April U.S. and Israeli intelligence sources picked up signs not only that the Soviets were accelerating their deliveries of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), supersonic jets, and tanks to Egypt but also that Soviet military personnel were beginning to man some of the SAM sites and fly some of the planes. Nixon ordered a full investigation of the expanding Soviet role and quietly stepped up the flow of U.S. military supplies to Israel; but he still held back on approving delivery of the supersonic planes the Israelis now urgently demanded.8 As the situation along the Suez became more threatening to Israel, Nixon played on Israeli entreaties for a more forthcoming U.S. response to its military equipment requirements by asking the Israelis to exhibit more flexibility in their terms for a settlement. At the end of May, Prime Minister Golda Meir reiterated Israel’s acceptance of Resolution 242 and agreed that it should be the basis of indirect talks between Israel and the UAR. Washington next pressed for an Arab-Israeli cease-fire while talks between the Israelis and Egyptians were conducted under the auspices of UN special ambassador Gunnar Jarring. To overcome Israeli fears that a cease-fire would only be exploited by the Russians and Arabs to further strengthen Arab military capabilities, Nixon assured Meir that the United States would continue its arms deliveries at whatever level was needed to prevent a shift in the local balance of power; to that end, in early July he authorized the shipment of electronic countermeasure (ECM) equipment for Israeli jets to help Israel overcome the Soviet SAMs in the canal zone.9

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The Israelis were not at all pleased with these marginal and temporizing responses to their requests for decisive U.S. diplomatic and military backing. They feared the Arabs would use the cease-fire not as the Americans hoped, as a transition to a negotiated peace, but rather as additional time for completing their military buildup while forestalling delivery of a major new round of U.S. military supplies to Israel. The strongest statement of American intentions during this period came from Kissinger in a June 26 background briefing at San Clemente. “We are trying to get a settlement in such a way that the moderate regimes are strengthened, and not the radical regimes,” he told a group of newspaper editors. “We are trying to expel the Soviet military presence, not so much the advisers, but the combat pilots and combat personnel, before they become so firmly established.”10 Egypt was the first to accept the American cease-fire proposal, followed by Jordan. Israel reluctantly acquiesced during the first week of August 1970. The cease-fire was supposed to last three months and to include a military standstill in a zone thirty-two miles wide on each side of the Suez Canal. But the Israelis almost immediately began to report Egyptian violations of the truce, in the form of a continuing movement of SAM batteries into the standstill zone. U.S. reconnaissance flights soon confirmed that the Egyptians were indeed systematically introducing new missile launchers into the prohibited area. On August 22 the administration informed the Soviet Union and Egypt that it had “incontrovertible evidence” that at least fourteen missile sites had been modified between August 15 and August 27.11 Nixon now decided to sell Israel at least eighteen of the F-4 supersonic aircraft it had requested. He also ordered rush deliveries to Israel of the latest ECM equipment and conventional Shrike air-to-ground missiles so the Israeli air force could neutralize the SAMs. At least as important as the resumption of a major flow of U.S. military supplies to Israel was the impact of the Soviet-Egyptian violations of the canal zone truce on the Nixon administration’s general policy. At Kissinger’s urging and over the objections of Secretary of State Rogers, there was now a decided tilt toward the Israelis and a new sympathy for the Meir government’s reluctance to make territorial concessions in advance of public and tangible commitments from Egypt indicating plans to live in peace with the Jewish state. Nixon and Kissinger also were freshly determined to reduce Soviet influence over the Arabs and were on the lookout for opportunities to demonstrate American coercive power in the region.12

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THE JORDANIAN CRISIS An opportunity to flex America’s muscles emerged in September 1970, a month of maximum trauma for King Hussein of Jordan, friend of the United States and interlocutor for Prime Minister Golda Meir with Israel’s Arab adversaries. King Hussein was not only the most pro-Western of Arab leaders but also the most cooperative when it came to working for a compromise Arab-Israeli peace. As a consequence he was on the enemies list of the militant anti-Israelis in the region, particularly the Palestinian commando organizations that wanted to use Jordan’s western border areas as a staging ground for raids into Israel. Moreover, many of the radical Palestinians living in Jordan were determined to destroy the Hussein regime and make Jordan the center of their drive to regain the Palestinian lands controlled by Israel and to push the Jews into the sea. On September 6, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked a TWA plane and a Swissair plane and forced them to land on a airstrip in Jordan twenty-five miles from the capital, Amman. A third airliner was captured and flown to Cairo, where its passengers were unloaded just before the plane was blown up. Still another plane, a BOAC jet, was hijacked the next day and also flown to the Jordanian airstrip, giving the PFLP a total of 475 hostages, many of them Americans, in Jordan. The hijackers threatened to blow up the three planes with their passengers aboard unless all Palestinian and pro-Palestinian prisoners in Israel, West Germany, Britain, and Switzerland were released. Beyond this ostensible purpose, the PFLP motive seemed to be to humiliate the Jordanian monarchy, paving the way for a Palestinian takeover of the government in Amman. King Hussein was in a double bind: if he failed to move decisively, the Jordanian army might take matters into its own hands, thereby undercutting his authority. Yet he was reluctant to order the army to storm the airstrip, apparently not so much out of fear that the hostages would be killed as out of anxiety that Syria or Iraq might move forces into Jordan on behalf of the Palestinians.13 Hussein’s dilemma, however, meshed with Nixon’s determination to show resolve and to inject the United States more directly into the Middle East as a counter to the increasing Soviet involvement. United States paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division were placed on semi-alert status; a fleet of C-130 air transports was dispatched to Turkey under an escort of F-4 jet fighters for possible use in evacuating the Americans from Jordan;

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and units of the Mediterranean Sixth Fleet were ordered to sail toward the coasts of Israel and Lebanon. On September 12, six days after the hijackings began, the PFLP transferred the hostages to some of their camps and blew up the three empty planes. In exchange for an Israeli agreement to release 450 Palestinian prisoners, the hijackers began releasing the hostages but continued to hold 55 Jewish passengers.14 Three days later what had started out as an extortionary ploy exploded into a raging international crisis with the risk of a direct U.S.-Soviet clash. While holding the hostages in the desert, the PFLP stepped up terrorist attacks against the royal forces. On September 15 the king replaced his civilian officials with a military government, signaling his decision to move in force against the guerrilla strongholds. Jordan was now in a state of civil war. The immediate question in Washington was whether Syria and Iraq would intervene. The intelligence community tended to discount the likelihood of such intervention, but Nixon spoke and acted as if he considered it imminent. On September 16, in an off the record briefing to a group of midwestern newspaper editors, he said that the United States might have to intervene if Syria or Iraq threatened Hussein. The Chicago Sun Times published some of the president’s remarks and, surprisingly, was complimented by Nixon for breaking the ground rules. Clearly, Nixon wanted his implied warning to be picked up not only in Arab capitals but also in Moscow. Similar intense concern and hints of U.S. involvement were expressed by Kissinger and Under Secretary of State Joseph Sisco in background briefings that the press could attribute to “administration officials.”15 The verbal signaling was underscored by a set of military decisions: The aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy was ordered into the Mediterranean and the helicopter carrier Guam, loaded with 1,500 marines, dispatched from Norfolk, Virginia, in the direction of the Middle East. Nixon also authorized half a billion dollars in military aid for Israel and an acceleration of fighter aircraft deliveries.16 “We would not allow Hussein to be overthrown by a Soviet-inspired insurrection,” Nixon recollected in his memoir. “If it succeeded, the entire Middle East might erupt in war; the Israelis would almost certainly take pre-emptive measures against a Syrian-dominated radical government in Jordan; the Egyptians were tied to Syria by military alliances; and Soviet prestige was on the line. . . . The possibility of a direct U.S.-Soviet confrontation was uncomfortably high. It was like a ghastly game of dominoes, with a nuclear war waiting at the end.”17

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On September 18 Kissinger was informed by both the Israeli ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Jordanian ambassador, Abdul Hamid Sharaf, that Syrian tanks had crossed into Jordan and were headed toward the city of Irbid. Kissinger had Sisco check with the Russians, who offered their assurances that the Syrians had not invaded Jordan. And the State Department received a communication from Moscow telling of the Kremlin’s efforts to prevent any outside intervention by Jordan’s neighbors. The next day the White House received firmer evidence that the Syrians had indeed invaded, and it was not a small probe. Some hundreds of tanks were now rolling toward Irbid. Kissinger is reported to have been furious at the Soviets for attempting to deceive him and the president. The Kremlin must have been aware of what was happening and perhaps had even urged the Syrians on, for Syrian tank units were known to have Soviet military advisers. Kissinger reported on the fast-breaking crisis to the president and recommended an alert of American forces. Nixon agreed and ordered a selective alert of American troops in the United States and Western Europe. The Sixth Fleet was also augmented, and the ships with marine corps fighting units aboard steamed ominously toward the coasts of Israel and Lebanon. These military moves were coupled with U.S. warnings to the Russians that if the Syrians did not withdraw from Jordan, the Israelis might intervene and the United States itself might not be able to stay out.18 On September 20 and 21, the Syrians continued to pour military forces into Jordan. Either the U.S. countermoves had not registered or Damascus, with Moscow’s backing, had determined the Americans were bluffing. But in truth Nixon and Kissinger were deadly serious. Additional U.S. military forces in Germany were placed on alert, and transport planes were readied to airlift them to the Middle East. The augmented Sixth Fleet moved in closer. As an indicator of U.S.-Israeli coordination, a small U.S. intelligence aircraft flew back and forth between the advance naval units and Tel Aviv, with the USSR obviously watching. Finally, on September 22, emboldened by confidence that Israel would indeed join the battle and would be backed by the United States, Hussein threw his own ground and air forces fully against the Syrians. The crisis suddenly broke. Syrian tanks turned around and moved back toward Syria.19 Triumphant, Nixon flew to Rome a few days later and spent a night on the aircraft carrier Saratoga in the Mediterranean to symbolize his renewed pride in the potency of American military power as a diplomatic instrument.

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THE YOM KIPPUR WAR From the fall of 1970 until October 1973, the administration’s bedrock assumption was that war was a wholly unattractive alternative to the Egyptians as long as Israel maintained effective superiority and there was a good prospect that it would return the occupied territories as a result of international political pressure. Egypt and Syria might threaten war from time to time, but this was only a ploy to intensify the international pressure on Israel to make concessions. The premises may have been correct; but even so, they begged the question of how Egypt might assess the pertinent military balance at any time, which would include its judgments about the willingness of other countries to come to the aid of the belligerents in case of war. They also left as a variable the degree of Egyptian optimism concerning Israel’s willingness to part with territory. In the final analysis the probability of a new Mideast war was to a large extent determined by highly subjective Egyptian judgments that could shift in response to the dynamic political and military situation. Another potentially unstable variable was Soviet policy. Kissinger and Nixon, however, assumed the Soviets were firmly opposed to a new round of war between Arabs and Israelis. The Kremlin might still be attempting to gain influence among the Arabs from a no-war-no-peace situation, but a hot war could draw in the USSR and the United States on opposite sides, and this might spell the end of their détente begun in 1972. Brezhnev was thought to have too much at stake in détente to put it at risk on behalf of his Middle Eastern clients. As the military supplier of Egypt and Syria, he was in a position to pull in the reins on any reckless action they might contemplate. The possibility that Soviet policy might be catalyzed by indigenous Middle Eastern factors rather than the other way around was presumably discounted in the White House. Thus, the general orientation of those at the highest levels of the U.S. government was responsible for the misreading and underweighting of a series of specific developments—of which U.S. intelligence agencies were cognizant—that in retrospect look like inexorable moves toward the October 1973 war:20 t
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for releasing the hostages Austria close some facilities it had made available to transiting Jewish emigrés—might retaliate by attacking Palestinian camps throughout the Arab Middle East. This, Kissinger feared, could set off a cycle of violence that could expand quickly into all-out war; and he warned the Israeli ambassador of the consequences. As reports poured in on the intense military posturing now being undertaken by the potential belligerents, Kissinger feared above all a major Israeli preemptive strike, in the mode of its lightning raids at the outset of the 1967 war, to hobble the Syrian and Egyptian war machines; but Israeli officials assured him they were not going to strike first this time. The secretary of state still refused to believe that Egypt and its allies might be planning to start a war as a deliberate act of policy. Even when Kissinger was informed on the night of October 4 that Soviet dependents were being evacuated from Cairo and Damascus, he interpreted this as perhaps another indication of difficulties between the Soviets and their Arab hosts. His intelligence advisers, while disagreeing with this interpretation, still were not ready to predict war. During the 48 hours preceding hostilities, with evidence from various sources confirming that the Syrian and Egyptian forward armored units were swinging into offensive formations, Kissinger received further assurances by telephone from Foreign Minister Abba Eban that Israel would not preempt. The American ambassador to Israel, Kenneth Keating, allegedly underscored Kissinger’s views in warning his hosts that only if there was irrefutable proof that the Arabs were the aggressors would the United States consider itself morally obligated to help the Israelis.21 In his memoirs Kissinger denies the allegation by Golda Meir among others that the United States brought great pressure against the Israelis not to preempt in October 1973. He admits having expressed the view in years past to Israeli officials that U.S. support would be impaired if Israel struck first. But as the Yom Kippur War approached, insists Kissinger, all the statements forswearing preemption were initiated by the Israelis themselves.22 Regardless of the exact nature of the intense conversations between American and Israeli officials on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Meir evidently believed that if Israel struck a preemptive blow, it would have to fight alone; and therefore, against the advice of Israel’s military chief of staff, she decided to allow her country to accept the first blows. The Arabs struck massively and simultaneously from Syria in the north and Egypt in the south on Yom Kippur morning, October 6, while

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many Israelis were attending religious services. It was a well-planned, wellcoordinated, and efficiently executed attack. The immediate physical losses suffered by Israel for letting the Arabs strike first were large; but Israel’s ultimate gain was presumably of larger significance: namely, a clear moral claim on the United States for support of Israel as a victim of aggression. As it turned out, however, this moral claim had less currency in the White House than the Israelis had been led to believe. The U.S. leaders, as should have been expected, would always put their own priorities first, and the resumption of hostilities once again made it plain that these were (1) to avoid a major war between the United States and the Soviet Union; (2) to ensure the survival of Israel (whatever Nixon’s and Kissinger’s private views, they knew that it would be political suicide to allow Israel to be destroyed); (3) to prevent the Soviet Union from exploiting the conflict to enlarge its influence in the Middle East; and (4) to conduct U.S. diplomacy in the region in such a way as to enhance the regional and global prestige of the United States and to increase domestic support for the Nixon administration. None of these interests required unequivocal U.S. support for Israel’s war aims or the underwriting of its military strategy. Rather, Nixon and Kissinger, in assessing the new situation brought about by the onset of war, seemed—to the shock and dismay of the Israelis—to be moving back to the evenhanded approach they had flirted with prior to the 1970 Jordanian crisis. The White House made no public condemnation during the 1973 war of either the Arabs or the Soviet Union. Kissinger articulated the objectives of U.S. crisis diplomacy as “first, to end hostilities as quickly as possible—but secondly, to end hostilities in a manner that would enable us to make a major contribution to removing the conditions that have produced four wars between Arabs and Israelis in the last 25 years.”23 Kissinger operated under the assumption—not publicly articulated— that these objectives could not be attained if either side achieved a clear military victory in the hostilities. It was Kissinger’s adoption of this assumption, particularly where it looked as if the Israelis might be attempting to conquer more territory than they obtained in 1967, that made him look anti-Israeli to many Israelis and their friends—not to mention the reputation he had gained with many Americans for perfidy and duplicity. Indeed, much of Kissinger’s most controversial behavior—his procrastination in moving military supplies to Israel, the timing of his demands for a cease-fire in place, and especially his pressures on the Israelis to free the

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surrounded Egyptian Third Army—would seem fickle, if not irrational, without this premise.24 The most detailed account (other than Kissinger’s own) of the considerations Kissinger brought to bear on the crucial decisions of the U.S. government during the 1973 war is provided by William Quandt. A member of the National Security Council (NSC) staff, Quandt attended most of the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG) meetings that Kissinger used as the basic sounding board for exploring and choosing among his options. According to Quandt, at the outbreak of hostilities Kissinger expected a short war in which Israel would prevail. He was worried, however, that if the Israelis once again began to humiliate the Arabs, the Soviets would find it difficult to stay out. Urgent diplomatic initiatives therefore were required to ensure that a cease-fire was reestablished on the basis of the territorial status quo prevailing before October 6. The cooperation of the Soviets would be essential in getting the Arabs to return to the status quo ante, so it was of vital importance that the Soviets understand that the United States would not countenance any new Israeli territorial expansion. Accordingly, Nixon sent Brezhnev a letter urging mutual restraint and the convening of the UN Security Council, while Kissinger pressed the case with his counterparts in the Soviet Union, Egypt, and Israel for a ceasefire based on the status quo ante. Otherwise, the United States kept a low profile during the first few days of the war. Egypt and Syria, with major military units still in the territory they wished to reconquer, were not ready to accede to the cease-fire proposal. Kissinger was confident that once the tide of battle turned against the Arabs they would change their tune, especially if Israel began to cross the canal into Egypt and move beyond the Golan Heights in Syria. Between the third and sixth days of the war, the WSAG’s assessments of the military prospects changed. Israel was finding it difficult to turn back the Arab assault. Suffering heavy losses of aircraft, the Israelis urgently appealed for more American arms and were informed that additional shipments had been approved, including a number of Phantom jets that would soon be on their way. It became impossible to ascertain who was gaining the upper hand as the Israelis launched a smashing counteroffensive on the Syrian front and began bombing Damascus. Assad and Sadat were putting great pressure on King Hussein of Jordan to open up a third front against Israel. Kissinger’s response to the rapidly developing military situation was to call for a cease-fire in place. Golda Meir immediately refused this revised

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proposal, insisting that any cease-fire must be tied to the restoration of the territorial dispositions prevailing before Yom Kippur. Sadat was cool to the Kissinger proposal, demanding concrete Israeli commitments to relinquish all land captured in 1967 as the condition for a cease-fire. The Soviets, while not rejecting the cease-fire and indicating willingness to cooperate with the United States on the diplomatic front, now began a major airlift of arms to the Syrians. The Israelis pressed their case for accelerated U.S. arms deliveries with greater persistence. Kissinger blamed the Defense Department for the sluggish implementation of the arms resupply effort. The temporizing on the Israeli arms request was consistent, however, with the Kissinger strategy of not having the United States emerge as Israel’s ally in opposition to the Arabs and pressuring the Israelis to accept a cease-fire in place.25 Meanwhile, the shifting fortunes of the belligerents in the war itself were producing a shift in their attitudes toward a cease-fire in place. To the Israelis, who were once again on the military offensive and hopeful of more than regaining their lost ground, the idea began to look more attractive, especially if its actual implementation could be delayed for a few days, while to the Arabs it began to look more and more like a trap. On October 12 the Israeli government, still bargaining hard for maximum assurances of American arms supplies, accepted the principle of a cease-fire in place. Now Sadat was unequivocally opposed. Kissinger and Nixon, frustrated by the Egyptian leader’s rejection of a cease-fire in place, suspecting that the Soviets were encouraging him to dig in his heels, and feeling the need to counter the Soviet airlift of supplies to Syria, were determined to change the Soviet-Arab calculations of gains from allowing the war to continue. Nixon authorized an acceleration and expansion of the delivery of Phantoms and ordered the U.S. military to fly the aircraft and other equipment directly into Israel. The principal purpose was to demonstrate to Sadat and the Kremlin that any prolongation of the war could not possibly operate to the military advantage of the Arabs—despite the flow of Soviet arms, which the United States could easily match. Nor could it be to their political advantage, for it would make it more difficult for the United States to convince Israeli hawks that the Arabs were sincerely interested in an equitable peace. A collateral purpose undoubtedly was to show the Russians, once again, that they would only be embarrassed if they attempted unilaterally to change the balance of military power in the Middle East.

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With the American airlift under way, the Israelis launched into a climactic hard-driving offensive on both fronts. The Syrians were decisively thrown off the Golan Heights and pushed back along the Damascus road. To the south the Israeli troops crossed over to the west bank of the Suez Canal in a maneuver designed to encircle the Egyptian troops still in the Sinai peninsula and cut off their line of retreat back over the canal into Egypt. In a matter of days, Israel was decisively in control of the military situation around its extended borders. Now the Soviets sent out anxious calls for a cease-fire. Brezhnev invited Kissinger to come to Moscow for “urgent consultations.” The moment for a cease-fire might have arrived. Kissinger’s premise that it would be counterproductive for the Israelis to humiliate the Arabs had not altered. He left for Moscow on October 20 with his bargaining position strengthened by a presidential request to Congress for $2.2 billion in emergency military aid for Israel. En route to Moscow, Kissinger received the news of the momentous Saudi Arabian decision to embargo oil shipments to the United States. Not only were the relative bargaining weights on each side of the Arab-Israeli conflict changed thereby, but as Kissinger was to discover in the months and years ahead, so was the overall world power equation out of which Kissinger had fashioned his realpolitik concepts. The Kissinger-Brezhnev meeting in Moscow on October 21 produced an agreed-upon superpower approach to an Arab-Israeli truce: a cease-fire resolution to be presented to the UN Security Council that would call for a simple cease-fire in place and negotiations between the parties; and an eventual peace conference, to be chaired by both the United States and the Soviet Union. In effect, the superpowers were agreeing to act jointly to compel their respective clients to stop the fighting. Despite the Israeli government’s protest that it was not adequately consulted, the United States joined the Soviet Union in presenting their agreed-upon text of a cease-fire resolution to the United Nations the very next morning. And after less than three hours’ deliberation by the Security Council, Resolution 338 was adopted by a vote of 14 to 0 (China did not vote). The October 22 resolution was a brief but specific statement: The Security Council: 1. Calls upon all parties to the present fighting to cease all firing and terminate all military activity immediately, no later than 12 hours after the moment of the adoption of this decision, in the positions they now occupy;

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2. Calls upon the parties concerned to start immediately after the ceasefire the implementation of Security Council resolution 242 (1967) in all of its parts; 3. Decides that, immediately and concurrently with the cease-fire, negotiations start between the parties concerned under appropriate auspices aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.26

The parties stopped shooting six hours after the Security Council passed its resolution, but not without some arm-twisting by both superpowers. Neither Israel nor Egypt was in a position to object too strongly. Israel was now in military control of more territory than before the war started and was in a strong bargaining position. Egypt was reeling from the Israeli counteroffensive and would probably lose even more ground if a ceasefire were delayed any longer. Syria, too, recognized the new realities and accepted the cease-fire the next day. Almost immediately after the formal cessation, however, there were charges and countercharges of violations of the truce. Who was responsible was of less concern to Kissinger, however, than the fact that the Israelis were exploiting the opportunity to extend their presence on the Egyptian side of the canal, putting them in a position to capture the city of Suez and completely encircle the 100,000-man Egyptian Third Army Corps. The new Israeli military thrusts and their noose-tightening around the Egyptian Third Army precipitated a new crisis for Kissinger as the Soviets indicated an intention to intervene directly with their own forces to enforce the cease-fire. Kissinger’s response—one of the most daring of his career—was to threaten counteraction against both the Israelis and the Soviets. He would show the Russians that the United States could yet control the Israelis and that therefore Soviet intervention was unnecessary to prevent total humiliation of the Arabs; and he would show the Israelis (and the rest of the world) that the United States still had the will and the power to deter a direct Soviet intervention, but only if the Israelis themselves acted with reasonable restraint. Kissinger’s reasons for insisting on Israeli restraint went beyond the imperative of preventing Soviet intervention. Now, with the Arab oil embargo in effect, it was more than ever important for the United States to demonstrate the capacity to separate itself from the more extreme Israeli actions and to act as an honest broker in the region on behalf of an equitable peace. Accordingly, Kissinger had resolved to at least prevent the Israelis from strangling the Egyptian Third Army Corps, even before the Soviets

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threatened to intervene.27 After the Soviet intervention had been deterred, Kissinger insisted that at a minimum, the Israelis permit humanitarian convoys of food, water, and medical supplies to the surrounded Egyptian soldiers. He hinted that if the Israelis attempted to prevent this, the United States would itself convoy the supplies and threatened to vote in favor of an anti-Israeli resolution the Arabs had introduced in the UN Security Council. Still the Israelis were not about to give up their advantage. The impasse was finally overcome by Sadat’s acceptance of direct military talks between Israeli and Egyptian generals at kilometer 101 on the Cairo-Suez road to implement the UN cease-fire/disengagement resolution—this in exchange for Israel’s permission for a nonmilitary convoy to bring supplies to the Egyptian Third Army under UN and Red Cross supervision.28 The threat of Soviet intervention had emerged obliquely. On October 24 President Sadat appealed to the United States and the Soviet Union to send a joint U.S.-Soviet peacekeeping force to police the cease-fire. Kissinger immediately rejected the idea. Soviet troops in the Middle East could only spell additional trouble, with or without a U.S. counterpresence. That night Ambassador Dobrynin phoned Kissinger with a “very urgent” message from Secretary General Brezhnev to President Nixon—so urgent, said Dobrynin, that he must read it over the phone to Kissinger. “Let us act together,” said Brezhnev, and “urgently dispatch Soviet and American contingents to Egypt” in order to “compel the observance of the ceasefire without delay.” The Soviet leader also went beyond the Sadat proposal with a threat that Nixon later described as the most serious to U.S.-Soviet relations since the Cuban missile crisis: “I will say it straight,” Brezhnev warned, “that if you find it impossible to act together with us in this matter, we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally. Israel cannot be allowed to get away with the violations.”29 U.S. intelligence agencies meanwhile were picking up signs of Soviet military movements—“a plethora of indicators,” according to Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, that Soviet airborne divisions in the southern USSR and Hungary had been placed on alert. More Soviet ships had entered the Mediterranean, and some unconfirmed reports suggested that they might be carrying nuclear warheads for the missiles sent to Egypt earlier in the year.30 While unsure of what the Soviets were really up to—was it a symbolic show of resolve? a bluff? an actual deployment of major military units?— Kissinger acted swiftly to put the Kremlin on notice that any unilateral

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introduction of Soviet military force into the area at this time would risk a dangerous confrontation with the United States. A toughly worded presidential rejection of Brezhnev’s proposals and demands was conveyed to the Kremlin. U.S. forces around the world were put on an intermediate DEFCON (defense condition) level, bringing the Strategic Air Command and other units to a higher than normal state of readiness. The 82nd Airborne Division was prepared for possible dispatch. And the aircraft carriers Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were ordered to move to the eastern Mediterranean. The administration’s momentous decisions on the night of October 24–25, involving the possibility of a direct military clash between the two superpowers, were made by Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, and other nonelected officials of the U.S. government. The president, emotionally consumed by the Watergate investigations, was indisposed or sleeping, and the office of vice president, in the interregnum between Spiro Agnew’s resignation and Gerald Ford’s confirmation by the Senate, was vacant. (Kissinger asked General Alexander Haig at 9:50 p.m. whether the President should have been awakened. The answer was negative: “Haig thought the President too distraught. . . . From my own conversation with Nixon earlier in the evening, I was convinced Haig was right.”)31 Kissinger, functioning also in his capacity as presidential assistant for national security affairs, convened the WSAG to deliberate with him and Schlesinger in the White House Situation Room between 10:40 p.m. and 2 a.m. and to provide top-level unanimity for decisions taken in the president’s name. The attendees included the director of the CIA William Colby; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer; presidential chief of staff Alexander Haig; deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs Brent Scowcroft; and Kissinger’s military assistant at the NSC, Commander John T. Howe. But for the absence of the president and vice president, the group comprised the full statutory membership of the NSC. In chairing this crisis management group and making the key force-deployment and diplomatic decisions, Kissinger was in effect acting president. “It was a daunting responsibility to assume,” he recalls.32 President Nixon’s message to Brezhnev (which Nixon himself did not see until after it was sent) expressed some openness to the idea of having some American and Soviet noncombat personnel go into the area as part of an augmented UN observation team, but it categorically rejected

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“your proposal for a particular kind of action, that of sending Soviet and American military contingents to Egypt.” It is clear, said the presidential reply, “that the forces necessary to impose the cease-fire terms on the two sides would be massive and would require the closest coordination so as to avoid bloodshed. This is not only clearly infeasible, but it is not appropriate to the situation.” Moreover, “you must know . . . that we could in no event accept unilateral action. . . . Such action would produce incalculable consequences which would be in the interest of neither of our countries and which would end all we have striven so hard to achieve.”33 In his October 25 press conference, Kissinger insisted that “we do not consider ourselves in a confrontation with the Soviet Union. We do not believe it is necessary, at this moment, to have a confrontation. In fact, we are prepared to work cooperatively [with them]. . . . But cooperative action precludes unilateral action, and the President decided that it was essential that we make clear our attitude toward unilateral steps.”34 CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb asked the secretary of state whether the American alert might have been prompted as much by American domestic requirements as by the diplomatic requirements of the Middle Eastern situation—implying that the Nixon administration, reeling from the Watergate affair, needed its own “missile crisis” to reestablish its prestige with the American electorate. Kissinger’s response was angry and defensive: “We are attempting to conduct the foreign policy of the United States with regard for what we owe not to the electorate but to future generations. And it is a symptom of what is happening in our country that it could even be suggested that the United States would alert its forces for domestic reasons.” He was absolutely confident, said Kissinger, that when the record was finally made available it would show that “the President had no other choice as a responsible national leader.”35 An hour after Kissinger’s press conference, the Soviet Union joined the United States and the other members of the Security Council in voting affirmatively for Resolution 340, demanding an immediate and complete cease-fire and a return to the positions occupied by the belligerents prior to the recent round of violations, and setting up a UN emergency force composed of nonpermanent members of the Security Council (thus excluding the USSR and the United States) to oversee the cease-fire.36 The guns fell silent on the Middle Eastern battlefields, and an intricate set of negotiations commenced to separate the forces, return prisoners of war, establish enforceable truce zones, and begin the long process toward an agreed-upon settlement of the underlying Arab-Israeli conflict.

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Historians will long debate whether Kissinger played his cards with consummate skill or whether he (and the world) were miraculously lucky to have avoided World War III. Kissinger did, however, establish convincingly that he was neither pro-Israeli nor pro-Arab but genuinely of the conviction that vital U.S. interests required a durable Middle Eastern peace and that this had to be based on specific political arrangements acceptable to all parties plus a local military equilibrium. This now-secured reputation served him well in the activist-mediator role that became the essence of his subsequent Middle East diplomacy.

KISSINGER’S NEW MIDDLE EAST DIPLOMACY The brink of war, like the hangman’s noose, concentrates the statesman’s mind. Out of his practical experience in terminating the 1973 war, more than out of his realpolitik concepts, Kissinger finally put together a sophisticated Middle East policy for the United States that corresponded more closely to the complexity and volatility of the area than the administration’s diplomacy following the Jordan crisis. The code term for Kissinger’s new Middle East diplomacy became “step by step”—a reference to Kissinger’s method of (1) getting Egypt and Israel to disengage their forces in January 1974 from the dangerous overlapping dispositions in which they were left at the cease-fire the previous October; (2) getting Syria and Israel to reestablish a narrow demilitarized buffer zone between them in May 1974; and (3) getting Egypt and Israel to agree in September 1975 to the so-called Sinai II disengagement, which provided for the first substantial relinquishment by Israel of part of the territory it had conquered in the 1967 war (a thick demilitarized buffer zone comprising most of the relinquished territory, now to be policed by the United Nations and a special observer team of U.S. civilians) and some limited Egyptian indicators of Israel’s legitimacy, such as the allowance of nonmilitary cargoes bound for Israel to pass through the Suez Canal. The step-by-step method separated tangible specific issues, on which there were incentives to achieve immediate agreement, from the larger issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which still generated high emotion on both sides. Rather than being asked to agree on a comprehensive set of principles for the settlement at the end of the road as the basis for the immediate specific negotiations, the parties would be induced to start down the road without an agreed-upon picture of their destination any

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more specific than the highly ambiguous UN Resolution 242. The process of working out an agreement, even on relatively minor matters, would have a salutary effect on the negotiating climate farther down the road. At every step, vested interests would be built up on each side who would not want to see the disintegration of what had already been achieved and therefore would act as a voice of moderation, possibly a peace lobby, for that side. The step-by-step approach, however, could not be sustained for long if either side began to regard it as a ruse to prevent the attainment of highly valued objectives. This, indeed, soon emerged as a large problem for Sadat, who had to defend himself against militants in his own country and throughout the Arab world—especially against the Palestinians, who charged that he was selling out the goal of regaining the lost Arab territories in order to buy peace with Israel and the goodwill of the United States. As time went on, therefore, Kissinger was compelled to increase his pressure on the Israelis to make sufficiently meaningful concessions for Sadat to be able to demonstrate to his militant critics that substantial and rapid progress was being made toward the main Arab goal. Another feature of the matured Kissinger diplomacy was to treat the Arab world not as “the other side” in the Arab-Israeli conflict but as a highly differentiated set of countries with which it was more productive to deal bilaterally on most issues, including relations with Israel. Even categorizing them into moderates and militants was too neat; and acting as if such a division were valid might mean neglecting opportunities for the United States to build special lines of influence with each of the countries. Thus, Syria and Iraq, the leaders of the so-called militants, had their own historical enmities and divergent attitudes toward the Christian-Muslim conflict in Lebanon; and Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, leaders of the so-called moderates, had played vastly different parts in the Cold War, with Egypt becoming a Soviet client and maintaining a professedly “progressive” regime while the Jordanian and Saudi monarchies built their armed forces around American-supplied equipment. Then again, Saudi Arabia, which along with Iran was a dominant force in the oil producer cartel, was in a different class from Egypt and Jordan when it came to bargaining with the United States and other industrialized countries. Moreover, each of these countries had its own problems with displaced Palestinians and a different set of preferences and priorities when it came to the demands of the various Palestinian guerrilla organizations against Israel. Of course, if U.S. bilateral diplomacy were conducted crudely, the various Arab countries might see it as a divide-and-rule policy designed to

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advance Israeli interests and might join to present a united front even if such unity would contradict important national interests. Even the subtle Kissinger found it impossible to sustain the bilateral approach, which involved frequent “shuttling” between the principal Middle Eastern capitals, without creating suspicion that he was playing off one country against another. To mollify such suspicions, especially near the end of his tenure, he began to weave a tangle of complicated reassurances, often in the form of promises of special economic and military-supply relationships, not all of which were likely to be backed up by Congress and some of which required him to make compensatory promises to Israel. A corollary to the strategy of building multiple relationships in the Middle East was a somewhat more relaxed attitude toward the Soviet role in the region that Kissinger had shown when he promised to “expel” the Soviets from Egypt. If it was now deemed counterproductive to polarize the Arabs into moderate and militant camps, it was even more disadvantageous from a global geopolitical perspective to overlay this with pro-Soviet and pro-U.S. groupings. This simply would give the Russians too many automatic clients. It should not be because of U.S. policy that countries ran to the arms of the Soviet Union or were reluctant to come to the United States to satisfy needs that were not adequately attended to by the Russians. The evolution of Sadat’s policy should serve as a model: let events run their natural course and Arab nationalism would assert itself against Soviet imperialism. The process might not take this course, however, if the United States acted as if it were illegitimate for Middle Eastern countries to have “peace and friendship” treaties or client-patron relationships with the USSR, or as if in order to build a relationship with the United States one must renounce relations with Moscow; for such an uncompromising U.S. policy would itself cut against the grain of local nationalism and pride and might only further alienate some of these countries from the United States. The more permissive U.S. attitude toward a Soviet Middle Eastern presence, however, might have its own pitfalls, particularly where the easiest way for the Russians to get a local foothold was through supplying military equipment. Increased flows of Soviet arms into the area might produce adverse shifts in the local power balance that the United States might need to counter by further military buildups of Israel or other primary U.S. clients. Thus, what started out as a relaxed approach might result in a new spiral of competitive arming of military clients and even a rigid repolarization of the area.

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In short, the new Kissinger strategy of defusing immediately combustible situations and weaving a web of positive relations with virtually all states in the region (regardless of their attitudes toward Israel) might not be sufficient to (1) prevent the expansion of Soviet imperialism in the Middle East, (2) reduce the prospects of a war between the superpowers starting in the region, and (3) ensure the continued survival of Israel. Moreover, the strategy could boomerang, resulting in another Arab-Israeli war with higher levels of armaments on both sides and with the Soviets more ensconced in the area than ever; and unless in the interim the industrial world substantially reversed its growing dependence on Middle Eastern oil, the United States, Western Europe, and Japan might be severely divided among themselves and troubled by internal political dissention over the costs and risks of coming to Israel’s assistance during its period of maximum peril. Kissinger must have known, on the basis of his past historical studies and his baptism in the fire of Middle Eastern politics, that symptomatic firefighting and step-by-step conflict-resolution techniques were only surface ameliorants. If any region in the world required a “structure of peace” to prevent events there from severely undermining U.S. external security and internal stability, it was the Middle East. Kissinger had reestablished American competence in the area, but something more was required. Perhaps he had a grand design, some architecture, a “vision”; but this remained unarticulated and could not be inferred from his behavior.

14

THE ANACHRONISM OF CONSERVATIVE REALPOLITIK In each period there exist anachronisms, states which appear backward and even decadent to those who fail to realize they are dealing with the most tenacious remnant of a disintegrating world order. —Henry A. Kissinger

HE EVOLUTION OF U.S. CRISIS diplomacy in the Middle East from 1969 to 1975 reflected the more general metamorphosis in U.S. foreign policy over which Henry Kissinger presided. What was once viewed as a protracted conflict between the forces of radicalism, revolution, and chaos (exploited by the Soviet Union) and the forces of moderation, stability, and order (led by the United States) showed itself to be a more complicated and many-sided interaction of ideological and material forces in which the natural and most effective role of the United States might often be that of sponsor of progressive reform. Similarly, the traditional stabilizing mechanism available to those who wanted to preserve the status quo—an advantageous balance of military power—was often insufficient for containing the forces of chaos and frequently inappropriate as a means through which the United States could exert influence on the side of constructive change. The metamorphosis in U.S. policy was hardly smooth, however, and often found the Nixon and Ford administrations falling back on conservative realpolitik concepts and stances. Nixon and Kissinger discounted the humanitarian and moral implications of Pakistani President Yahya Khan’s brutal suppression of the Bangladesh independence movement in 1971. They stressed rather the “illegitimacy” of India’s reactive intervention and attempt to “dismember”

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the sovereign state of Pakistan. Reversing the standing U.S. policy of scrupulously avoiding taking sides in India-Pakistan conflicts, the administration aligned itself diplomatically with Pakistan in the Bangladesh conflict, threatened to call off the Nixon-Brezhnev summit scheduled for the spring of 1972 if the Kremlin did not put restraining pressure on India, and dispatched a U.S. Marines intervention task force, ostentatiously escorted by the nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise, into the Bay of Bengal. This was a symbolic show of force, apparently with no real intention to directly participate in the fight. The administration was most worried that a decisive Indian victory over Pakistan (China’s diplomatic ally in its own border conflicts with India), with the United States standing idly by, would destabilize the Asian balance of power and might cause China to reconsider its opening to the United States. As it turned out, the Indians prevailed in effecting the separation of Bangladesh from east Pakistan despite the U.S. action. Nevertheless, Nixon and Kissinger claimed success in deterring India from pressing its advantage to the point of militarily attacking west Pakistan and occupying Pakistani-claimed areas of Kashmir.1 In authorizing covert CIA programs to support Chilean opponents of the Marxist government of Salvador Allende Gossens and implicating the United States indirectly in the violent military ouster and death of Allende in September 1973 (Kissinger denies allegations of active U.S. government complicity in or encouragement of the coup), Nixon and Kissinger re-embraced the ideological anticommunist definitions of U.S. interests that they claimed to be discarding in the “structure of peace” concepts. Kissinger himself had previously ridiculed claims by the U.S. military that Chile had vital strategic importance and is reputed to be the originator of the quip that a communist Chile would be a dagger pointed at the heart of Tierra del Fuego. But now he argued that “if Chile had followed the Cuban pattern, communist ideology would in time have been supported by Soviet forces and Soviet arms in the southern core of the South American continent.”2 Kissinger’s policy of politically quarantining Portugal—of acting as if that country had a contagious disease during the seventeen months of political turmoil following the April 1974 reformist coup in Lisbon—had the ostensible geopolitical rationale of insulating NATO military organs, especially the Nuclear Planning Group, from possible subversion by Portuguese leftists. The ruling cabinet of the provisional government, although led by a popular general and a prominent liberal, included two leaders of the Portuguese Communist Party as well as several Socialists. Actually, it

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was rather easy for the NATO organization to protect its essential functions against communist subversion by setting up special subcommittees, excluding Portugal, to deal with sensitive matters. Kissinger’s fears apparently went deeper: a communist victory in Portugal would profoundly destabilize the European equilibrium, providing the Soviet Union for the first time with a major presence in Western Europe and on the strategically located Iberian Peninsula. (The Portuguese communists, under Álvaro Cunhal, were openly pro-Soviet and not part of the liberalizing “Eurocommunist” movement.) Accordingly, as the communists intensified their efforts to take over the central and local governing apparatus of Portugal, Kissinger made it known that he intended to subject that country to virtually complete diplomatic and economic isolation from the West unless the Portuguese Socialists and liberals expelled the communists from official positions of influence in Lisbon. Noncommunist leaders in Portugal, the U.S. ambassador in Lisbon, and some of America’s European allies tried to dissuade Kissinger from such a coercive approach, arguing that it would only gain the communists greater sympathy among the Portuguese people. (Kissinger’s coercive diplomacy was never put to the test. Cunhal overplayed his hand by attempting a military putsch. This rash communist bid for total power was defeated by a coalition of moderate military officers and democratic Socialists, who now had sufficient grounds of their own for denying the communists important positions in the government.) Kissinger’s response to the phenomenon of “Eurocommunism” was also a product of a persisting Cold War mindset. Kissinger was mistrustful of pledges by Communist Party leaders in Italy, France, and Spain to respect freedom of expression and association and democratic political processes, including the rights of opposition parties to openly oppose a communistcontrolled government and the obligation of governments to turn over power to other parties when the electorate so decides. He regarded such pledges as a deceptive stratagem to undercut the reluctance of the noncommunist parties in Western Europe to form electoral alliances and coalition governments with the communists. Once the communists were allowed to share power, argued Kissinger, they would have no scruples about reneging on their promises and like the communists in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, would decisively suppress all opposition parties and deal brutally with anyone who cried foul. Moreover, the Western hope that once in power the European Communist parties would remain nationalist and pursue international policies distinct from those of the Soviet Union was regarded by Kissinger as a dangerously näive basis for relaxing the barriers

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to their attaining power. It would be damaging enough, from Kissinger’s viewpoint, if any of the key NATO countries turned neutralist. His strategy, therefore, was to allude openly to the international economic and political costs that would be incurred by any Western European country that turned toward communism—a drying up of foreign investments of private capital and second-class status in or expulsion from NATO—as a deterrent to any power-sharing experiments with the Eurocommunists. Kissinger’s vacillation and delay in responding to the July 1974 Greek nationalist coup in Cyprus that deposed Archbishop Makarios was perhaps attributable in part to the secretary of state’s preoccupation with the Middle East crisis and the climatic traumas of Watergate. But the fact that, when preoccupied, Kissinger gave the benefit of the doubt to the Greek military junta that engineered the coup and then remained aloof as Turkey, using U.S. arms in violation of congressional restrictions, invaded Cyprus to protect the island’s Turkish minority, was revealing of his natural, almost instinctual, biases: suspicion, even contempt, of democratic reformers and populist politicians (into which category he placed Archbishop Makarios) and faith in the reliability of decisive, militaristic, disciplined leaders such as might be found in a Greek military junta or in NATO-loyal Turkish governments. In May 1975, two weeks after the final communist takeover of Saigon, U.S. Marines stormed a Cambodian communist stronghold on Tang Island in the Gulf of Thailand to rescue the American crewmen from the freighter Mayagüez, which had been seized for penetrating what Cambodia claimed to be its territorial waters. Fighter planes from the U.S. aircraft carrier Coral Sea bombed the Cambodian mainland. By this swift use of force, Kissinger and President Ford impatiently preempted their own diplomatic initiatives through the UN and neutral channels. They found out afterward that the Cambodian government had decided to release the crew before the marine and air assault had started. If that information had been in Ford’s hands, the lives of the thirty-eight Americans who died in the operation, not to mention the larger number of Cambodians, could have been saved. But Kissinger and Ford, having just shown themselves unable to prevent the communists from attaining total military victory in Vietnam in violation of the Paris agreements of 1973, were particularly anxious to demonstrate that the United States, under their leadership, was still not to be trifled with. By seizing the Mayagüez, Cambodia provided them with the opportunity for a show of the old machismo without the risk of major war.

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THE CRISIS IN THE WORLD ECONOMIC ORDER The destabilization of international economic relations that resulted from the embargo and oil price increases imposed by oil-exporting countries in 1973 and 1974 was initially perceived and responded to by Kissinger mainly as an element in the East-West balance of power and as a critical variable in the Arab-Israeli conflict. He regarded the economic and political actions of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as serious threats worthy of his attention insofar as (1) the denial of oil to the Western industrialized nations or Japan might bring about the economic and political collapse of key members of the anticommunist alliance, and (2) the Arab members of OPEC, using such a denial threat, could coerce the industrialized nations into supporting the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The emergence of these threats in connection with the ArabIsraeli war of 1973 riveted Kissinger’s attention on the economics as well as the politics of the global energy situation and because the energy situation was now so closely linked with the overall workings of the international economy, compelled him to educate himself quickly on the structure and condition of the world economic order. (“From the start I had not expected to play a major role in international economics, which—to put it mildly— had not been a central field of study for me. Only later did I learn that the key economic policy decisions are not technical, but political.”)3 What he found significantly complicated his views on geopolitics and effected a transformation in his statesmanship. Global equilibrium, the structure of peace, the security of the United States itself—all of these depended as much on the distribution of economic power as on the distribution of military power and the pattern of political loyalties. It was therefore part of the art of high statesmanship to be able to manipulate the international economic variables, not simply as adjuncts to U.S.-Soviet détente but as elements in the very essence of international power. In this field too, in responding to crisis situations Kissinger was able to seize the reins and perform most effectively while others were confused and demoralized. During the first Nixon administration (1969–1972) the driver’s seat for U.S. foreign economic policy was usually occupied by Secretary of the Treasury John Connally or the president himself. The U.S. domestic economy was in deep trouble in 1971—“stagflation,” it was called—in ways that could have damaging effects on Nixon’s chances for reelection: Unemployment was dangerously high, simultaneously with abnormally high increases in the prices of goods and services. Labor unions in the

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United States had turned protectionist, arguing that a large part of the unemployment problem was due to the influx of foreign goods produced by cheap foreign labor, sometimes in foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinational corporations. Trade and monetary experts were alarmed at the rapidly deteriorating U.S. balance of international payments, reflecting the lag of U.S. exports behind imports and the increasing outflow of U.S. dollars in the form of overseas investments. Monetarists claimed that the dollar was highly overvalued in relation to other currencies and that this was dangerous for the health of the U.S. economy; it artificially made U.S. goods more expensive than they should be on the world market, and made foreign goods cheaper in the United States. There was growing pressure in international financial circles for the United States to devalue the dollar, but this would mean that the domestic economy would have to absorb the first shocks of the international readjustment; moreover, such talk could cause a dangerous collapse of the whole monetary system as holders of U.S. dollars—the most widely held of all currencies—rushed to cash them in for other currencies or, worse yet, demanded that the United States exchange their dollars for gold at the established price of $35 per ounce. (There was nowhere near that amount of gold in the U.S. Treasury.) Under the circumstances, argued Secretary of the Treasury Connally, the United States should insist that others in the system assume some of the burdens of making the international economy work. The West Europeans and the Japanese, having recovered from World War II to become major competitors of the United States, should no longer be babied. Speaking in Munich in May 1971, Connally bluntly told the Europeans that the United States was losing patience with the other industrialized nations, which it was still protecting in the NATO alliance, for not pulling their weight in the economic system. Questions were beginning to arise in the United States, he warned, over how the costs of NATO and other mutual security arrangements should be allocated. “I find it an impressive fact, and a depressing fact, that the persisting underlying balance of payments deficit which causes so much concern, is more than covered, year in and year out, by our net military expenditures abroad.” Financing the free world’s military shield was part of the burden of leadership that the United States should not cast off, said the Treasury Secretary, but the comfortable assumption that the United States should—in the broader political interests of the free world—be willing to bear disproportionate economic costs does not fit the facts of today.

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No longer does the U.S. economy dominate the free world. No longer can considerations of friendship, or need, or capacity justify the United States’ carrying so heavy a share of the common burdens. And, to be perfectly frank, no longer will the American people permit their government to engage in international actions in which the true longrun interests of the U.S. are not just as clearly recognized as those of the nations with which we deal.4

Ten weeks after Connally delivered this stern lecture, President Nixon announced a “new economic policy” to “blaze the trail to a new prosperity.” In addition to domestic measures to create new jobs (mainly tax breaks for industry to stimulate investment in new plants), to stimulate more consumer demand (a repeal of the 7 percent excise tax on automobiles and an increase in personal income tax deductions for dependents), and to control inflation (a temporary freeze on all wages and prices throughout the United States), Nixon ordered a set of measures designed to coerce the other industrialized nations into reconsidering their reluctance to allow the United States to openly compete with them in the international economy. On the advice of Secretary Connally, Nixon temporarily suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other international reserve assets. This technical action, dubbed by journalists as “slamming the U.S. gold window,” was taken, the president explained, to prevent the international money speculators from “waging an all-out war against the American dollar.” Also on the advice of Connally, Nixon imposed a temporary tax of 10 percent on goods imported into the United States. This action was taken, he said, “to make certain that American products will not be at a disadvantage because of unfair currency exchange rates. When the unfair treatment is ended, the import tax will end as well.” Now that the other nations had regained their vitality and had become competitors, argued Nixon, “the time has come for them to bear their fair share of defending freedom around the world” and maintaining a stable international economic order. “The time has come for exchange rates to be set straight and for the major nations to compete as equals. There is no longer any need for the United States to compete with one hand tied behind her back.”5 The European allies and Japan were shocked at Nixon’s harsh tone and uncompromising posture. Kissinger and Nixon both had criticized the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for their arrogant unilateralism on matters of concern to the alliance and had pledged a more consultative

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approach. Now Washington, without prior consultation, was not only changing key structural elements in the international monetary system but was also unilaterally imposing a special tariff (the 10 percent “import surcharge”) on goods from its trading partners—in effect, twisting their arms until they gave in to U.S. demands to revalue their currencies. The damaging effects of such coercive unilateralism to an overall system of mutual accountability among the economically advanced noncommunist countries alarmed the chairman of the Council on International Economic Policy, Peter Peterson, who implored Kissinger to intervene with Nixon against Connally’s Texan shoot-it-out style. Kissinger, although almost totally preoccupied with Vietnam and still unfamiliar with the intricacies of international economics, nonetheless weighed in on behalf of a less confrontationist approach.6 Nixon softened the U.S. position somewhat in subsequent negotiations with the Europeans and the Japanese by agreeing to devalue the U.S. dollar as the others revalued their currencies upward. The result was the agreement concluded at the December 1971 meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to realign all major currencies and subsequently allow them to “float”—that is, to have their values set by supply and demand on the world money markets within rather broad margins. Collaterally, the European Economic Community agreed to a new round of extensive trade negotiations with the United States. Japan also exhibited a cooperative attitude in implementing the “voluntary” restraints on its exports to the United States and the import barrier liberalizations it had accepted earlier in the year in exchange for U.S. cooperation in returning Okinawa. The official tone of mutual accommodation surrounding the December 1971 meeting of the IMF was capped by Nixon’s appearance at the meeting to bless what he termed “the most significant monetary agreement in the history of the world.” But this could not erase the fact that the United States had used not only economic coercion but also hints of a withdrawal of military protection to compel its allies to accede to its desires. If the international system was now to feature intense competition and coercive bargaining within the anticommunist alliance as well as EastWest rivalry, America’s partners would make their own adjustments to this new reality. Perhaps General de Gaulle was right after all, and Europe (and even Japan) would have to seek a unique role in the system that would maximize its bargaining advantages vis-à-vis both superpowers. Kissinger would reap the bitter harvest of 1971 at the conclusion of the Vietnam war two years later when he turned his attention to the disintegrating “Atlantic

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community.” The potentially disastrous geopolitical implications of the disintegrative trends would be driven home during the Yom Kippur War, when he tried to obtain allied cooperation against Arab oil blackmail and Soviet military threats. By 1973 the differences in membership and purposes between the North Atlantic security community on the one hand and the West European economic community on the other hand were prominently exposed and crucially affecting relations between the United States and Europe. With the new era of détente reducing the immediacy of the common defense purposes of NATO, the principle that everyone should do his part for the good of the whole was difficult to enforce. Those with the greatest military power did not automatically exercise the greatest authority, and conflicts within the community were harder to resolve than previously. Where nonmilitary matters were at issue—trade barriers, currency exchange rates, the terms of technological cooperation, access to energy supplies, environmental controls—there was now more opportunity for special-interest groups to press their demands on their own governments and on the deliberative assemblies and bureaucracies of the European and Atlantic communities. Even when it came to military issues, such as determining the size, composition, and strategy of NATO forces, the debates were less over how best to defend against military attack from the East than over the distribution of the economic burdens of alliance membership. Previously, when the United States had insisted that the economically thriving NATO countries provide more for their own defense and purchase military equipment from the United States to offset the U.S. balance of payment costs of American forces in Europe, it had been easier to compel agreement on the basis of the overriding imperatives of mutual security. But as the question of sharing military burdens became linked to monetary and trade issues (as it had been by Nixon and Connally in 1971), the United States found itself bargaining against a coalition of European countries in NATO.7 Against this background Kissinger proclaimed the “Year of Europe” in an address before the Associated Press editors’ meeting in New York City on April 23, 1973. The formulation was remarkably patronizing, leading French wags to complain that it was as if an inconstant husband had suddenly announced a “year of the wife.” Smarting from the insensitive and indifferent treatment they had been getting from top officials of the Nixon administration, European governments were predisposed to read the worst implications into the appeal for transatlantic cooperation, which Kissinger had meant as a sincere offer to make amends. His ringing call

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for a “new Atlantic charter” that would “strike a new balance between selfinterest and common interest, . . . identify interests and positive values beyond security in order to engage once again the commitment of people and parliaments, . . . [and set forth] a shared view of the world we seek to build” was received skeptically by the Europeans. They read his indelicately phrased observation—“The United States had global interests and responsibilities. Our European allies have regional interests”—as a reassertion of the hegemonic conceit that the United States had an obligation to consult with the Europeans only on specifically European matters but that the Europeans should consult with their superpower protector on all matters of significance. And they squirmed uncomfortably at the unintended irony of a Nixon administration official preaching to them that “we cannot hold together if each country or region asserts its autonomy whenever it is to its benefit and invokes unity to curtail the independence of others.”8 As a realist, Kissinger understood the inevitability of such tensions, given the centrifugal forces pulling the international system away from the bipolar abnormalities of the early Cold War period and back toward a more normal pattern of multiple and shifting coalitions. He was disappointed at the cool European response to his call for a new Atlantic charter but not terribly surprised. Yet he still hoped that in times of profound challenge to their common values from the Soviet Union or some other source, the NATO nations would bond together to protect Western civilization.9 He was therefore deeply dismayed at the Europeans’ failure to rally around the alliance leader in the fall of 1973, when the very fabric of society was threatened by OPEC’s quadrupling of the price of oil and by the embargo imposed by the Arabs on oil exports to Israel’s supporters. Not only did France, Britain, and Japan, conducting their own bilateral negotiations with the Arab producers, undermine Kissinger’s efforts to organize a united front of the major consumer nations to break the producer cartel, but some of the NATO countries were so anxious to disassociate themselves from actions in support of Israel that they refused to allow U.S. planes to use their bases or even to overfly their territory to transport military supplies to Israel during the 1973 war. The American secretary of state regarded such weakness in the face of Arab pressure as spineless and craven, reminiscent of the way European governments caved in to Hitler’s demands on the eve of World War II. Kissinger was able to adapt to this reality too, recognizing that the European and Japanese economies were more vulnerable to price changes and limited oil supplies than the United States and that the Europeans had

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developed considerable experience, still lacking in the United States, in diplomatic dealings with the Arabs and Third World raw material producers on such matters. He also had to recognize how little he knew about the economic side of the world energy situation, and accordingly he quickly recast his staff to give it intense study and began personally to avail himself of governmental and nongovernmental counsel on the subject. This crash self-improvement course was paralleled by a series of urgent consultations with the major oil-consuming countries and with representatives of the producer countries so that upon the termination of the Arab-Israeli war and the lifting of the oil embargo, the United States would be ready to propose a set of international rules for rational and fair commerce in this vital resource. Failure to resolve the energy problem on the basis of international cooperation, Kissinger warned, would threaten the world with a vicious cycle of competition, autarchy, rivalry, and depression such as had led to the collapse of world order in the 1930s. The basic approach to the energy problem that Kissinger would follow during the rest of his tenure as secretary of state was presented by him in broad outline to a conference of major oil-consuming countries summoned by the United States in February 1974.10 1. Conservation. Kissinger called for a “new energy ethic” designed to promote the conservation and efficient use of energy supplies by all countries. The United States, being the world’s most profligate country, bore a special responsibility in this regard, admitted Kissinger, and he pledged an expansion of crisis-stimulated conservation measures and offered to collaborate in a mutual review by the energy-consuming countries of one another’s programs. 2. Alternate fossil energy sources. Sources neglected during the era of low-cost oil now needed to be exploited—coal, of course, but also shale and offshore oil. The United States would be ready to coordinate its programs of new exploration and exploitation with the other consumer countries. 3. Research and development. The United States was prepared, said Kissinger, “to make a major contribution of its most advanced energy research and development [technologies] to a broad program of international cooperation,” including technologies to promote the use of nuclear reactors under controls to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. 4. Emergency sharing of petroleum. The most generous of the Kissinger proposals, but also the most problematic in view of likely opposition in Congress, was his offer “to share available energy in times of emergency or

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prolonged shortages. The United States would be prepared to allocate an agreed portion of our total petroleum supply provided other consuming countries with indigenous production do likewise.” 5. International financial cooperation. New international measures and above all a spirit of international responsibility were needed to cope with the accumulation of petrodollars and their “recycling” back into the consumer countries. These measures, said Kissinger, should include “steps to facilitate the fuller participation of producing nations in existing international institutions and to contribute to the urgent needs of the developing countries.” As we look toward the end of this century, said America’s arch-practitioner and conceptualizer of conservative realpolitik, we know that the energy crisis indicates the birth pains of global interdependence. . . . We confront a fundamental decision. Will we consume ourselves in nationalistic rivalry which the realities of interdependence make suicidal? Or will we acknowledge our interdependence and shape cooperative solutions?11

This was not simply posturing. Kissinger understood that the essence of statesmanship in the emerging international system was the ability to deal with the politics of economics and technology. He who had once dubbed such matters the province of second-rate minds now seemed to relish demonstrating his mastery of his new specialty. Confidently embodying a synthesis of finance minister and geopolitician, he grabbed the international ball back from the Treasury and Commerce departments and made it clear once again to foreign governments that the president’s principal adviser and spokesman on all matters of foreign policy—including economics— was Henry Kissinger. This was a more complicated policy arena than Kissinger had written about or operated in during his first four years as a high government official. At home there were more players in the multiple legislative and bureaucratic games in the field of foreign economic policy making than there were in the field of national security policy and U.S.-Soviet relations. Kissinger was to find that the commanding position of the United States in the global economy was not readily cashed in for bargaining chips on the specific issues of concern to him.

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The United States was a leading producer of goods for which there was high international demand, such as high technology and food, but the free market principles to which the United States was officially committed, combined with the opposition of domestic sellers to export controls, blocked Kissinger’s efforts to convert these assets into flexible instruments of diplomacy. Kissinger flirted with using the position of the United States as the largest exporter of food grains to exert leverage against the oil producer cartel. But the 1974–1975 famines in India and the African Sahel removed this option. To hold back food from the international market at a time of vast starvation, and by so doing to further drive up world prices, would be regarded as an act of the grossest cruelty. Kissinger was resourceful, however, in turning U.S. dominance as a food producer into more general world political leadership by proposing a World Food Conference and at its meeting in Rome in November 1974, offering a comprehensive scheme for nationally held but internationally coordinated stocks of surplus grain to stabilize grain prices and help the countries with the greatest need.12 Still, Kissinger’s lack of tangible and effective leverage against the energy producers continued to bother him, and he found it hard to resist the temptation to reach for the familiar political-military bargaining chips. At the end of 1974, Kissinger, unsuccessful in his effort to form a solid consensus among the major consumer countries for bargaining with OPEC, allowed himself to be quoted in Business Week on the pitfalls, but also the possibilities, of political and military power plays against the Arab oil producers. The only way to bring oil prices down immediately in the absence of consumer solidarity, Kissinger told his interviewers, would be to “create a political crisis of the first magnitude.” When probed to describe what he meant, Kissinger talked of massive political warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk their political stability and maybe their security if they do not cooperate. That is too high a price to pay even for an immediate reduction in oil prices. If you bring about an overthrow of the existing system in Saudi Arabia and a Qadaffi takes over or if you break Iran’s image of being capable of resisting outside pressures, you’re going to open up political trends which could defeat your economic objectives. Economic pressures or incentives, on the other hand, take time to organize and cannot be effective without consumer solidarity. Moreover, if we had created the political crisis that

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I described, we would almost certainly have had to do it against the opposition of Europe, Japan and the Soviet Union.

His interrogators persisted: One of the things we . . . hear from businessmen is that in the long run the only answer to the oil cartel is some sort of military action. Have you considered military action on oil? KISSINGER: Military action on oil prices? BUSINESS WEEK: Yes. KISSINGER: A very dangerous course. We should have learned from Vietnam that it is easier to get into a war than to get out of it. I am not saying that there’s no circumstance where we would use force. But it is one thing to use it in the case of a dispute over price, but it’s another where there is some actual strangulation of the industrialized world. BUSINESS WEEK: Do you worry about what the Soviets would do in the Middle East if there were any military action against the cartel? KISSINGER: I don’t think this is a good thing to speculate about. Any President who would resort to military action in the Middle East without worrying what the Soviets would do would have to be reckless. The question is to what extent he would let himself be deterred by it. But you cannot say you would not consider what the Soviets would do. I want to make clear, however, that the use of force would be considered only in the gravest emergency.13 BUSINESS WEEK:

When Kissinger’s references to remote possibilities when force might be considered caused a stir in Arab and European capitals, he claimed to be “astonished.” He insisted in a television interview that “no nation can announce that it will let itself be strangled without reacting. . . . I find it very difficult to see what it is that people are objecting to.” He was simply saying that the United States would not permit itself or its allies to be strangled. “Somebody else would have to make the first move to attempt the strangulation. . . . There would have to be an overt move of an extremely drastic, dramatic and aggressive nature” before the United States would seriously consider using military force against the oil producers.14 Only against economic actions that in their effects and intent would be akin to the use of force would the United States respond militarily; but in not totally ruling out such contingencies Kissinger

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obviously was attempting to warn the Arabs that at some point even their oil-pricing policies, let alone another embargo, could seriously provoke the United States. It was evident to Kissinger and other Western statesmen that an important shift in the global balance of power was taking place, in that key nations in the Third World were able to crucially affect the security and well-being of most of the countries in the noncommunist industrialized world. He was not at all pleased with the tacit bargain between the OPEC countries and other Third World countries to support one another’s demands in international forums to maximize their bargaining leverage. Professedly nonaligned African, Latin American, and Asian nations now ganged up in the United Nations and its subsidiary organs to help the Arab countries pass anti-Israel resolutions. In return, the Middle Eastern Arab countries and Iran lent their support to some of the most radical demands emanating from the Third World for a restructuring of the international economic order and a global redistribution of income to the economically disadvantaged nations. “It is an irony,” said Kissinger in an angry speech in July 1975, that at the moment the United States has accepted nonalignment and the value of diversity, those nations which originally chose this stance to preserve their sovereign independence from powerful military alliances are forming a rigid grouping of their own. The most solid block in the world today is, paradoxically, the alignment of the nonaligned. This divides the world into categories of North and South, developing and developed, imperial and colonial, at the very moment in history when such categories have become irrelevant and misleading.

He warned those in the majority in the UN General Assembly and its specialized bodies not to operate under the illusion that they could use their voting power coercively without paying a large price, “for the coerced are under no obligation to submit. To the contrary, they are given all too many incentives simply to depart the scene, to have done with the pretense.” Those who abused the procedures of the organization to isolate or deny the full privileges of the United Nations to members they dislike, as the majority, prodded by the Arabs, was now doing to Israel, “may well inherit an empty shell.” The United States had been by far the largest supporter of the United Nations, Kissinger reminded the Third World voting bloc, but

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the support of the American people, which has been the lifeblood of the organization, will be profoundly alienated unless fair play predominates and the numerical majority respects the views of the minority. The American people are understandably tired of the inflammatory rhetoric against us, the all-or-nothing stance accompanied by demands for our sacrifice which too frequently dominate the meeting halls of the United Nations.15

As if to drive home his growing anger, Kissinger had President Ford appoint Daniel Patrick Moynihan as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Moynihan had recently published in Commentary magazine a scathing attack on the Third World advocates of a new international economic order, whom he lumped together as the “Fabian socialist” international party of “equality,” and their apologists in the United States. The United States should take the offensive, argued Moynihan, as the leader of the “liberty party” and speak out loudly against those who would sacrifice freedom and condone tyranny in the pursuit of professedly egalitarian ends.16 Kissinger’s hardening rhetoric and the appointment of Moynihan raised apprehension in UN circles about the Seventh Special Session of the General Assembly scheduled for the fall of 1975. The Special Session was to consider means of implementing the principles of the “new international economic order” formulated by the General Assembly majority in the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States voted the previous December. The Third World coalition was demanding t
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developing countries at concessionary prices;

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international funding and lending institutions. To the relief of all countries, save perhaps the Soviet Union, China, and some of the more intransigent Third World militants such as Algeria and Libya, the feared North-South confrontation failed to materialize. The big struggle took place before the convening of the Seventh Special Session, not between the diplomats of the industrial and developing nations but within the U.S. government, between State Department officials sympathetic to the demands of the Third World and Treasury officials anxious to protect the international economic status quo. Kissinger was converted to the reformist position sometime during the summer of 1975; and in the weeks immediately preceding the UN meeting he reportedly was engaged in a major dispute with Secretary of the Treasury William Simon over the official U.S. posture toward the Third World’s demands for a new international economic order. Kissinger won out, and with the blessing of President Ford, the new American policy was presented to the United Nations in the historic address of September 1, 1975. It fell to Ambassador Moynihan, of all people, to deliver the secretary of state’s address to the General Assembly. (Moynihan, it became clear in subsequent months, never agreed with the philosophy he was now instructed to expound.) The specific proposals put forward in Kissinger’s address to the Seventh Special Session went only partway toward meeting the grievances of the developing country coalition; but they did imply substantial acceptance of the legitimacy of international compensation to the poorer countries for their comparative disadvantage in the international market.17 Granting the obligation of the international community to protect vulnerable economies against dramatic drops in their export earnings, Kissinger proposed the creation of a new “development security facility” within the IMF with the mandate and financial resources to give concessionary loans and grants to developing countries to make up for their export shortfalls. (However, the United States rejected the standing demand of the Third World militants for an indexing system to peg the price of basic commodities to price changes in industrial goods.)

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Conceding that many of the poor countries, in all fairness, did deserve special help in raising development capital, Kissinger urged expansion of the lending programs of the World Bank and the regional development banks as well as the creation of an international investment trust to mobilize portfolio investment capital for local enterprises. In addition, the United States would be willing to provide technical assistance and expertise to developing countries ready to enter long-term capital markets and asked other developed countries to provide similar assistance. On the touchy issue of the role of multinational corporations, Kissinger recognized the concerns of many host countries regarding the ability of foreign-controlled firms to dominate their economies, evade local laws, and intervene in their politics. He affirmed that “countries are entitled to regulate the operations of transnational enterprises within their borders.” But, contended Kissinger, host governments had an obligation to treat transnational enterprises equitably and responsibly. Finally, with respect to developing countries’ demands for a greater role in international institutions and negotiations, Kissinger agreed that “participation in international decisions should be widely shared, in the name of both justice and effectiveness. . . . No country or group of countries should have exclusive power in areas basic to the welfare of others. This principle is valid for oil. It also applies to trade and finance.”18 Kissinger was to be frustrated in his attempts to implement these proposals in the form of specific agreements between the developed and developing countries. In part, this was because of the lack of enthusiasm in the departments of Treasury and Commerce. In part, it was because of the lingering suspicion among Third World leaders that Kissinger wanted to split the developing country coalition from the OPEC countries and was attempting to co-opt the poor militants with cosmetic generosity. But as Kissinger’s policies toward Africa in 1976 were to show, there was a shift taking place in his grand strategy that was both fundamental and genuine.

AFRICA AND THE REALPOLITIK OF CHANGE On April 26, 1976, at a luncheon hosted by President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Kissinger once again surprised the world with a bold recasting of U.S. policy on southern Africa, identifying the United States for the first time as unequivocally on the side of black majority rule.

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The new U.S. policy that Kissinger outlined comprehensively in Lusaka was clearly a dramatic turnabout from the assumptions of the so-called tar baby policy the Nixon administration had decided on during its first year in office. The policy had been nicknamed “tar baby” by its State Department opponents to express their judgment that it was a sticky policy that the United States would be unable to abandon if it did not work.19 “Tar baby” had called for “selective relaxation of our stance toward the white regimes” while maintaining a public posture of “opposition to racial repression.” The policy had been based explicitly on the premise that “the whites are here to stay and the only way that constructive change can come about is through them. There is no hope for the blacks to gain the political rights they seek through violence, which will only lead to chaos and increased opportunities for the communists.” Increased U.S. economic aid would be provided to the black states “to focus their attention on their internal development and to give them a motive to cooperate in reducing tensions.” The Republic of South Africa would also be encouraged to provide economic assistance to the black states of Africa. Concrete measures to implement the policy were to include a selective liberalization of the arms embargo against South Africa and the Portuguese territories, plus the other relaxations of sanctions that had been imposed against the white regimes in conformity with U.N. resolutions; and flexible aid programs for the black states, including “nonsophisticated arms” in response to “reasonable requests,” while opposing the use of force by insurgent movements.20 In approving this policy President Nixon had set a U.S. course in southern Africa over the next five years that was to end ingloriously with the Angola crisis of 1975–1976. The United States got stuck on the tar of its policy of improving relations with the white regimes while the Soviets were left to pick and choose among black clients. Kissinger’s first response to this larger geopolitical consequence of “tar baby” was to counterintervene “covertly” against the Soviets and the Cubans in Africa; in Angola this only produced the further embarrassment of associating the United States with the losing blacks. Angola provided the shock of recognition for Kissinger that conservative realpolitik would no longer work in Africa. He resisted learning this lesson, however, until U.S. incompetence in Angola was exposed before the entire world. The leading claimant to head the new, post-Portuguese regime in Angola was Agostino Neto and his Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)—a movement supported by the Soviets. In January 1975 the CIA

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had been authorized by the Forty Committee (the top-level review board that controlled covert operations abroad during the Nixon and Ford administrations) to funnel assistance secretly to Neto’s principal opponent, Holden Roberto, the leader of the National Front for the Liberation of Angola. In the spring of 1975, the CIA requested more funds as well as authorization to expand its political and economic assistance into covert military aid to counter the growing Soviet shipments of military equipment to Neto and his increasing reliance on Cuban military advisers in the escalating civil war. It also asked for authorization to initiate a new program of support for another of Neto’s opponents, Jonas Savimbi. The CIA plan was strongly opposed by the National Security Council task force on Angola and by Assistant Secretary of State Nathaniel Davis. The covert military actions the CIA recommended might lead to increased intervention by the Soviet Union and other foreign powers, argued Davis. The level of violence in Angola would probably increase, and especially if there were widespread tribal or racial massacres, U.S. support for one or more of the rival groups would become a major political issue in the United States and an embarrassment internationally. It would be impossible to ensure the CIA operations could be kept secret, and their exposure would have a negative impact on U.S. relations with many countries as well as with large segments of the U.S. public and Congress. Moreover, the United States would be committing its prestige in a situation over which it had limited influence and whose outcome was highly uncertain. If Neto’s MPLA did come to power, the chances for the United States to establish working relations with it would be greatly damaged.21 Davis’ protestations were to no avail. Kissinger endorsed the CIA action plan, and President Ford gave Kissinger and the CIA the go-ahead to implement it in July 1975. Over the next six months, virtually all of Davis’ predictions came true. The Soviets transported over 10,000 Cuban troops into Angola by air and sea and flew in massive amounts of combat equipment for use by the Cubans and the MPLA, while South Africa and Zaïre intervened against Neto’s forces. In December the Senate voted to prohibit all further covert aid to Angola. The Soviets and the Cubans pressed their advantage. Neto trounced his opponents in the north of Angola, who had been aided by forces from Zaïre. The South Africans withdrew their forces from the south. By the end of January 1976, it was all over except for the recriminations. On January 29, 1976, Kissinger appeared before the Subcommittee on African Affairs of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in one last

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defense of his Angola policies. The blame for failure, he insisted, lay not with the Ford administration but with Congress for failing to provide the wherewithal for standing up to the Soviets in the crunch. His testimony was a string of castigations of the congressional majority for their naïveté and lack of spine.22 Senator Dick Clark, chairman of the Subcommittee on African Affairs, disagreed profoundly. The important lesson of Angola, he maintained, is that the United States should not ignore the African black liberation movements until their victories against minority regimes are imminent and then back particular factions simply because their opponents are backed by the Soviet Union. The United States should make a new beginning in its African policy, by establishing connections between U.S. and African commitments to human rights and racial equality and between the U.S. commitment to international pluralism and African concepts of nonalignment. If the United States pursued such a new African policy, contended Clark, “our cold war interests in Africa may very well take care of themselves.”23 In February the Organization of African Unity—the regional association of black African states—officially recognized the Neto regime as the legitimate government of Angola. Kissinger said little about Africa in public during the next two months. Only when he unveiled his new African policy in Lusaka at the end of April was it evident that he had taken to heart some of the criticism leveled at him by Senator Clark and others. He had come to Africa, he said, “to usher in a new era in American policy.” This new American policy endorsed the black African premise that racial justice and majority rule were the prerequisites for peace in Africa. This endorsement, however, was “not simply a matter of foreign policy but an imperative of our own moral heritage.” Specifically, with respect to Rhodesia, the United States unequivocally supported the British insistence that independence was illegal unless it was based on majority rule. “The Salisbury regime must understand,” Kissinger warned, “that it cannot expect U.S. support either diplomatically or in material help at any stage in its conflict with African states or African liberation movements. On the contrary, it will face our unrelenting opposition until a negotiated settlement [to institute majority rule] is achieved.” Accordingly, the United States was taking steps to insure its own and other nations’ strictest compliance with UN resolutions on economic sanctions against Rhodesia consistent with U.S. nonrecognition of the Ian Smith regime in Salisbury. In addition, the United States was ready to provide special economic assistance to countries bordering on Rhodesia that might

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themselves suffer economic hardship as a result of closing their borders to normal trade with Rhodesia. The Ford administration was prepared to immediately provide $12.5 million to Mozambique under this policy. Looking toward a successful transition to majority rule in Rhodesia and then full independence, Kissinger promised that the United States would join other nations in a program of economic and technical assistance to the “newly independent Zimbabwe.” (Kissinger’s use of the African name for the country was symbolic of the basic shift in policy he was attempting to convey.) On the Namibia question, Kissinger strongly reiterated the standing U.S. position that the Republic of South Africa’s continued occupation of its former mandate territory was illegal and that the South African government should withdraw and allow the United Nations to supervise the Namibian people’s attainment of full self-determination and independent statehood. On the matter of South Africa’s internal racial policies, Kissinger associated the United States with the position of the black African states more clearly than any previous top U.S. official had. “The world community’s concern with South Africa is not merely that racial discrimination exists there,” said Kissinger. “What is unique is the extent of which racial discrimination has been institutionalized, enshrined in law, and made allpervasive.”24 The white South Africans must realize that the world would not tolerate the continued institutionalized separation of the races being enforced under the “apartheid” policy. The secretary of state backed up his new political orientation toward African issues by pledging to triple U.S. economic support for development programs in southern and central Africa over the next three years. The evolution of Kissinger’s North-South policy—now focused primarily on Africa—was remarkably analogous to the evolution in U.S. Latin American policy associated with the Kennedy administration. Kissinger had vituperatively criticized Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress as naïve in its premise that democratic Socialists rather than the conservative military elite of the Third World would provide the best bulwark against instability and Soviet attempts at capturing leftist movements. Now he was embracing movements and concepts that he had previously branded as romantic and soft and insufficiently based on hard balance of power realities to be able to effectively counter the unsentimental and often brutal Marxist-Leninists. “Has Henry lost his nerve?” asked critics on the right. “Is he merely up to his old deceptive tricks?” asked critics on the left. Both suppositions

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were wrong. The Kissinger policy shift emanated largely from realpolitik considerations: how best to compete with the Soviets for influence in the Third World and how best to prevent the oil-producing nations from organizing the Third World into a bloc that would play the superpowers against one another, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, and undermine the economic strength of the West and Japan. In his “progressive” responses to the international populist demands for a global redistribution of wealth and political power, Kissinger was still acting essentially as a conservative. But in acting to conserve both American power and Western civilization he adopted an international posture analogous to the progressive responses of Theodore Roosevelt and later of Franklin Roosevelt to the domestic populist and Marxist movements in the first half of the twentieth century—or indeed, analogous to the way one of his heroes, Otto von Bismarck, had responded to the liberal and egalitarian agitations in Germany in the 1870s.

PA R T

V THE CARTER PERIOD I was familiar with the arguments that we had to choose between idealism and realism, between morality and the exertion of power; but I rejected those claims. To me the demonstration of American idealism was a practical and realistic approach to foreign affairs, and moral principles were the best foundation for the exertion of American power and influence. —Jimmy Carter

It is not a popular thing to remind people that power is important, that it has to be applied, that sometimes decisions which are not fully compatible with our concepts of what the world ideally ought to be like need to be taken. —Zbigniew Brzezinski

15

THE MANY FACES OF JIMMY CARTER I am a farmer, an engineer, a father and husband, a Christian, a politician and former governor, a planner, a businessman, a nuclear physicist, a naval officer, a canoeist, and, among other things, a lover of Bob Dylan’s songs and Dylan Thomas’ poetry. —Jimmy Carter

presidency, Jimmy Carter latched on to the popular discontent with Kissinger’s realpolitik—a discontent prominent on the ideological right as well as on the left, and which nearly lost Gerald Ford the 1976 Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan. Carter was more effective than any of his rivals for the Democratic nomination, and more believable than Ford, in putting himself forward as the embodiment of a revived national consensus that U.S. foreign policy should reflect basic American values. Carter’s candidacy catered to the hope that divisions and bitterness of the period of Vietnam and Watergate would be overcome by giving fresh expression at home and abroad to the country’s traditional dedication to the achievement by all of God’s children of political self-determination, freedom from oppression, and a decent material life. “World order” politics would supplant balance of power politics. It was time to move beyond arms control and toward the abolition of nuclear weapons. The bonds of trust between the people of the United States and the officials who conduct U.S. foreign policy would be restored, as would the trust by other countries in the word of the United States, by avoiding secrecy in the formulation of policies and in negotiations with other countries.

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Carter carried these themes forward into his early presidential pronouncements on foreign affairs—his inaugural address (“Our commitment to human rights must be absolute”; the ultimate goal of U.S. arms limitation policy is “the elimination of all nuclear weapons from the Earth”);1 his maiden speech to the United Nations (“I have brought to office a firm commitment to a more open foreign policy. . . . No member of the United Nations can claim that mistreatment of its citizens is solely its own business”);2 and his address at the 1977 commencement exercises of Notre Dame University: I believe we can have a foreign policy that is democratic, that is based on fundamental values, and that uses power and influence, which we have, for humane purposes. We can also have a foreign policy that the American people support and, for a change, know and understand. . . . Because we know that democracy works, we can reject the arguments of those rulers who deny human rights to their people. . . . We are confident that the democratic methods are most effective, and so we are not tempted to employ improper tactics at home or abroad. We are confident of our own strength, so we can seek substantial mutual reductions in the nuclear arms race. And we are confident of the good sense of the American people, and so we let them share in the process of making foreign policy decisions. We can thus speak with the voices of 215 million, and not just an isolated handful. . . . Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. . . . For many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty. But through failure we have now found our way back to our own principles and values.3

These idealistic aspects of Carter’s worldview were championed most vocally—inside the administration and in public—by Andrew Young, protégé of Martin Luther King and devotee of his pacifist philosophy, former congressman for Georgia, early supporter of Carter’s presidential candidacy, and Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations. But Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s principal tutor in world affairs during his campaign for the presidency and his national security adviser in

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the White House, was always at Carter’s elbow to insist that the idealistic impulses conform to the geopolitical realities of international relations—at least when it came to the actual conduct of policy. Brzezinski was a persistent advocate of the view that the necessary condition for the preservation of American values at home and their propagation abroad was the limitation of the power of the primary adversary, the Soviet Union. And he echoed Henry Kissinger’s “linkage” approach to the Soviets in maintaining that the Kremlin could not expect the United States to sustain cooperative relationships with the USSR in some fields—arms control, trade, technology transfer—while the Soviets engaged in aggressive power plays in Africa and the Persian Gulf area. Détente, insisted Brzezinski, “cannot be conducted on a selected and compartmentalized basis.”4 Indeed, Brzezinski was even more inclined than Kissinger to threaten a reduction in U.S.-Soviet cooperative arrangements as a punitive sanction for aggressive Soviet behavior and to play upon Soviet fears of a Sino-American alliance against the Russians. In contrast to Kissinger, Brzezinski advocated visible policies on behalf of human rights and Third World development as essential thrusts of an activist global policy that would be more than just a reaction to Soviet initiatives. In these respects he often could present himself as a soul brother to Andrew Young and other social-justice activists in the administration, even though he tended to shape his human rights and Third World policies to serve the geopolitical imperatives of the U.S.-Soviet competition rather than as ends in themselves. A third approach was that of Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance. A former high government official (secretary of the army in the Kennedy administration, deputy secretary of defense, and then diplomatic troubleshooter in the Johnson administration) and prominent New York lawyer, Vance was skeptical of grand designs, reformist or geopolitical, urging rather that each international situation be examined on a case-by-case basis to determine which U.S. interests might be implicated and which policy options might best serve those interests. His preferred options, even with adversaries, usually stressed problem solving through negotiations aimed at narrowing points of difference and solidifying common interests instead of the pressure tactics of linkage and confrontation. Perceiving that vital U.S. interests would be served by limiting the strategic arms race, he resisted all attempts in Washington to hold back SALT negotiations and ratification unless the Soviets reversed their interventions in east Africa and Afghanistan. Nor did Vance believe that U.S. relations with most other

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countries should be determined with primary and explicit reference to the global power rivalry between the United States and the USSR. Rather, the United States should deal with countries “on the merits” of the particular needs of each country and the capacity of the United States to relate to these needs. Jimmy Carter could be swayed by the worldviews and preferred style of each of these approaches; and at times during his campaign for the presidency and during his tenure in the White House he would appear to have adopted one or the other and at times some confusing hybrid of all of them. An uncharitable explanation of Carter’s apparent vacillation between these various approaches is that he had no deeply held views of his own and was simply a politician attempting to secure the support of diverse factions in the body politic and the policy establishment. A charitable explanation is that Carter, faithful to the country whose values he was attempting to embody, was a complex person, whose own deep impulses and commitments were sometimes at cross-purposes, particularly when it came to concrete policy implications, and that the various approaches he appeared to vacillate between were indeed facets of the real Jimmy Carter. Carter’s presidential campaign had been unabashedly populist, claiming that the common people were his constituency and that it was their common sense that guided him in what was good or bad public policy, rather than the recommendations of experts or the calculations of Washington lawyers or power brokers. Of course, having been governor of Georgia, Carter knew as well as anyone that “the people” are hardly unified in their common sense and more often than not are divided into bitterly opposed self-seeking interest groups who themselves employ lawyers, power brokers, and experts to advance their demands. His more private campaign had been a skillful effort to maintain and establish contacts in the world of the materially and politically powerful elites and to engender in them confidence in his intelligence, worldliness, nonideological pragmatism, and sophisticated experience in dealing with corporate and governmental power. An important vehicle for this campaign had been his membership in the Trilateral Commission, a nongovernmental organization of prominent influentials from North America, Western Europe, and Japan, to promote cooperation among the advanced industrialized countries. Founded by David Rockefeller and directed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Trilateral Commission included among its members many exiles from past Democratic administrations (Cyrus Vance, George Ball, Paul Warnke, Harold Brown, Paul Nitze), media executives

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(Arthur Taylor of CBS, Hedley Donovan of Time), and prominent multinational corporation directors. It was largely from his Trilateral Commission contacts that candidate Carter formed his Foreign Policy and Defense Task Force and subsequently his top-level and sub-cabinet appointments to his administration. Carter’s success as presidential candidate was largely attributable to his ability to present himself variously as populist and establishmentarian, human rights idealist and geopolitical realist, country boy and impeccably mannered dinner-party host, Bible-quoting “born-again Christian” and devotee of existentialism. He was credible in each of these roles, depending upon whom he was talking with, and—most remarkably—credible also in his professions of guileless honesty.5 The aura of credibility undoubtedly was a reflection of the fact that all these facets were the real Jimmy Carter, that he indeed was an amalgam of all of them, and a true believer in the mystical ethos that this was the essence of the nation he felt called upon to represent. With Walt Whitman’s America, he could proclaim: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Some of Carter’s main problems as president appear to have stemmed from his continuing to display in his executive role the all-things-to-allpeople quality that got him elected. To give vent in the Oval Office to the contradiction-laden instincts of Mr. Everyman was to fail to establish and stick to priorities among values and objectives without which consistent and credible policy is impossible to sustain. Each of Carter’s most trusted advisers sensed that the chief was most sympathetic with one’s own approach and would carry back to subordinates and sometimes to the public such presidential guidance as one wanted to (and did) hear. Moreover, the president himself, often giving expression to the formulations of his different advisers, frequently would deliver himself in policies and pronouncements of a sequence of inconsistent moves and postures. In foreign policy, the part of Jimmy Carter that was a Baptist preacherpolitician was in tune with the moral sloganeering and simplifications of Andrew Young. But the engineer in Carter, always seeking structural principles and formulas to resolve problems, was particularly susceptible to the geopolitical grand designs and systematic formulations of Brzezinski, which provided a sense of intellectual control over otherwise confusing events. Yet Carter was also a shrewd and pragmatic businessman who understood the pitfalls of being carried away by emotion, ideology, or overly abstract logic. This part of Carter admired the case-by-case,

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corporate-lawyer approach of Cyrus Vance, who patiently and coolly could work through a complicated negotiating sequence with adversaries without getting trapped in a confrontation over general principles. When it came to dealing with the Soviet Union, Carter’s own paradoxical qualities and his susceptibility to the approaches of his various advisers would produce a confusing series of policy stances—confusing not only to the American public and allies but also to the Soviet leadership. As a deeply religious man, Carter found strategies of polarization and alienation uncongenial; his preferred mode of dealing with adversaries was to discover bonds of common humanity as a context for attempting to harmonize, or at least reconcile, their conflicting interests. But such pacifist impulses were hardly as absolute for him or for Andrew Young as they had been for their hero, Martin Luther King Jr. Carter increasingly expressed in words as well as action an appreciation for maintaining an adequate arsenal of coercive power in order to defend one’s interest against aggressive adversaries. A self-made millionaire farmer, Carter could switch as required to a stance of toughness and decisiveness in dealing with the Soviets, especially when buoyed by Brzezinski’s counsel that these were the qualities that the Russians respected most. Brzezinski advised the president not to shirk from aggressively taking the diplomatic offensive against the Soviets, for they feared an America aroused and despite their boasting admired its economic and technological prowess and its military potential. But Secretary of State Vance’s cool professionalism, his insistence on considering the manifold implications of any course of action, would appeal to Carter’s self-concept as businessman-turned-chief executive and sophisticated modernist statesman. He was particularly receptive to Vance’s cautionary advice against unnecessarily provoking the Russians or stimulating a full-blown arms race, thus destroying the basis for U.S.Soviet cooperation—which was still new and fragile—by reviving a Cold War psychology on both sides. Carter’s first major address devoted to U.S.-Soviet relations, delivered at the June 1978 Annapolis commencement, revealed his ambivalence so openly that it was an embarrassment to many in the administration.6 It was widely believed, recalls Hodding Carter III, the State Department’s press spokesman under Vance, that the president “took speech drafts offered by the State Department and the National Security Council and simply pasted half of one to half of the other. The result was predictably all

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over the lot, offering the Soviet Union the mailed fist and the dove’s coo simultaneously.”7 The Third World policies of the administration revealed a similar ambivalence at the top, once again reflecting the differing worldviews of the president’s principal advisers. Brzezinski viewed the Third World much the way it was viewed in the Kennedy White House, as an arena of competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence over those demanding self-determination and equalization of wealth and power. To compete effectively, the United States should try to get on the side of the “new forces.” However, the United States should not simply accept losses where the Soviets had already established a local power base; in such cases it was imperative to organize local balances of power against those within the Soviet camp, even if this meant backing conservative or reactionary forces. Nor should the United States stand idly by and accept defections from the U.S. camp toward nonalignment, for this, as viewed by Brzezinski, would weaken the global power position of the United States vis-à-vis the USSR. Especially in the case of regional bulwarks against Soviet influence—most notably Iran—it was important to prevent a collapse of regimes friendly to the United States. Brzezinski and Andrew Young were frequent allies on the importance of putting the United States on the side of movements for national selfdetermination and economic development in the Third World, even if their basic reasons for this posture differed. Their joint championing of U.S. support for the Marxist Robert Mugabe who took power in Zimbabwe was a notable case in point. Brzezinski saw that the real alternative was not a perpetuation of the more conservative black-white Rhodesian regime backed by former white Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith, but rather the Soviet-supported faction of the black liberation movement. By backing the dominant Mugabe group (also supported by China), the United States retained considerable influence with the new Zimbabwe government, while the Russians were left out in the bush. Andrew Young’s reasons converged here with Brzezinski’s insofar as he too saw the Mugabe faction as the strongest among the liberationist forces. But Young was opposed to injecting Cold War considerations prominently into decisions about whom to support or oppose in the Third World. United States’ support, rather, should go to the “progressive” forces, which in the African context meant those most capable of establishing and sustaining black majority rule in those areas still dominated by the white minority, and which in the Third World generally meant those attempting to redistribute wealth and

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political power to broader segments of the population. Young was against treating Third World countries and movements as pawns in the U.S.-Soviet rivalry—a policy he branded a form of racist condescension—and argued for giving the benefit of the doubt to Third World “progressives,” whose judgments about their own interests should be respected, even when this meant accepting help from the Soviets and Cubans. Brzezinski, of course, regarded such a Third World policy as geopolitically naïve and dangerous. Cyrus Vance, as aware of the geopolitical realities as any of Carter’s advisers and hardly indifferent to Soviet expansionism, often differed with Brzezinski over the best means of limiting Soviet influence in the Third World. Vance held that Soviet expansion could be contained best by the development of strong, proud nations, unwilling to sacrifice their independence to the imperial purposes of a superpower. The United States should resist getting pulled into the game of competitive imperial expansion in the Third World. Rather, it should respond primarily to the development needs of Third World countries in a way that conveyed respect for their own ability to define and deal with their indigenous problems. The problems of the Third World should not in the first instance be defined as Cold War issues. The United States did not have to preach to the natives to save them from the communist devil. American practical know-how and its pluralistic ideology would speak for itself. Influence would come from good works. The Soviets would lose out in the larger competition through their crude power plays. Carter, in part, evidently wanted to be like Cyrus Vance, while sharing Andrew Young’s compassion for the oppressed and poor peoples of the world. He wanted to be the kind, wise world leader who puts the human dignity of all God’s children uppermost. But another part of him apparently wanted desperately to be admired as tough and unsqueamish in adversity, and he perceived that the largest part of his domestic American audience identified with the machismo image more than the saint. One of Carter’s speechwriters during his first two years in office summed up the problems: “Carter has not given us an idea to follow. The central idea of the Carter administration is Jimmy Carter himself, his own mixture of traits, since the only thing that gives coherence to the items of his creed is that he happens to believe them all. . . . I came to think Jimmy Carter believes fifty things, but no one thing. . . . Values that others would find contradictory complement one another in his mind.”8 Carter was perhaps all too faithfully a man of the season—the season of confusion in U.S. foreign policy goals following the country’s misadventure

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in Vietnam; the season of popular backlash against the immorality of Watergate and against the amorality and elitism of Kissinger’s brand of geopolitics; the season of realization that the Soviet Union, its arrogance revived by the attainment of full strategic equality with the United States and global military mobility, was not going to play détente according to the rules of mutual restraint; the season of adjustment to dependence on the Middle Eastern oil producers, most of whom were hostile to the U.S. for what they perceived as its past attempts to dominate them economically and politically and for its friendship with Israel. Neither Carter nor Brzezinski nor any other influential official had the genius to translate the mood of confusion and apprehension which brought Carter to the presidency into a coherent foreign policy. A semblance of coherence developed out of the perceived need to more effectively prosecute the rivalry with the USSR, especially after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979—but haplessly this turn reinforced the larger impression of vacillation, for it appeared to contradict Carter’s earlier pledges to reduce America’s preoccupation with the Soviet Union. The departure from the administration of Andrew Young in August 1979 and finally Cyrus Vance in April 1980 was the necessary correlate of this shift by Carter toward the primary orientation of Brzezinski. Vance’s resignation marked the ascendancy of the Brzezinski approach—the renewed preoccupation with the Soviet threat and the tendency to resort to confrontationist postures in dealing with adversaries. The secretary of state said in resigning that he had been overruled in his objection to the attempt to rescue the American Embassy hostages in Iran by helicopter. This explicit reason, of course, was only a symptom of his more basic disagreement with the direction U.S. foreign policy was taking under Brzezinski’s increasing influence. As Vance stated in his address at the 1980 Harvard commencement exercises: “Our real problems are long-term in nature. It will not do to reach for the dramatic act, to seek to cut through stubborn dilemmas with a single stroke.” It was also a “fallacy” to seek “a single strategy—a master plan” to yield “answers to each and every foreign policy decision we face. Whatever value that approach may have had in a bipolar world, it now serves us badly. The world has become pluralistic, exposing the inadequacy of the single strategy, the grand design, where facts are forced to fit theory.”9 Ironically, it was Vance’s patient, soft-spoken approach that was primarily responsible for most of the dramatic foreign policy successes of the Carter administration: the successful negotiation and ratification of

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the Panama Canal treaty; the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt and their subsequent treaties; the husbanding of the installation of a black majority regime in Zimbabwe; and finally the deal with Iran to free the embassy hostages, consummated during the last hours of the Carter administration. The major accomplishments of the administration for which Brzezinski could claim credit were the establishment of full diplomatic relations with China and the revival of serious efforts in NATO to balance the Soviet military buildup; but these two elements were already in the pipeline, so to speak, and it would have been surprising had they not materialized. The largest disappointment of the Carter administration—its inability to gain congressional ratification of SALT II—can be blamed primarily on the Soviets, who by invading Afghanistan on Christmas 1979 and brutally occupying that country throughout 1980, ruined whatever chance Carter might have had to gain Senate concurrence to the treaties. A president with substantial political clout who believed, as Carter did, that SALT II was still in the national interest, despite Afghanistan, might have been able to successfully prosecute the ratification battle in 1980. Carter’s international and domestic reputation as a statesman stayed too low to give him the kind of charisma that could convert wavering senators. Reluctantly, Carter backed away from a ratification fight he was sure to lose. Brzezinski would later complain that “SALT lies buried in the sands of Ogaden,” a reference to the unwillingness of the United States to support the Somalis in 1978 in their war against the Ethiopians, who were being helped by Cuban troops and Soviet military advisers and equipment. In Brzezinski’s view, SALT could have been ratified if the Carter administration had been able to sustain a reputation of not being “soft” toward the Soviets but being willing to “compete assertively” with them. “The argument that the phrase [about SALT and the Ogaden] is meant to capsulate,” explained Brzezinski, “is that, unless we stand up to the Soviet drive by proxy soon enough, we’ll not do well in the competition and will lose chances for effective cooperation.”10 Vance, from retirement, would rebut Brzezinski’s assertions and their implications. “The charge that some are making that there was an unwillingness to consider the use of force if necessary when our vital interests were concerned is hogwash,” he declared. The trouble was, rather, that Brzezinski gave too much emphasis to “the use of military power or bluff, ignoring, in my judgment, the political, economic, and the trade aspects of our relationship with the Soviet Union.” Brzezinski’s epigram about SALT

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being “buried in the sands of Ogaden” was symptomatic of the grand strategy’s neglect of the details of particular circumstances. It was “a catchy phrase without any substance,” said Vance. Somalia had violated Ethiopian territory by invading the Ogaden in 1978, and the Soviet Union and Cuba had sent troops into Ethiopia to help an ally defend itself. The United States got what it wanted, Vance recalled, as the Soviet Union and its allies, heeding the U.S. warning, held back from invading Somali territory.11 Having lost the election to Ronald Reagan, Carter might at least have been spared further public altercations by those closely associated with his presidency. It was a measure of the weakness of his administration that his associates felt the need to absolve themselves of Carter’s supposed failures by blaming each other.

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THE FUSION OF REALISM AND IDEALISM We seek these goals because they are right—and because we, too, will benefit. Our own well-being, and even our security, are enhanced in a world that shares common freedoms and in which prosperity and economic justice create the conditions for peace. . . . Nations, like individuals, limit their potential when they limit their goals. —Cyrus Vance

to the world reflected in Jimmy Carter’s campaign rhetoric were not the stuff that could be readily translated into programs and actions. Secretary of State Vance, in particular—the most experienced foreign policy official at the top level of the new administration—was wary of the pitfalls of an ideologically crusading policy. It should not be the business of the United States, in the words of John Quincy Adams, to roam the world “in search of monsters to destroy.” But Vance and other experienced hands were also aware of the pitfalls in the realpolitik posture of aloofness from the “domestic” politics of countries the United States was supporting for geopolitical reasons. The manifestations of such support—generous financial credits, technology transfers, military and police training programs, and weapons sales—all constituted, in fact if not by design, a rather significant intervention in the domestic policy of the client country. Thus, in practice, the ideological neutrality that was supposed to underlie the realpolitik policy was vitiated, for the governments that came forward as the most willing clients were usually rightist regimes, dependent for their domestic political survival on commercial and military classes and resistant to egalitarian reforms.

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HE IMPULSES TO BRING JUSTICE

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FASHIONING A WORKABLE HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY The earliest attempts by Carter to show the world that his human rights posture was more than rhetoric were fashioned for him by eager White House aides. A public letter by the president to the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and the media event of a White House meeting with the recently exiled Vladimir Bukovsky portended a resourceful co-optation of the human rights policy by Brzezinski and his staff of young activists. The Office of Human Rights and of Humanitarian Affairs under Assistant Secretary of State Patricia Derian was slow in getting its act together, and its initiatives, which would be equally directed against oppressive right-wing oligarchies in the Third World, were eclipsed by what appeared to be a Cold War revivalism in the White House. State Department officials spent much of spring 1977 trying to reassure the Soviets that this was not the case, especially after Brezhnev and Foreign Minister Gromyko insisted that serious negotiations on arms control and other matters would be distorted, if not precluded, in such an environment. A concerned President Carter asked Secretary Vance to sort things out and to fashion a coherent and workable human rights policy. The results of this first effort by the administration to think through systematically the policy implications of its human rights posture were presented in a major foreign policy address by Secretary Vance at the University of Georgia Law School on April 30, 1977. “In pursuing a human rights policy,” said Vance, “we must always keep in mind the limits of our power and wisdom. A sure formula for defeat of our goals would be a rigid, hubristic attempt to impose our values on others. A doctrinaire plan of action would be as damaging as indifference.” We must be realistic, he said. Our country can only achieve our objectives if we shape what we do to the case at hand. In each reported case of a country violating basic human rights norms, therefore, the administration would ask a number of specific questions in determining whether and how to act: First, what is the nature of the particular case? What kinds of violations or deprivations are there? What is their extent? Is there a pattern to the violations? If so, is the trend toward concern for human rights or away from it?

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What is the degree of control and responsibility of the government involved? And finally, is the government willing to permit outside investigation?

A second set of questions concerned the prospect for effective action: Will our action be useful in promoting the overall cause of human rights? Will it actually improve the specific conditions at hand? Or will it be likely to make things worse instead? Is the country involved receptive to our interests and efforts? Will others work with us, including official and private international organizations dedicated to furthering human rights? Finally, does our sense of values and decency demand that we speak out or take action anyway, even though there is only a remote chance of making our influence felt?

A third set of questions focused on the difficult policy dilemmas and trade-offs: Have we been sensitive to genuine security interests, realizing the outbreak of armed conflict or terrorism could itself pose a serious threat to human rights? Have we considered all the rights at stake? If, for instance, we reduce aid to a government which violated the political rights of its citizens, do we not risk penalizing the hungry and the poor, who bear no responsibility for the abuses of their government?

The secretary of state did not want to prejudge how such trade-offs would be made in any specific case, for this might encourage some countries to repress political dissent for the ostensible reason of more effectively implementing an economic development plan or to rationalize draconian police tactics in the service of security against terrorism. His listing of the types of human rights the United States would work to advance around the world placed civil and political liberties third, behind, first, . . . the right to be free from governmental violation of the integrity of the human person . . . [such as] torture; cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; and arbitrary arrest or imprisonment. . . . Second, . . . the right to the fulfillment of such vital needs as food, shelter, health care, and education.

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The civil and political liberties generally associated with liberal democracies, such as freedom of speech and press and freedom to run for elective office, could not realistically be accorded equal priority with the physical security and economic subsistence needs of peoples. Elementary respect for the basic integrity of the human person was another matter, and the Carter administration was putting all, including its allies, on notice that this administration would not condone, and certainly would not allow itself to be associated with, violations of this fundamental norm of decent society. Just as a variety of circumstances had to be carefully assessed in determining whether a country was guilty of human rights violations, so too a variety of possible responses would have to be assayed on a case-bycase basis. The means available ranged “from quiet diplomacy in its many forms, through public pronouncements, to withholding assistance. Whenever possible, we will use positive steps of encouragement and inducement.” There could be no mechanistic formulas, no automatic answers. “In the end, a decision whether and how to act in the cause of human rights is a matter for informed and careful judgment.”1 Opponents of giving human rights a central emphasis in U.S. foreign policy pointed out that with all the qualifications, dilemmas, and trade-offs in the secretary of state’s exposition of the policy, the Carter administration could not really claim to be offering the country and the world anything new. In their opinion, that was all to the good. Some opponents, however, would hold up the Carter administration’s highly circumscribed performance in the human rights field to the standards of Carter’s own earlier, more absolutist rhetoric, not to Vance’s refinements, and accordingly took delight in vilifying the administration for hypocrisy. Many human rights idealists agreed, but with sadness, with the allegations of hypocrisy, as they witnessed Carter showering praise on dictators like the shah of Iran and President Somoza of Nicaragua; continuing high levels of military support to the oppressive military regime in South Korea; taking a “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” stance toward the People’s Republic of China; and backing off quickly from his initial criticism of the Soviet regime for its treatment of dissidents in the USSR. Despite the unpopularity of the pragmatic and quiet approach, the president remained committed to Vance’s logic with few exceptions throughout his term of office. The president and the secretary of state made it clear that they were making human rights a central consideration in U.S. foreign policy and that they expected the bureaucracy to be resourceful in seeking

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and adapting policy instruments to give this commitment effect. Much legislation was already on the books, reflecting congressional attempts to get the executive to act during the Kissinger years. Part of the effort would be simply to organize the administration to implement the law, particularly in foreign military and economic assistance programs. The seriousness of the Carter-Vance commitment was reflected in the designation of Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher to head an interagency group on human rights and foreign assistance. The group’s mandate, backed by the authority of the National Security Council (NSC) directive of April 1, 1977, that set it up, was to approve, delay, limit, or deny any proposed project on the basis of the recipient country’s human rights record. Bureaucratic opponents of the new human rights emphasis might be able to undermine the efforts of Assistant Secretary of State Derian and her newly enlarged Office of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs; but the secretary of state’s trusted second-in-command presided over a powerful interagency group with members from the departments of Defense, Treasury, Commerce, Labor, and Agriculture, and the NSC. Decisions of the Christopher group were tantamount to an executive order and were backed up by the appropriate White House and cabinet-level endorsements when required. As a result of the actions of the interagency group, assistance levels were lowered, on grounds of poor human rights performance, to Afghanistan, Guinea, Central African Empire, Chile, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and El Salvador. And the group’s findings of positive human rights developments resulted in increased levels of assistance for India, Sri Lanka, Botswana, Gambia, the Dominican Republic, Peru, and Costa Rica.2 Under Carter, the U.S. government also opposed loans by international financial institutions to countries in gross violation of basic (especially “integrity of persons”) human rights, but much less consistently or automatically than human rights zealots in the Congress wanted. The Carter administration inherited a congressionally imposed requirement (denying it the case-by-case flexibility it thought essential) that the U.S. governors in both the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Fund must vote against loans to any country engaging in “a consistent pattern of gross violation of internationally recognized human rights unless such assistance will directly benefit needy people.” This legislation, an amendment sponsored by Congressman Thomas Harkin of Iowa to the May 1976 bill authorizing funding to these regional banks, became the model for congressional attempts during 1977 to extend human rights

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provisos to development loans from the World Bank and other international lending institutions. The Carter administration lobbied hard against such legislation, arguing that it reflected an overly rigid approach and would actually handicap U.S. efforts to encourage human rights improvements in other countries, since making the U.S. vote against loans to specific countries automatic weakened U.S. bargaining power. A compromise bill passed the Congress on September 2, 1977, instructing U.S. officials to international financial institutions to “oppose” any loans to rights violators unless the loans directly benefited the needy. The requirement to “oppose” rather than to “vote no” was more consistent with the flexibility the administration wanted.3 Despite dissatisfaction in Congress and a public generally confused by the administration’s pragmatic pullback from Carter’s earlier rhetoric and some glaring contradictions (such as Carter’s support for the shah of Iran), the Carter administration could properly take some credit for positive human rights developments in several countries: substantial numbers of political prisoners were released in Bangladesh, Sudan, Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines, Brazil, Nepal, and Cuba. In Ghana, Nigeria, and Thailand significant steps toward the transfer of power from military to civilian governments were taken. More freedom was granted to the press in various countries. As put by one administration official in his congressional testimony, “Both dissidents and governments have acknowledged—the former favorably and the latter at times less so—our inclusion of human rights issues into U.S. foreign policy. The wall posters of China, the statements of Sakharov and others, and the declarations of groups concerned with political prisoners in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, demonstrate that the U.S. human rights policy is a constant reality.”4

PANAMA, NICARAGUA, AND ZIMBABWE In four situations during the Carter administration, the United States was faced with challenges to the status quo that would have inevitable consequences for regional balances of power, and which provided the country the opportunity to put its ideals of self-determination and human rights in the service of its geopolitical interests. One of these, the revolution in Iran, because of the depth of the trauma it produced and the consequences of its outcome for the global balance of power, will be treated in a separate chapter. The other three—the maturing of the negotiations on the Panama

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Canal treaties, the success of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, and the failure of halfway measures toward black majority rule in Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe—were not as traumatic for the United States nor as consequential in their immediate effects; yet their management by the Carter administration also sparked considerable domestic controversy over the power and purposes of the United States in the world.

The Panama Canal Treaties The domestic controversy was most intense over the two treaties signed with great fanfare on September 7, 1977, by President Carter and Brigadier General Omar Torrijos Herrera, ceding sovereignty over the Panama Canal and the canal zone to Panama and guaranteeing the United States future peacetime and wartime use of the canal.5 For the treaties to become law, the Senate had to vote its consent with at least a two-thirds majority, or 67 votes; at the outset of the Senate deliberations, a United Press International poll reported only 36 senators for or leaning toward approval, 27 against or leaning against, and 37 uncommitted.6 Moreover, popular passion and organized pressures were running against approval. The administration won few converts by pointing out that technically the United States never had formal sovereignty over the canal and canal zone, but only a grant from Panama, through the original 1903 treaty, to act “as if it were sovereign,” and that even this was extracted from Panama by a coercive power play that by today’s standards would be universally condemned as imperialistic and illegitimate. The popular ground in the debate was occupied by those like Ronald Reagan, who argued for a revival of the kind of American patriotism that took pride in Theodore Roosevelt’s aggressiveness in securing the canal, and by those like Senator S. I. Hayakawa, who, with his quip “We stole it fair and square,” gave vent to a cocky American jingoism pressing for release from the post-Vietnam restraints on such impulses. Accommodating to the all-too-evident popular mood and senatorial reluctance to buck it, President Carter, during the seven-month battle for legislative approval of the treaties, shifted his own ground from invocations of the country’s traditions of fairness, nobility, and self-determination for all peoples, to predictions of disastrous geopolitical consequences for the United States if the treaties were rejected. And to assure senators that the United States was relinquishing neither any tangible military and

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commercial rights to use the canal in war or peace nor any real power to enforce these rights should Panama someday be hostile to the United States, the president accepted some ninety “reservations,” “understandings,” and “conditions” demanded by senators, as well as two amendments that required General Torrijos’s consent, in the process coming perilously close to pushing the Panamanian into a repudiation of the whole effort. Despite the amendments and reservations—some of which (like the Deconcini reservation providing that if the canal were closed for any reason, either the United States or Panama could take military steps to put it back into operation) almost killed both treaties—the president and all the heavies he could muster in the administration and outside, including Kissinger, persuaded the Senate to approve the treaties by only a slim twovote margin over the required two-thirds.

Ousting Somoza In Nicaragua, the United States was unavoidably implicated by the challenges to the legitimacy of the oligarchic Somoza dynasty, which because of its own staunch anticommunism and tangible cooperation with U.S. anticommunist interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, was heavily supported throughout the post–World War II period by U.S. economic and military assistance. Now, with the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle confronting a rapidly expanding revolution against his rule, the U.S. government—even with Carter’s commitment to human rights— found itself trapped by its past obligations. By the time of Carter’s inauguration, opposition to Somoza had become broadly based, with Managua’s large and thriving middle class organized in the Unión Democrática de Liberación, led by the respected editor of La Prensa, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro. The militant leftists, whose spearhead was the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, were still not the dominant force; but Somoza’s strategy of focusing on the Sandinistas as the main threat, and his allegations that their Cuban and Soviet connections (still rather thin) meant that an international communist conspiracy was behind the effort to undermine his regime, gave the leftists more visibility and influence in Nicaragua and internationally than they might have had otherwise. The Sandinistas thus became a partner with Somoza in polarizing Nicaragua, as their acts of terrorism and hostage-taking led to increased brutality by Somoza’s National Guard against suspected

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opponents of the regime. In the two years before Carter’s election, the escalation of the brutal civil conflict had led Somoza to declare a state of siege. And an elite “counterinsurgency force,” supported by an 80 percent increase in U.S. military aid, launched a reign of terror in the countryside, committing torture and mass executions, uprooting and forcibly resettling 80 percent of the rural population in the northern regions of the country.7 The gross and systematic brutality of the Somoza regime was brought to the attention of the Christopher interagency group and led to a restriction of military and economic aid to Nicaragua in April 1977—one of the first acts by which the Carter administration demonstrated its seriousness of purpose on human rights. But it was a minor slap on the wrist to the Nicaraguan dictator who had over the years developed influential allies in the U.S. Congress and State and Defense Department bureaucracies. Somoza banked on the efficiency with which his reign of terror had reestablished his invulnerability and domestic order to allow him to dispense with those acts that offended the sensibilities of the Carter administration. And indeed, in September 1977 the administration relaxed the restrictions it had imposed only five months before. But the assassination of the moderate leader, Chamorro, in 1978 led to a new flare-up of popular outrage and violence directed against Somoza. The country’s business leaders called a general strike to demand Somoza’s resignation, and terrorists launched attacks throughout the country. The Sandinistas were revived, and so were the harsh, repressive tactics of the National Guard. The moderates placed their hopes in the Carter administration, anticipating a reimposition of sanctions on Somoza coupled with pressure for the establishment of genuine constitutional representative government. The severe deterioration of Somoza’s ability to control events in 1978 posed a more stark dilemma for the Carter administration—sanctions might further undercut Somoza’s legitimacy at a time when the consequence would be the coming to power of the revolutionary elements. Yet to do nothing, given the widespread knowledge that the situation was even worse now than in the previous year, would be an embarrassing retreat for the Carter human rights policy. The result was the Carter administration’s 1978 decision to reimpose sanctions and to insist upon a “dialogue” between Somoza and the moderates. Once again, surface calm returned to the cities and countryside of Nicaragua, and by summer the Carter administration decided to reduce the sanctions. In addition Carter sent a letter to Somoza congratulating the dictator on his improved human rights record.8

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The U.S. reconciliation with Somoza had just the opposite effect of that intended by Carter. Rather than stimulating movement toward the liberalization of the government in Nicaragua, it demoralized most of the moderates and drove them in desperation into an alliance with the radicals under a new umbrella organization, the Broad Opposition Front. With the country now polarized, the militant Sandinistas were able to set the pace and call the shots for the broad anti-Somoza coalition. In August 1978, they stormed the National Palace while Somoza’s rubber-stamp Congress was in session and took 1,500 hostages, in exchange for whom they were able to force Somoza to release 59 jailed Sandinistas. Another general strike was called, and in September the Sandinistas launched attacks on National Guard garrisons in five provincial cities.9 The National Guard, insecure on the ground, retaliated from the air with bombing and strafing attacks on rebel strongholds in which thousands of innocent civilians were killed. By the end of the month Somoza had again established his power, at the cost of totally losing his authority. The events of bloody September 1978 finally convinced U.S. officials that Somoza must be persuaded to step down in favor of a constitutional regime. They still hoped to accomplish this by negotiations between Somoza and the moderates to arrange for a plebiscite and in this way to prevent the Sandinistas from dominating the post-Somoza government. Somoza agreed to participate in such negotiations, but his attempts to manipulate and subvert them provoked even the moderate elements to walk out in protest. In the meantime the Sandinistas had been reorganizing and rearming for what was to become the final, successful stage of their insurrection. The decisive anti-Somoza uprising began on June 4, 1979. Virtually the entire population of Managua cooperated in bringing to a halt all commercial and professional activity. The National Guard again retaliated with bullets and bombs, but this time the insurrection only spread. Wellequipped Sandinista forces that had been arming themselves and training in neighboring Costa Rica reentered the country. American and other foreign observers began to talk of an impending Sandinista victory.10 On July 21, 1979, Secretary of State Vance finally announced a change in U.S. policy during a meeting of the Organization of American States in Washington. “We must seek a political solution which will take into account the interests of all significant groups in Nicaragua,” he told the assembled Latin American diplomats. A cease-fire and halt of shipment of arms into Nicaragua would be supervised by a regional peacekeeping

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force, and a transitional government of national reconciliation would preside over the establishment of a democratic and representative national government.11 The Organization of American States almost unanimously rejected the U.S. proposals for a cease-fire and a regional peacekeeping force. It was clearly too little and too late, and—besides—the OAS was itself not well structured to perform this function or to guide in institution of a democratic government. The Sandinistas pressed forward, set up a provisional government, and Somoza, denied further U.S. backing, went into exile. The U.S. government, having lost virtually all credit with the new Sandinista-dominated regime in Managua, proved incapable of influencing events in that country during the remainder of the Carter presidency to prevent it from moving in a pro-Castro and pro-Soviet direction. If anything, the record of U.S. timidity in dealing with Somoza made such a radicalization likely.

Zimbabwe The Carter administration looked considerably more consistent and competent in dealing with Rhodesia/Zimbabwe than it did with respect to the Panama Canal treaties or the Somoza ouster. The policy dilemmas were no less profound nor was conservative opposition to a reformist policy lacking, but Carter’s relatively impressive success on matters in southern Africa was partly the result of there being an active constituency for change in Congress and among his appointees to high foreign policy positions. The U.S. government was also able to take a back seat to the British, who bore the principal international responsibility for bringing about a durable regime change in Harare. The reformist constituency in the administration, a part of what UN ambassador Andrew Young called “the new Africa coalition,” consisted of Young himself, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Richard Moose, and Director of the Policy Planning Staff Anthony Lake. Building on the voting power of the African American constituency Young was instrumental in bringing into the Carter camp in the 1976 campaign and the emergence of African issues as a post-Vietnam foreign policy concern among American liberals, this group was instrumental in getting Congress to allow the United States to join the UN-authorized boycott of Rhodesian mineral exports.

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But Carter soon came under renewed pressure from conservatives in Congress to lift the boycott of Rhodesian materials so as to indicate approval by the U.S. government for the racially mixed government Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith put together in 1978. The president, following the advice of the African coalition in his administration, continued to concert U.S. policy with that of Britain, which even under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher refused to accord legitimacy to the new Muzorewa regime. The British urged a more deeply cutting change in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe that would bring the most popular and vigorous elements of the black liberationist movement, the Patriotic Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe, into the now black-run government. If not, the British argued, the Marxist leadership of the Patriotic Front would come increasingly under the sway of the Soviet Union, and eventually stage a full-blown insurrection to install a pro-Soviet regime in Salisbury.12 It was thus essentially a realpolitik rationale of dealing with those who have the power (in this case potential power) that allowed Carter to sustain the boycott and to cooperate with Britain in inducing the Patriotic Front leader, Robert Mugabe, to lay down his arms and participate constructively in the formation of the new government of independent Zimbabwe. By so doing, the United States salvaged for itself in southern Africa, more than it had been able to do in Nicaragua or Iran, a position of influence with the ascending political forces. A not inconsiderable side benefit was the parallel diminution of Soviet influence. The new regime in Salisbury/Harare would hardly be a model of liberal democracy respecting human rights. But at least Carter could point to the outcome as, on balance, a plus for the United States. He was properly pleased to find that the newly installed leader of Zimbabwe, “who was formerly looked upon as a Marxist and a hater of the United States— Mugabe—has now, I think, become one of our strong and potentially very good and loyal friends.”13

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THE CAMP DAVID ACCORDS Carter’s Finest Hour We offer our good offices. I think it’s accurate to say that of all the nations in the world, we are the one that’s most trusted, not completely, but most trusted by the Arab countries and also by Israel. I guess both sides have some doubt about us. But we’ll have to act kind of as a catalyst to bring about their ability to negotiate successfully with one another. —Jimmy Carter

and Carter himself, had anticipated that the Middle East would provide the new administration with its greatest challenges and opportunities. The accomplishments of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy had begun to run down. Between Israel and each of its antagonists other than Egypt there were not the ingredients for the kinds of quid pro quo compromises that were needed to keep the peace process alive, nor did any of the other principal antagonists of Israel have the added incentive to play ball with the United States that President Sadat had after his falling out with the Soviets. It was of the utmost importance to regain the lost momentum of the peace process, for in the Middle East the status quo itself was too dangerously volatile. The bitter resentments and impatience of the Arabs toward Israel and its deepening consolidation of the territories captured in the 1967 war, plus the readiness of the Soviet Union to exploit Arab grievances in order to expand its own influence, were threatening to present the United States with another round of war in the Middle East. Renewed war would confront Washington with more profound dilemmas than ever: Israeli military superiority, if indeed it still existed, would be less than before, and the United States would probably need to come to Israel’s

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RESIDENT CARTER’S FOREIGN POLICY ADVISERS,

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assistance more heavily than in the past. And now there was a clear prospect of the Arabs cutting off the flow of oil to Israel’s supporters. Even short of a resumption of hostilities, continued high tension between the Arabs and the Israelis might at any time stimulate the Arab oil producers to use their resource as a political weapon. A dramatic breakthrough from the status quo was required. Carter and company thought they had a plan for bringing this about.

THE BROOKINGS REPORT AND THE OCTOBER 1977 INITIATIVE The new administration’s plan for getting the Middle East peace process moving again was brought with them into office in the form of a 1975 Brookings Institution study group report titled Toward Peace in the Middle East.1 Co-directed by former U.S. ambassador Charles Yost and Professor Morroe Berger of Princeton University, the Brookings study group had included Zbigniew Brzezinski among its sixteen members.2 Brzezinski brought the report to candidate Jimmy Carter’s attention and got him to endorse it during the 1976 presidential election campaign. The Brookings study group concluded that the approach followed since the 1973 war, emphasizing interim steps designed to reduce tension and to move the parties gradually toward a comprehensive settlement, was no longer feasible. To avoid a dangerous stalemate it was imperative that “peacemaking efforts should henceforth concentrate on negotiation of a comprehensive settlement, including only such interim steps as constitute essential preparations for such a negotiation.” The negotiations should aim at a “package” of agreements on boundaries, the nature of a Palestinian entity, and the regime for Jerusalem, and should involve all the nations that would be affected, plus the principal external guarantors. In exchange for Arab assurances to Israel of peaceful relations and the security of its territory and borders, Israel should withdraw to the boundaries prevailing prior to the start of the 1967 war, with only such modifications as might be mutually accepted. Israel also should accept the principle of Palestinian self-determination and should not rule out the possibility that the Palestinian entity would be an independent state; but in return the Palestinians should recognize the sovereignty and integrity of Israel and should accept whatever security arrangements, mutual guarantees, demilitarized zones, or UN presence was embodied in the peace settlement. The

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Brookings group felt it was premature to stipulate the precise nature of the regime for Jerusalem and granted that it might be wise to leave this question, particularly the issue of Israel’s sovereignty over the whole city, to a late stage in the negotiations. But it was not too early to obtain agreement on the minimum criteria for governing the city—namely, that there should be unimpaired access to all the holy places and that each would be under the custodianship of its own faith; that there should be no barriers to the free circulation of populations throughout the city; and that each national group, if it so desired, should have substantial political autonomy within the area of the city where it was predominant. Some of the elements of the proposed comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace settlement could be implemented in stages. But, advised the Brookings study group, “In order that a settlement be sufficiently attractive to all the parties to induce them to make the necessary compromises, all aspects of the settlement will have to be spelled out explicitly in an agreement or agreements that will be signed more or less simultaneously as part of a ‘package deal.’ ”3 Such a comprehensive package would have to be considered and approved, if not actually negotiated, in a “Geneva”-style conference at which all of the parties directly involved were represented along with the big-power guarantors of the settlement. The “Geneva” format refers to the December 1973 conference in Geneva cochaired by the United States and the Soviet Union and attended by Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, which broke up after only two days. If Geneva were to be reconvened, perhaps with a larger membership, Israel could obtain its objective of negotiating face to face with its Arab neighbors. Such a conference would again commit the USSR to the negotiating process in a way that would make it difficult for the Kremlin to reject the settlement that would emerge. The idea of a general conference also had inherent difficulties: How would the Palestinians be represented and would they first have to recognize Israel and its right to exist in peace and security? How could such a general conference be structured and conducted so as not to degenerate rapidly into a polarized polemical debating arena, with the Soviet Union playing to the militant Arab galleries? Such obstacles to a successful general conference are serious, admitted the authors of the Brookings report, but they should not be insurmountable if the nations involved could be persuaded there is no viable alternative to a comprehensive settlement.

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These were the assumptions underlying the initiative early in the Carter administration to get the Soviets committed to the broad principles in the Brookings report as the terms of reference for a reconvened Geneva conference. The Soviets were more than willing to be brought back into the picture as a partner in the Middle East peace process and jumped at the chance of joining the United States in presiding over the negotiations. In their formal joint statement of October 1, 1977, issued simultaneously in Moscow and Washington, the United States and the Soviet Union, as cochairs of the Geneva conference, maintained that “a just and lasting settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict . . . should be comprehensive, incorporating all parties concerned and all questions.” The settlement should resolve such key issues as withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the 1967 conflict; the resolution of the Palestinian question, including insuring the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people; termination of the state of war and establishment of normal peaceful relations of the Palestinian people; termination of the state of war and establishment of normal peaceful relations on the basis of mutual recognition of the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence. The only right and effective way to achieve a fundamental solution to these issues, said the U.S.-Soviet statement, was through negotiation within the framework of the Geneva Peace Conference specifically convened for these purposes, with the participation of representatives of all the parties involved in the conflict, including those of the Palestinian people.4 Although the statement departed somewhat from the standard Arab formulations (it did not name the Palestine Liberation Organization as the representative of the Palestinians, and it did not insist on Israeli withdrawal from all territories occupied in the 1967 war), it outraged the government of Israel and its supporters in the United States by referring to the “legitimate rights” of the Palestinian people, the code words for a claim to statehood, rather than their “legitimate interests”—the more innocuous phrase that Israel over the years had been willing to accept. The joint statement also alarmed Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, who wanted least of all to bring the Soviet Union back heavily into the peace process. Sadat had only recently made his historic shift away from being a principal client of the USSR and did not trust Soviet motives; and now here was the Carter administration unwittingly becoming an accomplice

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in subordinating Egypt’s interest to the Kremlin’s geopolitical designs in the Middle East. The negative reactions by Israel and Egypt to the October 1, 1977, joint statement were no real surprise to the Carter administration’s Middle East experts. Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Sadat each had previously voiced objections to reconvening the Geneva forum and were suspicions of Soviet designs. Nevertheless, Brzezinski and Carter were determined to shake loose the logjam; they were convinced Soviet leverage was needed to get the recalcitrant Arabs to negotiate with Israel and felt they could keep the Kremlin honest by making it clear that Soviet cooperation in bringing about a Middle East peace was an essential link in the overall détente relationship. Begin and Sadat, as well as the rest of the parties in the region, could be brought along if the two superpowers operated in concert. What the Carter administration did not know, however, was that simultaneous with the dialogue between the Soviets and the Americans that produced the October 1 statement, the highest levels of the Begin and Sadat governments were in secret dialogue to explore the prospects of a direct and substantial accommodation between Israel and Egypt. (The secret Israeli-Egyptian dialogue during the fall of 1977 had grown out of the decision by Begin to share Israeli intelligence information with Sadat about a Libyan terrorist plot to assassinate the Egyptian leader, which allowed Sadat’s secret police to capture the terrorists in Cairo. Sadat was doubly grateful when Begin announced to the Knesset that Sadat could go ahead with a military attack across the Egyptian-Libyan border without fear that Israel would take advantage of the situation on the Sinai front while Sadat’s forces were preoccupied with the situation on Egypt’s western front.5) Sadat’s dramatic decision to accept Begin’s rhetorical invitation to come to Jerusalem to talk peace could not have been predicted (even Sadat’s closest associates were surprised); but it is doubtful that the Carter administration would have so easily discounted the anticipated Israeli and Egyptian objections to the concerted Soviet-American move to reconvene the Geneva conference if they had been aware of the rapport that was developing between Begin and Sadat. Sadat’s historic visit to Israel on November 9, 1977, completely pulled the rug out from under the U.S.-Soviet October 1 démarche. In some measure, however, it may have been provoked by that démarche. The resulting negotiations between Israel and Egypt gave Jimmy Carter the opportunity to play his sought-for role as peacemaker.

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CARTER AS MEDIATOR The U.S. government, temporarily knocked off balance by the decision by Sadat and Begin to begin a dialogue themselves, once again was able to resume the role of provider of good offices to Egypt and Israel in their efforts to overcome the divergence in their terms for peace. The mediating role would be played less through the peripatetic shuttling of high U.S. officials between Cairo and Jerusalem than through the president of the United States encouraging the leaders of each country to visit with him personally in the United States to work out, at the highest level, ways of consummating a real peace. Begin came first, in mid-December 1977, to talk with Carter, and the following week traveled to Ismailia, Egypt, to negotiate directly with Sadat. Still, neither of the two leaders nor their technical working groups were able to solve the impasse. Next it was Sadat’s turn to visit with Carter. Meeting at Camp David in early February 1978, the two presidents of humble rural beginnings and deeply religious sentiments apparently established an easy rapport (in contrast to the reportedly poor chemistry between each of them and Begin), with Sadat commenting that the United States was no longer simply a “go-between” but was now a “full partner” in the peace process. There was more than personal rapport involved, however. This first Carter-Sadat meeting marked a return to the geopolitical understanding between Kissinger and Sadat that the United States and Egypt shared a priority interest in reducing the Soviet Union’s influence in the Middle East; and that momentum in achieving an Arab-Israeli settlement was crucial for this purpose, but so was the assumption by the United States of the role previously played by the Soviets of being Egypt’s principal arms supplier. Four days after Sadat left the United States, the Carter administration proposed that Congress authorize sales of $4.8 billion worth of military jet aircraft to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The Egyptian portion of the package (Cairo could purchase fifty F-54E short-range fighter bombers) would be the first transfer of U.S. weapons to Egypt since the 1950s. Speaking for the administration, Secretary of State Vance argued that “Egypt, too, must have reasonable assurance of its ability to defend itself if it is to continue the peace negotiations with confidence.”6 Prime Minister Begin came to the White House again at the end of March 1978; this time President Carter gave him a deliberately cool reception. The administration was now growing impatient with what it regarded

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as Israel’s increasing intransigence on the West Bank and Gaza Strip issues. Begin had stated on March 4 that his government did not regard UN Resolution 242 as obligating Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza. Moreover, the White House was especially irked at the Begin’s and Ariel Sharon’s policy of encouraging Israeli settlements in the West Bank to give corporeal substance to Begin’s biblical and ancient legal claims of Israeli sovereignty over this area.7 Carter himself apparently was also miffed at the Israelis for their mid-March invasion of southern Lebanon in retaliation for a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist raid near Tel Aviv. Sadat too was growing more and more impatient by the summer of 1978, calling Begin “an obstacle to peace.” On July 30, citing the “negative” and “backward” moves of Israel, Sadat opposed resuming their bilateral peace talks. President Carter now interjected himself even more actively into the process, inviting Begin and Sadat to meet with him in a three-way summit at Camp David to work out the peace agreement they all wanted. The Egyptian president and the Israeli prime minister accepted immediately and without conditions. The negotiations at Camp David between September 5 and 17, 1978, were more like a compressed version of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy than the famous summits between the leaders of the United States, the USSR, and Britain during World War II, where important bargaining took place in face-to-face sessions among the Big Three. Carter and his aides “shuttled” between the cabins of his two guests at the Maryland mountain retreat to hammer out a mutually acceptable agreement. And representatives of Begin and Sadat held working sessions with Carter in his cabin. Vice President Walter Mondale, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and the national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski were also actively involved in the cabin-to-cabin shuttle. Carter, Begin, and Sadat met together only twice during the thirteen-day marathon before they appeared together on September 17 to announce their success.8 It was an extremely difficult and delicate task of mediation for the Americans, for in the ten months since Sadat’s visit to Israel, Sadat and Begin had retreated back to positions the other side found offensive, and it was with these positions that they opened the Camp David negotiations. Begin came prepared to return all of the Sinai to Egypt (with the proviso that some Israeli settlements be allowed to remain there), but Israel would not, he said, cede sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza nor the right to maintain Israeli forces and settlements in these areas. Moreover,

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Israel could not agree to an independent Palestinian state. Sadat’s opening demands were that Israel withdraw totally from all the territory occupied during the 1967 war (which implied, in addition to the Sinai, the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights) and recognize the right of full self-determination for the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza. In short, Israel was bargaining for a separate peace with Egypt— the only Arab country willing to negotiate with it—but Egypt was insisting on linking any bilateral agreement to a broader Arab-Israeli settlement, without which Sadat knew he would be branded a traitor throughout the Arab world to their common cause. The central impasse was overcome by separating the Sinai issue, on which explicit and detailed agreements were immediately possible, from the West Bank and Gaza issues, on which agreement still seemed remote. The Sinai agreement would constitute the core of a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel to be concluded before the end of the year, whereas only general principles for settlement of the West Bank and Gaza issues would have to be agreed upon at this time. Both sets of issues, however, would be linked by virtue of their being two parts of an agreed “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” to be issued by the three governments as the fruit of their Camp David meetings, and by having the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty preamble commit both parties to work diligently toward a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict in all its aspects.9 Given this crucial breakthrough, there were still numerous difficulties to be worked out in each part of the draft Camp David framework as Begin and Sadat each threatened to walk out of the negotiations and return to a confrontational relationship. The thorniest obstacle to agreement on the draft Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was the issue of Israeli settlements in the Sinai—a pet project of the popular General Sharon. Carter adamantly supported Sadat’s demand that the Sinai settlements be removed and reportedly painted for Begin the stark consequences of a refusal by the Israelis to acquiesce: a renewal of war in the Sinai in which Israel could not count on U.S. help.10 Begin’s backdown in agreeing to dismantle the Sinai settlement if the Knesset approved broke the final serious logjam and allowed the full-speed-ahead drafting of the final Camp David accords that were announced by the smiling trio of Carter, Sadat, and Begin at the White House on September 17, 1978. The Camp David accords were published as two documents—the “Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” and the “Framework for Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel”—each signed by

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President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin as the parties and by President Carter as the witness. The first, more general document included the agreed principles for negotiating “autonomy” and a “self-governing authority” for inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. The second document stipulated the key points of agreement on the Sinai that would constitute the core of the peace treaty to be concluded within three months. The framework for settling the West Bank and Gaza issues outlined a negotiating process to establish a “self-governing authority” within five years—“the transitional period.” During this transitional period negotiations were to be undertaken among Egypt, Israel, and Jordan and elected representatives of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza “to agree on the final status” of these areas. The transitional “self-governing authority” for the West Bank and Gaza was to be established by negotiations to begin immediately between Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and “representatives of the Palestinian people,” with the Palestinians included in the Egyptian and Jordanian delegations. The “selfgoverning authority” would be an “administrative council” that would be “freely elected by the inhabitants of these areas to replace the existing military government.” A local police force would be established that could include Jordanian citizens. Israeli armed forces would be withdrawn, but there could be a redeployment of some Israeli forces into specified “security locations.” During the five-year “transition period,” “representatives of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and the self-governing authority will constitute a ‘Continuing Committee’ to decide by agreement on the modalities of admission of persons displaced from the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, together with the necessary measures to prevent disruption and disorder.” Thus, while granting the right of eventual self-determination to the Palestinians, the terms of the framework preserved basic Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza for at least the five-year transitional period: no devolution of authority to the Palestinian administrative council would take place beyond what it would be granted in the yet to be undertaken “autonomy talks” to institute the period of limited self-government; some Israeli forces would remain in the area, albeit at specially designated locations; and Israel would retain a veto over any developments through its membership in the Continuing Committee along with Egypt and Jordan. Yet these provisions could be interpreted by the Egyptians (as Sadat did when other Arabs accused him of selling out the Palestinians in order to achieve his separate peace with Israel) as a significant erosion of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza. Israel was more answerable

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than ever before to others—the United States, Egypt, and Jordan (if King Hussein agreed to participate in the process)—for its dealings with the inhabitants of the West Bank. The burden of proof would be on Israel to demonstrate why it could not move toward granting full self-determination and statehood to the Palestinians. Real, tangible, increases in administrative (including police) powers were to be given to the resident Palestinians during the transitional period; and although the tripartite Continuing Committee would give Israel a veto over major changes in the status of the area, it also would give Egypt and Jordan vetoes over attempts by Israel to reassume local powers it had already relinquished. The Camp David framework for the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was a much briefer, more specific, document, committing the parties to a rapid conclusion of the treaty negotiations begun at Camp David and recording details already agreed, including the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from the Sinai; limitations on deployments of Egyptian and Israeli military units on their respective sides of their common border; limitations on Egyptian armed forces to be stationed in the Sinai immediately east of the Suez; provision for UN forces adjacent to the Egyptian-Israeli border near the Strait of Tiran; and guarantees of rights of free passage to Israeli ships through the Gulf of Suez, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Tiran, and the Gulf of Aqaba. The Israeli troop withdrawals would be phased over a period of two to three years, but the two countries would establish full diplomatic and economic relations three to nine months after the signing of the peace treaty and upon the completion of an “interim withdrawal” of Israeli troops from the Sinai to lines yet to be determined.11 The decadelong impasse between the two countries in implementing Resolution 242 had been overcome at last—truly a historic achievement. But between the raising of the goblets of peace and being able to drink their wine there was still much to be worked out. The overarching issue was the degree of linkage between the EgyptianIsraeli peace treaty and the negotiations over the status of the West Bank and Gaza. Sadat, anxious to counter the intensifying drumbeat of charges by other Arab leaders that he was a traitor to their cause, wanted a stronger link to be stated explicitly in the preamble to the treaty than did the Israelis, who worried that the preambular linkage could be interpreted to mean that the provisions in the body of the treaty were inoperative until substantial progress had been achieved in the autonomy talks. In the months following Camp David the Carter administration was even more insistent than Sadat that collateral progress on the Palestinian autonomy

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arrangements was an essential content for a durable Egyptian-Israeli peace. Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders was dispatched in October to convince King Hussein of Jordan to join the negotiations and to persuade Palestinian leaders in the West Bank that the “autonomy” promised in the Camp David accords was only an interim step toward more complete self-determination. While on his trip Saunders angered Begin by saying that Israel would dismantle its settlements on the West Bank—there had been no such commitment at Camp David—and by calling East Jerusalem “occupied territory.”12 A provoked Israeli government hardened its opposition to what looked like new American pressures for a comprehensive peace and announced plans to “thicken” the Israeli settlements on the West Bank. It began to appear as if Begin had never really intended to transfer substantial power to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and that his limited concessions on the matter at Camp David were only for the purpose of getting the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty moving and need not ever to be concretely delivered. Sadat could not allow the rest of the Arab world to gain the impression that he had been diddled by Begin and began to toughen his stand on various details in the draft bilateral peace treaty. When Carter suggested in February 1979 that Begin and Sadat come to Camp David for a second summit to resolve their differences, both leaders declined. Begin saw Carter in Washington in March but left complaining that the Americans were now supporting Egyptian proposals that were totally unacceptable to Israel. Carter decided to inject himself even more forcefully into the bargaining than he had done through the means of the Camp David summit. He personally would fly between Jerusalem and Cairo in the type of mediational diplomacy Kissinger had pioneered, but with an immense difference—the prestige of the president of the United States would now be implicated in the success or failure of the effort. This was Carter’s daring gamble, and it gave his insistence on constructive negotiation added weight, for now Carter would be viewed in the media worldwide as a principal participant in the negotiations with high political values of his own immediately at stake, not just as a detached go-between providing “good offices.” Carter was gambling on the assumption that the Israelis and Egyptians were fundamentally committed to a consummation of the peace between them essentially on the terms outlined at Camp David and that the outstanding disagreements were negotiable details, which as part of the end game of the bargaining had been inflated into matters of “principle” by each side.

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In Jerusalem and Cairo, Carter created the impression that his failure to bring home peace was intolerable to him and that noncooperation at this point by either Sadat or Begin would result in a deterioration of relations between the United States and whichever country was most responsible for preventing final agreement. Any deterioration in relations with the United States was a particularly fearsome prospect for the Israelis given the growing strategic interest of the Americans in securing access to Persian Gulf oil and therefore in cultivating friendly relations with many of Israel’s hostile neighbors. The West Europeans and the Japanese had already put good relations with their Middle East oil suppliers ahead of friendship with Israel; it would be suicidal for the Begin government to alienate the American president. Sadat too was in a bind: increasingly isolated from other Arab governments, most of whom had severed diplomatic relations with Egypt in relation to his trip to Jerusalem and subsequent negotiation of the Camp David accords, Sadat had to turn to the United States for economic credits to rescue the faltering Egyptian economy and for arms to maintain a military balance not only against Israel but against his Sovietarmed enemy on Egypt’s western border, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Sadat, of course, did retain the option of another dramatic turnaround: to embrace the pan-Arab cause and to junk his Nobel Prize–winning peace initiatives with Israel; so Carter could not push him to accept terms that would sacrifice vital Egyptian interest or that would personally humiliate the proud Egyptian president. But Carter saw that Sadat would be doubly humiliated if he were to crawl back to the militant Arab fold and that any implied threat to do so in response to reasonable Israeli demands backed by the United States was a bluff. By purposefully inflating his own, and thus the U.S. government’s, stake in an Israeli-Egyptian settlement, thereby maximizing the pressure on Begin and Sadat to converge on the terms of their treaty, Carter’s Middle Eastern shuttle of March 8–13, 1979, should be ranked as one of the most impressive démarches in the annals of diplomacy—less infused with emotional drama than Sadat’s 1977 trip to Jerusalem, but as it turned out, the crucial element in transforming Sadat’s initiative from simply an act of political theater into a major branch point in world history. The terms of the Treaty of Peace Between the Arab Republic of Egypt and the State of Israel signed in Washington on March 26, 1979, by President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin and by President Carter as “witness” were remarkable. Usually peace treaties codify the results of war, giving international legitimacy to control over territory established by

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battle, attempting to give de jure durability to the new de facto situation and to resolving marginal issues not settled by war that could provoke new hostilities. The Egyptian-Israeli treaty, by contrast, substantially changed territorial dispositions established twelve years previously by war and instituted a fundamentally new status quo, effecting a revolutionary change in the thirty-year-old situation in the Middle East in which the leading Arab country, among others, had refused to grant legitimacy to the state of Israel. As anticipated in the Camp David framework, Israel agreed to evacuate its military forces and civilians from the Sinai peninsula in a phased withdrawal over a three-year period; the state of war between Egypt and Israel was terminated; and the parties agreed to establish normal and full diplomatic relations after the initial nine months of Israeli military withdrawal; Israeli ships were accorded the right of free passage through the Suez Canal and its approaches, and all normal international navigational rights through the Strait of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba. The parties agreed to negotiate special security arrangements, including the deployment of UN forces to monitor the implementation of the peace treaty. They also agreed “not to enter into any obligation in conflict with this treaty.” On the controversial issue of the linkage of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty to the negotiations on the regime for the West Bank and Gaza, as provided for in the Camp David framework, the text of the treaty itself was mute, except for a vague clause in the preamble committing the parties to continue “the search for a comprehensive peace in the area and for the attainment of the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict in all its aspects.” The Israelis won their determined fight to keep all clauses out of the treaty that might make its implementation conditional on the settlement of the Palestinian problem. Sadat’s need to demonstrate to the other Arab countries and the Palestinians that his peace with Israel was only the opening move in a larger strategy of getting the Israelis to give back all of the territories conquered in 1967 was catered to, on the insistence of President Carter, in the form of a joint letter to Carter signed by Begin and Sadat in which they agreed to continue good faith negotiations according to the Camp David framework for “the establishment of the self-governing authority in the West Bank and Gaza in order to provide full autonomy to the inhabitants.” It was more than politeness or the requirements of protocol that was reflected in the accolades paid by Sadat and Begin at the signing ceremony to Carter’s role in the negotiations. As put by Sadat, “the man who

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performed the miracle was President Carter. Without any exaggeration, what he did constitutes one of the greatest achievements of our time. . . . There came certain moments when hope was eroding and retreating in the face of pride. However, President Carter remained unshaken in his confidence and determination. . . . Before anything else, the signing of the peace treaty and the exchange of letters is a tribute to the spirit and ability of Jimmy Carter.”13 Begin agreed.

18

IRAN AND AFGHANISTAN Carter’s Struggles to Salvage Containment I don’t know what historical assumptions guided Carter’s or Vance’s approach . . . but I assumed that their assumptions were different from mine and involved a somewhat different scheme of the world. To me, principled commitment to a more decent world order did not preclude the use of power to protect our most immediate interests. —Zbigniew Brzezinski

looked like two comfortably-thick barriers to any attempt by the Soviet Union to expand its sphere of control into the geopolitically significant Southwest Asian “rimland”: Iran and Afghanistan. Iran was ruled by a proAmerican and modernizing monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi; and Afghanistan had been an adherent to the doctrine of nonalignment in the Cold War. But by the last year of his presidency, Carter had to deal with the embarrassing fact that it was on his watch that Iran had fallen under the control of virulently anti-US Islamicists, and Afghanistan had been subverted and then invaded by the Soviets. The president’s skillful and commanding international leadership in negotiating the Camp David Israeli-Egyptian accords was now overshadowed by his struggle to overcome allegations that the United States was entering a period of decline.

T

HE CARTER ADMINISTRATION INHERITED WHAT

THE “ISLAND OF STABILITY” ERUPTS “Under the Shah’s leadership,” recalls Kissinger, “the land bridge between Asia and Europe, so often the hinge of world history, was pro-American and pro-West beyond any challenge. . . . The Shah’s view of the realities of

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world politics paralleled our own. . . . Iran under the Shah, in short, was one of America’s best, most important, and most loyal friends in the world.”1 Nixon and Kissinger had themselves built upon the legacy of U.S.Iranian relations that went back to World War II and that had been elaborated during the Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson administrations. President Franklin D. Roosevelt perceived it to be the American mission to prevent the USSR and Britain from transforming their wartime zones of military occupation in Iran into a permanent postwar partition of the country. It was on U.S. insistence that the two occupying powers signed a treaty with Iran in January 1942 to withdraw their troops from Iranian territory within six months after the end of the war. Roosevelt was concerned, with Britain no longer able to perform its historic geopolitical role of containing Russian expansion into the oil-rich Persian Gulf, to solidify a posture of determined independence within Iran—a substitute, as it were, for the traditional British presence.2 In any event, by being in favor of an independent Iran, the United States would not have to assume an anti-Soviet posture. The geopolitical, rather than the idealistic, basis for U.S. attempts to assure Iranian independence took over U.S. diplomacy during the first year of the Truman administration, when in the first major U.S.-Soviet altercation of the postwar period, the United States brought maximum diplomatic pressure on the Soviets to get Stalin to honor his commitment to withdraw Russian occupation troops from northern Iran after the cessation of hostilities. The geopolitical considerations henceforth dominated U.S. policies toward Iran; but the assessments of the best means for keeping Iran out of the Soviet sphere kept fluctuating between efforts to induce the shah to liberalize his regime and efforts to bolster his internal and external power by aiding him to build up his security forces and his military establishment. The larger movement of U.S. policy was toward catering to the shah’s preference for a powerful military establishment and other trappings of monarchic, even imperial, grandeur and for glamorous industrialization projects and away from insistence on basic socioeconomic and political reforms. The Truman-Acheson policy of trying to convince the shah that he needed to modernize and democratize Iran lest it suffer a fate analogous to Chiang Kai-shek’s China and of making loans and arms transfers at least partly contingent upon a sincere effort by the shah to institute domestic reforms gave way to the Eisenhower-Dulles policy of relying on the shah

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to make Iran the centerpiece of the U.S. anticommunist alliance system in the Middle East and of intervening to help the shah combat his domestic enemies.3 The Eisenhower administration feared that Mohammad Mossadegh, the nationalistic prime minister appointed by the shah in 1951, was by 1953 demagogically catering to extremist and pro-Soviet elements, especially the Marxist Tudeh Party, and that Mossadegh’s nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was only the first step toward a complete radicalization of Iran’s political economy and a turn toward alignment with the Soviet Union. As Mossadegh moved in 1953 to dissolve the Parliament and to assume dictatorial powers, the Eisenhower administration felt justified in authorizing the CIA to proceed with its plan to topple Mossadegh and reinstate the shah, who already had fled to Italy. Although, at the time, the overthrow of Mossadegh and the restoration of the shah was more popular than unpopular in Iran, the recollection by Iranians of the CIA-engineered coup, more than any event in the relationship between the two countries, provided the source of the hysterical charges during the 1979–1980 hostage crisis that the United States was a full accomplice in all of the crimes committed by the shah against his people. While the restoration of the shah in 1953 hardly produced the reign of terror that the 1978 revolutionary leaders would allege was the immediate result, and while many participants in the Mossadegh government willingly went to work for the shah, the 1953 coup decimated the sociopolitical infrastructure that was gradually maturing in Iran and that given time and encouragement, might have provided a stable structure for a moderate democracy. In the post-Mossadegh period all political authority was concentrated in the monarchy; the bureaucracy and Parliament became rubber stamps for the shah’s decrees, and in the name of securing the regime against a resurgence of Tudeh radicalism from the left and Muslim fundamentalism from the right, the shah delegated more and more enforcement powers to the armed forces and police. With the shah less inclined than ever to accept foreign advice on the basic structure of his regime, the bargaining between Washington and Tehran tended to concentrate during the remaining years of the Eisenhower administration on the material inputs and technical assistance the United States could contribute to Iran’s economic, administrative, and military modernization and on the role Iran should play in the regional “mutual security” network being constructed in the Near East by John Foster Dulles. The shah shrewdly calculated, as did other leading U.S. clients in the Third World, that by catering to Dulles’s preoccupation with the

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U.S.-Soviet rivalry he could get maximum support from the United States for building up his own domestic and regional power, even though this was targeted more against the shah’s local adversaries than against hypothetical Soviet aggression. The Eisenhower administration was not at all sanguine about Iran’s future stability and pro-Western orientation. In the White House there was particular concern that the shah’s emphasis on expensive military projects was dangerously retarding the evolution of a balanced domestic economy capable of supporting his attempts to rapidly industrialize the country. But Eisenhower and Dulles were loath to threaten a reduction in military or economic assistance as a lever on Iranian domestic reform for fear of undercutting the shah’s authority and stimulating the anti-shah groups. Iran’s economic and military programs went even more against the grain of the economic development philosophies influential among John F. Kennedy’s New Frontiersmen in the White House and in the Agency for International Development, as did the shah’s reputation as a ruthless autocrat. Kennedy’s own determination to move away from the previous administration’s policy of deference to the shah was apparently crystallized by Khrushchev’s prediction at the 1961 Vienna summit that the shah would fall victim to a popular uprising. In 1962 the Kennedy administration conditioned its contributions to Iran’s economic plan and military modernization upon the shah’s agreement to reduce his army from 240,000 to 150,000 men and to institute various economic and political reforms. Displeased with such meddling, the shah nevertheless went along with most of the new U.S. insistences, meanwhile attempting to increase his bargaining power vis-à-vis the United States by accepting Soviet economic and military aid and by attempting to exploit the increasing dependence of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan on Iranian oil. During the Johnson administration the shah, perhaps sensing the opportunity arising out of the U.S. preoccupation with Vietnam, became increasingly manipulative of his U.S. patrons. United States’ financial aid was being rapidly phased out due to Iran’s soaring oil revenues and therefore provided virtually no leverage by the late 1960s. The shah’s main requests now were that he be permitted to purchase the most sophisticated military equipment: ground-to-air missile systems and radars, supersonic aircraft, and surface-to-surface missiles. The shah perceived that many top U.S. officials, alarmed at Soviet arms deliveries to Iraq and Egypt, were ready to support his requests before congressional committees and within

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the bureaucracy despite growing skepticism about the shah’s purported needs and worries about the distortions the arms transfers would produce in Iran’s economic and social system. Whatever opportunities there might have been for U.S. officials to capitalize on the divisions in Washington by way of hard bargaining with the shah were bypassed in the latter years of the Johnson administration; instead the president and secretary of state followed the counsel of Under Secretary of State Eugene Rostow that the shah not be “alienated,” lest he turn to the Soviets.4 The shah’s star reached its zenith in Washington during the NixonKissinger years. The “Nixon Doctrine”—devolving frontline containment and regional stabilization tasks to selected U.S. allies who would be well supplied with U.S. military equipment—was precisely suited to the role of Iran as conceived of by the shah. In the wake of the British military withdrawal from the Persian Gulf at the end of 1971, Kissinger recalls that “there was no possibility of assigning any American military forces to the Indian Ocean in the midst of the Vietnam war and its attendant trauma.” But with Iran as a willing military client, “the vacuum left by British withdrawal, now menaced by Soviet intrusion and radical momentum, would be filled by a local power friendly to us. . . . And all of this was achieved without any American resources, since the shah was willing to pay for the equipment out of his oil revenues.”5 Despite this mutuality of interests between Washington and Tehran, the shah was not averse to playing hardball diplomacy to extract the maximum possible out of the American arsenal. In 1971 he indicated a willingness to join with the Arab majority in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in its threat to use the oil cartel as an instrument of international leverage against Israel unless the United States was fully responsive to Iran’s security needs. The result was Nixon’s promise in Tehran in May 1972 to allow the shah to buy virtually any and all nonnuclear weapons he wanted.6 Kissinger objected to journalistic characterizations of the 1972 arms transfer agreement as “open ended,” branding these accounts “hyperbole.”7 But the fact of a nearly totally open spigot on the American arms pipeline to Iran after 1972 is indisputable. From 1973 to 1977 more than a third of all U.S. military sales were to Iran, whose military budget rose fourfold during this period, consuming over a quarter of the Iranian government’s expenditures. The increase in the value of arms exports from $1 billion annually in the early 1970s to $10 billion annually in the mid-1970s was attributable in large part to the shah’s insatiable appetite for new weapons.

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Throughout Jimmy Carter’s first presidential year, the public face of United States policy toward Iran was one of unwavering support for the shah, despite growing concern within the administration and in Congress over the vulnerability of the shah’s regime and his use of his secret police, SAVAK, to brutally suppress political opposition. On November 15, 1977, the president and the shah stood together on the White House south lawn, exchanging expressions of mutual admiration and respect while blinking and wiping their eyes from the tear gas fired by Washington police breaking up a fierce riot north of the White House between 4,000 anti-shah and 1,500 pro-shah demonstrators. And on January 2, 1978, U.S. news media carried reports of Carter’s New Year’s Eve toast in Tehran to the shah’s regime as “an island of stability” in one of the more troubled areas of the world. “This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and the respect, admiration and love which your people give to you.”8 Critics of the policy of continuing to support the shah with mawkish flattery and lavish arms sales wondered how an administration professing dedication to human rights and arms control could justify these actions. However, the reasons for special support of the shah, especially during his time of troubles, were convincing to the new president, just as they had been convincing to Carter’s predecessors. The shah’s Iran had become the most important of the “regional influentials” (Brzezinski’s phrase) upon which the United States had to rely, particularly in the post-Vietnam era of opposition to overseas U.S. military deployments, to provide an adequate forward defense against Soviet impulses to expand the USSR’s sphere of control. Both the human rights and the conventional arms transfer policies of the Carter administration provided explicitly for geopolitically determined exceptions such as this. The legacy of past commitments and the lack of current alternatives to the shah continued to tilt sentiment in the administration, including Carter’s, in favor of supporting the shah—until the foundational premises of the policy had already crumbled beyond repair.

AMBIVALENCE IN WASHINGTON The Carter administration inherited more than the arms sales contracts of its predecessors; it also inherited career bureaucrats in the departments of State and Defense who, in approving the sales, had made judgments about the basic viability of the shah’s rule and about his regime’s suppression of political opposition. The prevailing consensus among the careerists was

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that the shah was without peer among Middle Eastern leaders in his ability to maintain domestic order while instituting major socioeconomic reform of a traditional society and that the draconian measures he sometimes used were hardly unusual among regimes in the region and throughout the Third World. The careerists had to contend against Carter appointees who were committed to helping the president implement his campaign promises to reduce arms sales and promote human rights, but the old hands found a powerful ally in Zbigniew Brzezinski, who accepted the Kissingerian argument that a constriction of weapon transfers to Iran, especially if it were an expression of discontent with the monarchy’s human rights record, would be against U.S. interests, since it could only alienate the shah and turn him toward other arms suppliers. As evidence mounted during the first half of 1978 that opposition to the shah’s regime was spreading in Iran, this bureaucratic coalition in Washington continued to successfully resist a fundamental reassessment of U.S. policy by arguing that any criticism of the shah at this time would play into the hands of his opponents and exacerbate the turmoil, and this in turn could only increase the shah’s tendency to rely on SAVAK’s brutal techniques of repression. In the fall of 1978, however, when it began to be evident that the growing instability in Iran was more serious than anything that had been seen since the Mossadegh period, Brzezinski himself began to argue that the overthrow of the shah was a real possibility. Strikes were endemic in essential public service industries; the economy was near collapse; wealthy Iranians were sending their money out of the country; and Ruhollah Khomeini was calling from exile in Paris for civil war. Carter’s national security adviser’s response to the impending crisis was predictable: back the shah all the way and let him and his opponents know that this was U.S. policy.9 The view from the American Embassy in Tehran was quite different. Ambassador William Sullivan sent a message to Washington on November 9, 1978, recommending that since the shah’s regime might collapse, the United States should begin to look for alternative means to preserve its interests. The unity of the armed forces and their willingness to support a post-shah regime would be crucial to preserving the territorial integrity and independence of Iran, and therefore the United States should attempt to use its influence to “broker an arrangement” between the Khomeini group and the leading military officers about the makeup of the new regime and on the role of the armed forces under it. Receiving no reply to his message and believing his views were no longer welcome at the White

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House, Ambassador Sullivan, through talks on his own with the revolutionary leaders and the military, began to explore the possibility of acceptable post-shah arrangements.10 By the end of the first week of December 1978, reports reaching the White House on the disastrous crumbling of the shah’s support in Iran moved Carter to publicly urge the shah to broaden the base of his government in an effort to restore its legitimacy. And the president, in response to questioning by the press, allowed himself to express some doubt about the shah’s ability to hang on to power unless he instituted a major effort to transform his regime into a constitutional monarchy with free elections and a decentralization of power.11 Behind the scenes, a fierce debate raged among Carter’s inner council of top foreign policy and national security advisers. Brzezinski and James Schlesinger (Carter’s energy secretary and formerly secretary of defense under Nixon and Ford) wanted the president to make clear to the shah that the United States encouraged and would back him in a major mobilization of the Iranian armed forces to put down civil disturbances, take over the provision of essential services, and root out and incarcerate subversive groups—in short, anything that was necessary to decisively smash the revolution. Secretary Vance, on the other hand, felt the time had come for the president to distance the United States from the shah. There was no saving him anymore, and he should be urged to leave the country. The United States should back a transition government that would be supported by the armed forces and could rely on them to restore public order and establish procedures for instituting a constitutional, popularly legitimized regime. By the end of December, events in Iran appeared to validate the Vance approach. The shah appointed Shapour Bakhtiar, an opposition leader and former deputy minister in the Mossadegh government, to the post of prime minister. Bakhtiar’s conditions were that he be allowed to release political prisoners, dissolve SAVAK, and reinstitute freedom of the press— and that the shah should leave the country. The announcement on December 29, 1978, of the shah’s appointment of Bakhtiar as prime minister was followed by great confusion and near chaos. The militant National Front, heady with the developing revolutionary situation, expelled Bakhtiar for being too willing to compromise. The shah’s spokesman denied that Reza Pahlavi had actually consented to leave Iran. Seemingly credible rumors were rife about coups being hatched by the Right, the Left, and various factions of the armed forces.

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And increasing attention—Iranian and international—was focused on the charismatic Khomeini to determine to whom he might throw his support. Ambassador Sullivan urged a meeting between U.S. officials and Khomeini, but Brzezinski vetoed the idea. Khomeini rejected the Bakhtiar government and himself named a shadow government with a religiously oriented leader of the National Front, Mehdi Bazargan, as its prime minister. Meanwhile the U.S. government had declared its support for Bakhtiar. Finally, on January 16, 1979, the shah left for Egypt, telling Bakhtiar that his departure would result in a worsening of the situation and that the people would soon call him back to rule. The White House, taking up some of the suggestions made by Ambassador Sullivan, appointed its own emissary to the Iranian military to negotiate their cooperation with the new Bakhtiar regime. Brzezinski’s designee for this mission was General Robert Huyser, a deputy to General Alexander Haig, then supreme Allied commander in Europe, who knew little about Iran. Ambassador Sullivan, however, warned that “it would be feckless to transfer the loyalty of the armed forces to Bakhtiar because this would cause the destructive confrontation between the armed forces and the revolutionaries that we hoped to avoid. It would result in the disintegration of the armed forces and eventually in the disintegration of Iran.”12 Sullivan’s warnings were discounted, and he soon would be relieved of his ambassadorship. The revolutionaries worked assiduously to develop converts in the armed forces, and as Sullivan had predicted, there were mutinies and defections as confrontations between junior officers and loyal army elements began to occur. SAVAK was also riddled with defections. In the midst of this crumbling of the Bakhtiar regime, the Ayatollah Khomeini finally landed in Iran on February 1, 1979, and appointed Medhi Bazargan his prime minister. On February 11, the army declared itself neutral. As revolutionary machine gunners began to close in around the prime ministerial office, Bakhtiar made good his escape and soon afterward fled the country. The Khomeinists were exultant but obsessed with the idea that the United States was yet plotting a counterrevolution to reinstall the shah.

ATTEMPTING TO CONTROL THE UNCONTROLLABLE Despite the extreme hostility against the United States being whipped up in Iran by the Marxists and the Khomeinists, U.S. officials in Tehran and Washington remained optimistic during the first ten months of 1979 that

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the Khomeinists, who seemed to have the upper hand, would realize that the main threat to their goal of turning Iran into a fundamentalist Islamic state came from the Marxists and their external patron, the Soviet Union, and that therefore after the Islamicists consolidated their power they would soon move to reestablish cordial relations with the United States. An early sign that the Khomeinists knew where their real interests lay was their denunciation of the February 14, 1979, armed attack and capture of the U.S. embassy by the radical Fedayeen-i-Khalq group, many of whom had been trained by Palestinian guerrillas. The armed militants were persuaded to give up control of the embassy and the American officials they had taken prisoner by the new regime’s deputy premier, Ibrahim Yazdi, and its foreign minister, Karim Sanjabi. On February 21, 1979, the United States officially recognized the Bazargan government, and Ambassador Sullivan met with the regime’s military and political leaders to facilitate the resumption of American arms transfers to Iran. The United States would also continue its oil purchases and business activities in Iran to the extent desired by the new regime. But as the revolution, in the classic mold of revolutions, began to take revenge on members and supporters of the old regime, voices were raised in Congress against the retributive brutality; and in May the Senate passed a resolution deploring the executions. Khomeini and his followers were furious and vilified the United States for its double standard of indifference to the brutalities of the shah’s regime. The question of whether or not to grant the deposed shah political asylum in the United States occasioned intense controversy at the top levels of the Carter administration. Brzezinski was for inviting the shah; Vance was opposed. “It was my view from the beginning,” a New York Times interviewer quotes Brzezinski as recalling, “that we should make it unambiguously clear that the shah was welcome whenever he wanted to come. Our mistake was to ever let it become an issue in the first place.”13 When the shah left Iran in January 1979, he apparently felt he had a firm invitation from the United States. Walter Annenberg, the wealthy publisher and former U.S. ambassador to England during the Nixon administration, was to let the shah use his estate in Rancho Mirage, California. But while in transit in Egypt, the shah was informed that there had been a cooling of enthusiasm in the United States for his arrival. The Beverly Hills home of his mother had been stoned, and the U.S. government was getting worried about its ability to provide adequate protection for the shah and his family. Offended, the shah decided to go instead to Morocco, where he

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would be more welcome. After two months in Morocco, however, demonstrations against the shah by university students had reached such a pitch that his embarrassed host, King Hassan, felt compelled to request the shah find another place of exile before the forthcoming Islamic summit conference in Marrakesh. Humiliated, the shah now inquired whether the United States was ready to receive him, and was told by the U.S. ambassador in Morocco that the United States government was concerned for the safety of Americans in Iran if the shah came to the United States.14 David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger now found the shah temporary refuge at a resort in the Bahamas, and then in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Rockefeller and Kissinger also stepped up their efforts to get the Carter administration to reconsider the decision to refuse the shah’s request to come to the United States, enlisting a senior member of the policy establishment who was highly respected by the Democrats, John J. McCloy, to join them in personal interventions with Vance, Vice President Mondale, and Carter himself (Brzezinski needed no persuading). Rebuffed by the president, Kissinger took to the public podium to voice his outrage at the Carter administration’s treatment of the shah as reducing the monarch to “a Flying Dutchman looking for a port of call.”15 Another try was made by the shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf, in an August 10, 1979, letter to President Carter in which she stressed “the quite noticeable impairment of his [my brother’s] health” as a consideration Carter should take into account.16 The shah had been suffering from cancer for the past seven years but had kept it a secret from the world, and extensive tests and diagnoses were required by cancer specialists to determine how far the disease had progressed. After a report from the State Department medical officer, Secretary Vance advised that despite the potential for political difficulties, the shah should be admitted to the United States, not to take up residence, but only for required emergency medical observation and treatment. Carter agreed, and on October 22 the shah flew from Mexico to the United States, where he was taken immediately to New York Hospital.17 Although angry at Washington’s decision, the Iranian officials promised that the embassy would be protected against assaults by militants, such as the armed attack the previous February. After the February assault on the embassy, U.S. personnel had been reduced from over 1,000 to fewer than 100, a few extra marine guards had been assigned to the embassy, and steel doors had been installed. These new security measures would be insufficient to defend the embassy from a determined siege by armed militants,

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but the assumption in Washington was that the Iranian government, as it did in February, would intervene in case of a serious threat to the premises or to U.S. officials. By the time of the shah’s arrival in the United States for medical treatment, the Bazargan regime, for the very reasons that Secretary Vance and others thought it could be trusted—its moderation and desire to normalize the situation—had lost its revolutionary legitimacy not only with the Left but, more importantly, with the Muslim fundamentalists. Thus the Carter administration, by deciding to work with the Bazargan government, was only contributing to its increasing difficulties. Zbigniew Brzezinski, meeting with Bazargan in Algiers on October 31 on the anniversary of Algerian independence, allowed a photograph to be taken of them and inflicted the proverbial kiss of death on the Bazargan regime. The next day, the Ayatollah Khomeini broadcast an appeal to the Iranian people to take to the streets on November 4 to demonstrate and to “expand with all your might your attacks against the United States and Israel.” The November 4 demonstration had originally been the idea of the Society of Islamic Students (the date being the first anniversary of an invasion by the shah’s troops of Tehran University that resulted in the killing of several students) to demand that the shah be returned to Iran to stand trial for torturing his political opponents and other crimes. Khomeini was now taking over the demonstrations, but the students would yet force the pace of events, for they had decided, apparently without Khomeini’s knowledge, to seize the American embassy.18

THE TEST OF AMERICA’S HUMANITARIANISM: STRENGTH OR WEAKNESS Demonstrators started circling the embassy early in the morning of November 4. At midmorning some of them began scaling the gate, at which time the guards locked the recently installed steel door to the chancellery. But the mob broke open the steel door. The few marine guards held off the Iranians by pointing shotguns at them while embassy employees gathered on the second floor, access to which was barred by a second steel door. On the second floor, employees began to shred secret documents and destroy computer circuits. Meanwhile the embassy’s security officer attempted to talk with the leaders of the militants but was taken captive and apparently forced to order a marine to open the steel access door to the

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second floor. The militants rushed upstairs and immediately took all the Americans captive, except three officials who had locked themselves in a steel vault to complete the shredding of documents. The officials within the vault were coerced into surrendering before they had finished their shredding job as the militants held a knife to the throat of one of their American captives before a television monitor on view within the vault. Sixty-three American officials were now at the mercy of a group of young Iranian militants in physical control of the embassy, and three more—including the chargé d’affaires, Bruce Laingen—who had been at the Iranian foreign ministry blocks away and were in telephone contact with the embassy during its siege, were also taken captive. The militants, a small group of hitherto virtually unknown young radical Muslim activists, suddenly found themselves in a position to bargain with one of the global superpowers—that is, as long as they kept their American captives alive and as long as Jimmy Carter continued to place a high value on the lives of these American officials.19 “I listened to every proposal, no matter how preposterous,” recalls Carter, “all the way from delivering the Shah for trial as the revolutionaries demanded to dropping an atomic bomb on Tehran.”20 One proposal was a rescue attempt in emulation of Israeli methods of freeing hostages held by airplane hijackers, such as the famous rescue at Entebbe, Uganda. The Joint Chiefs of Staff pointed out the pitfalls of such an attempt in the present situation: Tehran was not like the Entebbe airport; there was no way to pull off such a commando raid in the middle of the city without getting the hostages killed in the process. Even so, this option might yet have to be used, and thus the military was ordered to prepare for such a rescue effort and to put the people most knowledgeable about this kind of operation to work in devising ways of minimizing injury to the hostages in case a rescue was decided upon. A “show of force” in the form of massing naval units near Iran was discussed, but dismissed: to work as a coercive ploy it would have to be a visible and dramatic deployment, which might provoke the militants into either a wholesale slaughter of the hostages or killing them one at a time to pressure the United States to give in to their demands while there was still some chance of saving the rest. Carter early on decided to shift the responsibility for bloodshed onto the captors: “I am not going to take any military action that would cause bloodshed or arouse the unstable captors of our hostages to attack or punish them,” he announced, as long as they were not harmed or put on trial. The clear implication was that he would feel compelled to take

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military action under such circumstances, but yet this kind of formulation stopped short of an ultimatum that locked the United States into a military response. On the other hand, it left open the definition of “harmed,” and “put on trial” so that Carter would not have to tolerate the hostages’ being tortured or otherwise abused, and the captors would be put on notice not to push their luck.21 Carter’s initial restraint on the use of any force that would endanger the lives of the hostages was consistent with the dominant public sentiment at the time as reflected in public opinion polls and editorial opinion, which in turn was shaped by media attention given to the families of the hostages, their anguish, and their fears. The president himself met periodically with these families and thereby helped create a national empathy with their plight, so it was not a group of faceless U.S. diplomats and embassy guards whose lives were at risk, but the sons and daughters of one’s neighbors. Having rejected a military move against Iran or a rescue operation as immediate responses to the taking of the hostages, the Carter administration moved quickly to exploit the nonlethal forms of pressure at its disposal that might sway those in control in Iran to induce the militants to release the hostages. Who those in control were, apart from Khomeini himself, was not at all clear; and Khomeini was still an enigma. Would international diplomatic and economic pressures really make any difference to him? It was decided to try anyway, under the assumption that there were large segments of Iranian society that did want Iran to be an accepted member of the larger society of nations and did realize that their own material wellbeing was dependent upon the government of Iran and Iranian citizens being able to buy and sell normally in the international market. If most of the internationally connected and internationally sensitive elements in Iran could be made to realize that the hostage-holding would hurt them, then perhaps even the xenophobic Khomeinists could be prevailed upon to intercede to get the hostages released. On November 7, the president prohibited U.S. companies from buying oil from Iran. A week later the president enlarged the scope of proscribed economic transactions to include various other imports as well as certain U.S. exports to Iran. But to have any real pinch in Iran, these sanctions would require concerted action by other countries so that Iran could not simply shift its commerce elsewhere; and such cooperation with the United States proved hard to induce. The most important economic sanction proved to be a freeze on Iranian assets on deposit in U.S. banks in the United States and abroad—some $12 billion in all.

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On the diplomatic front, the Carter administration, now defined by the Iranians as the enemy, had to rely on intermediaries to press its case that normalized U.S.-Iranian relations would be of substantial benefit to the post-shah regime; that the United States had no plans or intention to reinstall the shah; that the United States was willing to hear the claims of the Iranians against alleged U.S. crimes in Iran, and even to discuss the shah’s future, but not with a knife at the throats of American officials. Carter himself contacted as many as thirty foreign leaders personally, among them Leonid Brezhnev, to request such intercession.22 To the surprise of most Americans, but not to Carter and his advisers, one of the early intermediaries, and probably the most effective, was the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s leader Yasir Arafat. The Palestinian guerrilla chief was not asked directly by the Carter administration to use his influence with Khomeini, but Carter was apprised of the initiative of Congressman Paul Findley (Republican of Illinois), a known champion of Palestinian causes, to get Arafat to intercede, and that Arafat wanted the U.S. leadership to know he was engaging in an action that might be politically costly for him. On November 19 and 20, thirteen hostages—the women and blacks—were released upon Khomeini’s orders, evidently as a result of Arafat’s intercession. The diplomatic intercessions were also for the purpose of finding out precisely what the Khomeini government would settle for to release all of the hostages. In mid-November, in secret “proximity talks” at the United Nations between Vance and an envoy of the Iranian government (Vance and the Iranian, Ahmad Salamatian, sat in separate rooms and passed papers to each other through Secretary General Kurt Waldheim), it was determined that the Iranian government would no longer insist on the extradition of the shah. The hostages might be released if three conditions were met: (1) the U.S. government would arrange for the shah’s wealth to be returned to Iran; (2) the U.S. government would pledge never to interfere again in the internal affairs of Iran; and (3) the U.S. government would agree to participate in an international forum in which Iran could present its charges against both the shah and the United States and have these examined before the world. Vance indicated his desire to pursue negotiations on each of these demands and his hope of reaching a settlement with the Iranian foreign minister, Abdulhasan Bani-Sadr, at the time of the Security Council meetings on the crisis scheduled for the end of November.23 Before the delicate negotiations could resume, however, there was another shake-up in the government in Tehran. Khomeini denounced the forthcoming UN Security Council meetings as staged by and for the

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United States. Foreign Minister Bani-Sadr was dismissed and replaced by Sadegh Ghotbzadeh—a vocal proponent of forcing the extradition of the shah. The Carter administration was disheartened by this regression, but surmised it might be a part of the political maneuverings among the revolutionaries, and that patience and further diplomatic skill might yet return the Iranians to this more reasonable bargaining posture. Each passing day of the hostages’ captivity was being counted off on the evening news. Opposition politicians were demanding a reassertion of American will and power to protect the country’s honor. Editorial writers were complaining that the president had drastically weakened the U.S. bargaining power by making the lives of the hostages the highest national interest and thereby giving the world to believe that the United States was an easy target for blackmail. The situation was further exacerbated when medical reports issued from New York Hospital indicated the shah was ready to leave at the start of December. If he remained in the United States the credibility of Carter’s original rationale for admitting him would be destroyed and efforts to free the hostages might collapse. The shah was flown to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas—“temporarily” and “en route” to his next place of residence outside the United States— while the White House and State Department frantically attempted to locate another country for his exile. Panama’s General Omar Torrijos, who had developed a close rapport with the White House during the successful negotiations on the canal treaty, bailed out the administration by inviting the shah to reside in Panama. Early in 1980, in order to get the embassy hostages released, the United States and the Iranian government agreed to participate in hearings by an international commission of inquiry, organized by UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, about past U.S. complicity in the shah’s crimes.24 The Iranians stage-managed the scenario in Iran, providing hundreds of victims of brutal treatment by the shah’s government and police for the commission to interview. By the end of the first week in March, after the investigation of the past had been performed, the Iranian government, to implement its end of the bargain, was supposed to take control of the hostages from the militants. But the young militants at the embassy refused, and the Iranian government claimed to be in no better a position than the United States to use force against them without provoking a slaughter of the hostages. Now Carter’s own domestic political troubles (Senator Kennedy won the New York presidential primary on March 26), coupled with his anger

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at the Iranians’ sabotage of the UN commission’s work, began to erode his patient and meticulous approach. On March 29, he sent a warning to the Iranian government that if the hostages were not transferred to the government’s control the United States would inflict new and harsh sanctions on Iran. With the failure of this ultimatum to produce results, Carter was in a corner. Graduated diplomatic and economic sanctions were no more likely to work than before. But given the ugly mood in Iran at not being able to get at the shah or have his and the American “crimes” revealed by the UN commission, a major escalation, such as a naval blockade of Iran, might provoke the Iranians into staging a show trial of the hostages and demanding their execution.

THE ABORTIVE RESCUE MISSION Frustrated and angry and prodded by political advisers who were concerned that he would be in a very weak position for the forthcoming presidential election, Carter allowed his spokespersons to hint that the use of force was being seriously contemplated. On April 7, 1980, the United States formally broke diplomatic relations with the government of Iran; and ten days later the president announced a ban on all exports to Iran and the U.S. government’s seizure of the Iranian assets frozen in U.S. banks. The members of the European Economic Community (EEC) reluctantly voted sanctions of their own under the assumption, reinforced by U.S. officials, that such concerted U.S.-European action would make it unnecessary for the United States to resort to force at this time and that the resulting international isolation of Iran should be the basic pressure on Tehran for a while. The failure of the Europeans to join the United States in applying diplomatic and economic sanctions, U.S. officials had strongly suggested, would compel a resort to military action before the summer. Behind the scenes, Carter was indeed closely reviewing his military options, and even before the EEC had voted to cooperate on the nonmilitary sanctions, he decided—in a National Security Council meeting with Brzezinski, Harold Brown, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher (Vance was in Florida on a four-day vacation), General David Jones (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Stansfield Turner (director of the CIA), Vice President Mondale, and White House aides Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell—to go ahead with a helicopter rescue of the hostages.

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Upon his return from Florida, Secretary Vance, in a private meeting with Carter, objected to the rescue plan, arguing that even if it succeeded with minimal injury to the hostages (which he thought improbable), the raid would place at risk the approximately two hundred other Americans still living in Iran, who might themselves be seized as hostages, and it would jeopardize U.S. relations with other countries in the region as well as with the EEC countries, which had joined in the diplomatic and economic sanctions. A follow-up meeting of the National Security Council was convened to hear out Vance’s objections, but Carter had already made up his mind to go ahead with the rescue. On learning this, Vance told Carter that even if the raid succeeded he would resign.25 Why did the president feel he had to resort to the rescue raid just then? Couldn’t he have waited so as to satisfy Vance and the Europeans that all other options short of force had been exhausted? Evidently, a few key details determined the timing: the hostages were still being held in the embassy compound (once they were dispersed to other places it would be almost impossible to try a rescue); the desert nights were getting shorter and the desert temperatures hotter as summer approached, thus each passing week would degrade the efficiency of the helicopter operation and reduce nighttime concealment—two crucial elements of the plan. Carter was convinced it was now or never.26 The president was strengthened in his conviction that this was the time to try a more dramatic option by reports of a shift in public attitudes toward the use of force against Iran. A Washington Post nationwide poll conducted during the second week in April 1980 showed nearly a two-to-one majority in favor of military action even if it imperiled the lives of the hostages (this in contrast to a similar poll taken in January showing 51 percent rejecting the use of force on grounds that it could result in harm to the hostages).27 The rescue scheme authorized by the president had been carefully worked out to minimize the chances of its being discovered by the Iranians in time for them to first move or kill the hostages. Early in the evening of April 24, 1980, six transport planes carrying ninety commandos, helicopter fuel, and weapons-jamming equipment took off from Egypt. At the same time eight navy helicopters took off from the aircraft carrier Nimitz in the Arabian Sea and headed for a rendezvous point in the Dasht-i-Kavir salt desert 200 miles southeast of Tehran. The commandos were to be carried in the helicopters to a staging site just outside of Tehran, where they would be met by other commandos who had been infiltrated into Iran over recent months and had obtained local trucks in which they would drive the raiding party, unnoticed,

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blending with Tehran city traffic, to the embassy compound. In the middle of the night, the force, equipped with nonlethal chemical weapons, was to scale the compound wall, cut telephone and electricity lines, incapacitate the Iranians, and evacuate the hostages in helicopters that meanwhile had landed on the embassy grounds. The helicopters would escape to another desert rendezvous with the transport planes, which would then fly the hostages and the raiding party out of the country, leaving the helicopters behind. Some Americans would be likely to die in the operation. (A CIA evaluation of the plan estimated that most probably 60 percent of the hostages would lose their lives in the rescue attempt.) The mission was aborted in midcourse, after three malfunctioning helicopters reduced the fleet available for the final evacuation efforts from the embassy to five instead of the original eight helicopters. Receiving this information and an evaluation from the mission commanders at the desert airstrip that at least six operational helicopters would be required to implement the rescue plan, Carter had no choice but to call off the attempt. No one had yet been killed. But tragically, while the helicopters were refueling for their return flight, one of them collided with a transport plane on the ground, igniting both planes and killing eight men. Knowing that the failed raid could no longer be kept secret, the president sadly informed the nation on television of the abortive rescue operation and freak desert collision that killed the eight men. But he expressed no regrets for attempting the mission, and thereby implied that this was not the last of such efforts, or of other military moves contemplated against Iran, especially if the hostages were now harmed by the angry Iranians.28 To the relief of the Carter administration and the American public, the Iranians contented themselves with verbal anger and ridicule at the desert debacle, including a warning to Carter from the ayatollah “that if he commits another stupid act we won’t be able to control the youths now holding the . . . spies and he will be responsible for their lives,” and a statement from President Bani-Sadr that to make a second rescue attempt impossible, the hostages were being transferred outside the embassy.

THE U.S. AND IRANIAN DIPLOMATIC DENOUEMENT Domestic politics in Iran and the United States preoccupied both countries for four and one half months after the abortive rescue attempt. The shah died in an Egyptian military hospital on July 27, and no high official of the

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U.S. government attended his funeral (former President Nixon did attend, in a private capacity). The Iranians were electing their first parliament since the revolution. The United States was in the final stages of the nominating process for the 1980 presidential elections. The hiatus on the diplomatic front was an opportunity for Carter to follow the strategy, recommended by European diplomats and some professionals within the State Department, of turning the spotlight off the hostages and thus reducing the bargaining leverage the Iranians could gain from their incarceration. The American press, with its tendency for single-minded emphasis on the issue of the day, obliged by indulging in its typical obsession with the presidential election. The Iranian parliamentary elections, completed in August, were a popular victory for the Khomeinists, legitimizing their revolution and making it less important for them to show their power and curry favor with the masses by exploiting the hostage issue. Moreover, according to U.S. intelligence reports, electoral success left the Islamic leaders with a new set of imperatives—namely, restoring civic order and economic stability to the country for which they were now officially responsible and resurrecting its international respectability. The role of “kidnapper” served none of these purposes, and Khomeini, still titular leader and elder statesman of the revolution, sensing this, now sanctioned the first serious negotiations to free the hostages since the embassy takeover the previous November. The Carter administration was made aware of Khomeini’s new openness to negotiations when in early September German diplomatic intermediaries informed Secretary of State Edmund Muskie (Vance’s successor) that the Iranians now wanted to meet urgently to work out a deal to release the hostages. A close associate of the ayatollah, Sadegh Tabatabai, met in Bonn with Deputy Secretary Warren Christopher to get down to specifics; and at these meetings it was immediately apparent that Iran’s demands were now within the range of negotiability. There was no mention of ransom or even of an apology from the United States. The Iranians still wanted a U.S. pledge of noninterference in Iran; but the principal talking points were over the release of Iran’s financial assets that had been seized by the United States and the size and repayment modalities of Iran’s obligations to its U.S. creditors. The credibility of the negotiating positions Tabatabai presented to Christopher was established in a speech by the ayatollah stating essentially the same conditions. The negotiations, which took place mainly in Algeria, with the Algerians acting skillfully as mediators, resembled complicated international commercial negotiations rather than the highly charged political encounters of the earlier stages in the crisis. High politics was an ever-present background

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factor, but now the political context worked to reinforce Iran’s incentives to settle with the United States. Iraq’s attack on Iran on September 22, and the ensuing war, made it all the more urgent for Iran to establish international respectability with its Western arms suppliers (especially the United States) to counterbalance the new arms Iraq had been receiving from the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan’s election in November also increased the incentives in Tehran to settle before January 20, for the president-elect had revealed himself during the campaign to be a more confrontationist type than Carter, unwilling to grant that Iran had any legitimate cause whatsoever for its actions over the past year. Reagan, moreover, had pledged to freeze the negotiations when he assumed office and to reassess the whole strategy of dealing with the hostage issue. The Carter administration played on the Iranians’ fears of Reagan by convincing them that a finalized official agreement with the Carter government, capped by a return of the hostages before Reagan was inaugurated, would very likely be honored by the new administration, whereas an uncompleted agreement could be easily torn up. The negotiating end game, typically, involved efforts by both sides to extract maximum face for themselves, as well as some nontrivial differences over the financial settlement. As late as December, the bargaining was almost derailed by Tehran’s surprise insistence that its frozen assets plus the wealth removed from Iran by the shah required $25 billion to be handed over to Iran. Patient negotiation by Christopher, with helpful intercessions by the Algerians, moved the Iranian demands back to the more reasonable level— of approximately $8 billion in exchange for the hostages—which appeared in the final agreement of January 20. After setting aside $5.1 billion that Iran owed in debts to American banks, some $3 billion in cash was to be released to Iran simultaneously with the freeing of the hostages. The $3 billion was to be held in escrow until the hostages were safely airborne in a U.S. Air Force jet. This final exchange of fifty-two lives for cash, as the two Air Force craft carrying the hostages cleared Iranian airspace, was consummated just after 12:30 p.m. on January 20, 1981. Ronald Reagan had become president at noon.

AFGHANISTAN AND THE REASSERTION OF GEOPOLITICAL IMPERATIVES More than any other event, the Soviet military invasion of Afghanistan at the end of December 1979 appeared to bring Jimmy Carter’s view of the USSR into congruence with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s and to cause the

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president finally to discard his 1976 election campaign promise to supplant balance of power politics with world order politics. “It’s only now dawning on the world the magnitude of the actions that the Soviets undertook in invading Afghanistan,” said Carter in a New Year’s Eve television interview. “This action of the Soviets has made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time I’ve been in office.”29 The president’s admission of being moved to reassess his views of the Soviet Union was jumped on by critics as evidence of Carter’s shallowness and naïveté when it came to the hard facts of geopolitics and Soviet strategy: the inevitability of Soviet-American rivalry all around the Eurasian rimland, or what Brzezinski called the “arc of crisis.” In fact, the president had moved considerably toward adopting Brzezinski’s geopolitical views well before the Soviet action provided a provocation of sufficient weight and drama to justify a formal resurrection of a U.S. foreign policy directed centrally at containing Soviet expansion. Brzezinski had pushed for a tough stance against Soviet expansion during the first year of the Carter administration in response to the open Soviet support of Ethiopia in its border war with Somalia and the Kremlin’s exploitation of this conflict to move Soviet naval and air power and a hefty contingent of Cuban troops into the strategically significant Horn of Africa. Secretary of State Vance argued that this was the wrong place to draw the line against the Soviets, since it was the Somalis, not the Ethiopians, who were widely regarded by other Africans as the expansionary aggressors in the border conflict. The strongest statements in opposition to the Soviet-Cuban activities in Africa came from Brzezinski, not the president, as did the administration’s warnings to the Kremlin that such Soviet power plays might threaten the negotiating climate for SALT II and that the Senate, in response to public anger at Soviet behavior, might be reluctant to ratify whatever agreement was negotiated.30 The fact that Carter could have muzzled Brzezinski and did not was taken by the administration’s critics as evidence of a leadership gap at the top of the administration. A more plausible explanation is that Carter found it useful to have the stern-faced Brzezinski surface the hawkish impulses within the administration without the president yet having to adopt this demeanor himself—thus preserving room to maintain the cordial relations with Brezhnev that might be crucial for progress on SALT and other matters, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, where the administration was anxious to gain Soviet cooperation.

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Carter accepted the need to display credible capabilities and intentions to oppose Soviet moves to take advantage of their military prowess and mobility and to disabuse the Kremlin of any beliefs that this administration had a “soft” approach to world order and might be squeamish about employing military counters to Soviet aggression. The capacity to act tough if driven to it was conveyed in two major presidential addresses in 1978—the March 17 speech at Wake Forest University calling for increased defense spending and the June 7 commencement address at the Naval Academy in Annapolis on U.S.-Soviet relations. Reiterating the doctrine that a Soviet strategic nuclear attack on the United States “would amount to national suicide for the Soviet Union,” the president took cognizance from the podium at Wake Forest of impending improvements in Soviet missiles that could make U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) increasingly vulnerable to a Soviet first strike in the coming decade. However remote their attempting to launch such a first strike, cautioned Carter, “it is a threat on which we must constantly be on guard.” He pointed out the accelerated development and deployment of cruise missiles for U.S. strategic bombers and decisions to work on the MX intercontinental ballistic missile and Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile “to give us more options to respond to Soviet strategic deployments. If it becomes necessary to guarantee the clear invulnerability of our strategic deterrent, I shall not hesitate to take actions for full-scale development and deployment of these systems.” The president also pointed to the enlargement and modernization of Soviet theater deployments in Western Europe, charging that these were “beyond a level necessary for defense.” In response the United States was developing new force augmentation and modernization plans with its NATO allies, focusing on efforts for speedy reinforcements in wartime and to plug specific gaps in deployed NATO defenses. Additionally, announced the president, “the Secretary of Defense, at my direction, is improving and will maintain quickly deployable forces—air, land, and sea—to defend our interests throughout the world.”31 Paralleling this concern with Soviet military capabilities, the president’s remarks at the June commencement exercises at the Naval Academy were hardly a sanguine characterization of Soviet intentions: To the Soviet Union, détente seems to mean a continuing aggressive struggle for political advantage and increased influence. . . . The Soviet Union apparently sees military power and military assistance as the best means

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of expanding their influence abroad. Obviously, areas of instability in the world provide a tempting target for this effort, and all too often they seem ready to exploit any such opportunity. As became apparent in Korea, in Angola and also, as you know, in Ethiopia more recently, the Soviets prefer to use proxy forces to achieve their purposes. . . . The Soviet Union can choose either confrontation or cooperation. The United States is adequately prepared to meet either choice.32

Carter’s acknowledgment that the containment of Soviet expansion still required a visible readiness and impressive capability to use force was reflected in a number of programs and actions during the second and third years of his administration. t
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as much as 7 percent from the last Ford administration budget, Carter pledged to increase the real level of defense spending by some 3 percent each year and persuaded most of the NATO allies to make the same pledge. t
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NATO long-range defense program to rectify European theater deficiencies in a number of fields—especially the growing Soviet tank superiority (against which NATO now planned to deploy a new generation of conventional and nuclear antitank weapons) and the Soviet deployment of new intermediate-range missiles such as the multiple-warhead SS-20 targeted on Western Europe (against which the United States would deploy the Pershing II and the ground-launched cruise missile). t
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arsenal in two major respects: reducing the vulnerability of the ICBMs to a Soviet strategic first strike (the preferred option was a mobile deployment of the new MX missile) and improving the accuracy and other effectiveness of U.S. strategic weapons so as to give them a capability for rendering Soviet ICBMs more vulnerable. Without these improvements, maintained Secretary of Defense Brown, the Soviet Union might appear to have a “war-fighting” strategic arsenal while the United States was prepared only for a mutual-suicide type of strategic war, and this might give the Soviets an intimidating edge in a future intense U.S.-Soviet confrontation.33 t
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force (RDF) for quick military intervention in crises outside the NATO area. When finally fleshed out in the 1980s, the RDF was supposed to be ready to inject up to 150,000 troops with fighting equipment into a trouble spot,

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say, in the Persian Gulf, with the leading contingents arriving in a matter of days from the “go” order. (This idea, popular with military strategists as far back as the Eisenhower administration, was thought to have been buried by the post-Vietnam antipathy to U.S. military intervention in the Third World; but it had been revived in a classified study of the country’s global military requirements directed by Samuel P. Huntington out of Brzezinski’s office in 1977, and Brzezinski himself became one of the strongest backers of an RDF. Brzezinski argued that without such a capability, the United States could be faced with Soviet-sponsored local military faits accompli in areas of strategic importance like the Horn of Africa or the Persian Gulf.) t
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Carter administration announced in March 1979, without waiting for congressional review, that it would sell $400 million worth of advanced military equipment to North Yemen, including jet aircraft, tanks, and antitank guided missiles, to help that country—an ally of Saudi Arabia— defend itself in its ongoing war against South Yemen, a Soviet client state. To punctuate U.S. support for the North Yemenis and the Saudis, the aircraft carrier Constellation and its escort ships set sail from the Philippines toward the Arabian Sea. Administration spokesmen explained that this was part of a larger strategy to demonstrate that stability in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula was a vital U.S. interest and that the decisions involving Yemen were only the first steps toward an enlarged U.S. military presence in the region. (By the end of March 1978, the two Yemens agreed to a cease-fire, after South Yemen had been strongly pressured by the Soviets to call off the war. Although the administration would have liked to be able to claim that its tough stance was decisive in stopping the war, the more weighty consideration with the Soviet Union seems to have been the embarrassment its backing of South Yemen was causing other Soviet clients in the area, especially Syria and Iraq.)

REDRAWING THE CONTAINMENT LINE The sudden and swiftly executed Soviet military takeover of its Muslim neighbor in the last week of 1979 and first week of 1980 was the kind of fait accompli about which Brzezinski had been warning. Once it had been substantially accomplished (the Soviets had difficulty in completely subduing fierce Afghan tribesmen in the mountainous parts of the country), there

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was little the United States could do. The immediate question was whether or not the Soviet move (the first combat use of Soviet troops outside the Warsaw Pact area in Eastern Europe since World War II) was only the first phase of a larger plan of aggressive expansion targeted on the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The answer was a large question mark. The rest of the states in the region, even unstable Iran, were apparently not in immediate jeopardy of military attack; the Soviets were concentrating tens of thousands of troops in their Afghanistan operation; these troops would be pinned down as an army of occupation for months if not years; and it was highly unlikely that the Soviets could afford to make additional major diversions from their primary military deployments in Eastern Europe and along the China border. But the longer-term threat posed to other states in the region by a consolidated Soviet military presence on Iran’s eastern border and Pakistan’s northwestern border could not be discounted; a failure of the United States to react strongly to the invasion of Afghanistan would undoubtedly shake the confidence of those Persian Gulf countries that depended ultimately on U.S. protection against an imperially expanding Soviet Union and would vindicate those who had signed peace and friendship treaties with the USSR. An immediate military countermove by the United States was not a seriously considered option. Afghanistan itself was simply not that important a geopolitical prize to deny the Soviet Union, and it therefore would have been grossly imprudent to climb on to an escalation ladder of military threat and counterthreat that would dangerously commit the prestige of the United States to a Soviet military withdrawal. A regime in Afghanistan that would not allow that country to be used by Islamic revolutionaries as a base for building anti-Soviet links into the Muslim populations of the USSR was, after all, a more substantial interest to the Soviet Union than a free Afghanistan was to the United States. 34 Thus the Soviet military takeover of Afghanistan, while illegitimate, shocking, and even outrageous, was in itself not really intolerable to the United States; therefore a U.S military response to reverse the Soviet aggression, which would have to be very large to be effective, was not a realistic option. However, as President Carter put it, “If the Soviets are encouraged in this invasion by eventual success, and if they maintain their dominance over Afghanistan and then extend their control to adjacent countries, the stable, strategic, and peaceful balance of the world will be changed. This would threaten the security of all nations including, of course, the United States, our allies and friends. Therefore, the world cannot stand by and permit the Soviet Union to commit this act with impunity.”35

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Accordingly, the administration immediately announced a wide range of punitive but nonlethal sanctions: the president asked the Senate to delay further consideration of the SALT II treaty; licensing of high-technology items for sale to the USSR was suspended; fishing privileges for Soviet ships in U.S. waters were severely curtailed; an embargo was placed on 17 million tons of grain already purchased but not yet shipped to the USSR; planned openings of new American and Soviet consular facilities were canceled; and most Soviet-American cultural and economic exchanges then under consideration were deferred. The president also revealed that he was considering asking U.S. athletes not to participate in the Olympic Games scheduled for Moscow in the summer. Critics charged that the sanctions were too little and too late to effect a reversal of the Soviet aggression, but they were unable to propose stronger alternatives that were feasible. Unknown by the public at the time, the CIA, encouraged by Brzezinski, did have an active (though yet small) program underway in Afghanistan, even before the Soviet invasion, to undercut the pro-Soviet regime by aiding and arming militant Islamic groups. And this program, in collaboration with Pakistan’s intelligence agency, was expanded after the invasion to form the Afghan mujahideen insurgency that, with a significant augmentation of CIA-provided arms during the Reagan administration (especially Stinger missiles capable of shooting down the Soviet helicopter gunships) forced Brezhnev to eventually withdraw his troops. Collateral moves to shore up the region against further Soviet encroachments were feasible; the administration made a point of its determination to redraw the containment line deeply in the sands of Southwest Asia. Pakistan was offered $400 million in military aid. Discussions with Kenya, Oman, Somalia, and Egypt were intensified to arrange for the establishment of service facilities for U.S. naval units deployed in the region. The president firmed up his public rationale for these actions in his State of the Union address of January 23, 1980. “The implications of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could pose the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War,” said the president. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Strait of Hormuz— a waterway through which much of the free world’s oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.

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He then voiced the warning that was labeled by journalists, with the approval of the White House, as the Carter Doctrine: Let our position be absolutely clear: Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States. It will be repelled by use of any means necessary, including military force.36

The administration’s two-pronged response—imposing current economic and diplomatic sanctions on the Soviet Union; and building up over five years a military capability to confront future Soviet power plays in the Persian Gulf region—was designed to tell the Kremlin, the world, and not incidentally the American electorate, that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was based on a miscalculation of the American will to resist Soviet aggressive expansion, especially in the geopolitically crucial “rimland” area between the Mediterranean and China. Despite the grumblings of wheat farmers and some Olympic athletes, the domestic response was generally favorable. It virtually assured that the 1980 elections would be contested in a post-détente atmosphere, with the candidates competing over who could best stand up to the Russians. Afghanistan also—more than any event in Carter’s tenure in the White House—reordered the priorities in the Carter foreign policy from those indicated at the outset of the administration. Human rights, global economic development, reducing arms sales, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, even the Soviet-American strategic arms agreements, were all subordinated to the imperative of preventing the Soviet Union from gaining global dominance. Allies with dubious human rights records, like Pakistan, would be courted and built up; economic aid would be allocated on the grounds of the consequences for East-West alignment; conventional arms transfers would be increased to countries opposed by arms clients of the Soviet Union; adherence to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and safeguards would not be rigidly imposed as a precondition for military or economic aid when such insistences might alienate an anti-Soviet ally; and finally, the Soviets would be put on notice that the U.S. was prepared to resume the arms race in all categories of weapons if driven to it and that the USSR would be substantially worse off at the end of the next round. Ironically, a national consensus was being created by the Carter administration’s new rhetorical and policy preoccupations with the Soviet threat that appeared to legitimize the complaints of the unreconstructed cold

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warriors in the Reagan camp. The Reaganites, who had never accepted even Kissinger’s détente approach, had charged that the Carter foreign policy was inexcusably naïve in its emphasis on human rights and world order and had contributed to the decline of the West’s ability and will to stand up to the Soviet Union. It was time, argued the Reaganites—with impressive success, first in their own party and then in the November 1980 general election—to install in Washington a group of leaders who had never been duped by Soviet professions of peaceful coexistence, who had always understood the crucial relevance of military power to the security of the American way of life, and who had been willing all along to engage in higher defense expenditures and a confrontationist policy toward the Soviet Union and its allies. Thus the Carter administration, adopting many of the foreign policy views of its earlier critics, helped reinforce the backlash that removed it from office.

PA R T

VI THE REAGAN ERA—REALISM OR ROMANTICISM? Suppose we were at the point of deploying the SDI system and we alone had it; our research is done but it is going to take months, maybe years, to deploy. We are also sitting with a great arsenal of nuclear weapons and the world knows it; we’d realize it might seem very tempting for them to push the button on their weapons before our defense is installed because of a fear we’d soon be able to blackmail the world. When the time comes to deploy SDI, the United States would have no rational choice but to avoid this situation by making the system available to all countries, so they know we wouldn’t have the power to blackmail them. We’re not being altruistic. —Ronald Reagan

In truth, Ronald Reagan knew far more about the big picture and the matters of salient importance than most people—perhaps especially some of his immediate staff—gave him credit for or appreciated. He had blind spots and a tendency to avoid detail. . . . But he had a strong and constructive agenda, much of it labeled impossible and unattainable in the early years of his presidency. . . . You couldn’t figure him out like a fact, because to Reagan the main fact was a vision. —George Shultz

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HIGH PURPOSE AND GRAND STRATEGY I think that . . . it is important that the Soviets and the world know that the U.S. has changed, and that we . . . will acquire much greater strength as well as greater firmness and resolve during this administration. —Caspar Weinberger

ONALD REAGAN WAS CONVINCED THAT his 1980 election victory, in addition to being a mandate to reduce the role of government in the domestic economy, was a mandate on foreign policy: a mandate to regain for the United States the reputation of a country that could not be pushed around; to revive the clear definition of what America was for and against internationally (as had been articulated in the Truman Doctrine and in the rhetoric of John Foster Dulles); to reestablish the United States as the leader of the “free world” coalition; and to organize the required programs under a grand strategy that would bring U.S. power, especially military power, back up to the level needed to effectively assert U.S. interests. These foreign policy imperatives, like Reagan’s domestic policy imperatives, were appropriately seen by both supporters and critics as conservative in that they looked to the country’s past for models and inspiration. His inaugural address heralded a “new beginning” in the form of “an era of national renewal.” The “heroic dreams” he called for were of an America again standing tall after the decay and self-doubts of the 1960s and 1970s. “Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope.”1 But whereas the more glorious past as a model for Reagan’s domestic policy was the laissez-faire era preceding the New Deal (even though ex-Democrat Reagan continued to admire

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Franklin Roosevelt), the model era for his foreign policy was the early Cold War of the late 1940s and early 1950s when U.S. leaders were willing to define the international struggle against communism as a conflict between good and evil. Drawing his inspiration from a simpler past, Reagan’s rhetoric (and foreign policy for Reagan was as much rhetoric as operational planning) was rich in metaphors of war, the mythical cowboy West, and most nostalgically, sports. His heroes were those who, in real life or Hollywood fantasies, facing defeat and death, summoned the strength to lead their side on to victory. Reagan’s favorite story was of another great storyteller, Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, and the ailing football hero, George Gipp. The most famous version of the tale, a concoction of fact and Coach Rockne’s fertile imagination, was reflected in the 1940 movie Knute Rockne—All American. The last words of the dying Gipp, played by Reagan, were that Coach Rockne should tell the team, then losing, to “win just one more for the Gipper.” Rockne rouses the team to victory with this message. The Notre Dame player who makes the winning touchdown is carried off the field severely injured, saying: “That’s the last one I can get for you, Gipper.” Reagan liked the story so much that he made it his own, embellishing it to suit the occasion, from rallying political campaign workers, to mobilizing his aides to lobby a close vote in the Congress, to encouraging a graduating class to tackle the challenges ahead. “Win one for the Gipper” became synonymous with win one for Reagan; and Reagan himself became “the Gipper” for many in his administration and in his admiring audiences. Even Nancy Reagan began to refer to her husband by the name when she sensed it would make him appear more heroic. Sports also provided the metaphoric support for the strategic paradigm of the Cold War the incoming Reagan administration was determined to revive: the view of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry as a global struggle for ascendancy in which there was no substitute for victory. The object of the game was to win—to be “number one,” as sports fans typically proclaim.

THE GRAND STRATEGY OF PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH The goal was a peaceful world where Americans, with a minimum of government interference, could once again attend to their domestic pursuits in a free capitalist society. But the restoration of this simpler, better America

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was threatened by the hostile forces of Marxism, now championed by an ever more aggressive superpower. In a mirror image of the Marxist dictum that peace would come only with the worldwide revolutionary eradication of class conflict, the Reaganites believed that peace and freedom for Americans required the worldwide victory over the proponents of Marxism-Leninism. Reagan’s grand strategy for victory was heralded by the Republican national platform of 1980. Written largely by Reagan ideologists, it committed the next Republican president to “achieve overall military and technological superiority over the Soviet Union” and by “nonmilitary means to roll back the growth of communism.” The goals of military superiority and the rollback of communism had not been so openly promulgated as U.S. policy since 1956, when they were discarded as too expensive and dangerous by their earlier Republican advocates in the Eisenhower administration. Once again opposition to Soviet power and influence would unambiguously top the list of U.S. international objectives. And military power—U.S. equipment and training for its allies, backed by credible threats to directly employ the awesome U.S. arsenal—would provide the principal means for asserting U.S. influence and limiting Soviet expansion. It was time to leave behind the Vietnam-era squeamishness about the decisive application of U.S. military force. Economic power and the attractiveness of the American way of life would also be exploited with confidence and pride, not with the equivocation and apologetics of the Carter years, in a worldwide assault on the false prophets of socialism.

THE “FULL COURT PRESS” ON THE SOVIET UNION The various strands of the peace through strength strategy as they developed during the first year of the Reagan administration were brought together and publicly articulated in his national security adviser William Clark’s May 21, 1982, address at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. Administration officials (speaking anonymously) called attention to the speech in background briefings for reporters. One invoked the analogy of the basketball stratagem of a fullcourt press, wherein the opposing team is aggressively harassed in their own half of the court to prevent them from moving the ball into your half of the court where they can score. The Reagan strategy, explained Clark, included “diplomatic, political, economic, and informational components

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built on a foundation of strength.” Its objective was to “convince the Soviet leadership to turn their attention inward” instead of engaging in expansionary international moves.2 The administration’s embrace of a projected $1.7 trillion in military expenditures for the period 1982–1987, amounting to a real annual increase (corrected for inflation) of 7 percent a year, was the centerpiece of this “full-court press” on the Soviets. Adopted and openly proclaimed by Reagan and Secretary of Defense Weinberger over the objections of Budget Director David Stockman even before the Pentagon had come up with plans for spending the money, the extravagant increase in defense outlays was dictated less by considerations of military effectiveness than by the grand strategy of pricing the Soviets out of the superpower competition. Accordingly, a key Defense Department planning document urged the development of weapons that “are difficult for the Soviets to counter, impose disproportionate costs, open up new areas of military competition, and obsolesce [sic] previous Soviet investments.”3 The intention of this early stance by the administration, Reagan recalls in his memoirs, was to let them [the Soviets] know there were some new fellows in Washington who had a realistic view of what they were up to and weren’t going to let them keep it up. . . . I intended to let them know that we were going to spend whatever it took to stay ahead of them in the arms race. We would never accept second place. The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism—money. The Russians could never win the arms race. We could outspend them forever. Moreover, incentives inherent in the capitalist system had given us an industrial base that meant we had the capacity to maintain a technological edge over them forever.4

Would the Soviet Union recognize the challenge of a very expensive arms race? “Someone in the Kremlin had to realize that in arming themselves to the teeth,” averred Reagan, “they were aggravating the desperate economic problems in the Soviet Union, which were the greatest evidence of the failure of Communism. Yet, to be candid, I doubted I’d ever meet anybody like that.”5 In other words, the Soviet Union could not realistically be expected to reform before it experienced a total collapse, perhaps in the aftermath of losing a war with the capitalist West. Not that the United States would start such a war. “They had nothing to fear from us if they behaved themselves,”

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insisted Reagan. But in a reverse of the standard Marxist-Leninist prophecy, it was the communists (not the beleaguered capitalists) who at the moment of truth about the failure of their system might initiate another world war— even a nuclear war—in a last gasp of desperation. The Americans would have to arm themselves to the teeth not simply to deter such a war but to limit damage to themselves and prevail in the event deterrence failed. Meanwhile, access by the USSR to the markets of the West would be severely constricted, not encouraged under the naïve belief, propagated by Kissinger, that trade with the capitalist West would give the Kremlin a stake in international equilibrium. The policy of isolating the Soviet Union from the international economy, however, proved difficult to implement for it required the cooperation of the other advanced industrial countries, many of which opposed this both on grounds of national economic interest and coalition grand strategy. The intra-alliance differences over commerce with the USSR surfaced most dramatically in public altercations with the governments of Germany, Britain, France, and Italy over their arrangements with the Kremlin to provide technology and financing for construction of a Soviet pipeline for transporting natural gas from Russia to Western Europe. Reagan’s unilateral announcement at the end of December 1981 of a suspension of U.S. export licenses for sales of pipeline equipment to the Soviets was not echoed by the allies.6 At a time of economic recession in the West, and with the United States having recently cut back on its steel imports from the European Community, the Europeans were in no mood to forgo jobgenerating orders for their pipeline equipment or a source of natural gas not prone to Arab embargoes or price hikes. The Reagan administration tried to persuade its European counterparts that their assistance to the Soviets in building the gas pipeline had geopolitical implications transcending immediate economic considerations: the U.S. call for an embargo was part of the grand strategy of denying the Soviet Union goods and technology that contributed to its war-making capabilities. The Europeans did not take kindly to the charge that in the gas pipeline deal they were letting commercial objectives override the common defense needs of the West, particularly in light of the recently lifted embargo on U.S. grain sales to the Soviets. The White House admitted that lifting the embargo on grain sales was a response to domestic economic considerations (actually, it was a political payoff to the farm lobby for its support of Reagan in the election) but argued that the grain made no contribution

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to Soviet military capabilities. Moreover, by purchasing the grain the Russians would be depleting their hard currency reserves; by contrast, in the gas pipeline deal the Soviets stood to earn over $10 billion a year once the gas began to flow, and this would increase their capacity to continue their dangerous military buildup and to pursue an aggressive foreign policy. Even more ominous, the Western countries would become dependent on the gas they received through the pipeline and thus would be vulnerable to Soviet threats to turn off the spigot in East-West crises. The Europeans rejected these arguments and took special umbrage at the allegation that by becoming consumers of Soviet natural gas they would be making themselves susceptible to Soviet pressures. At most, they pointed out, supplies from Russia would constitute 5 percent of their total energy consumption, a gap that could be filled from other sources in the event of a cutoff from the East. At the suggestion of Secretary of Defense Weinberger, President Reagan issued instructions in the summer of 1982 prohibiting European-based subsidiaries of U.S. companies from selling or delivering equipment to the USSR for the pipelines and banning the use of American equipment or technology in the pipeline project by foreign companies. The European governments, supported by powerful elements in their business communities with a stake in expanding East-West commerce, charged that the extraterritorial prohibitions by the United States were an infringement of national sovereignty. “The question,” explained Reagan’s usually loyal friend, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “is whether one very powerful nation can prevent existing contracts from being fulfilled. I think it is wrong to do that.”7 It fell to Secretary of State George Shultz, newly appointed to succeed Alexander Haig, to resolve the intra-alliance confrontation. Shultz negotiated a face-saving agreement for Reagan in which the allies agreed to enlarge the list of items in the NATO category of technology and equipment with military applications that could not to be sold to the USSR and its allies, in return for the United States looking the other way while the Europeans consummated their gas pipeline deal with the Russians.8 The president was more successful in sustaining the pressure on the Soviets at the level of ideological rhetoric. He did perhaps overstate the revived Cold War orientation and embarrass allied governments in some off-the cuff press conference remarks at the start of his administration. Most notorious was his charge that “the only morality” for the Soviets is what will further “their goal of . . . a world revolution and a one world

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Communist state . . . , meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to obtain that.”9 But the great communicator clarified his meaning in a number of artfully crafted and flawlessly delivered speeches designed to seize the political high ground from the Soviet propagandists. Reagan’s proudest effort of this kind was his rousing address in London to the British Parliament on June 8, 1982. In an open castigation of the Soviet system more extreme than anything since John Foster Dulles railed against “atheistic communism,” the president attributed what he called “the decay of the Soviet experiment” to the inherent flaws of Marxist state socialism. He predicted that the repressiveness of the Soviet system would ultimately drive its people to resist it—possibly by violent revolution. “While we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change,” he cautioned, “we must not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward them.” It was time to launch a new “crusade for freedom,” to “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” The president pledged to cooperate with various ongoing international efforts for helping democratic political movements as well as a new action program by the United States that implied an increase of covert activities by U.S. intelligence agencies. “This is not cultural imperialism,” insisted the president. “It is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity.”10 The anticommunist convictions at the core of Reagan’s foreign policy were evident nine months later in his address to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida. Calling the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world,” the president castigated arms control advocates who, he implied, were inadvertently assisting the devil by spreading the pernicious doctrine that both sides were equally at fault for the Cold War. This was “to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” To “simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding,” he said, was to “remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”11

SDI: AN ARMS PROGRAM ON THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS When thinking about good and evil in connection with the arms race, Ronald Reagan was disturbed by the fact that his military advisers continued to operate within the inherited strategic orthodoxy of mutual assured

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destruction (MAD). According to the MAD orthodoxy, if neither superpower could hope to escape a devastating retaliatory strike on its centers of population and industry no matter how large and well-executed its first strike against the other side, then each side would be deterred from starting a strategic nuclear war. The MAD relationship, codified and secured in the SALT treaties, was thought to be the realization of Winston Churchill’s prophecy of a situation in which “safety will be the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation.” The president’s principal national security advisers were aware of the president’s deep dislike of the inherited deterrence doctrine, but they were taken aback on March 23, 1983, when he publicly promulgated a diametrically opposed strategy for defense and arms control. In a speech that reported favorably on the administration’s defense program and strategic arms reduction talks with the Soviets, Reagan added a section that was a surprise even to the secretary of defense, whose office had drafted the body of the speech. At the end of the mostly “nuts and bolts” disquisition on the intricacies of the superpower military balance, the president reflected that it was still . . . necessary to rely on the specter of retaliation, on mutual threat. And that’s a sad commentary on the human condition. Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them? Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. . . . What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest on 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? I know that this is a formidable technical task; one that may not be accomplished before the end of the century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it is reasonable for us to begin this effort. . . . My fellow Americans, tonight we’re launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history.12

The president’s expression of moral anguish about the need to base deterrence on the threat to devastate the enemy’s society, as well as his endorsement of efforts to limit damage to American society in case

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deterrence failed were not novel. Similarly, there was nothing revolutionary in urging expansion of efforts to develop an antiballistic missile (ABM): indeed, while adhering to the prohibitions in the 1972 ABM treaty, the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations had all continued research and development programs on ballistic missile defense. Many officials in the Reagan administration wanted the president to repudiate the ABM treaty as being too inhibitory of essential development and testing programs; but even the Pentagon proponents of a more vigorous ABM effort looked toward deployments that protected U.S. retaliatory forces and command and control centers from nuclear destruction. Few if any U.S. defense planners assumed that either the United States or the Soviet Union now or in the foreseeable future, whatever the research and development efforts, would be able to protect the bulk of their populations in a major U.S.-Soviet nuclear war. But this was precisely what the president was now advocating. In his memoirs, Reagan reconstructs the reasoning that led him to embrace the goal of a comprehensive defense of the American people in the event of a nuclear war between the superpowers. One of the first statistics I saw as president was one of the most sobering and startling I’d ever heard. I’ll never forget it: The Pentagon said at least 150 million American lives would be lost in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union—even if we “won.” . . . Even if a nuclear war did not mean the extinction of mankind, it would certainly mean the end of civilization as we knew it. . . . My dream, then, became a world free of nuclear weapons. Some of my advisers, including a number at the Pentagon, did not share this dream. They could not conceive of it. They said a nuclear-free world was unattainable and it would be dangerous for us even if it were possible; some even claimed that nuclear war was “inevitable” and we had to prepare for this reality. . . . But for the eight years I was president I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind. Since I knew it would be a long and difficult task to rid the world of nuclear weapons, I had this second dream: the creation of a defense against nuclear missiles, so we could change from a policy of assured destruction to one of assured survival.13

On the basis of interviews with Reagan friends and aides, Reagan’s biographer Lou Canon finds the president’s obsession with protecting the

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American people in a nuclear war as at least partly reflective of Reagan’s belief in armageddon prophecies. Nuclear World War III might well be the manifestation of that prophecy.14 But where did the president suddenly get the idea that a space-based nationwide defense against ballistic missiles was feasible? In fact, this was a vision Ronald Reagan had nurtured for more than fifteen years. In 1967, as governor of California, Reagan visited the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for a briefing on nuclear defense technologies by physicist Edward Teller. One of Dr. Teller’s pet projects was utilization of X-ray lasers for destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles early in their trajectories. The idea appealed to Reagan, who over the next dozen years on his way to the White House was repeatedly briefed by Teller and other proponents of spaced-based defenses. Upon becoming president, Reagan continued this special interest in exotic ABM options despite the skepticism of most of the professional military strategists and planners in his administration. He was backed by his young adviser on domestic politics and economics, Martin Andersen, and the presidential science adviser, Dr. George A. Keyworth, an associate of Dr. Teller enthusiastic about the potential of X-ray lasers. Anderson and Keyworth were joined by the national security adviser Richard Allen in a series of private White House meetings in 1981 with leading advocates of space-based defense, including Teller and former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Daniel Graham (an advocate of an alternative concept called “high frontier”). This intensification of interest coincided with a study issued by the Heritage Foundation, a Washingtonbased conservative think tank urging that a nationwide system to defend against ballistic missiles be adopted as a high-priority goal for the country. Dr. Teller and General Graham were prominently involved in the study.15 The new national security adviser, William Clark, and his principal military deputy, Robert McFarlane, became converts to the idea and found sufficient rationale for a presidential endorsement in a number of political developments: the peace movement was proposing a freeze on nuclear weapons deployments; the administration had failed to gain congressional authorization for MX multiple-warhead missile deployments because it could not come up with an acceptable basing plan for the vulnerable missiles; the Soviets were dragging their feet in the strategic arms negotiations while augmenting their own supermissiles; and the Conference of American Catholic Bishops was disseminating a major moral critique of the prevailing nuclear-deterrent strategy.

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The peace through strength strategy was faltering. McFarlane later revealed in interviews with Lou Canon that he worked through the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), particularly Chief of Naval Operations James D. Watkins, who shared Reagan’s repugnance of the assured destruction doctrine, to create the appearance of military support for taking a serious look at ballistic missile defense options. Reagan misinterpreted the new openness of the JCS as tantamount to a recommendation that the administration get to work on his dream. McFarlane later claimed to have envisioned the large new research and development program as a “bargaining chip” in the strategic arms negotiations with the USSR—a bargaining chip the Americans would be willing to trade in for major Soviet concessions.16 This turned out to be a gross miscalculation of Reagan’s intentions. The president continued to make clear, in public and in the councils of his administration, that he believed deeply in the moral and strategic necessity of defending the U.S. population—the entire country—against nuclear attack. A strategic defense initiative organization (SDI) organization, directly under the authority of the secretary of defense, was given overall management responsibility, while the media and the Congress were fed fancy descriptions and visuals of alternative SDI systems. The White House favored a multilayered defense “umbrella” of orbiting spacecraft that would use lasers to destroy as many Soviet multiple-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles as possible in their boost phase (before the warheads had separated) and then knock out any surviving warheads in midtrajectory and terminal intercepts.

RESERVATIONS OF THE ADMINISTRATION’S STRATEGIC EXPERTS The president’s optimism was not supported, however, by the results of the administration’s newly ordered feasibility studies. Whether conducted within the Pentagon or contracted out to think tanks, they showed the president’s dream of physically defending the population of the United States from a major Soviet strategic attack to be an unrealizable fantasy. Even if 99 percent of the Soviet strategic nuclear warheads could be destroyed by the defense shield (a wildly optimistic premise), and even if official Washington were spared, that would still leave the continental United States vulnerable to well over 100 nuclear explosions, each on the average 50 times as powerful as the explosion that devastated Hiroshima.

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Moreover, SDI did nothing about nuclear bombs that could be delivered by Soviet strategic aircraft, low-trajectory missiles launched from Soviet submarines deployed near American coasts, and terrorist “suitcase” bombs. The costs of SDI would run into the trillions of dollars; and even after deployment of the most comprehensive system, the country would still lack a leakproof defense: even only 10 warheads (less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the available Soviet arsenal) leaking through the umbrella would cause millions of fatalities. If the contemplated systems—popularly known as Star Wars—had any strategic utility at all, according to most of the new studies, it was in their potential role in protecting the deterrent forces themselves and in “complicating” enemy attacks.17 The president did not want to hear the gloomy assessments, and Secretary Weinberger was glad to shield him from the devastating conclusions of the studies, for by now the JCS and the Pentagon generally saw the opportunity of funding other missile and exotic technology projects through Star Wars. Within the Pentagon, to think tank strategists, and to congressional experts on military matters, SDI’s potential for protecting the deterrent was emphasized; while in their public and media presentations administration spokespersons sustained a facade of confidence in eventually being able to deploy systems that could protect the population. Reagan himself took to the public rostrum to counteract the spreading impression that SDI had a more modest purpose. Typical was a 1985 speech before the National Space Club in which he insisted that “We’re not discussing a concept just to enhance deterrence, but rather a new kind of deterrence.” The capability “to intercept ballistic missiles during their early-on boost phase of trajectory,” claimed the president, “would enable us to fundamentally change our strategic assumptions.” The revolutionary significance of the initiative should not be underestimated: We seek to render obsolete the balance of terror—or Mutual Assured Destruction, as it’s called—and replace it with a system incapable of initiating armed conflict or causing mass destruction, yet effective in preventing war. Now, this is not and should never be misconstrued as just another method of protecting missile silos.18

One of the most worrisome aspects of the Star Wars program to arms control specialists was not simply that it contradicted the ABM treaty, but that in posing a potential negation of the Soviet Union’s assured

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destruction deterrent, it would only stimulate the Soviets to augment their offensive strategic arsenal (numerically and with sophisticated countermeasures) to neutralize whatever antimissile defenses the United States might eventually deploy. But some strategic hard-liners in the administration, most notably Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, saw this as all to the good: it would strain Soviet resources to the breaking point and weaken the USSR’s ability to sustain its superpower rivalry with the United States. At least one of Reagan’s top advisers, arms control negotiator Paul Nitze, was not all that confident that the objective of pricing the Soviets out of the arms race would be that easily attained. His February 1985 public speech to the Philadelphia World Affairs Council, created quite a stir among the national security policy cognoscenti. Ambassador Nitze laid out the consideration of a criterion for any defense system: New defensive systems must . . . be cost effective at the margin—that is, they must be cheap enough to add additional defensive capability so that the other side has no incentive to add additional offensive capability to overcome the defense. If this criterion is not met, the defensive systems could encourage a proliferation of countermeasures and additional offensive weapons to overcome deployed defenses, instead of a redirection of effort from offense to defense.19

All these reservations and debates, however, missed the most important function of SDI for Reagan. The very dream quality that earned it the ridicule of critics was its primary appeal for this president whose power lay in his capacity to reach and identify with the people through fantasy. The fantasy of armageddon, which served to revive both the fear of God and the imperative of fighting the devil in an overly secular world, was complemented by the fantasy of salvation by America’s technological imagination and skills applied to noble purposes.

THE REGAN DOCTRINE The worldview articulated in the London and Orlando speeches was later dubbed the Reagan Doctrine. This was merely a journalistic label (willingly accepted by the president) for policy premises and actions that were

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essential to the administration’s approach to world affairs from the outset of the Reagan presidency: t
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governments and anti-government forces on the side of free democratic capitalism and weakening governments and anti-government forces on the side of Marxism-Leninism. The Reaganites came to office convinced that their predecessors has lost sight of these fundamentals and therefore could not distinguish friend from foe, particularly in the volatile Third World. Their principal mission in foreign policy, which Reagan had been openly preaching during five years of campaigning for the presidency, was to put the United States back on the basic course from which it had strayed under both Kissinger’s realpolitik and Carter’s human rights policies. During Reagan’s first term, however, the administration attempted to keep secret the most controversial part of the revived Cold War policy toward the Third World: namely, efforts to overthrow existing Marxistoriented governments, by force if necessary. The Reaganites admired President Eisenhower’s successful use of the CIA’s covert capabilities in the 1950s to organize renegade elements of the Guatemalan military to overthrow the Marxist Arbenz regime in Guatemala and to stage a coup in Tehran to restore the Shah’s power (interventions that Eisenhower proudly took credit for in his memoirs). A new globally extensive covert operations policy against Marxist governments (or Soviet client states) was presented by Director of Central Intelligence Casey in March 1981 in a top secret briefing to the National Security Planning Group—the Reagan administration’s highest-level foreign policy directorate, which at this date comprised, in addition to the CIA director, only President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Secretary of State Haig, Secretary of Defense Weinberger, and NSC adviser Allen. Casey’s plan called for covert U.S. support to anti-government groups in pro-Soviet states, including Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Laos, and

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Libya.20 However, Casey advised that there would be too much opposition in the Congress to the renewed interventionist policy if it were made public. Casey’s initiative led to a series of “findings” signed by the president (as required by congressional legislation on covert operations) to authorize the CIA to start down the road that Congress did indeed attempt to block when information on the full extent of the covert activities began to leak out. The administration’s reaction to congressional restrictions on the covert action, particularly Casey’s program of arming and training the Nicaraguan Contras (see chap. 22), took two forms: the low road of flouting the law and lying to the Congress and the high road of public rhetoric designed to create popular pressure on Congress to support the policy of overt actions and sanctions to destabilize Marxist regimes. The Reagan Doctrine was the principal expression of the campaign to gain legitimacy in the form of public support and congressional authorization for what the administration was doing covertly. In his State of the Union address on February 6, 1985, the president enunciated what supporters hoped would stand as both a reaffirmation and enlargement of the Truman Doctrine—now expanded to encompass support not only for governments under attack by communist rebels but also for rebels against communist rulers: “We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth. . . . Support for freedom fighters is self defense.”21 Then, at Bitburg, Germany, on May 5, 1985, the president gave the doctrine a special emotional twist: Twenty years ago President John F. Kennedy went to the Berlin Wall and proclaimed that he, too, was a Berliner. Well, today freedom-loving people around the world must say: I am a Berliner. I am a Jew in a world still threatened by anti-Semitism. I am an Afghan, and I am a prisoner of the Gulag. I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am a Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.22

The principal intellectual guru behind the Reagan Doctrine was UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick—William Casey’s closest ally in the cabinet. A political science professor and former Democrat, she owed her appointment as ambassador to the UN to the president-elect’s admiration

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for her November 1979 article in Commentary magazine urging vigorous support for anti-Marxist elements in the Third World. Titled “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” the essay provided conceptual muscle and seemingly tight logic—an intellectual wrapper, as it were—for Reagan’s intuitions. Professor Kirkpatrick argued that a naïve set of deterministic and essentially apolitical misconceptions about “modernization” and “development” prevalent in the Carter administration had led to mistaken reformist pressures by the United States on reliable Cold War allies such as the shah of Iran and Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, undermining the legitimacy of these rulers within their own countries; and then when these friends were most in need of American support against radical revolutionary movements, the U.S. pulled the rug from under them, at the end even aligning itself with their (and ultimately America’s own) enemies. In Kirkpatrick’s words: The Carter administration brought to the crises in Iran and Nicaragua [and elsewhere in the Third World] several common assumptions each of which played a major role in hastening the victory of even more repressive dictatorships than had been in place before. These were, first, the belief that there existed at the moment of crisis a democratic alternative to the incumbent government; second, the belief that the continuation of the status quo was not possible; third, the belief that any change, including the establishment of a government headed by self-styled Marxist revolutionaries [or left-leaning clerics], was preferable to the present government.23

Moreover, in attempting to force the pace of human rights progress and democratic development on the part of traditional autocrats like the shah and Somoza, the United States was operating with a double standard. “Assisting ‘change,’ ” complained Kirkpatrick, “did not lead the Carter administration to undertake the destabilization of a Communist country”— an inhibition the Carterites cloaked in “selectively applied” principles of self-determination and nonintervention. “We accepted the status quo in Communist nations (in the name of ‘diversity’ and national autonomy), but not in nations ruled by ‘right wing’ dictators or white oligarchies.”24 Kirkpatrick located the source of this double standard in what she saw as the Carter administration’s failure to comprehend the essential differences between “traditional autocracies” and “revolutionary [or totalitarian] autocracies” and the relation of each to U.S. national interests. Traditional authoritarian governments are not only “less repressive” than

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totalitarian governments, they are also “more susceptible of liberalization.” A realistic policy, consistent with U.S. geopolitical interests as well as the American commitment to freedom and democracy, would operate on the premise that “there is a far greater likelihood of progressive liberalization and democratization in the governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile than in the government of Cuba; in Taiwan than in the People’s Republic of China; in South Korea than in North Korea; in Zaire than in Angola; and so forth.”25 The policy implications for the incoming Reagan administration were clear. Foreshadowing what would later emerge full-blown as the Reagan Doctrine, Kirkpatrick advised that “a posture of continuous self-abasement and apology vis-à-vis the Third World is neither morally necessary nor politically appropriate. Nor is it necessary or appropriate . . . for our leaders to forswear unilaterally the use of military force to counter military force.”26 Later, when the White House decided to go public with what it had been attempting covertly in the Third World, not surprisingly Ambassador Kirkpatrick provided the most intellectually compelling geopolitical and moral justifications for U.S. policy. Typical was her address before the National Press Club on May 30, 1985, in which she contended that Soviet military aid, often including Cuban and other Soviet-bloc military and paramilitary personnel in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Cambodia, let alone the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan, internationalized the struggle for power in these countries. Only the narrowest reading of the UN Charter’s prohibitions on intervention in violation of national sovereignty would argue against the legitimacy of U.S. support for indigenous opponents of such Soviet-supported regimes. “It seems clear,” she said, that if client rulers have the “right” to ask for external assistance to maintain their rule, citizens deprived of rights have the right to ask for external aid in reclaiming them. . . . In aiding those who resist Communism are we adopting the same concepts of morality in reverse? The answer is, assuredly not. To suggest otherwise is to deny the relevance of context and consequences to moral and legal judgment: it is like asking us to look only at the knife that cuts into an abdomen without taking account of whether the man wielding it is a surgeon or Jack-the-Ripper, or whether the patient is likely to be cured by the knife or destroyed. . . .

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Suggestions that force is force is force deny . . . that there is an objective difference between liberation and conquest and treats them if it were merely a matter of whose ox is being gored. . . . A government which takes power by force and retains power by force has no legitimate grounds for complaint against those who would wrest power from it by force. A government whose power depends upon external support has no legitimate grounds for complaining that externally supported force is used against it. Obviously it is legitimate for the U.S. to support an insurgency against a dictatorial government that depends on external support.27

Kirkpatrick was speaking in 1985. During Reagan’s first term, such an open embrace of the interventionist logic prevailing in the administration had been deliberately avoided. Many of the actual operations of the U.S. government in the Third World were kept secret from the public and the Congress until it was evident that they would be exposed by journalists and congressional investigators. White House public relations specialists feared a public and congressional backlash (there was still a considerable hangover of the “Vietnam syndrome”) to implications that the United States was girding itself up for new military interventions against communists in the Third World. But the policy of intervening with money, equipment, and training on behalf of Third World anticommunists, and preparing to do so with U.S. military force if necessary, would go forward regardless of growing congressional efforts to rein in the zeal of the president’s and Casey’s men. When Reagan decided to use the occasion of the 1985 State of the Union address to make overt the premises that had been governing the covert operations, the State Department (reflecting the cautious approach of Secretary Shultz) fought to water down the passages pledging worldwide support for “freedom fighters.” But the president was enthusiastic about declaring his deeper convictions and the speech was delivered as written.28 With or without the rhetoric, with or without congressional approval, a marked alteration in U.S. Third World strategy coinciding with the ascension of Reagan to the presidency was evident in country after country in the thrust of U.S. operations, both overt and covert. Egalitarian reformers, from democratic Socialists to Marxist-Leninists, were isolated and opposed—not courted as they had been during the Carter (and Kennedy) years in the hope of driving a wedge between nationalist leftists and those

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who were agents of the Soviets. The qualification for U.S. favors, funding, equipment, and training was whether the recipients, governmental or anti-governmental, had creditable anticommunist credentials; such governments, autocratic or not, were defined (consistent with the Kirkpatrick distinctions) as part of the “free world,” and all anticommunist insurgents, even those in league with the most anti-democratic elements in their countries, were seen as “freedom fighters.” Remarkably, given the fact that the cultural, ethnic, and tribal determinants of the most intense indigenous conflicts in the Third World cut across the Manichean worldview of the Reagan Doctrine, U.S. diplomats and operatives in virtually every country were expected to implement the doctrine’s imperatives in their areas of responsibility. The actual local configuration might not conform to the policy premises, but more often than not U.S. officials faithfully persisted in trying to bend local realities to the president’s known predilections. In Afghanistan, the stated purposes of the Reagan Doctrine and the behavior of the involved parties corresponded quite closely—if one squinted (as Reagan did) to make the fanatical Muslim mujahideen look like fighters for democratic freedom while blurring their connections with and affinity to the radical theocratic government in neighboring Iran. Their opponents, the Soviets and their puppet government in Kabul, did measure up to their billing as an evil presence that the United States was fully justified in helping the mujahideen resistance remove by force. The Soviets had blatantly invaded the country with major military force in 1979 “to restore order” on the invitation of an Afghan government installed in a brutal coup engineered by the KGB. To this extent the mujahideen were truly “freedom fighters” on behalf of national self-determination against Soviet imperialism. United States’ assistance to the Afghani rebels was initiated by the Carter administration, and its expansion to some $600 million worth of military equipment during the Reagan years, including highly effective Stinger antiaircraft missiles, was popular with both parties in the Congress. In southern Africa Reagan found worthy “freedom fighters” in the UNITA rebels led by Jonas Savimbi against the Marxist regime in Angola. Dr. Savimbi, a loser to his Soviet-supported rival Agostino Neto in the struggle for power in Luanda after Angola achieved independence from Portugal, had been accepting aid from the white apartheid regime in South Africa (Pretoria was furious at the Neto government for harboring the outlawed anti-apartheid African National Congress and radical factions of the

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Namibia independence movement). The incoming Reagan administration was anxious to directly aid Savimbi but was prevented from doing so by the Clark Amendment, passed by Congress in the 1970s in the aftermath of Vietnam. The Soviets had dramatically enlarged their presence in Angola and the other ex-Portuguese colony, Mozambique—going so far as to airlift thousands of Cuban troops into Angola to help Neto redress the balance of power against militarily powerful South Africa. The Soviet-supported Cuban troops in Angola were a major case in point for the four-year lobbying effort by the Reagan administration to repeal the Clark Amendment. After the repeal of the Clark Amendment in the spring of 1985, following the president’s vigorous defense of an interventionist policy in the State of the Union and other speeches, U.S. diplomats in discussions with their Soviet counterparts reported an apparent willingness by the Soviets to explore a quid pro quo comprising the withdrawal of Cuban troops in exchange for U.S. and South African withdrawal of support for the Savimbi rebels and credible progress toward Namibian self-determination. In the White House the presumed new willingness of the Soviets to pursue diplomatic resolutions of the conflicts in southern Africa was attributed to the enlarged and more vigorous support for Savimbi, and perhaps also for rebel elements in Mozambique, that the repeal of the Clark Amendment made possible. The motivation for peaceful settlement was not all on the Soviet side, however. There was considerable apprehension in the State Department and among the U.S. military—who did worry about “another Vietnam” in the making—that the increasing U.S. involvement with Savimbi carried the high risk of escalation to a direct U.S. confrontation against Cuban and possibly even Soviet forces. Additionally, the deepening U.S. involvement was likely to produce a severe domestic political backlash against the administration’s policy of “constructive engagement” toward the government of South Africa; for now, in going beyond the theory of Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker that association with the regime in Pretoria, not its economic and diplomatic isolation, would produce reform of the apartheid system, the United States was becoming, willy-nilly, an open and direct ally of that government’s racist military and police actions against the African National Congress and militant factions of the Namibian independence movement. In Cambodia the Reagan administration could claim it was on the side of human dignity and freedom only by obscuring the fact that the proChinese rebels it was supporting (including the genocidal Khmer Rouge)

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were at least as brutal in areas they controlled as were the Cambodian puppets who ran the government in Phnom Penh under Vietnamese military occupation. Administration officials attempted to maintain the appearance of consistency with the Reagan Doctrine by emphasizing the right of the Cambodians to national self-determination against imperialistic, Sovietbacked Vietnam. But this was a transparent justification for siding with China in its regional power rivalry vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. In the Philippines, even as the nonviolent “people power” resistance to the corrupt dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos gained the admiration of Democrats and Republicans alike, the White House stubbornly clung to the Kirkpatrick version of the Reagan Doctrine: autocratic dictators loyally allied with the United States in the larger struggle against the MarxistLeninists needed understanding and support when in political trouble; precisely at such times the U.S. should avoid undermining them by providing either tangible or rhetorical assistance to their domestic opponents. Marcos’s fraudulent interference with the 1986 elections (which he allowed to take place only after urgings from Washington) and his refusal to accept his electoral defeat by Corazon Aquino, the widow of the assassinated opposition leader Benigno Aquino, was finally too much for Secretary of State Shultz and other officials. The president’s special emissary to Manila, Senator Paul Laxalt, and diplomatic troubleshooter Philip Habib both confirmed the allegations of fraud and urged Reagan to sever the embarrassing association with the corrupt dictator; still Reagan resisted abandoning his friend, with the lame excuse that the election involved “fraud on both sides.”29 Reagan’s reluctance was perhaps personal as well as ideological. Lou Canon points out that Marcos, a World War II Medal of Honor winner who concocted legends of his own bravery, had long been a hero to Reagan, who now found it “nearly impossible to adjust to the idea that Marcos had become a corrupt and discredited despot.” 30 Only the imminent prospect of a bloody civil war between pro- and anti-Marcos factions of the armed forces pushed Reagan at last to ask Marcos to abandon his dictatorship in exchange for protected exile in Hawaii.31 The principal Third World arena for attempting to implement the Reagan Doctrine was in Latin America, specifically the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The Latin American policies of the administration are given extended treatment in chapter 22.

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THE TENSION BETWEEN FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC IMPERATIVES He has two religions: free enterprise and God. —François Mitterrand on Ronald Reagan

NE OF THE MOST BEGUILING features of Ronald Reagan’s worldview was his faith in the free market economy—beguiling not only his constituency but Reagan himself. Ironically, Reagan was no less an economic determinist than the Marxists in whose atheistic materialism he saw the work of the devil: the free market was the engine of economic development and national and world prosperity, the fairest dispenser of social justice, and the essential precondition for political democracy. Overlooking the early history of U.S. governmental protection and subsidies to its infant industries, Reagan never tired of preaching to Third World countries that they should follow the example of the United States, where a commitment to “the magic of the marketplace” produced rapid and spectacular growth and prosperity.1 Supported by the ideas of distinguished economists such as Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, Reagan claimed that a principal source of the world’s social maladies was government policy that distorted the natural economic relationships among supply, demand, and price. Whatever interfered with the freedom of sellers to market their goods and services at the highest profit to themselves and of buyers to make purchases at the lowest prices they could find was both inefficient

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and unjust. Accordingly, it was counterproductive and morally wrong for government policy to inhibit capital from being invested where otherwise the factors of production (land, natural resources, labor, managerial and entrepreneurial skills, and marketing outlets) were most conducive to the highest output per unit of capital invested. The greatest good for the greatest number of people the world over would flow from the unfettered workings of the free market. These were self-evident economic (and moral) truths to the ideologues in the Reagan administration (not all of the president’s aides were true believers) who saw themselves as the vanguard of a policy revolution. But their determination to translate this laissez-faire economic philosophy into practice ran up against the aggressive nationalism and special-interest politics that—in addition to the popular clamor for reduced taxes—were responsible for the right-wing Republican revival and the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. Revealingly, one of the most committed of the true believers—David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985—titled his memoir on “why the Reagan revolution failed” The Triumph of Politics.2 Even among the true believers, the Reagan revolution, like most revolutions, had its rival factions. The radical “supply-siders” put their faith in a drastic reduction of taxes, particularly those taxes that inhibited entrepreneurial risk taking, thought to be the engine of the new economic growth that would generate the revenues needed to balance the federal budget. The supply-side ideologues were willing to accept increased budget deficits (the probable immediate effect of major tax reductions), convinced that these would be only temporary. The more cautious “monetarists” in the Reagan vanguard felt that the movement toward the laissez-faire economy needed to be steered via Federal Reserve Board controls on the money supply and interest rates so as to avoid the wide swings in the unfettered business cycle that once again (as during the 1930s) could produce a backlash against the free market system. The “fiscal conservatives”—in the tradition of anti-welfare-state Republicanism from Herbert Hoover to Barry Goldwater—were first and foremost anxious to reduce federal spending.3 Where did Ronald Reagan stand on the fractious disputes among those purporting to launch a revolution in his name? His rhetoric, happily for the image of a united Republican Party and administration, soared above the fray. However, to the chagrin of administration aides who wanted more precise guidance, so did his own thinking. As put by William

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Niskanen, member of the Council of Economic Advisers, and for a period its acting chairman: The primary problem of advising Reagan was his incurable optimism. . . . One important consequence of this optimism was the impossibility of preparing realistic economic and budget forecasts. . . . He wanted all good things to come in a package and was reluctant to signal priorities when there was a trade-off among his objectives.4

Reagan’s basic economic goals were clear enough and widely shared throughout his administration: to remove the heavy hand of the federal government from the economy so the free market could once again reward those who were most competitively efficient (and not subsidize the inefficient), thereby stimulating product innovation and overall economic growth that would benefit everyone; to induce other countries to follow the example of the United States, thus giving Americans an even larger market in which to compete and spreading the benefits of the free enterprise system to more of the world’s peoples; to bring the federal budget into balance, but without raising taxes; and to reduce corporate and individual income taxes as soon as possible, especially those that discouraged entrepreneurship. It was up to his subordinates to work out among themselves how all this was to be accomplished and present it to him as a comprehensive program that he, with the aura of the presidency and his great communicative skills, would sell to the country. Reagan’s zealous young budget director, David Stockman, was at first astonished at how his hero ran the administration, but then seized the opportunity to fill the vacuum himself. Reagan “seemed so serene and passive,” Stockman recalls, “He conveyed the impression that since we all knew what needed to be done, we should simply get on with the job. Since I did know what to do, I took his quiet message of confidence to be a mandate. If the others weren’t going to get his administration’s act together, I would.”5 By the end of Reagan’s first term, however, Stockman was convinced that the White House had become “a dreamland.” Those who had the president’s ear and were crafting his optimistic rhetoric were “holding the American economy hostage to a reckless unstable fiscal policy based on the politics of high spending and the doctrine of low taxes.” Orwellian doublespeak had been given a new lease on life. “In 1984 we were plainly

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drifting into unprecedented economic peril,” but the “brash phrasemakers of the White House . . . had the audacity to proclaim a golden age of prosperity.” And worst of all, the president seemed to actually believe what he was saying.6

NATIONAL SECURITY VERSUS REAGANOMICS Stockman’s disillusionment with the president in the spring and summer of 1981 came to a head in the battle over the defense budget. It was no secret in Washington that Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s announced pledge to increase defense spending at an average real (corrected for inflation) rate of 7 percent annually during the coming five years was a quantitative projection picked out of the air for political reasons, not the product of serious Pentagon studies of essential force requirements. From Stockman’s perspective, the Defense Department’s initial budget submissions were obviously still soft, containing items that could be cut. However, Weinberger, Reagan, and Secretary of State Haig were determined to best the outgoing Carter administration’s fiscal 1982 request for a 5 percent increase in the defense budget. To maintain the patriotic enthusiasm that was a crucial factor in Reagan’s election it was important to appear deadly serious about reversing the relative decline in U.S. military power vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. A dramatic increase over the Carter defense budget was also an essential element of the full-court press on the Soviet Union, designed in large part to shock the Kremlin into recognizing that it could not hope to keep up with the United States in the next round of the arms race.7 Once he realized that the president would reject any reductions in the defense budget that would undercut this grand strategy, Stockman’s fallback position was to develop a more efficient spending plan to achieve roughly the same military buildup. But his alternative—projecting a modest cut of only $13 billion in Weinberger’s proposal to spend $1.46 trillion over five years—was characterized by the secretary of defense as subversive of national security. Stockman was livid at what he regarded as Weinberger’s disingenuous debating tactic in front of the president. “His briefing was so intellectually disreputable, so demeaning, that I could hardly bring myself to believe that a Harvard-educated cabinet officer could have brought this to the President of the United States. Did he think the White House was on Sesame Street?”8

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By the end of the first budget-planning cycle, Stockman was convinced that “the President didn’t have it in him to overrule his Secretary of Defense.”9 Reagan’s typical suggestion that “you fellas get together and see if you can work it out” was merely a wink and a nod to his old crony Weinberger. Barely nine months after the inauguration, the new administration’s key official for translating ideology into programs had already reached the point “when I ceased to believe that the Reagan Revolution was possible.”10 Clearly, however, Secretary of Defense Weinberger was serving the president in stubbornly acting on behalf of the Reagan imperative to stand tall again against the Soviets. Those who thought that the president, simply because he seemed to know more about domestic economics than international relations, would give higher priority to balancing the budget than balancing Soviet power, did not know their man. In giving the highest priority to the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, Reagan in the early 1980s embodied the nation’s psychic need to rebound from its withdrawal reactions to the Vietnam fiasco. And other politicians knew this to be the case. Thus, in the 435-member House of Representatives, only 54 Democrats and 7 Republicans voted against Weinberger’s defense appropriations bill of November 1981, and in the 100-member Senate only 4 Democrats and 1 Republican voted against it.11 Yet, as the deficit grew, the president—while adamantly opposed to reversing his tax-relief policies, let alone imposing new taxes—required at least the political gesture of frugality from all departments, in the sense of eliminating wasteful and unnecessary expenditures. After the 1984 elections, an internal review of the second-term agenda and the fiscal year 1986 budget by the so-called core group of Edwin Meese, James Baker, Donald Regan, Malcolm Baldrige, David Stockman, Richard Darman, William Niskanen, and Jack Svahn, produced a defense budget proposal that would have led to no Pentagon increases in the coming year and a 3 percent real growth in successive years without any basic change in Weinberger’s projected force capabilities. (Weinberger was invited to participate in the deliberations of the “core group” but declined.) Once again, when Weinberger was presented with these recommendations in a cabinet meeting with the president, he insisted that national security required that the defense budget should be determined only with reference to the Soviet threat and should be exempt from domestic economic considerations. In this setting, Weinberger would again carry the day. Niskanen recounts, for example, how Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan, who had supported

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a lower defense budget in the core group, was now “a tower of jelly on this issue in front of the president.”12 Regan, in his memoirs, claims to have been more of a true-blue Reaganite than such accounts suggest, being both a devotee of the strategy of pricing the Soviets out of the arms race and a believer in the supply-side philosophy of stimulating the economy through tax reductions instead of drastic budget cuts (especially in the military).13 However, in Ronald Reagan’s second term (perhaps even late in his first term, though he would not admit it before the 1984 elections), there appears to have taken place in the president’s mind a reassessment of the prospects of pulling off the economic miracle of financing the lavish arms buildup through reduced tax rates. The accumulated deficit was careening off the charts as the gap between government expenditures and revenues continued to widen. In Congress former supporters were abandoning the badly listing supply-side ship and swimming for rescue devices like the Gramm-Rudman mandatory budget-cutting bill. It was more than coincidence that just about this time, and over Weinberger’s objections, Reagan began to pursue U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements in earnest. During his last two years in office, and despite his oft-repeated admonitions against trusting the Marxist-Leninists, Reagan was ready to credit Mikhail Gorbachev with a sincere interest in negotiating a truce in the increasingly expensive Cold War. The relationship between national security and economics turned out to be more complex than Reagan had anticipated. The imperatives of his peace through strength policy interfered from the very first with his domestic dream of restoring America’s mythical laissez-faire economic system. And the real predicaments of the contemporary American economy led him eventually to embrace the very kind of East-West détente policies for which he had so roundly condemned his predecessors.

THE DOMESTIC BACKLASH AGAINST INTERNATIONAL FREE TRADE At the outset of the Reagan administration there was a rather solid consensus among the top officials in the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury, and the National Security Council, supportive of the president’s free trade posture. The president and Treasury Secretary Regan were committed to global free trade as one of their articles of faith in the market economy. In addition, Secretaries Haig (and his successor Shultz) and

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Weinberger buttressed Reagan’s conviction that he was right to resist the rising pressures in Congress to retaliate against the Japanese and Western Europeans for subsidizing their own export sectors while discriminating against U.S. imports: the early argument from State and Defense was that since America’s principal competitors in the global market were also its principal allies in the Cold War, it was not in the security interest of the United States to play rough with them in the trade and monetary arenas— especially at a time when the United States was attempting to persuade its allies to assume a greater burden of the collective defense effort. But others in the administration more directly responsive to aggrieved domestic interests, notably Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige and U.S. Trade Representative William Brock, as well as the secretaries of agriculture and labor, argued that it was time to stop babying economically prospering allies, particularly Japan and members of the European Community, who were simultaneously failing to assume their fair share of the common defense burden and preventing Americans from competing freely in their markets. Moreover, unless the administration took the lead in demanding that the allies agree to compete on “a level playing field” in the international economy, Congress was sure to take matters into its own hands with counterproductive protectionist legislation. President Reagan and other advocates of free trade for a time could feel content that they were taking both the moral and geopolitical high ground in resisting the popular rise of protectionist sentiment. But the free market had its own natural laws—which rhetoric might obscure but which could not be violated without severe consequences. With the government required to borrow heavily simply to keep functioning, the rates of interest the government had to pay to attract lenders were bound to rise. Raising the value of the dollar in relation to other currencies, made foreign goods cheaper for American consumers and U.S. goods more expensive for foreigners. The competitive advantage handed to foreigners threatened not only those U.S. industries that produced mainly for the home market but also those dependent on sales abroad. Declining U.S. exports and rising U.S. imports combined to produce the largest trade deficits in the country’s history. The shock of the conversion during the 1980s of the United States from the world’s biggest creditor into the world’s biggest debtor nation severely weakened the case within the government against protectionism. Early in Reagan’s second term Treasury Secretary Donald Regan and White House chief of staff James Baker switched jobs. At the White House,

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Donald Regan’s ideological predilections were overtaken by his obsession to become the president’s right-hand man, while at Treasury the politically sophisticated Baker was now in a strategic position to compel the previously feuding commerce secretary and U.S. trade representative to form a common front with him for bargaining with the Congress. Starting in mid-1985, under the leadership of the new secretary of the treasury, the administration’s foreign economic policies took a noticeable turn away from rhetorical absolutism on free trade toward managed relationships with various trading partners in the service of “fair trade”—a euphemism for governmental interventions in the market. An early expression of the new pragmatism was the agreement (engineered by Secretary Baker) among the finance ministers of the United States, Japan, France, West Germany, and the United Kingdom to devalue the dollar. Announced at the Plaza Hotel in New York on September 22, the so-called Plaza accord committed Japan and the European governments to “some further orderly appreciation of the main nondollar currencies.”14 The five leading industrial countries, by authorizing aggressive central bank intervention in currency exchange markets, were openly legitimizing a significant departure from the laissez-faire philosophy heretofore propounded by the Reagan administration. Although the other members of the Group of Five were not all that pleased with having to increase their own risks of recession in order to relieve the balance of trade deficits being borne by the United States, the Plaza accord signaled a healthy step back toward the principal of multilateral accountability in monetary matters that had been at the core of the Bretton Woods system established at the end of World War II. The September 1985 Plaza accord was welcomed by industry leaders who had been appalled at the Reagan-Regan “America is back!” sloganeering about the “strong” American dollar (the reality was that the high exchange rate of the dollar had given foreign competitors a 30 to 40 percent pricing advantage in the U.S. market). Yet many trade-embattled sectors of the economy regarded the international monetary adjustments as too indirect and uncertain in their effects. From an administration purportedly responsive to business interests they expected a vigorous approach to trade-affecting mechanisms already on the books and were angry and frustrated that the administration was apparently paralyzed—either by an extreme free trade ideology or bureaucratic infighting, or both—from giving American industries even a fraction of the protection their competitors were provided by their governments. In frustration, disadvantaged

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industry groups formed a tacit alliance with organizations representing affected labor to pressure Congress to defend their interests.15 Reagan therefore felt compelled to compromise, if not virtually abandon, one of the central commitments of his faith, or else see the control of U.S. trade policy fall almost totally into the hands of Congress. Not that the president had been all that steadfast in his defense of free trade during his first term. But the departures from the path of economic righteousness had been finessed and called something else. Thus, under threat of congressional action to put a quota on the importation of Japanese autos, the administration let the Japanese government know early in 1981 that it would have no objections to a “voluntary” limit by the Japanese on the amount of cars they shipped to the United States. The quota agreed on was 1.67 million cars per year. By this device, recalls a former Reagan administration trade negotiator, “the United States was able to maintain the fiction of being a free-trader without having to be one.”16 At the start of his second term, President Reagan finally admitted that he had no other alternative, in the face of the surge of protectionist legislation pending in Congress, but to assume a more aggressive posture toward Japan and other countries to get them to abandon their “unfair” trading practices. The new strategy was reflected in the president’s major speech of September 23, 1985, in which he reiterated his faith in free and open markets and his opposition to programs that were “purely protectionist,” but went on to argue that above all else, free trade is, by definition, fair trade. When domestic markets are closed to the exports of others, it is no longer free trade. When governments subsidize their manufacturers and farmers so that they can dump their goods in other markets, it is no longer free trade. When governments permit counterfeiting or copying of American products, it is stealing our future, and it is no longer free trade. When governments assist their exporters in ways that violate international laws, then the playing field is no longer level, and there is no longer free trade. When governments subsidize industries for commercial advantage and underwrite costs, placing an unfair burden on competitors, that is not free trade.

And he warned, “I will not stand by and watch American businesses fail because of unfair trading practices abroad. I will not stand by and let American workers lose their jobs because other nations do not play by the rules.”17

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The new get-tough attitude was manifested in high tariffs imposed by the administration (under existing laws) against Japanese electronic products in response to Japanese “dumping” of semiconductors; special duties on various Canadian lumber products in response to Canadian government subsidies to its lumber industry; threats by administration officials of retaliatory barriers against food imports from Europe in response to European bans against meat from animals treated with growth hormones; and threats of tariffs on Brazilian goods in response to Brazil’s import restrictions on U.S. computer hardware and software. By the last year of the Reagan administration—whatever the ostensible reasons—U.S. trade policy had taken a decided protectionist turn: 35 percent of the goods produced in the United States (as compared to 20 percent at the start of Reagan’s presidency) were helped to compete against foreign goods by U.S. government–imposed import barriers and duties and by “voluntary” controls by foreign governments on their own exporters following strong pressure from Washington.18 Neither America’s trading partners nor many economists were persuaded by the administration’s excuse that the new protectionism was being forced upon it by the unfair trading practices of others. The major culprits, in fact, were the huge federal deficit and the heavy allocation of the country’s innovative energies into defense research and development. The deficit, because of its effects on interest rates and the value of the dollar, was making many U.S. goods more expensive than their foreign counterparts. Meanwhile, the federal government was sucking investments into elaborate military research and development projects through all manner of subsidies favoring U.S. industries, while (being ideologically averse to an “industrial policy”) government spending on commercial research and development was in drastic decline, as were public outlays for upgrading the country’s deteriorating transportation infrastructure. Also consequential for any prospect of recovery of basic American competitiveness was the constriction in federal funding of higher education. The Japanese and the West Europeans, less constrained by ideological aversions to public spending in order to enhance the competitiveness of industries involved in international commerce, were thus handed a substantial trading advantage by the Reaganites. All too obviously there was hypocrisy or self-delusion (or both) in complaints from Washington that the Japanese and West Europeans were violating the moral norms of the free enterprise system; for the standing U.S. industrial policy— conducted largely under the rubric of national security—was persisted

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in and enlarged upon by the Reagan administration. Administered by the Pentagon and its sister agencies, America’s high-technology industrial policy had become such a staple of the country’s economic life that Reagan and other laissez-faire ideologues were apparently able to delude themselves that it was not the highly intrusive complex of subsidies that it was. But, unlike the industrial policies of the Japanese and West Europeans, the U.S. policy did not produce innovative technologies that were sufficiently convertible into products that could compete effectively in consumer-goods markets.19 Rather than negotiating from strength, the Reagan administration, in the international economic sphere, found itself—with increasing embarrassment—negotiating from weakness. In the decades of U.S. economic hegemony, American administrations could be credibly committed to free trade as serving the national interest, both in the long term and the short term. But now, as revealed in the president’s slide into the rhetoric of “fair trade” (which not incidentally, was artfully applied to the “free trade” agreement with Canada), and despite the continued insistence by U.S. economic policy makers that all they wanted was an international “level playing field,” the White House copies of Adam Smith and Ricardo became, like the Bible, a source of homilies to be quoted in Sunday sermons to assuage the guilt of workday actions.

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MIDDLE EAST COMPLEXITIES, 1981–1989 The Arab-Israeli Conflict, Terrorism, and Arms for Hostages As every president since World War II has learned, no region of the world presents America with more difficult, more frustrating, or more convoluted problems than the Middle East. —Ronald Reagan

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HE MIDDLE EAST, A CRUCIAL theater of great power rivalry throughout

history, was high on the Reagan administration’s list of arenas in which to stand tall against the Soviets. In the eyes of the Reaganites, the nations of the region were needlessly dissipating their energies in communal conflicts, diverting their attention from the mammoth imperialist beyond the mountains who posed a potentially fatal threat to all of their various ways of life as well as to the petroleum lifelines of the industrialized West and Japan. Here in particular it was imperative to forge the “consensus of strategic concerns” that Secretary of State Haig was insisting on, to reverse the potentially disastrous shift in the balance of power resulting from the defection of Iran from the anticommunist coalition and the occupation of Afghanistan by Soviet troops—both of which, according to the Reaganites, had been brought on by the Carter administration’s distortion of priorities and indecisiveness. The traditional Anglo-American geopolitical thinkers whom Alexander Haig studied at West Point had warned against allowing a would-be Eurasian “heartland” hegemon to establish a position of dominance on the Near Eastern “rimland,” for this would allow the Eurasian imperialist

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to interdict the oceanic powers’ lines of global navigation for essential commerce and military operations. A heartland power that also controlled the rimland could rule the world. Yet this was exactly what loomed ahead unless the United States urgently took up the challenge of reconstituting a vigilant coalition of states in the region to counter the growing Soviet presence. Secure access to and transit through the rimland had been a key strategic premise of virtually all geopolitically oriented U.S. officials since the 1940s—including George Marshall, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. The problem (from the perspective of the Reagan grand strategists) was that in recent years softer notions—most disastrously, Carter’s vision of a human rights–based world order supplanting the balance of power—had increasingly emasculated U.S. foreign policy. The Carter Doctrine reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had been a too-little, too-late response to a too narrowly defined threat from the Marxist-Leninist enemy. Reagan, Weinberger, Haig and their principal foreign policy aides were all agreed that the Soviets and their friends were up to no good in the Middle East. The geopolitical understanding of the stakes in the region reflected in the Truman Doctrine had to be restored. The Reagan cold warriors apparently believed that it was both vital and politically feasible for the noncommunist countries of the Middle East to subordinate their internecine conflicts—Muslim versus Jew, Shiite versus Sunni, Arab versus Persian, Palestinian versus Hashemite, radical Socialist versus monarchist, current-demand oil producers versus supply-conservation producers— to the imperative of containing Soviet expansion. In his memoirs, Haig attempted to refute allegations that the administration’s concept was a geostrategic abstraction distant from the vital concerns of the peoples of the region. “There was, in a real rather than a theoretical sense, a strategic consensus in the region,” he insisted. “This had nothing to do with American phrase making or with an American tendency to turn the Middle East into a theater for East-West confrontation. Three great fears ran through the region: fear of terrorism, which was endemic; fear of Islamic fundamentalism, which had broken out in Iran in fanatical form; and fear of the Soviet Union.”1 The strategic consensus approach would impel the anticommunist governments of the area to focus on what united them rather than what

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divided them; presumably, when they did, each would rediscover that its natural geopolitical inclination was aligned with the United States.

ISRAEL’S RAID ON IRAQ’S NUCLEAR REACTOR The fact that those who were expected to adhere to the strategic consensus had their own very different priorities and would be highly resistant to joining in a revived Cold War coalition flashed dramatically on Ronald Reagan’s global viewing screen on June 7, 1981, as the Israeli Air Force, using American F-15 and F-16 combat aircraft, destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor the Iraqis were constructing ten miles from Baghdad. Washington was neither consulted nor informed in advance of the raid, and questions were immediately raised in Congress concerning Israel’s apparent violation of the law prohibiting the offensive use of U.S. arms transferred to other countries without the express consent of the U.S. government. While many U.S. officials privately appreciated Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s rationale for ordering the raid—the reactor could have given Iraq a usable nuclear weapons capability within five years, and destroying it before it was “hot” removed the risk of lethal radioactive fallout—the Reagan administration was placed in the awkward position of having to mollify both outraged Arab governments and angry members of Congress. United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick maneuvered to have the Security Council pass a resolution strongly condemning Israel but without provisions for sanctions. The administration suspended delivery of four F-16s about to be shipped to Israel. President Reagan publicly expressed strong displeasure with Israel’s unilateral use of force but also granted that “Israel had reason for concern in light of the past history of Iraq.”2 The Israeli attack also made it extremely difficult for the administration to insulate its arms transfer policies to the region (meant to be directed almost exclusively against the Soviet threat, not as a means of maintaining a local military balance) from the Arab-Israeli conflict. Saudi Arabia openly justified its arrangement for advanced U.S. military surveillance aircraft as dictated by the need to warn its Arab friends of Israeli attacks. And the Israelis used such Arab statements to buttress their case against the Reagan administration’s policy of increasing the flow of arms to Saudi Arabia and other “moderate” Arab countries.

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BOMBING THE PLO IN DOWNTOWN BEIRUT: HARBINGER OF THINGS TO COME On July 17, 1981, the day the Reagan administration was to announce the resumption of the F-16 shipments to Israel, the Israelis again unleashed their air force unilaterally in an attack on Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters in downtown Beirut, reportedly killing more than 300 people and wounding more than 800. Again, although there may have been some appreciation in the Reagan administration of the Israeli motive and strategy (the Begin government was retaliating against increasing PLO rocket and artillery attacks across the border on villages in northern Israel and signaling that Israel would no longer allow the PLO sanctuary in Lebanon), Washington’s official reaction was one of shock and condemnation. Many strong supporters of Israel in Congress openly warned of the erosion of popular support for Israel. Secretary Weinberger was quick to brand the Beirut raid as immoderate; and Deputy Secretary of State William Clark, reflecting Haig’s worries, stated that such actions by the Begin government were “making it difficult for us to help Israel.”3 Not only did the administration continue to suspend delivery of the four F-16s held back in June, but it now put on hold ten more F-16s previously scheduled to have been delivered to Israel in the summer. Meant to put Israel on notice that the United States would not countenance any additional unilateral moves of this sort, these “punishments” by Washington only convinced Begin that Israel would have to take matters into its own hands and present the world with a fait accompli if it was ever to remove the PLO threat to its northern borders.

AWACS AND ALL THAT Arms proffered, arms withheld—if you love me, send me arms. The Reagan administration, like its predecessors, became ensnared in the game of international courtship in the contemporary Middle East. Naïvely, Haig, Weinberger, and Reagan expected the recipients of U.S. arms to be monogamous (love us, keep away from the Soviet Union) while the United States remained free to develop “special relationships” with various attractive Middle Eastern partners. It was quite some time before Reagan understood why everyone was so resentful while he was trying to be so nice. Part of

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the problem was that early in his administration, he had emerged from heavy arms negotiations with the supposedly aloof Saudi Arabians under the impression that he had “scored”—a view not shared in the Middle Eastern bazaars. That Reagan should become involved in an arms courtship of Saudi Arabia was understandable. The Khomeini revolution, which took Iran out of the U.S.-led Mideast coalition, left only two reliable anti-Soviet Islamic pillars in the region: Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The oil-rich sheikdom was much weaker militarily than Iran (which was now the center of the Shiite fundamentalist threat to the conservative theocracy of Riyadh) or than either of the Soviet Union’s principal Middle Eastern clients, Iraq and Syria. The Saudis’ military capabilities needed to be significantly strengthened for the country to play its new and larger role in the regional balance of power. Accordingly, the Reagan administration requested congressional approval of sales of Sidewinder air-to-air missiles and refueling equipment to enhance the combat effectiveness of the sixty F-15 fighter aircraft the Saudis had bought in 1978. The Israeli government was opposed, but Secretary of State Haig was convinced that in his forthcoming trip to the Middle East to champion the new strategic consensus he could persuade Jerusalem to acquiesce—particularly if he carried an offer to sell the Israeli defense forces forty additional improved F-15s (Israel already owned twenty-five) and a promise to increase U.S. grant aid to Israel to help finance the purchases. Israel and its supporters in the Congress might have accepted the F-15 bargain were it not for the April 3, 1981, announcement that the Reagan administration also intended to sell five airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft to the Saudis. Preliminary negotiations on the AWACS deal had begun in the latter days of the Carter administration. Saudi expectations of being able to buy these top-of-the-line reconnaissance/combat control systems—ostensibly needed to protect Saudi oil fields from Iranian air attack—could not be denied without engendering Arab suspicions that beneath the surface of even-handedness, Reagan and Haig were in reality more pro-Israel than their predecessors. For their part, the Israelis were alarmed not only at the military implications of an Arab AWACS capability (which could reduce Israel’s prime advantage of being able to control the airspace in another Arab-Israeli war) but also at the ominous implication that the Reagan administration’s obsession with countering the Soviets in the Middle East could translate into a decided tilt by official Washington toward the Arab side in the ArabIsraeli conflict generally.

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By the summer of 1981, Israel’s supporters in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives had mobilized a majority against the Saudi possession of AWACS, but Reagan was depending on the Senate, where the Republicans had a slim majority, to sustain his policy. Under the governing Arms Export Control Act, the executive was authorized to make such weapons transfers to friendly countries as long as Congress in a concurrent resolution did not explicitly block a proposed sale; thus, if only one house defeated the negative resolution, the administration could still consummate the AWACS deal.4 The president, recovering from his gunshot wound (suffered in the March 30, 1981, assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr.) and basking in the enhanced aura of toughness this gave him, was ready to make the AWACS sale a high-stakes issue worthy of engaging the prestige of the presidency. In his autobiography, Reagan recounts his feelings and determination: Unfortunately, . . . Israel and some of its supporters in Congress . . . chose to take on the administration over the AWACS sale and created a donnybrook in Congress that we could not afford to lose. I believed it was a battle that had to be won to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East. I also knew that if we lost on AWACS, it might undermine our ability to persuade Congress to approve our domestic programs and the rearmament of the Pentagon.5

The president’s ire was raised further by the behavior of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin during his visit to Washington early in September. In their White House meeting Reagan said that the United States was as ever committed to Israel’s survival and would do nothing to reduce its military superiority over the Arabs. The Pentagon had given its assurances, he told Begin, that the AWACS would not alter the Arab-Israeli military balance. At the end of the day’s meetings and ceremonies Reagan contentedly recorded in his diary that his assertive Israeli guest had “mellowed.” But Reagan was subsequently told that Begin, upon leaving the White House, went to Capitol Hill to actively lobby against the AWACS sale. Reagan took it as a personal affront: “after he told me he wouldn’t do that. . . . I felt he’d broken his word and I was angry about it.”6 The assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, was invoked by both sides in the AWACS debate. The administration contended that now more than ever, with the future of Egypt highly

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uncertain, it was crucial that the United States solidify its ties with moderate Saudi Arabia. Critics of the Saudi arms deal countered that Sadat’s murder demonstrated the instability of all regimes in the Arab Middle East and the danger of relying on any of them to provide durable links in the containment chain around the Soviet Union. Reagan recalls that in his efforts to beat back congressional opposition to his decision to sell AWACS to the Saudis, he “experienced one of the toughest battles of my eight years in Washington. . . . I spent more time in one-on-one meetings and on the telephone attempting to win on this measure than on any other.”7 The Saudis didn’t make the president’s job any easier when one of their spokesmen in Riyadh admitted that, as far as they were concerned, their principal opponent was Israel, not the Soviets. In response to reports from Senate majority leader Howard Baker that the vote was too close to call, the administration pressured the Saudi government to agree to a list of stringent restrictions on how the AWACS would be used. Reagan’s five-page letter detailing these stipulations stated that the Saudis had agreed that their AWACS would be operated solely within Saudi Arabian airspace except with the prior, explicit mutual consent of the two governments and solely for defensive purposes as defined by the United States With these assurances in hand, on October 28 the Senate narrowly defeated (by a 52–48 vote) the resolution to block the sale.

THE MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING Secretary Haig and President Reagan tried to limit the damage to U.S.Israeli relations from the AWACS controversy by responding positively to Begin’s desire for a comprehensive agreement of strategic cooperation, just short of a formal military alliance, to solidify the special WashingtonJerusalem relationship against the erosive trends now evident. But the memorandum of understanding signed without fanfare in Washington at the end of November 1981 by Israel’s minister of defense, Ariel Sharon, and Secretary of Defense Weinberger (who never liked the idea and successfully watered it down) turned out to be more of an embarrassment to the Begin government than an asset. Not only did the memorandum fail to provide many of the tangible arrangements the Israelis wanted—most important, a prepositioning of U.S. military equipment at Israeli bases to assure U.S. dependence on Israeli cooperation in a future crisis—but its core commitments clearly

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favored U.S. priorities. The document obligated both governments to cooperate in meeting threats in the Middle East “caused by the Soviet Union or Soviet-controlled forces from outside the region,” but it did not commit the United States to help Israel defend itself against attack by its Arab enemies.8

ISRAEL’S ANNEXATION OF THE GOLAN HEIGHTS The differences between Washington and Jerusalem were exposed once again as the Begin government moved in December 1981, without consulting the United States, to extend Israeli civil law to the Golan Heights— the strategic high ground between Israel and Syria that the Israelis had captured in 1967. The Reagan administration charged that Israel’s Golan demarche was inconsistent with the memorandum of strategic understanding and suspended implementation of the terms of the memorandum. In turn, Begin gave the U.S. ambassador to Israel a vitriolic lecture against efforts by the United States to treat Israel like a “vassal state.”9

INTO THE POLITICAL QUICKSANDS OF LEBANON Eight months before the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, at the funeral of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Prime Minister Begin had informed Secretary Haig of the plan under consideration in the Israeli cabinet to take control of a swath of Lebanon up to 40 kilometers (25 miles) beyond the Israeli border. The ostensible purpose of the military operation was to push PLO artillery and rockets out of range of settlements in northern Israel. Haig, known for blunt speaking, did not unequivocally object. Instead, he told Begin, “If you move, you move alone.” And in a remark that Begin chose to interpret as a qualified endorsement, Haig added: “Unless there is a major, internationally recognized provocation, the United States will not support such an action”; moreover, the Israeli military response would have to be “strictly proportional” to the provocation.10 In the months following, the Begin government kept probing for how the U.S. government would react if Operation Peace for Galilee were carried out, and each time it received the same studiously ambiguous reply. Even when the director of Israeli military intelligence informed Haig on February 3, 1982, of the larger dimensions of the Lebanon

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invasion plan, which included a drive to Beirut, Haig reiterated the now standard U.S. formula. The final failure of communication—inadvertent or deliberate—took place in a conversation between Haig and Defense Minister Sharon in Washington late in May. Sharon had just outlined the more ambitious version of Israel’s planned Lebanon operation, shocking a roomful of State Department officials. As Haig recounts in his memoirs: after the meeting, so that there could be no question that I was playing to an audience, I invited Sharon into my office and told him privately what I had repeated to him and Begin and their colleagues many times before: unless there was an internationally recognized provocation, and unless Israeli retaliation was proportionate to any such provocation, an attack by Israel into Lebanon would have a devastating effect in the United States. “No one,” Sharon replied, in his truculent way, “has the right to tell Israel what decision it should take in defense of its people.”11

In this crucial face-to-face encounter the U.S. secretary of state apparently let the Israeli defense minister have the last word. Begin and Sharon were handed the “provocation” they required on June 3, 1982, when a Palestinian terrorist group acting on its own, not on behalf of the PLO, shot and gravely wounded the Israeli ambassador to Britain on a London street. Three days later the Israeli Defense Force invaded Lebanon as Begin invoked the right of self-defense in Article 51 of the UN Charter and compared the operation to the British military action in the Falkland Islands, then underway with the tacit support of the United States. Even as Israeli paratroopers were landing on the coast well above the 40-kilometer line and beginning to advance north toward Beirut, Begin publicly (and in a personal letter to President Reagan) defined the operation as being only for the purpose of clearing out the PLO contingents in southern Lebanon that had been attacking the Israeli settlements in the Galilee. In fact, the Israeli move into Lebanon was nothing less than the full assault Sharon had described to Haig and his staff. By June 13 the Israelis had surrounded and laid siege to the Lebanese capital, bombarding the western sections of the city and demanding the surrender of the PLO headquarters there. Meanwhile, despite Israeli assurances to Syria via the United States and other diplomatic channels that its forces would not attack Syrian military units in Lebanon unless the Syrians attacked the Israelis, there were intense ground and air battles between Israeli and Syrian forces

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in the Bekaa valley. In this Bekaa valley war, which raged for several weeks punctuated by temporary cease-fires, the Israelis trounced the Syrians, to the great embarrassment of the Soviet Union, which had supplied Syria with most of its military equipment. The White House was shaken by its inability to anticipate, let alone control, events in the Middle East. An intense battle for the mind of the president ensued over how to deal with Begin and Sharon. Most of Reagan’s foreign policy advisers, including Secretary of Defense Weinberger, national security adviser Clark, CIA director Casey, and Vice President Bush, wanted to discipline Israel; they favored support for UN resolutions condemning the Israeli invasion and urged Reagan himself to demand Israel’s unconditional withdrawal. On the other side, standing virtually alone, was Secretary of State Haig, who saw the new situation as a “great opportunity to make peace.” Haig’s “strategic plan,” as he called it, was to exploit the Israeli military stranglehold on Beirut to negotiate a removal from Lebanon of the PLO and all other foreign forces—namely, the Syrian and Israeli armies—and to restore the country to the Lebanese under international guarantees and protection. Henry Kissinger’s protége, sensing his chance to emulate the great diplomatic impresario, was convinced that “if we acted quickly and with a sure hand, the United States could achieve all this.” Moreover, “such a moment might never come again if it was not seized.”12 Haig was working through special envoy Philip Habib to effectuate PLO, Israeli, and Syrian agreement to a mutual withdrawal at the same time that Caspar Weinberger, Vice President Bush, and deputy national security adviser Robert McFarlane were assuring the Saudis and other Arabs that Israel would not be allowed to get away with its aggression. Haig was livid at the Weinberger faction for undercutting his diplomatic démarche, but his anger only isolated him from the president, who hated to deal with infighting among his subordinates. Frustrated by his failure to obtain the trust and support necessary, he believed, to his effectiveness as secretary of state, Haig resigned on June 25, 1982, leaving the seasoned negotiator and Middle East expert Philip Habib in effective control of U.S. Lebanese diplomacy while the new secretary of state, George Shultz, settled into his job. The U.S. efforts at mediation during the summer of 1982 eventually bore fruit, but not before Israeli armored units entered West Beirut in force on August 4. Over the next two weeks, with the Israelis intensifying their air and ground military operations in and around Beirut, Habib hammered out an agreement among the various governments and parties providing

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for the immediate evacuation of PLO forces from Lebanon and their relocation in neighboring Arab countries simultaneous with the withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian forces from Beirut and an agreement in principle to free Lebanon from all foreign military intervention. The PLO evacuation was to be monitored by a multinational peacekeeping force not under UN control (at Israel’s insistence), composed of troops from France, Italy, and the United States. Secretary of Defense Weinberger and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Vesey argued against U.S. participation in the multinational force (MNF), but they were overruled by the president who, increasingly unhappy at the carnage in Beirut, now became a visible player in the unfolding drama. After a particularly devastating series of military assaults by the Israelis into West Beirut culminated in an eleven-hour aerial bombardment on August 12, Reagan was photographed delivering a telephone reprimand to Begin, demanding an end to the attacks. Begin called back in a few minutes to tell the president that he had ordered a stop to the bombings. Michael Deaver (the White House Deputy Chief of Staff) reports the president’s surprise at the Israeli prime minister’s acquiescence. “I didn’t know I had that kind of power,” said Reagan.13 The president’s willingness to publicly criticize the Israeli escalation gave Ambassador Habib the added leverage he needed to gain Syrian, PLO, and Israeli adherence to his plan for a mutual withdrawal from Beirut under MNF supervision.14 The president enthusiastically supported U.S. participation in the MNF operation. Eight hundred U.S. Marines came ashore on August 25, 1982, to join the contingents from Italy and France. In a little over a week the PLO, including Yasir Arafat, were out of Beirut and on their way to neighboring Arab countries willing to host them. Ambassador Habib and Secretary of State George Shultz thought the marines should stay on to help stabilize the situation and to oversee the full Israeli and Syrian withdrawals from the country. However, Weinberger and Vesey prevailed on Reagan: mission accomplished, quick in, quick out, no mess, plus new prestige for a job well done. Less than three weeks after landing the marines were back on their ships. France and Italy also decided to pull out their MNF contingents. Secretary Shultz did not weigh in as heavily as he might have against such a quick withdrawal of the marines from Lebanon. New to the job, he was seized with the idea of turning his own intense orientation in Middle Eastern politics and Reagan’s newfound willingness to focus on the issues into an all-out presidential effort to bring peace to the region. The result

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was the president’s surprise September 1, 1982, speech on the Middle East. The Reagan plan was fanfared in a well-orchestrated White House and State Department media blitz. In content it did little more than reiterate the moribund Camp David formula for bringing “autonomy” but not statehood to the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 15 Reagan had hoped that with the departure of the marines from Lebanon he could leave the tangled politics and diplomacy of that country to underlings while he concentrated on grand strategy. But no sooner had the marines left than chaos broke out. On September 14 Lebanon’s Christian president-elect, Bachir Gamayel, was assassinated. The Israeli military immediately moved back into Beirut with the declared mission of preventing a new cycle of violence in the city, while Gamayel’s Christian paramilitary Phalange went on a retributive rampage of Palestinian refugee camps. On the might of September 16 the Phalange massacred more than 700 unarmed Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila camps. Neither the Israelis nor the Italians, whose forces had not yet been withdrawn, did anything to stop the slaughter. National security adviser William Clark and his principal deputy Robert McFarlane urged Reagan to send a larger U.S. force back to Lebanon, again as part of a multinational operation, to restore order and to effect the full withdrawal of Israel and Syria. Secretary of Defense Weinberger and General Vesey again opposed what Weinberger criticized as a “passionate desire to use our military.” The new MNF would not have a mission that could be defined, he argued, and its “objectives were stated in the fuzziest possible terms.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) complained that it would be very difficult to determine the proper size and weaponry and rules of engagement for such a force.16 But once again the president was persuaded that a visible U.S. presence could be a crucial stabilizing element. Exactly what the defined mission of the U.S. forces was to be nobody told him, nor did he ask. “After the decision was made to go back in,” General Vesey recalls, “we debated this business of what are we going to do.”17 No matter: by the end of September 1982, only two weeks after their previous departure, an augmented U.S. Marine contingent numbering 1,200 rejoined their French and Italian counterparts in a reconstituted MNF deployed in the outskirts of Beirut. Over the next year, as the number of U.S. Marines grew to 1,800, this presumably neutral presence was transmuted in the eyes of many of the Muslim factions in the civil conflict into the status of allies of the Christian government and therefore appropriate targets of attack.

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The Shiites escalated their holy war against the United States on April 18, 1983, with a truck-bomb attack on the U.S. embassy that killed more than fifty-seven (seventeen of whom were U.S. citizens). To Weinberger and the military brass in the Pentagon it was beginning to look like Vietnam all over again. By the end of June the marines were conducting joint patrols with the Lebanese armed forces. Vulnerable to snipers and grenade attacks, the marines began to carry loaded weapons on patrol. These visible changes in behavior by the marines further confirmed the view that the United States was a party to the civil war. Yet the marines remained constrained by their formally defined mission as a neutral presence from engaging in active perimeter defense operations which were now becoming essential to their self-defense. Weinberger intensified his arguments for removing the marines from Lebanon or at a minimum to remove them from the line of fire by redeploying them on navy ships 500 yards offshore. His memoirs recount his anguish at not being able to convert the president to his belief that “we were totally unable to accomplish anything with this second Multinational Force” because it had been “sized and structured” to serve “only as an interposition force, as a buffer between withdrawing armies,” not to perform the other actions they were being drawn into. “I urged that our marines were in a position of increasing vulnerability as they sat, in effect, in the middle of a target, unable to do what was required to protect any occupied position.” Again, Weinberger found himself on the wrong side of Reagan’s sensibilities: The arguments raged back and forth, with the President always being concerned about how it would look to the rest of the world if the MNF were removed. The State Department and the NSC played to that worry of the President’s by telling him that it would always appear that we had “cut and run,” that we had been “driven out,” and similar phrases designed to encourage the belief that only if we stayed in Lebanon could we demonstrate our manhood.18

At the end of the summer of 1983, reacting to increasing incidents of U.S. units coming under fire, including an artillery attack from Druze Muslim forces that killed two marines, members of Congress attempted to invoke provisions of the 1973 War Powers Resolution. A legacy of the Vietnam War, the War Powers Resolution established a ninety-day limit on any foreign commitment of U.S. combat troops by the president without explicit

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congressional authorization. The administration resisted such a limitation on its flexibility, arguing that the marines were not combat troops but part of an international peacekeeping operation; that the War Powers Resolution was an unconstitutional infringement on the separation of powers (an argument made by previous administrations); and that any such establishment of a time limit on the U.S. participation in the MNF would undercut the restoration of the political independence and territorial integrity of Lebanon. The administration and the congressional leadership worked out a compromise resolution endorsing the U.S. Marine deployment in Lebanon but mandating their withdrawal after eighteen months. The resolution explicitly invoked the War Powers Resolution, but when President Reagan signed it on October 12, 1983, he stated in writing that he did not recognize the constitutionality of the 1973 act and that as commander in chief he retained full constitutional authority to deploy U.S. forces.19 Just eleven days later, the worst fears of Weinberger, Vesey, and many congressional opponents of the marine deployment were realized. Early Sunday morning, October 23, 1983, a terrorist driving a Mercedes-Benz stake-bed truck accelerated through the public parking lot south of the U.S. Marine compound at the Beirut International Airport. The truck drove over a barbed- and concertina-wire obstacle and passed between two marine guard posts. Speeding toward the headquarters and sleeping quarters of the battalion landing team, the vehicle flattened the guard booth at the building’s entrance and penetrated into the central lobby, where it detonated with the force of 12,000 pounds of TNT. The building collapsed, killing 241 U.S. military personnel and wounding over 100.20 The high-flying abstractions of the strategic consensus bore no correspondence to the deceptive and treacherous realities of Middle Eastern politics. Drawn in by the belief that the temporary presence of an honest American sheriff would assure a stable self-determined Lebanese order (thereby enhancing both Israeli security and the containment of communism), the White House was now faced with the avoidable massacre at the Beirut airport. The bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, Reagan recalls, produced “the lowest of the low” points of his presidency, “perhaps the saddest day of my life.”21 But in the manner of a fast-paced Hollywood adventure movie, before the end of the week, while the full story of the Beirut disaster was being absorbed by the American public, Reagan was able to present the nation with a dramatic catharsis in the form of the swift and apparently

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efficiently executed marine invasion of Grenada (see chap. 22)—“one of the highest of the high points of my eight years in the presidency.”22 Reagan used a speech in which he conflated the pushover intervention in Grenada with the futile sacrifice of American lives in Lebanon to extract from these events a grander meaning. In a televised address from the Oval Office on October 27, 1983, the president told the nation that the “events in Lebanon and Grenada, though oceans apart,” were “closely related.” Not only had “Moscow assisted and encouraged violence in both countries,” but the Kremlin had provided “direct support through a network of surrogates and terrorists.” The U.S. interventions in both countries were thus necessary to prevent the ultimate incorporation of the Middle East and Central America into the Soviet bloc.23 Having staked out his position with heroic oratory, Reagan became impervious to the arguments for extracting the remaining U.S. forces from Lebanon, despite the virtual consensus among his national security advisers (Shultz was still a holdout) behind Weinberger’s proposal that the marines be redeployed to their ships and despite growing bipartisan pressure in Congress for their withdrawal. The case for withdrawal was strengthened at the end of the year by the release of the findings of a special Department of Defense commission on the Beirut airport fiasco. The presidentially ordered investigation laid part of the blame on inadequate security at the marine headquarters in the airport. But the commission’s most damning indictments were directed at the highest policy levels of the administration: The Commission concludes that U.S. decisions as regards Lebanon taken over the past fifteen months have been, to a large degree, characterized by an emphasis on military options and the expansion of the U.S. military role, notwithstanding the fact that the conditions upon which the security of the USMNF were based continued to deteriorate as progress toward a diplomatic solution slowed. The Commission further concludes that these decisions may have been taken without clear recognition that these initial conditions had dramatically changed and that the expansion of our military involvement in Lebanon greatly increased the risk to, and adversely impacted upon the security of, the USMNF.24

These findings further raised congressional and public anxieties about the sacrifice of American lives in the confused Lebanese civil conflict.

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By appealing to Reagan’s growing frustration with the failure of Shultz’s diplomatic initiatives, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the JCS finally, in early February 1984, were able to obtain presidential authorization to get the marines out of Lebanon. The White House did not talk of “withdrawal” but emphasized the “redeployment” of the marines to their ships offshore, coupled with vague threats of new military steps if the situation warranted. During the week that the decision was publicly announced, Reagan was on a Western speaking and vacation trip. Usually accessible on such trips, the president was kept away from reporters.25 But there was no way to avoid the negative outcome. The final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Lebanon, followed by the withdrawal of the French and Italian contingents of the MNF, left Lebanon in greater communal turmoil than ever. Even the Israelis abandoned their strategy of attempting to directly affect the political-military balance of power in the country as a whole and returned to their more limited objective of making sure that southern Lebanon could not be used as a base for attacks against Israel. There were surely no gains to the people of Lebanon from the failed U.S. foray into their country. The only beneficiary was Soviet client Syria, which augmented its military deployments while persisting in Machiavellian maneuvers to divide and dominate the feuding Lebanese. The Reagan administration was saved from a major Cold War loss in Lebanon by the fact that the Soviets were no more successful in forging their own strategic consensus among their fiercely nationalistic Middle Eastern clients and would-be clients—many of whom (Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the PLO) were as determined to dominate one another as they were to counter Israeli power. The Soviets could not identify themselves too closely with Syrian ambitions in still ungovernable Lebanon without alienating the others in Moscow’s fragile sphere of influence in the region. During Reagan’s second term, with the development of his symbiotic relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, the U.S. and Soviet governments began to explore the possibility of a bilateral “strategic consensus” (though never calling it that) to bring order to Lebanon. This was hardly the result of the success of either superpower’s assertive policy, but rather the beginning of an accommodation to the reality that they both were being manipulated in embarrassing and potentially dangerous ways by their respective Middle Eastern clients.

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TAKING OFF AFTER THE TERRORISTS The popular discontent with the Carter administration’s careful, almost respectful, dealings with the captors of the U.S. embassy personnel in Tehran had been fanned and exploited by Ronald Reagan on his way to the White House. And he did nothing to discourage the journalistic speculation that the coincidence of his inauguration with the release of the 52 U.S. officials the Iranians had held hostage for 444 days was due to the Iranian regime’s fear that he would have dealt harshly with Iran if the hostages were still in captivity when he assumed the presidency. Reagan had intoned at a White House lawn celebration of the hostages’ return that never again, certainly not during his presidency, would the United States allow itself to be humbled by terrorists: “Let terrorists beware that when the rules of international behavior are violated, our policy will be one of swift and effective retribution.”26 Reagan’s newly installed secretary of state was also ready to make the war on terrorism one of his central charges. Himself a target of an assassination attempt in 1978 while serving as NATO supreme commander, Alexander Haig brought a special animus, bordering on an obsession, to the new administration’s determination to go after international terrorists. Whereas the Carter administration had made human rights a centerpiece of its foreign policy, the Reagan–Haig foreign policy would make the war on terrorism one of its highest priorities. As Haig explained in his first press conference as secretary, “International terrorism will take the place of human rights in our concern because it is the ultimate abuse of human rights.”27 Haig claimed that the government’s intelligence on the terrorist threat demonstrated conclusively that the Soviet Union was the principal sponsor of international terrorist activity. “They [the Soviets] today are involved in conscious policy, in programs, if you will, which foster, support and expand this activity which is hemorrhaging . . . throughout the world.”28 Unlike Carter’s human rights policy, which was a diversion from the persisting Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, Reagan’s antiterrorist policy, according to Haig, would be fully integrated with the geopolitical grand strategy.29 Accordingly, the United States need not wait until the next hostage crisis to act against the international terrorist conspiracy. By building up its covert counterterrorist capabilities, the United States could preempt the international conspiracy by moving against key operatives in

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the terrorist network whenever and wherever they might be located—in Tehran, Tripoli, Havana, or PLO strongholds in Lebanon—while making it clear to the leaders of the Kremlin that they would be held ultimately responsible for any intensification of the global campaign of terrorism against the West. The president’s 1981 inaugural-week statements on allowing terrorists no quarter30 and Secretary of State Haig’s public diagnosis of the terrorist threat as a global Marxist-Leninist conspiracy masterminded by the Kremlin31 created the expectation of dramatic action. The showman’s instinct in the White House sought the appropriate scene, the right villain to target. But a dramatic antiterrorist victory proved to be more elusive than anticipated. There were plenty of international terrorist incidents to grab the headlines, but—frustratingly for the administration—none of these could convincingly be traced directly to governments or groups against whom the United States could take dramatic and effective reprisal. There was the additional problem of fashioning an appropriate military response that would not obviously violate international rules of noncombatant immunity. This latter consideration was present at the time of the suicide truck attack on the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut airport. Reagan retrospectively complained: I’ve pounded a few walls myself when I’m alone. . . . It is frustrating. But . . . you can’t just start shooting without having someone in your gun sights. . . . Retaliation in some people’s minds might just entail striking a blow in a general direction, and the result would be a terrorist act in itself and the killing and victimizing of innocent people.32

The administration’s reputed “moderate,” Haig’s successor as secretary of state, George Shultz, emerged in response to the marine barracks massacre and subsequent terrorist acts as the champion of swift and dramatic military responses—even preemptive strikes. And Secretary of Defense Weinberger, widely regarded as one of Reagan’s most hawkish advisers, became the most insistent defender of the proposition that military force should be used only as a last resort. The Shultz strategy was given its most elaborate public airing in a speech at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City on October 25, 1984. In order to deter terrorist acts, said the secretary of state, terrorists must face the certainty of punishment. There should be “no question about

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our ability to use force where and when it is needed.” This would require that the American public be prepared for the risks: The public must understand before the fact that there is potential for loss of life of some of our fighting men and the loss of life of some innocent people. The public must understand before the fact that some will seek to cast any preemptive or retaliatory action by us in the worst light and will attempt to make our military and our policy makers—rather than the terrorists— appear to be the culprits. The public must understand before the fact that occasions will come when their government must act before each and every fact is known—and decisions cannot be tied to the opinion polls.33

In this and related statements both within the councils of the administration and from the public platform Shultz tried to overcome the general reluctance with regard both to the preemptive use of force and the killing of noncombatants. An effective counterterrorism policy, he argued, “will have to have an element of unpredictability and surprise.” There would not always be time for national debate: “We may never have the kind of evidence that can stand up in an American court of law. But we cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond.”34 The prerequisite for the required swiftness and flexibility was “a broad public consensus on the moral and strategic necessity for action”: “Fighting terrorism will not be a clean or pleasant contest, but we have no choice but to play it. . . . If terrorism is truly a threat to Western moral values, our morality must not paralyze us; it must give us the courage to face up to the threat. . . . There is no room for guilt or self-doubt about our right to defend [our] way of life.”35 Shultz’s speech, which he had reason to believe reflected the president’s views, was a surprise to Secretary of Defense Weinberger and Vice President Bush—both of whom had argued against some of its premises within the administration. Reporters aware of the cabinet-level controversy asked the president (then in New York for a reelection campaign appearance) for his views on the Shultz statement. The president’s immediate reply was that Shultz’s remarks represented Reagan’s own thinking. But the vice president, campaigning in the Midwest, took issue with Shultz’s advocacy of military responses to terrorism that might kill innocent people. “I don’t agree with that,” Bush said. “I think you have to pinpoint the source of the attack. . . . It has not been our policy to needlessly risk the lives of innocent

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civilians. This makes it difficult to retaliate.” Bush was echoing the president’s remarks of the previous Sunday in his debate with the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale. Reagan had said that “we want to retaliate, but only if we can put our finger on the people responsible and not to endanger the lives of innocent civilians there.” Alerted by his staff to these various contradictory remarks coming out of his administration, and reminded of the unresolved debate within it, the president pulled back from his initial flat endorsement of the Shultz speech, saying that he did not think it represented a statement of policy. This infuriated Shultz, since it publicly undercut his role as the administration’s principal spokesperson on foreign policy. White House press secretary Larry Speakes shortly added to the confusion by saying the speech by the secretary of state “was Administration policy from top to bottom.”36 Weinberger was chagrined at Shultz’s unilateral policy making on an issue in which the Defense Department’s views were crucial. But he waited until after the presidential election to publicly air his views. Speaking to the National Press Club in Washington on November 28 on the broad subject of the criteria for the use of military force, the secretary of defense took oblique swipes (reportedly his remarks in internal debates were more pointed) at the secretary of state’s readiness to commit the country’s military power to undertakings before the consequences had been fully explored. There are six tests to be satisfied before undertaking a major military operation, said Weinberger: (1) the use of force must be deemed vital to U.S. national interest or that of its allies (Shultz regarded this criterion as unnecessarily vague and likely to engender endless debate, producing just the paralysis he was trying to overcome); (2) the use of force, once decided upon, must be premised on the intention of winning, and the military must be guaranteed the full material, financial, and political backing of the other agencies of government in using as much force as necessary to win (Shultz only disagreed with the need to get such guarantees in advance); (3) both the military and political objectives of the military operation must be clearly defined (Shultz wanted an option of reprisal even where there was no compelling military objective); (4) a clear plan of precisely how the military action will accomplish the objectives must be in place (Shultz was willing to act in advance of meeting this stringent requirement); (5) there must be reasonable assurances of public support—in advance (this in contrast to the Shultz view that in military responses to terrorism the public should be prepared not to be consulted); and (6) military action must be undertaken only as a last resort after an assessment that alternative

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means could not accomplish the objective (Shultz felt that the use of force, even when alternative action was available, might nevertheless be justified as a signal that the United States was ready for a major military encounter should the adversary choose to escalate the conflict).37 Weinberger’s views reflected the deeply held convictions of the military after their searing experience in the Vietnam War. Never again should the leaders of the armed services allow the top political levels of the government to drag the country into a war without full exploration of the implications and the requirements for victory. And never again should the conduct of military operations be hamstrung by untested, intellectually conceived theories of deterrence, graduated escalation, and the like. In articulating these views more consistently and vigorously than any of his predecessors the SecDef enhanced his influence within the Pentagon. The issue also provided Weinberger with a “hard-nosed” military basis for waging his protracted bureaucratic battle with Secretary Shultz for Reagan’s favor, in this case on an issue in which the secretary of state could be shown to be amateurishly venturing onto turf where military expertise was crucial. But Shultz had no intention of backing off. He persisted in castigating Weinberger’s position as “the Vietnam syndrome in spades, carried to an absurd level, and a complete abdication of the duties of leadership.”38 Weinberger rejected any suggestion that he was a dove on the question of tough and unsqueamish responses to terrorism. His stance was, before using force, you had better choose the circumstances carefully and make adequate provision to carry through what you start to a successful conclusion. Reluctant to use force until all the planning criteria were satisfied, the Pentagon would show itself the most determined once the threshold had been crossed and would then be ready to err, even on the side of overkill.

REAGAN’S HOSTAGE CRISES The gap between the brave posturing at the outset of the Reagan administration and the more equivocal actions required by the complex realities of the 1980s was starkly revealed in the U.S. government’s response to the hijacking of TWA flight 847 in June 1985. The president found that his standing pledge to inflict “swift and effective retribution” upon those who resorted to terrorism against the United States and above all his promise never to negotiate with them were simply not appropriate premises of action in this case. Neither this nor the byzantine dealings the

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administration undertook to obtain freedom for some seven American citizens (including a CIA covert operations agent) being held hostage by various militant Shiite groups in Lebanon prevented Reagan from frequent public reiteration of the absolutist no-deals stance.

THE TWA HIJACKING After it became clear to the White House that the young Shiite hijackers of TWA flight 847 were prepared, if their demands were not met, to murder the airplane crew and its American passengers (as demonstrated by their beating and shooting of one of the passengers and dumping his body onto the tarmac at Beirut airport) and the JCS advised that a commando rescue operation was unfeasible, Reagan was left with two bitter options: to take his chances and threaten military reprisal against governments in the area thought to be sponsors of the hijacking group; or to explore the possibility of obtaining the hostages’ release by meeting at least some of the demands of their captors.39 The first option would have compelled Reagan to distance himself emotionally from the media-fanned public sympathy for the hostages and their families. The White House staff, aware of his susceptibility to individual human appeals, tried their best to prevent any face-to-face meetings between relatives of the hostages and the president. But at various speaking engagements Reagan’s staff was unable to dissuade him from meeting with hostage family members backstage.40 (The Wall Street Journal complained about the parallel between Reagan’s increasing emotional involvement with the hostages and his predecessor’s plight in an editorial under the caption “Jimmy Reagan.”) The hijackers’ highest priority demand was the release by Israel of the remaining 700 Shiite civilians captured by the Israeli defense forces during their invasion of Lebanon. The Israelis had already released some 300 of the 1,000 they had imprisoned; but the process of releasing the prisoners had been suspended after the kidnapping of some UN soldiers in southern Lebanon. Since this demand could be satisfied by Israeli action and would not require the U.S. government to make any direct concessions, the president was provided with an alternate course of action. If the release of the remaining prisoners could induce the hijackers to free the TWA passengers and crew, the Israelis would oblige a public request by the U.S. government so they would not be seen capitulating to Shiite blackmail.

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While the official definitions of who was acceding to whose requests were being worked out between Washington and Jerusalem, the prominent Shiite Lebanese lawyer Nabih Berri negotiated on behalf of the hijackers. The United States also prevailed upon President Hafez al-Assad of Syria to intercede against more radical Muslim groups in Lebanon that were hoping to exploit the TWA incident to embarrass Israel and the United States. Pressure was brought on Reagan at this point by the families of the “forgotten seven” American hostages in Lebanon (who had been captured one by one by pro-Iranian militants in recent years) to link their release to the arrangements being worked out. Even though such linkage would have required coordinated negotiations with diverse rival groups in Lebanon, Reagan spoke publicly as if the U.S. government were demanding the release of all Americans held hostage in the Middle East. The more limited deal was salvaged by a special statement by President Reagan—suggested by the Syrians—affirming U.S. respect for the sovereignty of Lebanon. When he announced the release of the TWA crew and passengers, Reagan struck his standard rhetorical posture: “The United States gives terrorists no reward and no guarantees,” he insisted. “We make no concessions. We make no deals.”41 He followed this with an even more bellicose statement a week later in his address to the American Bar Association: Let me make it plain to the assassins in Beirut and their accomplices that America will never make concessions to terrorists. . . . The American people are not going to tolerate . . . intimidation, terror, and outright acts of war against the nation and its people. And we’re especially not going to tolerate acts from outlaw states run by the strangest collection of misfits, Looney Tunes, and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.42

Paradoxically, the president’s unshakable determination to obtain the release of all the Americans being held hostage in the Middle East led to the two greatest embarrassments of his administration: the sale of arms to Iran and the clandestine diversion of profits from these sales to the Contras in Nicaragua (see chap. 22).

ARMS FOR HOSTAGES The office of the national security adviser was the center of the effort, begun in earnest in the summer of 1985, to exploit the Khomeini government’s need for U.S. antitank and antiaircraft missiles and parts during the

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Iran-Iraq war in exchange for Iran’s help in getting the Shiite militants in Lebanon to release their American hostages. Initially the weapons came from Israeli stocks; subsequently some of the equipment came directly from the United States. The brainchild of the Israelis, who were already supplying arms to Iran, the idea caught the fancy of the president when it was first broached to him in a private meeting by national security adviser Robert McFarlane.43 McFarlane had been informed in May 1985 that the Peres government in Israel was worried about Soviet-backed Iraq and wanted American approval to sell artillery shells originally obtained from the United States to Iran. McFarlane was persuaded by Israeli arguments that this might be a way to support the anti-Khomeini factions in Iran with whom the Israelis were dealing and also insure against any temptation in Iran to cultivate relations with the Soviets. In July, Iranian agents proposed to the Israelis that in return for U.S. approval of Israeli sales of antitank missiles to Iran the hostages being held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon could be released. The president, intrigued, presided over a discussion at the White House on August 6, 1985, with McFarlane, Secretary Weinberger, Secretary Shultz, Vice President Bush, and White House chief of staff Donald Regan on Israel’s request for authorization to sell 100 of its antitank TOW missiles. McFarlane reported that the Iranians were prepared to release four of the seven hostages as part of the deal. Weinberger and Shultz opposed the plan, arguing that it would contradict the basic policy of isolating Iran and undermine U.S. efforts to get other countries to cooperate in the embargo. Shultz was adamant against “falling into the arms-for-hostages business.”44 Despite the objections raised by the secretaries of state and defense, Reagan—obsessed by the need to free the hostages and backed by CIA director William Casey’s opinion that the plan was worth a try—authorized McFarlane and his associates to arrange for a sequence of arms sales to Iran. In the words of one of the authorizing findings signed by the president, I hereby find that the following operation in a foreign country (including all support necessary to such operation) is important to the national security of the United States, and due to its extreme sensitivity and security risks, I determine it is essential to limit prior notice, and direct the Director of Central Intelligence to refrain from reporting this Finding to the Congress . . . until I otherwise direct. scope Iran

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description Assist friendly foreign liaison services, third countries, which have established relationships with Iranian elements, groups, and individuals sympathetic to U.S. Government interests and which do not conduct or support terrorist actions directed against U.S. persons, property or interests, for the purpose of: (1) establishing a more moderate government in Iran, and (2) obtaining from them significant intelligence not otherwise obtainable, to determine the current Iranian Government’s intentions with respect to its neighbors and with respect to terrorist acts, and (3) furthering the release of the American hostages held in Beirut and preventing additional terrorist acts by these groups.

The presidential finding went on to elaborate that the U.S. government would: Provide funds, intelligence, counter-intelligence, training, guidance and communications, and other necessary assistance to these elements, groups, individuals, liaison services and third countries in support of these activities. The USG will act to facilitate efforts by third parties and third countries to establish contact with moderate elements within and outside the Government of Iran by providing these elements with arms, equipment and related material in order to enhance the credibility of these elements in their effort to achieve a more pro-U.S. government in Iran by demonstrating their ability to obtain requisite resources to defend their country against Iraq and intervention by the Soviet Union. This support will be discontinued if the U.S. Government learns that these elements have abandoned their goals of moderating their government and appropriated the material for purposes other than that provided by this Finding.45

Until the arms sales to Iran were exposed by a Lebanese magazine article in November 1986, the initiative was supported among Reagan’s principal foreign policy advisers by CIA director Casey, national security adviser McFarlane, and his successor, Admiral John Poindexter; and opposed by Secretary of State Shultz and Secretary of Defense Weinberger. (The president himself was strongly in favor of the initiative; Vice President Bush evidently did not attempt to change Reagan’s mind.) Casey worked with McFarlane and Poindexter, both of whom relied increasingly on National Security Council action officer Oliver North in implementing the policy and conspiring to keep the details of what they were doing from Secretaries Shultz and Weinberger.

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Remarkably, the formulators of the arms-for-hostages plan persisted with it secretly even when it should have become evident to them that they were being “snookered” (White House chief of staff Donald Regan’s term) by the Iranians. They expected at least four hostages would be released in September 1985 in return for Israel’s shipping 504 TOW antitank missiles to Iran, but only one was released. They allowed themselves to be persuaded by Iranian agents that the rest of the hostages would be released after Israel shipped Iran Hawk antiaircraft missiles; none were released. They were persuaded that Iran would deliver the hostages once the United States itself delivered Hawk missile parts in 1986; but again only one hostage was released. Finally, they believed they had obtained a credible promise from the Iranians to turn over one more hostage and to exert pressure on their friends in Beirut to obtain the release of one other after the United States shipped 500 more TOWs in October 1986: once again they were humiliated as the Iranians demanded additional weapons before making any real effort to fulfill their promise. The failure to obtain the release of the hostages by arms sales should have been enough to terminate the sales before the disclosures in the fall of 1986 embarrassed the White House. Casey, Poindexter, and North kept the operation going because it had taken on another function of high value to the administration by generating millions of dollars in profits from the arms sales—funds that then were diverted secretly into the coffers of the “enterprise” set up by Casey and North to funnel military assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras. Once the secret Iran-Contra diversion was exposed, the White House suffered a double embarrassment. There were flat denials, sustained for the duration of the Reagan administration, that the president or any cabinet-level officials (other than Casey) had any knowledge of the diversion, and Poindexter and North were promptly fired for acting beyond their authority. The president’s knowledge of the arms sales to Iran could not be denied. But the administration insisted that it had not engaged in any “arms-for-hostages” deals. Ten days after the release of one of the hostages, David Jacobsen, director of the American Hospital in Beirut, in the first week of November 1986, the Iranians disclosed the secret May 1986 visit by McFarlane, North, and others to Tehran to sell arms. Before the disclosure, Larry Speakes’s press briefings on the release of Jacobsen were carefully crafted by national security adviser Poindexter to maintain the fiction that the Iranians and their friends in Lebanon received nothing in exchange for Jacobsen. Speakes was instructed to say, “As long as Iran advocates the use of terrorism the U.S.

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arms embargo will continue.” The effort to sustain these denials proved too much for the president’s skillful press secretary, Larry Speakes, and ultimately led to his resignation. After the Iranian announcement, Speakes and others in the administration tried to persuade the president that rather than risk the charge of an “Irangate” cover-up, he should admit to the public that he was wrong and apologize for his mistake. But it was not clear to the president exactly what the basic mistake was: trying to obtain the release of the hostages through selling arms (after all, Jacobsen had just been released and it was possible that further releases might follow) or the rigid posture against any deals and the duplicity of conducting such negotiations while publicly denying it. The most the president allowed himself to admit publicly was that “mistakes were made” and that as president, he was responsible. But, as Speakes complains in his memoir, the president “could never bring himself to say that he had made a mistake . . . he did not think he had done anything wrong and was not about to concede that he had, as a matter of principle.” Speakes offers the judgment that “It was just the makeup of the man.”46 The president was receiving contrary advice from his trusted advisers as to what was right and wrong about the Iran initiative; moreover, those like Speakes and Shultz who wanted the president to take certain public positions do not appear to have been clear even in their own minds why he should do so—for the good of the hostages? for the geopolitical interests of the country? to avoid another Watergate? The result was a hodgepodge of confusing remarks from the president, some of them containing not only half-truths but also major inaccuracies. Thus, in his televised address of November 13, 1986, Reagan said: The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran in ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists. Those charges are utterly false. . . . We did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages—nor will we.47

In his press conference six days later, fending off a question alleging that the United States had condoned Israeli arms shipments to Iran, Reagan insisted, that the question “[was] based on a supposition that [was] false. We did not condone, and do not condone, the shipment of arms from other countries,” he said. Knowing that the U.S.-Israel-Iran connection was

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being uncovered, Poindexter drafted a hasty correction that was immediately issued in the president’s name, admitting: “There was a third country involved in our secret project with Iran.” But the statement still claimed that “all of the shipments of the token amounts of defensive arms and parts that I have authorized or condoned taken in total could be placed aboard a single cargo aircraft.”48 As congressional investigations of the Iran-Contra affair began to reveal the true extent and modalities of the administration’s Iranian arms-forhostages initiative, the president countered with denials that this was not “ransom” since the U.S. government had not dealt directly with the captors of the hostages but only with intermediaries. Speakes, in his memoir, still could not bring himself to suspect Reagan: “Frankly, I don’t believe the man can tell a lie. The man can make a mistake and the man can hear something so many times that he believes something is true when it really isn’t, but he simply isn’t a liar.”49 Gary Wills is probably closer to the mark in showing Reagan to be capable of believing things to be true if they are true to him in an emotional sense (in particular, his tendency to confuse roles he played in the movies with what actually happened to him) even though they may not withstand empirical validation. Wills quotes a revealing confession by Reagan: “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me it is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”50

THE ACHILLE LAURO SAGA: A HOSTAGE CRISIS MADE TO ORDER On October 7, 1985, the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro en route from Alexandria to Israel, was hijacked by four members of the Palestine Liberation Front (a faction of the PLO) who demanded the release of 50 of their fellow terrorists from Israeli prisons. The captured ship contained a mostly Italian crew of 344 and 97 passengers (the remaining passengers were to have boarded that night at Port Said), among them a few retired Americans. 51 The hijackers asked Syria for permission to dock the Achille Lauro at the port of Tartus where they planned to negotiate with diplomatic representatives of the hostages’ countries to put pressure on Israel to agree to their demands; but Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, apparently anxious to undermine PLO chief Yasir Arafat, cooperated with the United States and Italy and refused the ship permission to dock.

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This left the ship in open waters vulnerable to seizure by antiterrorist commandos. Deputy national security adviser John Poindexter and Oliver North, acting through the interdepartmental terrorist incident working group that Poindexter chaired, quickly established themselves in the White House situation room to coordinate the U.S. response under direct authority of the president. This time it would be a military response—swift and decisive, like an Israeli operation. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was mobilized and deployed specially trained SEAL frogmen and DELTA helicopter assault units—500 men in all—in a dozen giant air transports to forward NATO bases on Sicily and Cyprus. To the disappointment of those itching for action, the terrorists were ordered by their more realistic superiors in the Palestinian Liberation Front to release the hostages. The Achille Lauro headed back to Egypt, where the PLO struck a deal with the Mubarak government and the Italians to provide the hijackers safe passage out of Egypt. The American government objected, claiming that the hijackers should be brought to justice in U.S. courts for murdering and throwing overboard an elderly American passenger. But the Mubarak government, determined not to provoke the Palestinians (President Anwar Sadat had been assassinated in 1981 by Palestinian fanatics), was anxious to facilitate safe passage for the hijackers out of Egypt in return for releasing the hostages in Port Said. An EgyptAir 737 was made available to fly the hijackers to Tunis. North and Poindexter saw an irresistible opportunity in a scheme concocted by a navy captain on the National Security Council staff. Appropriated by Colonel North as his own, the plan called for intercepting the Egyptian airliner with U.S. fighter planes from the carrier Saratoga as the airliner flew from Egypt to Tunis through international airspace over the Mediterranean. After forcing the Egyptian plane to land at the NATO base at Sigonella, Sicily, U.S. authorities would apprehend the hijackers for transport to the United States to stand trial. In addition to the hijackers, the airliner would be carrying an additional prize: Abu Abbas, head of the faction of Palestinian radicals that had directed the hijacking. Poindexter briefed McFarlane on the scheme, and McFarlane obtained the president’s approval despite Secretary Weinberger’s effort to dissuade Reagan on the grounds that the interception would damage U.S. relations with Egypt. The technical aspects of the operation over the Mediterranean were carried out brilliantly. But a complication arose during the attempt to escort

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the airliner to the NATO base in Sicily, which was under the sovereign jurisdiction of Italy. The Italian air control tower at Sigonella had not received authorization from President Bettino Craxi, who was reluctant to antagonize Mubarak and to make Italy the target of another round of terrorism. The control tower was withholding permission for EgyptAir flight 2843 to land. An American Navy lieutenant grabbed the microphone from the Italian controller and talked the plane down onto the runway. As American troops surrounded the aircraft, Italian troops surrounded the Americans, outnumbering them five to one. American diplomats in Italy implored President Craxi to order his troops to withdraw and to allow U.S. authorities to take the hijackers into custody. Craxi stood firm, insisting that Italian courts had jurisdiction over crimes committed aboard an Italian ship. The White House ordered the American troops to allow the Italians to assume custody over the hijackers. President Reagan, speaking to Craxi, had to content himself with saying that the U.S. government would submit a formal petition to the Italian government for extradition of the four hijackers. Reagan also asked that the United States be allowed to arrest the two Palestinian leaders also on board; but Craxi demurred after checking with the Egyptian government, which wanted the two returned to Egypt. Craxi ordered his troops to take the four hijackers into Italian custody while allowing Abbas and his companion to remain onboard. As the Egyptian aircraft took off with its remaining passengers for another airport in Italy, it was buzzed by a small U.S. Navy jet. Later the two Palestinian leaders were secretly transferred onto a Yugoslav airplane for a flight to Belgrade, where they took refuge in the PLO embassy. Overlooking the confrontations with the Italians and the Egyptians and ignoring the fact that the United States was not able to get its hands on the hijackers, Reagan was publicly and privately ecstatic over the dramatic midair intercept. The president, delivering one of his most memorable lines, crowed that “these young Americans [who flew the Navy jets] sent a message to terrorists everywhere. The message: You can run but you can’t hide.”52 In fact, Abu Abbas, who masterminded the Achille Lauro hijacking, both ran and hid. Within the administration, Reagan had found his Rambos, Poindexter and North, who for a time could do no wrong and were given broad discretion to implement the administration’s counterterrorism policy. The secretary of defense, who had opposed the aerial interception, could only praise the president for authorizing it: “He has better judgment than all the rest of us put together.”53

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TAKING IT OUT ON GADDAFI The demonstration of American derring-do in the aerial intercept of the Achille Lauro hijackers had virtually no impact on the pattern of terrorism. Again there was a buildup of frustration in Washington. In the third week of November 1985, members of the Abu Nidal organization attempted to hijack an EgyptAir jetliner. A courageous effort by the crew to foil the hijacking resulted in a forced landing in Malta, where the plane was stormed by Egyptian commandos and sixty people were killed in the exchange of fire. The CIA was convinced, on the basis of communications intercepts, that the Libyan government had financed and in other ways abetted the failed hijacking. Abu Nidal, protected and financed by Gaddafi, was also believed to be behind two attacks at El Al ticket counters at the Rome and Vienna airports on December 27, 1985, in which five Americans were among nineteen travelers killed. In response the United States suspended economic relations with Libya and ordered all Americans to leave that country. Pressure was brought on the NATO allies to follow suit, with the United States hinting that plans were being readied to use force against Libya if the efforts to isolate Gaddafi economically did not work. Reagan stated publicly that “if these steps do not end Gaddafi’s terrorism, I promise you that further steps will be taken.”54 Actually, the White House did not expect economic sanctions to succeed. In resorting to these measures along with the public threats of tougher sanctions to come, the administration was attempting to lay the groundwork for domestic and allied support for more dramatic actions. The president wanted irrefutable evidence of Libyan involvement in terrorist acts—a “smoking gun”—in order to justify a direct U.S. blow at Gaddafi. This was provided to his satisfaction by the early morning terrorist bombing of La Belle disco in West Berlin on April 5, 1985. It was a weekend night and the disco was crowded with U.S. servicemen. One American soldier was killed, another was mortally wounded, and over 200 people were injured. Earlier that night British intelligence intercepted the latest in a series of messages between the Libyan intelligence service in Tripoli and a known Gaddafi terrorist network in Europe, the People’s Bureau. The messages indicated the network was preparing attacks against U.S. military installations and other targets where Americans congregated. During the previous week Libya had exchanged fire with American naval forces in the Gulf of Sidra. In the April 4 message intercept the People’s

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Bureau predicted an imminent “joyous event.” The full texts of these interceptions were never made public, and West German investigators did not conclude that the La Belle bombing was in fact ordered by Libya. Nor did the circumstantial evidence unequivocally indict Gaddafi—for instance, the disco was a favorite of black servicemen and the Libyans avoided targeting blacks and other minorities.55 Despite the lack of evidence, the president felt that Libyan involvement was clear enough to authorize the navy and air force to undertake an air strike against Libya. The targets were military facilities and aircraft at the Tripoli airport, a frogman school and Gaddafi’s own principal compound in Tripoli, and the military airfield and Gaddafi’s compound in Benghazi. The prime target was the Gaddafi compound in Tripoli, comprising communications facilities, the staff headquarters of the Libyan military, barracks for Gaddafi’s personal security guards, and the residence in which Gaddafi lived with his wife and seven children. Although officially denied from the president on down, the pattern of bombings and subsequent interviews of personnel involved in the operation left no doubt that one of the purposes of the air strike was to kill Gaddafi.56 President Reagan personally approved the targeting of Gaddafi’s compound, convincing himself that it did not violate his standing policy against assassinations since the principal objective was to destroy the military communications facility; the risk to Gaddafi’s life, if indeed he was there at the time, would be a side effect of an attack with a compelling military rationale. Before proceeding with the air strike on Libya it was necessary to obtain Margaret Thatcher’s permission to use F-111 fighter planes deployed in Britain. The British prime minister wanted to help her friend in the White House, especially in light of Reagan’s support during the 1982 Falkland Islands war. Given her public position against retaliation that was simply punitive reprisal, she had to be convinced that each of the targets was an important component of Libya’s terrorist capability and therefore could be destroyed under the rationale of legitimate self-defense. French president François Mitterrand was not convinced of the need and efficacy of the bombing raid. He refused permission for the American warplanes to fly over French territory. The warplanes had to circle the continent from England and come through the Strait of Gibraltar in order to reach Libya—doubling the flying time and fuel requirements. The mission thus included—in addition to short-range air attacks from U.S. carriers in the Mediterranean—eighteen fighter-bombers and accompanying

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refueling tankers on a fourteen-hour, 5,400-mile round-trip from Lakenheath Air Base in Britain: a big, noisy, malfunction-prone operation. The strike at Tripoli airfield, which was supposed to catch Gaddafi’s entire fleet of Ilyushin-76 transports on the ground, found less than half there (the others had been dispersed). In the attack on the other airfield, two of the navy’s nine fighter-bombers had to turn back because of equipment failure. Only two of the six targeted MIG hangers sustained significant damage. The aircraft that struck at the military barracks complex got only 10 percent of their weapons on target. And in the prime target area—Gaddafi’s own compound—the operation was particularly sloppy: bombs landed no closer than thirty yards from the leader’s residence, but the blasts and flying debris injured two of Gaddafi’s little sons and killed his fifteen-month-old adopted daughter. Gaddafi himself escaped major injury. Meanwhile, six bombs, totaling five tons of explosives, missed their targets completely and landed in residential streets, killing thirty-seven, according to the Libyans, and injuring ninety-three.57 President Reagan proudly addressed the nation from the White House. “Today we have done what we had to do. If necessary we shall do it again. . . . Self-defense is not only our right, it is our duty, and that’s the purpose of tonight’s mission.”58 The bombing raid on Libya was popular with the American public but not with America’s European allies. Margaret Thatcher had to defend herself for allowing British bases to be used and asked the Reagan administration, which was reportedly preparing a repeat operation, not to ask such a favor of Britain again. It was clear to America’s allies that the effort was not really an act of self-defense. An effort to deter future terrorist acts, yes; and perhaps, as suggested by George Shultz, a pointed demonstration to potential anti-Gaddafi elements in Libya that the flamboyant, megalomaniacal ruler was leading their country down a suicidal path and needed to be deposed. The president, however, stuck to his explanation that the air strike was an act of self-defense: We Americans are slow to anger. We always seek peaceful avenues before resorting to the use of force, and we did. We tried quiet diplomacy, public condemnation, economic sanctions and demonstrations of military force— and none succeeded. So we were driven to strike against the headquarters, terrorist facilities, and military assets that constituted the nerve center of Gaddafi’s international network for terrorism and subversion against U.S. citizens and facilities around the globe.59

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In actuality, as American and allied intelligence services were reporting, to the extent that there was a nerve center of globally active terrorism and subversion against the United States, it was located in Tehran, not Tripoli. But Iran was for the time being out of bounds for U.S. military reprisals due to the arms-for-hostages effort. The underlying cathartic rationale for going after Gaddafi was well put by Admiral William Crowe Jr., chairman of the JCS. “There comes a time in the events and affairs,” he said, “when you’ve got to retaliate just because people are doing things to you they don’t have a right to do, and you’ve got to stand up.”60

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CONTRADICTIONS IN LATIN AMERICA What may be aptly called the “cabal of zealots” was in charge. —U.S. Congress, Iran-Contra Report

NITED STATES’ LEADERS OF VARIOUS foreign policy persuasions— expansionary nationalists, human rights reformers, realpolitik strategists—have been disposed to treat Latin America as within the U.S. (hemi)sphere of influence. Washington is criticized, however, for seeking influence without respectful engagement, hegemony without obligation, and for being generally indifferent to the well-being of its hemispheric neighbors. But when threats to important U.S. interests emerge in or are targeted on Latin America, particularly if hostile extra-hemispheric powers are seen to be involved, there tends to be a coalescence across party lines of righteous indignation, and even isolationists are inclined to support the commitment of economic and military resources abroad for the purpose of exorcising such threats. The Reagan administration’s obsession with Marxism in Latin America was only the latest expression of this foreign policy tradition extending back to its classic statement in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. It was manifest in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848, the Spanish-American War of 1898, the construction of the Panama Canal, Woodrow Wilson’s military interventions in Mexico, the 1954 CIA-engineered uprising against the Marxist government in Guatemala, the Alliance for Progress as well as the Kennedy administration’s covert and overt efforts to get rid of Fidel

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Castro, the Cuban missile crisis, Lyndon Johnson’s dispatching of the U.S. Marines to the Dominican Republic in 1965, the Nixon administration’s complicity in the Chilean coup against Salvador Allende in 1973, and even the Carter administration’s support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas against Somoza in 1979. But this picture of crisis-driven attention overlooks the broad metamorphosis in U.S. policy from the anticommunist simplicities of the early 1950s to a rather sophisticated set of assumptions about the connections between socioeconomic underdevelopment and Marxist inroads in the Western hemisphere. Near the end of his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower, in a major speech at Newport in July 1960, defined the choice facing the United States throughout most of Latin America as whether to support “social evolution” or to face “revolution.” Among “evolutionary measures” he listed land reform, housing, a wider distribution of national income, the strengthening of institutions for promoting economic growth, and greater respect for human rights and the will of the people as expressed in democratic elections. In the Act of Bogota of September 1960, the Eisenhower administration offered an immediate loan of $500 million to inaugurate “a broad new social development program for Latin America.” The Kennedy administration carried forward the new orientation in its Alliance for Progress. Presented to the public in idealistic terms as a dramatic reidentification of the United States with the global struggle for freedom and equality, the Alianza was defended in the counsels of government as a strategy for driving a wedge between Soviet clients and other leftist movements in the hemisphere. Viewed from this perspective, the Reagan administration’s anti-leftist orientation was a retrogression in U.S. Latin American policy.

COUNTERINSURGENCY IN EL SALVADOR The incoming Reagan administration saw the conflict in El Salvador as a flash point of the intensifying East-West struggle. The U.S.-backed regime headed by José Duarte was trying to put down a leftist insurrection that appeared to be supplied through Marxist Nicaragua with active support from Cuba and other Soviet-bloc countries. In early February 1981, the Department of State issued an elaborate white paper, “Communist Interference in El Salvador,” which laid the groundwork for a series

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of requests to Congress for emergency aid for the Duarte regime as well as for possible moves against governments in the Caribbean and Central America—particularly Cuba and Nicaragua—alleged to be giving support to the rebel forces. The white paper purported to show conclusively that “over the past year, the insurgency in El Salvador has been progressively transformed into a textbook case of indirect armed aggression by Communist powers through Cuba.” The evidence was “definitive” that “Cuba, the Soviet Union, and other Communist states . . . are carrying out . . . a well-coordinated covert effort to bring about the overthrow of El Salvador’s established government and to impose in its place a Communist regime with no popular support.”1 Complicating the new administration’s anticommunist strategy was the undeniable fact that the Duarte government was itself unpopular and unable to restrain Salvadoran military death squads from brutal, repressive tactics against the insurgents and their suspected civilian supporters. The Reagan White House inherited a report prepared for President Carter in December 1980 by a distinguished nonpartisan committee of lawyers headed by William D. Rogers and William G. Bowdler (former assistant secretaries of state for Latin America in the Ford and Carter administrations, respectively) on the killing of four American churchwomen by members of the Salvadoran National Guard. The Rogers-Bowdler report had concluded that “there is a high probability that an attempt was made [by the Salvadoran authorities] to conceal the deaths.”2 Early comments by Reagan administration officials attempted to shift the blame for the nuns’ murder away from the Duarte regime. Secretary of State Haig suggested that the nuns may have provoked fire on themselves by trying to run a roadblock. United Nations’ ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick claimed that “the nuns were not just nuns; the nuns were political activists . . . on behalf of the [revolutionary] Frente.”3 President Reagan hoped the public would view the episode “that happened before I took office” in the perspective of reforms being instituted by the Duarte government: “One of our reasons for the support of this government is because we believe they do hold out the best hope for improving the conditions of the people of El Salvador. . . . We think we are helping the forces that are supporting human rights in El Salvador.” Reagan claimed it was wrong to focus exclusively on alleged excesses by the Salvadoran military when “the terrorists themselves, the guerrillas, boast of having killed . . . somewhere above 6,000 people in the last year.” The important thing was

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to realize that the situation in El Salvador and the U.S. response to it were part a larger struggle: What we’re doing . . . is [to] try to halt the infiltration into the Americas by terrorists, by outside interferences and those who aren’t just arming El Salvador but I think, are aiming at the whole of Central and possibly later South America—and I’m sure eventually North America. . . . What we’re doing, is trying to stop the destabilizing force of terrorism and guerrilla warfare and revolution from being exported in here, backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba and those others that we’ve named.4

This line was echoed by administration officials trying to deflect the growing concern in Congress over human rights abuses by the Salvadoran military. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders in his March 6, 1981, testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on behalf of continuing aid to the Duarte government insisted that the legislators keep their eye on the big picture: “Here you have, in fact, Shafik Handel [the leader of the Salvadoran resistance], requesting assistance from the Soviet Union . . . and getting assistance from Vietnam. . . . You have the Cubans shipping arms and organizing the political leadership of the El Salvadoran insurrection.”5 Secretary Haig appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee to outline what he called a “four-phase” operation by the Soviet Union in Central America. The first phase, “the seizure of Nicaragua,” had already been completed. “Next is El Salvador,” he said, “to be followed by Honduras and Guatemala.” This was not necessarily a domino theory, said Haig: “I would call it a priority target list—a hit list, if you will—for the ultimate takeover of Central America.”6 The most eloquent, and revealing, explanation of the administration’s attitude came from UN ambassador Kirkpatrick: “Speaking generally, we must make it perfectly clear that we are revolted by torture and can never feel spiritual kinship with a government that engages in torture. But the central goal of our foreign policy should not be the moral elevation of other nations, but the preservation of a civilized conception of our national self-interest.”7 The congressional majority was not persuaded by such rationalizations. In the International Security and Development Cooperation Act of 1981, Congress included El Salvador among those countries that would qualify for aid only if the president of the United States certified every six months that that country’s government was making a genuine effort to comply with internationally recognized standards

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of human rights. Not surprisingly, the president, starting in January 1982, provided the required periodic certification: “I hereby determine that the Government of El Salvador is making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.” 8 When skeptical members of Congress brought up contrary testimony by human rights organizations and individuals with direct knowledge of the situation in El Salvador, such as former ambassador Robert E. White, the standard rebuttal was that “accurate information is hard to establish” (Assistant Secretary Enders) and “responsibility for the overwhelming number of deaths . . . cannot be found in the majority of cases” (Ambassador Deane Hinton).9 Fifty-seven members of Congress, outraged at the administration’s see-no-evil, hear-no-evil stance, sent a letter to the president charging that his certification of El Salvador’s human rights compliance “is contrary to documented fact” and urging him “to withdraw that ‘certification’ and provide a more accurate assessment of the junta’s actions with respect to human rights . . . so that your determination on providing military assistance may be credible.”10 The congressional objections signaled to the White House that future authorizations of military aid for the Duarte government might be held back unless there was, at a minimum, a more candid admission of the deficient human rights situation in El Salvador. Accordingly, subsequent presidential certifications were imbedded in rather detailed accounts of repressive and even brutal actions by factions of the Salvadoran military, along with claims that the Duarte government, with prodding from the United States, was taking steps to make its military more aware of the need to observe human rights. Reagan hailed the March 1982 elections in El Salvador as an indication that the country was on the road to genuine democracy. The election results gave four right-wing parties sufficient votes in the Salvadoran Constituent Assembly to allow Roberto D’Aubuisson, the militant rightist leader alleged to be connected with the death squads, to become the new president. Knowing that a D’Aubuisson presidency would galvanize Congress to cut off military aid, the Reagan administration let it be known in influential political circles in San Salvador that unless they formed a centrist government, they would risk losing further aid from the United States. A deal was struck among the centrist and rightist parties in which Dr. Álvaro Borja Magaña, a centrist, became interim president of El Salvador until the elections of 1984, and D’Aubuisson was made president of the Constituent Assembly.11

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These efforts to limit D’Aubuisson’s ascendancy marked the beginning of the realization in the White House and State Department that, Jeane Kirkpatrick’s theories to the contrary, unqualified support for autocrats who happened to be on the anticommunist side in the Cold War could be counterproductive. As human rights abuses by the Salvadoran military continued in 1983, U.S. ambassador Hinton and his successor Thomas Pickering publicly as well as privately stepped up their criticisms of the political establishment in that country, including the business community, for remaining silent. The high point of official U.S. criticism was Vice President Bush’s visit in December 1983 to warn Salvadoran officials that the Reagan administration held the government in San Salvador responsible for human rights abuses.12 At a dinner hosted by President Álvaro Borja Magaña and attended by all the government leaders, including the minister of defense and the high military command, the American vice president pulled no punches. The cause of defeating the anti-government guerrillas “is being undermined by the murderous violence of reactionary minorities,” said Bush: These rightwing fanatics are the best friends of the Soviets, the Cubans, and Sandinista comandantes, and the Salvadoran guerrillas here. Every murderous act they commit poisons the well of friendship between our two countries and advances the cause of those who would impose an alien dictatorship on the people of El Salvador. These cowardly death squad terrorists are just as repugnant to me, to President Reagan, to the U.S. Congress, and to the American people as the terrorists of the left. . . . I ask you as a friend not to make the mistake of thinking that there is any division in my country on this question. It is not just the President, it is not just me or the Congress. If these death squad murders continue, you will lose the support of the American people, and that would indeed be a tragedy.13

Bush’s rhetoric had more effect on the political process in Washington than in San Salvador. The administration’s public posture of opposition to the death squads was sufficient to undercut congressional criticism of the president’s certifications of human rights progress, and future aid requests for El Salvador moved through Congress with relative ease. The government in San Salvador was once again headed by the moderate (but increasingly ineffective) Duarte; and the administration had virtual carte blanche in its Salvadoran policies for the remainder of the Reagan years.

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THE FALKLAND ISLANDS FAUX PAS Ronald Reagan’s good guys versus bad guys view of the world (and Jeane Kirkpatrick’s distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes) also clashed with hard reality in the case of the Falkland Islands—one of Britain’s remaining imperial possessions, claimed for Argentina by the right-wing military regime in Buenos Aires. Central Intelligence Agency Director Casey was favorably disposed toward General Leopoldo Galtieri’s junta for providing military training in Honduras to the anti-Sandinista Contras. Casey’s ally, Ambassador Kirkpatrick, had championed the Argentine dictatorship by meeting with General Galtieri and lobbying the State Department and Congress to obtain a favorable human rights rating for Buenos Aires so that Argentina could again qualify for the U.S. arms sales that had been denied on grounds of human rights violations. Miscalculating the degree of support for him in Washington, General Galtieri in April 1982 sought to take the Falklands from Britain in a swift invasion, under the assumption that the United States, in the name of anticommunist solidarity in the hemisphere, would dissuade Britain from military counteraction. Indeed, for almost a month after the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, the Reagan administration refrained from taking sides on the competing sovereignty claims. As the British task force sailed toward the Falklands, Secretary of State Haig tried to act as mediator, proposing that Britain commit itself to negotiating with Argentina over the future political status of the islands in return for a pullout of Argentina’s military forces and suggesting some kind of international presence to administer the islands during the negotiations and transition period. But neither side was willing to compromise its claim to the islands. Haig could not persuade Prime Minister Thatcher to rescind her demands that the status quo ante be restored as a precondition for negotiations, nor could he persuade General Galtieri to withdraw the Argentine occupation troops before negotiations began over the Falklands. As the British warships reached the Falklands on April 30, Secretary Haig announced that because his mediation effort had failed and since Argentina had violated the international rules against the use of force to settle international disputes, the United States had no choice but to back the United Kingdom. But the U.S. shift to the ground of higher principle was too late to avert a bloody battle. The British, with their advanced air and naval units, decisively overpowered the defending Argentine occupation force.

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President Reagan, addressing the British Parliament in June as British troops tightened the noose around Galtieri’s beleaguered garrisons on the islands, warmly embraced the British effort as part of a great “crusade for Freedom.” Voices had been raised, said the president, against the sacrifice of British young men “for lumps of rock and earth” so far away in the South Atlantic. “But these young men aren’t fighting for mere real estate. They fight for a cause, for the belief that armed aggression must not be allowed to succeed and that people must participate in the decisions of government under the rule of law.”14 The last phrase was an endorsement of the British claim that in a free plebiscite the Falkland Islanders would show an overwhelming preference for retaining British sovereignty. Reagan’s praise of Thatcher’s deployment of the royal armed forces as a noble defense of freedom solidified his relationship with his friend at No. 10 Downing Street. But the Falklands episode removed Argentina from the thin roster of Latin American players on the U.S. team combating Marxists in Latin America and exposed the fact that the Reagan administration’s formula for ascertaining its friends and enemies in the Third World had not worked as clearly as intended.

URGENT FURY IN GRENADA Reagan could see the enemy clearly on the small Caribbean island of Grenada, as clearly as Cervantes’ hero Don Quixote could see them on the Spanish plain. No episode of the Reagan presidency approximates tilting at windmills better than Operation Urgent Fury, the marine and army paratroop invasion of Grenada during the last week of October 1983 in response to the civil chaos in Grenada following the assassination of the island’s Marxist prime minister, Maurice Bishop, by rival Marxists. With the U.S. Marines already landing in Grenada, the president on October 25 dispatched a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the president pro tempore of the Senate officially informing Congress of his decision to use armed force in response to a call from members of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) to help them counter the “threat to the peace and security of the region created by the vacuum of authority in Grenada.” Of overriding importance, he stated, was “protecting the lives of the United States citizens in Grenada.”15

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Speaking on television on October 27, Reagan provided his larger rationale for ordering U.S. combat forces into Grenada: Grenada was without a government, its only authority exercised by a selfproclaimed band of military men. There were then about 1,000 of our citizens on Grenada, 800 of them students in St. George’s University Medical School. . . . Six members of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, joined by Jamaica and Barbados . . . sent an urgent request that we join them in a military operation to restore order and democracy to Grenada. . . . These small peaceful nations needed our help. Three of them don’t have armies at all, and the others have very limited forces. The legitimacy of their request, plus my own concern for our citizens, dictated my decision. I believe our government has a responsibility to go to the aid of its citizens, if their right to life and liberty is threatened. The nightmare of our hostages in Iran must never be repeated. . . . Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn’t. It was a Soviet-Cuban colony, being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. We got there just in time.16

The invasion resulted in the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers, 45 Grenadians (37 of them civilians), and 24 Cubans; 116 Americans, 337 Grenadians, and 59 Cubans were wounded. To Reagan this cost was more than worth the returns. In his memoirs, he recalls that his “eyes got a little misty” watching the television coverage of the rescued medical students landing in the United States, seeing them step off the airplanes and “lean down and kiss American soil.” On November 7, the White House staged a ceremony for the students and the soldiers who had rescued them. When some of the students embraced the soldiers, Reagan marked the contrast with his experience as governor of California when he had “seen college students spit on anyone wearing a military uniform.” In his diary entry he wrote that it was “the most wonderful South Lawn ceremony we’ve ever had . . . heartwarming, indeed thrilling to see these young people clasp these men in uniforms to their hearts.”17 Reliable assessments of the invasion, however, disclosed that most of the students and their parents in the United States felt it was unnecessary to remove them from the island. And questioning of the administrators of St. George Medical School showed that neither at the time nor subsequently did they believe the students were actually in danger.18

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The Reagan administration eventually came to rest its case on the grander strategic considerations: the Soviets and Cubans were transforming the island country into a military base. Grenada’s neighbors, their independence and security threatened by the presence of an aggressive Soviet-Cuban outpost, had requested U.S. military action under the aegis of regional collective security arrangements that the United States was obligated to honor. According to the administration, the major indication of the intention of the Grenadian Marxists to turn the island into a Soviet base was the construction of a new airport in Grenada that could handle Soviet and Cuban military traffic. But the new airport had in fact been designed mainly to promote and handle Grenada’s increasing tourist traffic. The project was supported and financed by the governments of Canada and Britain, among others; nor did the project involve construction of facilities that would have signaled military use: protected fuel dumps, antiaircraft defenses, hardened shelters for warplanes, or the like. What about the request for U.S. military intervention by the OECS, the group consisting of Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. KittsNevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent? A March 1984 report by the British House of Commons concluded that the way in which this OECS request came about remained “shrouded in some mystery.”19 The request was drafted in Washington and delivered to the members of the OECS by special U.S. emissaries. Although the OECS Treaty stipulates that collective action requires a unanimous decision by all seven parties to the treaty, the Reagan administration chose to interpret a request from only four of the seven members as an official act of the OECS. There is no doubt that at least these four members were alarmed by the radicalizing trends on Grenada and regarded the murder of Bishop as a portent of greater violence, possibly directed against them. Yet it is equally clear that the U.S. government planted the idea with these governments that they should ask for an immediate U.S. military intervention: U.S. ships had been diverted into the area a day before the OECS met.20 Reagan repressed these messy details. He chose rather to recall the heroic imagery of “one of the highest of the high points of my eight years in the presidency”: The people of Grenada greeted our soldiers much as the people of France and Europe welcomed our GIs after they liberated them from Nazism at the end of World War II. The Grenadans had been captives of a totalitarian state just as much as the people of Europe. . . . I think our decision to stand up to

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Castro and the brownshirts on Grenada not only stopped the Communists in their tracks in that part of the world but perhaps helped all Americans stand a little taller.

When Reagan later visited Grenada to personally experience the gratitude of its people, he was delighted to find no yankee go home signs . . . , just an outpouring of love and appreciation from tens of thousands of people—most of its population—and banners proclaiming god bless america I probably never felt better during my presidency than I did that day.21

The president was angered by editorials and congressional comments implying that he ordered the invasion of Grenada to distract attention from the massacre of 241 U.S. Marines in their barracks at the Beirut airport on October 23. He had reason to resent such innuendos, for although the final order for the actual invasion of Grenada probably was not transmitted until October 24, the preliminaries of Operation Urgent Fury were already underway with presidential approval days before the terrorist attack at Beirut airport. Yet Reagan was partly to blame for the widespread suspicion that his motives were more cathartic than strategic, since he made a special point of linking the two events. “The events in Lebanon and Grenada, though oceans apart, are closely related,” he said in his television address of October 27, the first half of which was devoted to the Beirut airport massacre, the second half to the military action still underway in Grenada. “Not only has Moscow assisted and encouraged the violence in both countries, but it provides direct support through a network of surrogates and terrorists.” He closed his address with an emotional invocation of the Marine Corps motto, Semper fidelis, calling on all Americans proudly to “stand shoulder to shoulder in support of our men and women in the armed forces.”22

Contraband in Nicaragua The Sandinista takeover in Managua had been a favorite issue for Republicans eager to demonstrate the Carter administration’s indecisiveness and ineptitude. Now Nicaragua would become the centerpiece of the Reaganites’ determination to make the hemisphere inhospitable to Sovietsupported Marxists.

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When in the summer and fall of 1980 the Sandinista-dominated government in Nicaragua signed military and intelligence assistance agreements with Soviet-bloc countries, Carter’s reelection campaign was put on the defensive by Republican allegations of neglect of U.S. interests in Central America. Candidate Reagan demanded a cessation of further U.S. support for the Sandinistas. Before leaving office Carter felt compelled to suspend aid to the now openly pro-Soviet government. By the time Reagan assumed the presidency, there was renewed and rapidly growing support in the U.S. foreign policy establishment for new vigilance against Soviet-sponsored Marxism in Central America. The political pragmatists in the new administration saw that it would take time for congressional action to reverse the legislative inhibitions against the policies that would be required to oust the Sandinistas from power; but the zealots were impatient to go against the Marxists immediately, even while the pragmatists were trying to forge a broader consensus and a set of policy instruments behind the yet-to-be-named Reagan Doctrine. The contest between the political pragmatists and the zealots over Reagan’s Nicaragua policy allowed Thomas Enders, the experienced diplomat appointed assistant secretary of state for Latin America, to operate as point man for Washington-Managua relations at the start of the new administration. Enders, like Secretary Haig, a Kissinger protégé, favored a carrotand-stick realpolitik bargaining approach to the Sandinista government, alternating hints of renewed economic support and threats of U.S. military action to get the Ortega regime to cease its support of the insurgency in El Salvador and to reverse its increasingly close ties with Cuba and the Soviet Union. The elitist diplomatic style and the substance of the early Enders initiatives went against the grain of both the leftist populism in Managua and the new rightist populism that was the animating spirit of the Reagan administration. The Enders approach, involving a flurry of diplomatic shuttles between capitals and overly clever bureaucratic maneuvering in Washington to keep Congress and rivals in the administration from hampering his flexibility, alienated the anticommunist zealots and stimulated countermoves by Enders’ bureaucratic rivals to block his influence.23

Casey Into the Breach The new director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey, set the pace and direction of policy for rooting the Marxist-Leninists out of Latin America. Casey’s case for stepping up covert operations to pro-U.S. elements all

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around the globe prompted the president to sign a secret finding on March 9, 1981, authorizing covert CIA anti-Marxist operations in Central America. (The law required the president to formally “find” that national security required covert actions in a particular situation before Congress, acting through its Select Committees on Intelligence, would authorize the release of funds for such operations.) On November 17, with Thomas Enders presenting the comprehensive brief, Casey persuaded Reagan to issue National Security Decision Directive 17 authorizing covert support to the Nicaraguan anti-Sandinistas (who called themselves Contras). This was followed on December 1 by another presidential finding that identified the Sandinista government as the target; to ward off possible objections from members of the intelligence oversight committees who would see the finding and who might not be ready to support covert operations against a government with whom the United States maintained formal relations, the objective of the anti-Sandinista program was defined as the interdiction of the arms flow from Nicaragua to the Marxist rebels in neighboring El Salvador.

Countering Congressional Attempts to Restrain the CIA As newspaper reports of U.S. activities in Nicaragua increased in 1982, the administration released cover stories admitting to aiding the Contras, but only to prevent the Sandinistas from exporting revolution to El Salvador and not for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. Some members of Congress and editorial writers were skeptical of the official explanation, quoting Contra leaders who claimed their goal was the overthrow of the Sandinistas. Other members of Congress and opinion leaders urged that in the service of bringing democracy to Nicaragua, the U.S. government should openly oppose the Sandinista government. The debate in Congress resulted in the passage of a restrictive amendment introduced by Representative Edward Boland to the December 1982 defense appropriations bill. Later referred to as Boland I, this amendment prohibited the CIA from using funds “for the purposes of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua.” This was, of course, precisely the raison d’etre of the Contras, as their supporters in the Reagan administration knew very well. In the months following the enactment of Boland I, reporters filed stories from Nicaragua detailing the deep involvement of the CIA with the Contras. Members of congressional intelligence committees and their

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staffs also returned from visits to Nicaragua with reports strongly suggesting that the administration’s covert action program was operating beyond the limits set by Congress. The growing suspicions prompted thirty-seven members of the House of Representatives to write to President Reagan on March 24, 1983, warning that CIA operations in Nicaragua could be in violation of the law. Reagan responded to the letter and to the growing chorus of editorial allegations by asserting publicly and unequivocally that “We are complying with the law, the Boland Amendment, which is the law.” Whatever “I might personally wish or what our government might wish,” he said, “still would not justify us violating the law of the land.” Was the administration doing anything to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, journalists probed? “No,” replied Reagan, “because that would be violating the law.”24 In his address on Central America before a joint session of Congress on April 27, 1983, the president further attempted to quiet such concerns: Let us be clear as to the American attitude toward the Government of Nicaragua. We do not seek its overthrow. Our interest is to ensure that it does not infect its neighbors through the export of subversion and violence. Our purpose, in conformity with American and international law, is to prevent the flow of arms to El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.25

Suspicious congressmen on the intelligence committees were not at all reassured. They introduced legislation in the summer of 1983 threatening an aid cutoff to the Contras in the absence of more concrete indications, secret as well as public, that CIA activities were in fact confined to the president’s publicly stated policy. Fearing a complete congressional cutoff of aid for the Contras, Director Casey devised a new “finding” for the president that expanded the rationale to include the more vague and open-ended purpose of pressuring the Sandinista government into negotiating a treaty with its neighboring countries, committing them all to cease subversive action against one another and committing the Sandinistas to holding free elections in Nicaragua. Casey’s stratagem worked. Intelligence committee members, flattered into believing they finally were being taken into the confidence of the administration, voted in September to support continued covert operations in Nicaragua. Opposition in the House of Representatives, however, resulted in a congressionally imposed cap of $24 million to support the Contras for the coming fiscal year. The $24 million appropriation fell far short of

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the amount needed to accomplish the administration’s larger agenda for Nicaragua. The president’s counselors were divided as to whether to rely on the Great Communicator’s speechmaking talents to create a national consensus on behalf of the administration’s real policy of ousting the Sandinistas from power, or to do an end-run around the Congress. Casey did not wait for the issue to be resolved and pushed ahead with intensified activities designed to escape congressional monitoring.

The Casey-North Connection Convinced that Casey’s schemes had the president’s blessings, the new national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, assigned his most vigorous and resourceful action officer, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, to serve as the National Security Council’s (NSC) liaison with the CIA, to provide a conduit for Casey’s increasing reliance on the NSC to accomplish in Nicaragua what Congress would not let the CIA do. It is doubtful that the president, with his aloof executive style, was fully apprised of the constitutional significance of what was being done under his authority: the CaseyNorth connection in effect turned North into Casey’s principal deputy for operations in Nicaragua. The director of the CIA created for himself a satellite office within the NSC that took on the special privileges and immunities from accountability that were supposed to be lodged in the CIA itself. The arrangement was quickly reflected in stepped-up activities by the Contras and their U.S. advisers in Nicaragua. In January and February 1984, with the approval of the president, mines were laid by the CIA in Corinto and Sandino harbors. Colonel North served as the NSC staff liaison for this operation, keeping national security adviser McFarlane well briefed. An air raid to destroy a Sandinista communications and arms depot was successfully carried out through essentially the same clandestine grouping and earned North a “well done” from NSC deputy director Poindexter.26

Avoiding Boland II When a Wall Street Journal story on April 6, 1984, revealed that the CIA had been responsible for the mines in Nicaraguan harbors that damaged a Soviet oil tanker and several other ships, there was outrage in the Congress, especially from members of the intelligence committees. Barry Goldwater,

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the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, normally a loyal supporter of the administration, wrote an angry letter to his friend Bill Casey: I’ve been trying to figure out how I can most easily tell you my feelings about the discovery of the President having approved mining some of the harbors in Central America. It gets down to one, little, simple phrase: I am pissed off! . . . Bill, this is no way to run a railroad and I find myself in one hell of a quandary. . . . The President has asked us to back his foreign policy. Bill, how can we back his foreign policy when we don’t know what the hell he is doing? Lebanon, yes, we all knew that he sent troops over there. But mine the harbors of Nicaragua? This is an act violating international law. It is an act of war. For the life of me, I don’t see how we are going to explain it.27

Casey apologized to the congressional committees for inadequate disclosure, but this was insufficient to head off new efforts to rein in the administration’s covert operations. In addition to refusing the president’s request for an additional $21 million for the Contras, Congress voted another restrictive amendment by Senator Boland to the fiscal 1985 omnibus appropriations bill, which the president reluctantly approved when he signed the whole bill on October 12, 1984. Boland II included the provision that: During fiscal year 1985, no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose or which would have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement or individual.28

Casey and North, convinced they were operating under a presidential mandate to keep the Contras’ “body and soul together,” as Reagan put it, would now run the Contra operation almost entirely through the NSC staff—which under their legalistic interpretation of Boland II was not an “agency or entity involved in intelligence activities.” And they would bypass the congressional withholding of funds by raising money from private sources and from other governments anxious to do the president of the United States a favor. More than ever, this put North in charge of U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. Casey and North needed and got the full

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cooperation of the assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, Elliott Abrams, and of North’s superiors at the NSC, Robert McFarlane and his deputy John Poindexter. Of this group, only McFarlane claimed to have any reservations about the legality of the maneuvers for evading Boland II. Asked during the Iran-Contra investigations why he did not so advise the president, McFarlane confessed that “probably the reason I didn’t is because if I had done that, Bill Casey, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Cap Weinberger would have said I was some kind of commie.”29 By the end of October 1984 all the elements of what later became known as the Iran-Contra affair were in place: an unshakable conviction at the pinnacle of the administration that removing the Sandinistas from power in Nicaragua was a current imperative in the global struggle against Sovietsponsored communism; a determination to use the Contras in the vanguard of that project; a refusal to accept congressional interference with this presumed vital national interest; a small cadre of totally dedicated and resourceful activists, convinced they were loyally serving the president and willing to bend the law and if necessary evade it; an administration pervaded by careerists and sycophants who, even if they doubted the efficacy and legality of what they were asked to facilitate, were too awed or too intimidated by those who claimed to be working directly for the president to blow the whistle.

“The Enterprise” The president, convinced that the end was right, characteristically left it to his subordinates to devise the means, which included writing the script for his performance. Between the summer of 1984 and early 1986, the president, the national security adviser, and the NSC staff secretly raised $34 million for the Contras from other countries—the leading contributor was Saudi Arabia. In addition, North raised $2.7 million in 1985 and 1986 from private contributors who were delighted to help the president fight the good fight, especially when rewarded by an invitation to come to the White House for a personal thank you and photo opportunity with the president.30 Casey and North assigned the job of converting the “third country” and private funds into practical assistance to the Contras while avoiding congressional scrutiny to “the Enterprise”—a clandestine group involving retired military officers with experience in covert operations, soldiers of

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fortune, and entrepreneurs active in arms sales. Run by retired general Richard Secord and his associate Albert Hakim, an international arms dealer, the Enterprise reported directly to Colonel North. According to the congressional report on the Iran-Contra affair: By the summer of 1986, the organization that Richard Secord ran at Lt. Col. Oliver North’s direction controlled five aircraft, including C-123 and C-7 transports. It had an airfield in one country, warehouse facilities at an airbase in another, a stockpile of guns and military equipment to drop by air to the Contras, and secure communications equipment obtained by North from the National Security Agency (NSA). Flying the planes were veteran pilots and crew, many experienced in covert operations. At any given time, about 20 airmen were paid consultants to a Panamanian corporation formed by Secord and Albert Hakim at North’s direction; their salaries were paid from secret Swiss accounts controlled by Secord and Hakim.31

The Enterprise and its activities were concealed from Congress and the public. It functioned without any of the accountability required of government activities—even of covert intelligence operations. By maintaining the fiction that it was “private” or funded from foreign sources, Casey, North, and numerous other high officers of the administration—including President Reagan and Vice President Bush—apparently convinced themselves (or at least thought they could convince others) that they were not acting contrary to the Constitution’s most basic check on executive action—the power of Congress to grant or deny funding for official U.S. government programs. In early October, 1986, a Sandinista SAM-7 missile downed one of the aircraft of the Enterprise flying supplies to the Contras. The surviving crew member, Eugene Hasenfus, admitted to his captors that he was employed by an organization with ties to the CIA, but senior U.S. officials categorically denied any U.S. government connection with the supply effort. Two days later, Secretary of State Shultz told interviewers that “the people involved were not from our military, not from any U.S. government agency, CIA included.”32 The next day the president was equally emphatic in responding to questions from skeptical reporters about the Hasenfus plane. “There is no government connection with that at all,” he said. But he did allow: “We’ve been aware that there are private groups and private citizens that have been trying to help the Contras—to that extent—but we did not know the exact particulars of what they’re doing.” He used

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the exchange with reporters as an opportunity to praise the courage of those who were trying to get arms to the Contras, comparing them to the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.”33 (A curious analogy, since that 1930s group of mainly leftist volunteers aided a Soviet-supported Spanish government holding out against the rightist insurrection led by General Francisco Franco and supported by Hitler.) In the congressional Iran-Contra hearings the following year, the activities of the Enterprise were held up to the public spotlight. Secord and Hakim detailed their relations with Oliver North, and North confirmed most of what they revealed. But North vigorously defended his role in setting up and giving direction to the Enterprise as being required by the highest national interests and as entirely within the law—basing his legal argument on the grounds that the funds for the operation were all raised from private or third country sources and thus could not be a misuse of public funds in violation of the congressional proscriptions; and that his NSC office, from which he guided and facilitated the work of the Enterprise and related pro-Contra activity, was a part of the president’s NSC staff and was not one of the named agencies in the 1984 Boland Amendment prohibited from assisting the Contras. North justified the Enterprise on the basis that the president was determined the Contras should be kept alive despite opposition in Congress and that the president’s obduracy was repeatedly confirmed orally and in documents by his immediate superiors in the White House, Robert McFarlane and Admiral John Poindexter. North also invoked the national interest in defense of his having withheld information from Congress about his proContra activities: such scrupulous secrecy was necessary, he argued, for the safety of those involved in the dangerous covert operations. McFarlane and Poindexter, in their testimony, backed up North’s claims about the president’s commitment to the Contras and admitted their own complicity with Casey and North in avoiding full disclosure to Congress. At the same time, they were especially protective of the president and other high officials who claimed a lack of detailed knowledge of the covert operations, particularly those actions that might raise questions of legality. When it came to explaining the whys and wherefores of the diversion to the Contras of the profits from the secret sale of arms to Iran (see chap. 21), Poindexter and North denied they had done anything fundamentally wrong (while taking responsibility for all U.S. government actions on behalf of the Contras); they insisted they were acting only to

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loyally implement the president’s policies (indeed, Poindexter testified he believed the president would have approved the diversion if he had been asked), yet denied that the president ever explicitly authorized the messy operational details. The hubris of noble ends justifying corrupt means was perhaps most revealingly expressed by Oliver North’s impeccably efficient and loyal secretary, Fawn Hall. She did feel a bit uneasy, she admitted, in helping her boss alter, destroy, and smuggle documents out of the White House that might incriminate North and his associates. But Hall was convinced that “protecting the initiative” required these unusual measures. Didn’t she know, asked Congressman Thomas Foley, that such handling of official documents was considered a violation of one’s legal responsibilities as a public servant? Hall responded that she did know this, but that she believed in Colonel North and what he was doing. “Sometimes you have to go above the written law,” she said.34 Fawn Hall’s statement was doubly revealing in that it stripped away North’s pretense that he always thought he was acting within the law: Hall was obviously reflecting her boss’s philosophy. But from how far up in the Reagan administration did this philosophy emanate?

The Growing Circle of Culpability In the hierarchy above North there was no such willingness to admit publicly to such a disdain for the law—the Watergate affair was too deeply seared into the consciousness of this generation of high officeholders. The official posture at the cabinet level was one of scrupulous legal rectitude. As the story of the Iranian arms for hostages initiative surfaced in the world press in November 1986 and American journalists and congressional staff began to close in on the truth, the president acceded to Attorney General Edwin Meese’s suggestion that the Justice Department fully investigate any possibility of legal improprieties. Despite tactical warnings to Poindexter, North, and Casey, the Meese investigation inadvertently uncovered Poindexter-North memoranda on the secret diversion to the Contras of profits from the Iran arms initiative. The attorney general reported this immediately to the president. White House chief of staff Donald Regan, the president’s wife, and others in Reagan’s inner circle persuaded the president to preempt Congress and the press by going public with what was known and firing Poindexter and North. (Officially, the president accepted

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Admiral Poindexter’s resignation and Colonel North was reassigned to the Marine Corps.) After informing the full NSC and the congressional leadership on November 25, 1986, President Reagan and Attorney General Meese faced the press to tell about Meese’s discovery of the Iran-Contra diversion and what they intended to do about it. The president’s opening statement was as cryptic as it was brief. He told of not being fully informed about an activity undertaken in connection with the Iran initiative that raised “serious questions” about its propriety. The two officials most directly responsible, national security adviser Poindexter and Colonel North, were being relieved of their duties at the NSC. But the president still defended his administration’s “policy goals toward Iran” as “well founded.” It was only the implementation that was “seriously flawed” in this case. Measures were being taken to avoid mistakes of this sort in the future by assuring that such initiatives proceeded only under his authorization. He then turned the rest of the press briefing over to Meese.35 The attorney general was not about to grant that any U.S. official had actually violated any law. The Department of Justice, he said, was still looking into whether there was any criminality involved. All those associated with the Iran initiative claimed that the questionable transactions were conducted by Israel and therefore, “So far as we know at this stage, no American person actually handled any of the funds that went to the forces in Central America.”36 Reagan’s public relations staff and Meese’s lawyers quickly went into action to undercut any attempt by the president’s opponents to suggest that the administration, and not simply a few misguided functionaries in the NSC, was guilty of impropriety, let alone illegalities. The president appointed a special review board comprising Senator John Tower, Edmund Muskie, and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, with the mandate to assess the procedures of the NSC staff. A distinguished jurist, Lawrence E. Walsh, was appointed independent counsel to investigate the Iran-Contra diversion. Congress would not allow the administration to stage-manage its own self-investigation. North and Poindexter should not be allowed to simply walk off into the obscurity of anonymous jobs somewhere: they owed it to the country to reveal what they were really doing and at whose direction. The public hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran and the Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition, although

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allowing Oliver North a national stage from which to galvanize popular support for his patriotic zealotry, also kept public attention focused on the scandalous aspects of Iran-Contra. Reagan left office on January 20, 1989, with nagging questions still ringing in his ears: How high in his administration did the malfeasance extend? How much did the president know of what was being done in his name? The White House hope that the rather anodyne findings of the Tower Commission—its strongest criticisms were directed at the president’s overly aloof management style—would cool the public’s enthusiasm for the intensifying spectacle on Capitol Hill was not to be realized. Its very blandness consigned the Tower Commission report to relative obscurity in contrast to the televised Iran-Contra hearings, with their parade of charismatic witnesses and duel of legal gladiators. Meanwhile, the tenacious investigations by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh uncovered sufficient evidence of indictable criminal offenses by North, Poindexter, and others associated with the Enterprise to warrant bringing them to trial. Walsh obtained criminal convictions of North, Poindexter, and ex–CIA agent Thomas Clines. North was convicted in May 1989 on three felony counts: aiding and abetting obstruction of Congress, destroying NSC documents, and accepting an illegal gift. He was fined $150,000 and sentenced to two years’ probation and 1,200 hours of community service. Poindexter was convicted the following April on five counts involving charges that he obstructed and made false statements to Congress and was sentenced to six months in prison. Clines was convicted of various financial crimes, sentenced to 16 months in prison, and fined $40,000. All three men appealed their convictions and in July 1990 a federal appeals court suspended all three of North’s felony convictions— a ruling that independent counsel Walsh unsuccessfully appealed to the Supreme Court. Robert McFarlane, Richard Secord, Albert Hakim, and two of the Enterprise’s private fund-raisers, Carl Channell and Richard Miller, all pleaded guilty to various charges in the Iran-Contra affair. Each was sentenced to probation and some were required to pay fines or perform community service. Walsh’s initial prosecution of those most directly involved portended the possibility of more indictments of a much wider network of administration officials. But Walsh’s further investigations were severely inhibited by the wall of secrecy surrounding the CIA, by the death of CIA director Casey of a brain tumor in the midst of the congressional Iran-Contra hearings, and by the immunity from future prosecution offered witnesses by the congressional Iran-Contra committee.

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THE REAGAN-GORBACHEV SYMBIOSIS journalist: Sir, yesterday you did say you no longer believed the Soviet Union is an “evil empire.” You said that was another time, another era. What’s changed? Is it just Mr. Gorbachev’s succession to the General Secretaryship, or have you yourself changed or expanded your view of the Soviet Union? the president: No, I think that a great deal of it is due to the General Secretary, who I have found different than previous Soviet leaders have been. —Reagan news conference

HE OFFICIAL LINE FROM WASHINGTON explaining the rapid thaw in the superpower Cold War relationship during the last three years of the Reagan administration was that the president’s peace through strength policy worked. The basic premises of the full-court press against the USSR had been validated: by challenging the Soviets to an expensive arms race with exotic technologies, by refusing the Russians and their allies normal commercial access to capitalist markets, by putting the Kremlin on the defensive both with respect to human rights abuses and the failure of economic modernization in the Soviet sphere, and by countering Marxist-Leninist movements and regimes in the Third World, the United States had forced the Soviets to severely constrict their external expansionary activities. In short, Reagan produced Gorbachev. The record of the administration’s policy making, however, reveals a considerably more complex story.

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REAGAN’S PRE-GORBACHEV MELLOWING More than a year before Gorbachev ascended to power in the Kremlin, the White House was faced with the contradictions between the increasing federal deficit and the full-court press strategy against the Soviet Union. Looking toward the 1984 elections, domestic political advisers were telling the president that he needed to find a way to prevent the Democrats from exploiting the peace issue. The president’s foreign policy advisers counseled that the Soviets were still in a post-Brezhnev torpor and might be amenable to a relaxation of international tensions while they worked on their domestic problems. On January 16, 1984, Reagan delivered an uncharacteristically conciliatory speech on U.S.-Soviet relations. It included the usual self-congratulatory claims of American economic recovery and restored military strength and the standard characterization of the adversary as “a government that does not share our notions of individual liberties at home and peaceful change abroad.” Deterrence would remain essential to preserve peace and the American way of life, but “deterrence is not the beginning and end of our policy toward the Soviet Union. We must and will engage the Soviets in a dialogue as serious and constructive as possible.” The new U.S.-Soviet dialogue, said the president, should concentrate on three broad areas: First, we need to find ways to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the threat and use of force in . . . regional conflicts. . . . As a first step, our governments should jointly examine concrete actions that we can both take to reduce the risk of U.S.-Soviet confrontation in these areas. . . . Our second task should be to find ways to reduce the vast stockpiles of armaments in the world. . . . We must accelerate our efforts to reach agreements that will greatly reduce nuclear arsenals, provide greater stability, and build confidence. Our third task is to establish a better working relationship with each other, one marked by greater cooperation and understanding. . . . We’re prepared to discuss the problems that divide us and to work for practical, fair solutions on the basis of mutual compromise.1

The president affirmed that the United States was ready to resume serious arms limitation negotiations on strategic weapons and to continue to work with the Soviets on East-West confidence-building measures,

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including advance notification of missile tests, military maneuvers, and the like, to avoid dangerous miscalculations and to diminish the risk of surprise attack. “We will negotiate in good faith,” he promised. “Whenever the Soviet Union is ready to do likewise, we’ll meet them halfway.”2 He returned to this theme in his 1984 State of the Union address on January 24, saying that he wanted “to speak to the people of the Soviet Union” to tell them that if their government wanted it, “We can come together in faith and friendship to build a safer and better world.” In contrast to the standard strategic and NATO concepts that the secretary of defense would reiterate to the Congress a few days later,3 Reagan intoned: People of the Soviet Union, there is only one sane policy, for your country and mine, to preserve our civilization in this modern age: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?4

Over the next few months, prior to the 1984 elections, the administration’s posture toward the Soviet Union mixed continuing toughness and clear indications of a willingness to make another try at détente (though the administration would never use that word). This mix was less the product of a calculated carrot-and-stick policy than the result of different agencies and elements within the administration getting Oval Office endorsement for their particular projects. Washington’s seeming ambivalence was also in part simply a reaction to Moscow’s erratic and unsettled foreign policy during Brezhnev’s last tottering years until the installation of Gorbachev in the spring of 1985. Throughout the spring of 1984, the Pentagon kept hammering away at Soviet violations of arms control agreements: the construction of a radar facility in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and the encoding of missile tests to avoid detection. In March, the new Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko, succeeding Andropov, called for a renewed U.S.Soviet dialogue. United States’ administration spokespersons welcomed the conciliatory tone. In Vienna, NATO and Warsaw Pact negotiators resumed their talks on conventional force reductions; but the strategic force negotiations, derailed by the Soviet walkout in reaction to the new U.S. intermediate nuclear force deployments in Europe, were still not back on track. Instead, the Soviets announced deployment of a new intermediate-range missile of their own.

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Public receptivity to better East-West relations suffered a setback with the imbroglio over the Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games when the U.S. government denied visas to certain Soviet officials because of their ties to the KGB. In May 1984 the Soviets and most of their allies announced they were pulling out of the games, claiming inadequate security for their athletes. Nevertheless, on a broad and less visible front, efforts to restore détente went forward. In July the superpowers agreed to modernize the “hotline” between Moscow and Washington, the Reagan administration rescinded the 1980 ban on Soviet fishing in U.S. waters, and U.S. and Soviet trade officials again began exploring ways of resuming more normal commercial relations. Reagan’s public effort to outflank Walter Mondale on the peace issue almost came undone with his gaffe at the start of his August 11 weekly radio broadcast. Mistakenly believing he was only testing the microphone prior to airtime, the president joked, in mock confirmation of the charge he was a warmonger: “We begin bombing in five minutes!” Hardly anyone thought it funny, least of all Reagan’s campaign managers, as editorial writers around the world expressed alarm over trusting the fate of the planet to someone with such a cavalier attitude toward his responsibilities. Opinion polls at the end of the summer indicated that Reagan’s most unpopular trait was his harsh anti-Soviet stance. Secretary Shultz accordingly suggested the president should have Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko pay a visit to the Oval Office in connection with his trip to New York to attend the UN General Assembly meeting in September.5 Nancy Reagan was apparently instrumental in convincing her husband to extend the invitation.6 The president addressed the UN General Assembly on September 24. Building on the themes of his January address, he issued a ringing call for the “new beginning” of a more cooperative superpower relationship. He invited the Soviets to join the Americans in multiple negotiating arenas to reduce international tensions—particularly to resolve regional conflicts, to reverse the arms race, and (in a departure from previous “linkage” strategies) not to allow setbacks in one field to hold up progress in others. Toward this end, Reagan proposed to the Soviets (who at the outset of his administration he insisted were too deceitful to negotiate with seriously) that “we institutionalize regular ministerial or cabinet-level meetings between our two countries on the whole agenda of issues before us, including the problem of needless obstacles to understanding.” Identifying himself at the end of his speech with humanity’s greatest peacemakers,

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Reagan quoted the “vision” of Mahatma Gandhi: “Think on it . . . always. All through history the way of truth and love has always won.”7 Gromyko, whose General Assembly address followed Reagan’s, used the occasion to strongly denounce U.S. foreign policy. The Soviet foreign minister met with Secretary Shultz in New York, where he also met with the Democratic presidential candidate. The White House meeting between the president and Gromyko the next day, while providing the photo opportunities Reagan’s campaign managers wanted, turned out to be a frigid affair, but no matter—foreign policy issues had virtually no effect on the November election results. An overwhelming majority of the voters, evidently agreeing with Reagan that they were “better off now than you were four years ago,” gave the Republican ticket a landslide victory.

GENEVA 1985: THE FIRST ENCOUNTER The domestic economic recovery helped re-elect Reagan; but despite his upbeat rhetoric, the president was by now aware of the deep risks of continuing to finance the recovery by getting the country deeper and deeper into debt. Moreover, he knew that even under the most optimistic supply-side assumptions about increasing revenues without raising taxes, the federal budget could not be brought into balance without drastic cuts in expenditures, including substantial reductions in defense outlays. Meanwhile, the huge national debt was driving up interest rates and making it virtually impossible to erase the country’s international trade deficit, while the principal economic competitor of the United States, Japan, unburdened by huge defense obligations, was outpacing the United States in the production and marketing of attractive high-tech consumer goods. Michael Deaver and Nancy Reagan in particular were concerned by new public opinion surveys reflecting a widespread belief that the president was too hawkish for the safety of the nation. Mikhail Gorbachev’s accession to power in the spring of 1985, and the evident determination of this relatively young pragmatist to modernize Soviet society, plus his recognition that a less threatening international environment was required for sufficient resources to be allocated to this task, could well provide the opening for Reagan to take center stage as the great peacemaker. Michael Deaver gives Mrs. Reagan much of the credit for getting the Reagan-Gorbachev show underway. “It was Nancy who pushed everybody

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on the Geneva summit. She felt strongly that it was not only in the interest of world peace but the correct move politically. She would buttonhole George Shultz, Bud McFarlane, and others, to be sure that they were moving toward that goal.”8 In her memoirs, Nancy Reagan explains that: With the world so dangerous, I felt it was ridiculous for these two heavily armed superpowers to be sitting there and not talking to each other. I encouraged Ronnie to meet with Gorbachev as soon as possible, especially when I realized that some people in the administration did not favor any real talks. So yes, I did push Ronnie a little. But he would never have met Gorbachev if he hadn’t wanted to.9

Shultz and McFarlane wanted the president to meet with Gorbachev while Secretary of Defense Weinberger, CIA director Casey, and Edwin Meese did not. The pro-summit faction had a crucial ally in White House chief of staff Donald Regan, at this point the person who, apart from Nancy, had the most influence over Reagan’s plans. The former Treasury secretary weighed in with arguments about the relationship between Soviet economic troubles and Gorbachev’s grand strategy. The key was SDI: to stay equal, the Soviets would either have to build a defensive shield of their own or develop a new generation of offensive weapons capable of penetrating it. To match SDI, Regan told the president, “Gorbachev would have to mortgage the whole future of communism.” That was why Gorbachev wanted to negotiate, and that was why Reagan would be “holding the trump card” in the negotiations.10

THE GENEVA SUMMIT The first U.S.-USSR summit in six years began in Geneva on November 19, 1985, and lasted four days. Secretary of Defense Weinberger in particular was concerned that the president, even under the tutelage of Secretary Shultz and national security adviser McFarlane, might be too eager to come away with a dramatic breakthrough in arms control without understanding the full strategic implications. A Weinberger letter to the president advising him not to give in to the Soviets on arms control was leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post while the presidential party was en route to Geneva. McFarlane and others around the president believed it to have been a deliberate leak by disgruntled

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Pentagon hard-liners—perhaps even Weinberger himself—designed to sabotage the summit.11 Although neither Reagan nor Gorbachev made any compromise of substance on any of the major outstanding issues in U.S.-Soviet relations, the hawks were nonetheless disconcerted, fearing that Reagan, like Franklin Roosevelt, was possessed of the hubristic illusion that he could charm his Soviet counterpart into a mutually trusting relationship and that such personal trust between the two could overcome the hostility between the two nations. In his memoirs, Reagan confirms that this was indeed the way he felt. “I believed that if we were ever going to break down the barriers of mistrust that divided our countries, we had to begin by establishing a personal relationship between the leaders of the two most powerful nations on earth. . . . I wanted to convince Gorbachev that we wanted peace and they had nothing to fear from us.”12 Even before Gorbachev came to power: I’d dreamed of personally going one-on-one with a Soviet leader because I thought we might be able to accomplish things our countries’ diplomats couldn’t do because they didn’t have the authority. Putting that another way, I felt that if you got the top people negotiating and talking at a summit and then the two of you came out arm in arm saying, “We’ve agreed to this,” the bureaucrats wouldn’t be able to louse up the agreement. Until Gorbachev, I never got an opportunity to try out my idea. Now I had my chance.13

In their formal concluding statement the two leaders agreed to an exchange of visits in the near future and to accelerate the negotiations on nuclear and space arms. They endorsed the principle of halving their nuclear arsenals; directed their experts to study the idea of jointly staffed nuclear risk-reduction centers and other confidence-building measures; reaffirmed their commitment to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and agreed to continue their bilateral consultations on this problem; agreed to accelerate efforts to ban chemical weapons; and encouraged increased U.S.-Soviet cooperative endeavors in various environmental, scientific, and transportation projects. Picking up a theme from Reagan’s address to the United Nations, the joint statement approved the idea of regular meetings between the Soviet minister of foreign affairs and the U.S. secretary of state as well as between the heads of other agencies. The joint statement also adopted Reagan’s statement that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” A related departure from the U.S. government’s internal planning premises was the

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phrase that the superpowers “will not seek to achieve military superiority” over one another.14 Generalities. No substantive agreements. Still, the chemistry that began to develop between these two vastly different personalities had the potential for more substantial results, and they and their immediate aides were excited by it. The White House press secretary recounts that as the two leaders prepared to sign the final summit statements, Reagan whispered to Gorbachev, “I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are squirming,” and that Gorbachev nodded in agreement.15 Donald Regan’s account of the Geneva summit captures some of the chemistry between the two men as revealed in particular in their informal conversations. The White House chief of staff, attuned to the president’s preferences, arranged to have the informal one-on-one sessions as often as possible. During these, “The President, speaking in anecdotes as is his way, sprinkled his conversation with memorable phrases from past presidents and other famous Americans. Gorbachev was almost wholly impersonal in his own statements. . . . his interest ran to issues rather than personalities, and he seemed to have a detached rather than a narrative style.”16 Given this characterization, Regan’s report, a few sentences later, that “Both Gorbachev and his wife were spellbound by Reagan’s stories of his Hollywood days” seems somewhat exaggerated. But clearly the Soviet leader gave the president to feel that he held them spellbound, laughing appreciatively at Reagan’s jokes. Reagan came away from the summit liking Gorbachev and—which was to prove significant for their subsequent encounters—wanting to trust the Soviet leader and wanting desperately for Gorbachev to trust him. Nancy Reagan recalls an “unmistakable warmth” between the two men. And with this achieved, “Ronnie’s main objective for the Geneva summit had already been met. Above all, he had wanted to establish a personal working relationship with Gorbachev. Everything else would follow from that.”17 Reagan would refer to “our personal liking for each other” and in his memoirs he gives great weight to the “chemistry between Gorbachev and me that produced something very close to a personal friendship.”18 A few days after returning to Washington, Reagan recalled for his press secretary how in one of his private chats with Gorbachev they had reflected on their immense mutual power, not only to bring about World War III, but to prevent it. “I think I’m some judge of acting, and I don’t think Gorbachev was acting. He, I believe, is sincere, as we are, in wanting an agreement.”19

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THE EMBARRASSMENTS OF REYKJAVIK On October 9, 1986 (the day Nancy Reagan’s astrologer thought most auspicious),20 only ten days after deciding to go, after putting aside his prior insistence that he would not participate in another summit meeting before the 1986 midterm elections—certainly not one without a clear agenda of issues already thoroughly prepared at lower diplomatic levels—the president and a hurriedly assembled entourage departed on Air Force One for Reykjavik, Iceland. Administration officials refused to call it a summit, but their awkward locutions (pre-summit, preparatory meeting) were unconvincing and were belied over the next few days as the extent to which Reagan and Gorbachev became engaged in strategically momentous negotiations became known. The president had every intention—misguided or not—of conducting serious negotiations. He was looking to build on the exchange of letters he had been conducting with Gorbachev over the past four months, which culminated in a letter hand-delivered by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze to Reagan on September 19. In this letter, Gorbachev not only proposed a meeting between the two at the earliest time possible to resolve the deadlock of the professional arms control negotiators but also moderated a number of previously rigid Soviet positions on intermediate-range missiles (particularly with respect to British and French missiles). Reagan sensed an opportunity for a “historic breakthrough.”21 Historic it was. Reykjavik now appears in the diplomatic lexicon as a symbol for amateurish, ill-prepared, and romantically naïve summitry. As put by John Newhouse, “There can have been no stranger meeting between leaders of big powers . . . in modern history. . . . Two high rollers were matching idealistic visions and raising each other. They reached a higher and more rarefied place than anyone had been, and then fell off the cliff.”22 Gorbachev brought with him to Reykjavik a proposal with which, he told Reagan, they could “wrench arms control out of the hands of the bureaucrats.” He and the president could now agree to the principles of a treaty that the specialists would then prepare for their signatures at a forthcoming Washington summit. Gorbachev’s proposal featured a halving of strategic offensive forces, distributed across all categories of weaponry and including—this was sure bait for Reagan—substantial cuts in heavy missiles. Another Soviet concession (foreshadowed in his letters to Reagan) concerned NATO intermediate-range missiles and bombers,

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even those capable of striking the Soviet Union: these would no longer be included in the total from which the 50 percent reduction would be calculated. We will accept “your definition” of “strategic,” he told the Americans. Along with the strategic arms reductions, all Soviet and U.S. intermediate-range missiles in Europe would be eliminated—“your own zero option,” Mr. President. There was even a concession on SDI: in consideration of how strongly Reagan was attached to it, said Gorbachev, the program could go forward as long as it complied with the antiballistic missile (ABM) treaty for ten years (the Soviets up to then had been demanding a fifteen-year adherence).23 As Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s advisers discussed the Gorbachev proposals, it emerged that the only issue blocking agreement was the ABM treaty; the Soviets insisted that the ABM treaty be strictly interpreted, and the Americans insisted on a broad interpretation. The disagreement revolved around the technical question of the extent to which tests of SDI components had to be confined to laboratories. The anti–arms control, anti-détente members of the U.S. delegation, led by the Pentagon’s Richard Perle, were not anxious for this deadlock to be broken and counseled that the president should stick to his guns; but they were sensitive to the position into which Gorbachev had skillfully maneuvered the president—one of looking obstructionist before the world in the face of his counterpart’s remarkably generous concessions. Perle accordingly got Secretary Shultz to endorse a dramatic démarche for Reagan to put to Gorbachev: the superpowers would agree to eliminate all ballistic missiles over a ten-year period. During the first five years, the arsenals would be cut in half, and the ABM treaty would remain in force. At the end of the ten-year period, with no ballistic missiles on either side, deployments of antimissile defenses would be permitted as “insurance” against cheating or accidents and against the missiles of other countries. Gorbachev would be bound to reject the American counterproposal—thought Perle—since the Soviets would be divesting themselves of their strategic advantage in ballistic missiles while the United States retained its advantage in strategic bombers and cruise missiles. No stranger to this political game, Gorbachev was not about to be branded the naysayer. In the final Sunday evening session, he upped the ante, proposing the elimination of all nuclear weapons over a ten-year period. The American president’s startling acceptance of this proposal, which Reagan and his aides later denied he had done, has since been

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confirmed by various sources. Chief of staff Regan’s verbatim account is the key source: Nuclear weapons? Reagan said. Well, Mikhail, that’s exactly what I’ve been talking about all along. That’s what we have long wanted to do—get rid of all nuclear weapons. That’s always been my goal. “Then why don’t we agree on it?” Gorbachev asked. We should, Reagan said. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.24

The president reportedly thought a great historical moment had arrived. But then Gorbachev suddenly ruined it all by adding that the abolition of nuclear weapons had to be in conjunction with a ten-year extension of the ABM treaty and a ban on the development and testing of SDI outside the laboratory. “He threw us a curve,” the president later wrote. “I couldn’t believe it and blew my top.”25 Abrupt and unequivocal in his angry refusal, the president gathered up his papers. Gorbachev tried to dissuade him from leaving. Reagan said it was too late. The summit was over. Donald Regan recalls the president’s distress: In the limousine Reagan was somber, and for the first time since I had known him I felt I was in the presence of a truly disappointed man. . . . Reagan sat in silence . . . Then he said, Don, we came so close. It’s just such a shame. . . . His frustration was palpable. Laboratory, laboratory, laboratory, the president said, repeating the word over and over again.26

Speakes remembers it as “a crushing blow” for Reagan. “Now he saw time running out. I believe when he told Gorbachev ‘It’s too late,’ he was—for once—confronting his own mortality.”27 Reagan himself, in his otherwise cheerful memoir, confesses that “At Reykjavik, my hopes for a nuclear-free world soared briefly, then fell during one of the most disappointing—and ultimately angriest—days of my presidency.”28 The administration’s massive public relations machine undertook “the biggest effort we ever made to get out the White House side of the story,” says Speakes. Administration officials made some ninety press appearances in the first three days after the summit. At the end of the exhausting post-summit week of spin control, Don Regan quipped to the New York

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Times: “Some of us are like a shovel brigade that follows a parade down Main Street, cleaning up.”29 National security policy analysts of all persuasions, in and out of government, feared that Reagan and his aides were themselves spinning out of control—losing the capacity to distinguish between the hard realities of geopolitics and the illusions of presidential greatness they were weaving. In a scathing article in Foreign Affairs, former secretary of defense James Schlesinger, one of Washington’s most respected and sober hard-liners, inveighed against the “casual utopianism” that marked the president’s performance at Reykjavik and turned the summit into a “near disaster from which we were fortunate to escape.” Schlesinger pointed to the “astonishing irony” that it was “the President’s preoccupation with SDI” that “saved us from the embarrassment of entering into completed agreements from which subsequently we would have had to withdraw.” The United States was lucky. The president was lucky. But he was reckless: At Reykjavik he was prepared apparently to sacrifice our entire strategic nuclear-armament, but unprepared to compromise on outside-the-laboratory testing of SDI. One finds it hard to believe that preserving the freedom to test SDI is by itself of sufficient importance to determine whether to jettison or salvage the entire Western system of security based on nuclear deterrence.30

Many in the peace movement felt that a wonderful opportunity had been stupidly squandered. But in the eyes of most of Washington’s defense and arms control community, the country could thank Reagan’s Star Wars for inadvertently preventing an ignominious diplomatic defeat. John Newhouse reports that Allied leaders, including the usually supportive Margaret Thatcher, were shaken, judging “the what-might-have-been as constituting a near abandonment of the American commitment to defend Europe.”31 Most of the criticism of Reagan’s performance at Reykjavik was based on the premise that the global balance of power restraining Soviet international aggressiveness depended crucially on the credibility of the NATO (primarily U.S.) threat to respond with overwhelming power, including nuclear weapons, to any Soviet military move against a country outside its sphere of control. To eliminate nuclear weapons from the equation, prior to rectifying the conventional force imbalance favoring the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies, would be to grant the Soviet side overall

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superiority in the global balance of power. Moreover, without having to face the likelihood of military conflict escalating to nuclear war, the Soviets would be tempted to engage in aggression, under the assumption of being able to control the risks. After Reykjavik, and having to fend off the rising chorus of neoconservative criticism that he was, like the détentists in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, too easily beguiled by Soviet promises rather than deeds, Reagan for a while shied away from positions that might confirm fears that he was turning soft. He retrieved the heroic high ground in June 1987 in a speech at the Berlin Wall on his return from the G-7 economic summit in Vienna. “We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness,” he said. “Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it?” There was one sign that the Soviets could make of real change: General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!32

Reagan admits in his memoirs that this was a rhetorical gambit. “I never dreamed that in less than three years the wall would come down and a six-thousand pound section of it would be sent to me for my presidential library.”33

THE INF BREAKTHROUGH In Gorbachev’s comprehensive opening proposal at Reykjavik on October 11, 1986, the Soviets had indicated a readiness to accept the essentials of Reagan’s zero option for intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF). The INF offer was taken seriously by Reagan’s advisers, for it was consistent with what Gorbachev had stated to Reagan in their exchange of letters leading up to the summit. Perhaps at least this part of the convergence between the two leaders could be retrieved. The elimination of INF from their arsenals would be a natural, strategically risk-free, yet dramatic first step by the superpowers toward mutual

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nuclear disarmament. It would remove weapons that were essentially superfluous for both sides. Any targets now assigned to the INF could be covered by only a small fraction of their intercontinental-range forces. The United States would insist on stringent verification procedures; but even if one side cheated, it would not attain a decisive strategic advantage. But would Gorbachev be willing to “de-link” an INF treaty from the impasse over SDI? The answer came from the Soviet leader on February 27, 1987, in a statement offering to separate the INF negotiations from all other issues, including SDI. But there was still opportunity for mischief. Two additional ploys remained for Richard Perle and others in the administration opposed to arms control: the United States would insist on a “double-zero” INF ban— not only on all U.S. and Soviet deployments in Europe, but all such intermediate-range nuclear forces worldwide, thus compelling the Soviets to dismantle their anti-China systems deployed in Siberia. The United States would also demand verification procedures the Soviets would be bound to reject as too intrusive. Once again, however, Gorbachev showed himself to be master of the technique of throwing the adversary off balance by suddenly removing all resistance. The Soviet negotiators were given instructions in the spring of 1987 to accept the premise of the U.S. proposal that all Soviet and American intermediate-range land-based missiles should be banned: there should be no deployment anywhere in the world; indeed, the missiles in the inventories of the superpowers would be dismantled or destroyed. In addition, the Soviet negotiators argued for even more intrusive on-site inspection procedures: whereas the Americans had insisted on stationing inspectors at suspected missile production or storage sites on the basis of spur-of-the-moment challenges, to monitor what was coming in and out, the Soviets now urged inspections of the interiors of such facilities as well, “any time, any place,” including on the territory of “third countries.” This was exactly the opposite of what the Pentagon authors of the toughened verification requirements had expected: the Russians were supposed to find the requirements incompatible with national sovereignty. The negotiations would have gotten nowhere. Now, however, it was the turn of the American hard-liners to invoke fears of espionage: suppose the Soviet inspectors insisted on entering sensitive intelligence facilities or intercontinental ballistic missile bunkers; this was verification run wild.34

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Clearly neither side wanted anything near this degree of intrusive inspection. But each leader, for his own reasons, really did want the INF negotiations to produce an arms reduction treaty for them to sign in a Washington summit meeting before the end of the year. Gorbachev was determined to reduce the drain on Soviet resources from the persisting global rivalry with the United States; an INF ban would involve the dismantling of already-deployed Soviet forces and could mark a turn toward a substantially reduced arms competition. And Reagan, who also sensed the positive fiscal implications of success in arms control, now had an additional incentive: diverting public attention away from the Iran-Contra scandal. As it turned out, the verification experts on both sides found they could transcend the negotiating impasse, once it was agreed that all U.S. and Soviet missiles with ranges of between 500 and 3,000 miles would be eliminated; even the discovery of one missile in this comprehensive class of weapons would be proof of violation, so a somewhat less intrusive inspection regime would suffice. Accordingly, the White House and Kremlin approved treaty wording providing for short-notice inspections at sites on mutually agreed lists of installations—which was hailed by Reagan as “the most stringent verification regime in history.”35 Reagan and Gorbachev finally had the positive international accomplishment each had been seeking. Their signing of the INF treaty was the centerpiece of their summit meeting of December 7–10, 1987, in Washington. In the signing ceremony, the president shared credit with the Soviet leader for effectuating a “dramatic shift in thinking, to which it took conventional wisdom some time to catch up.” The two of them had been more creative than their respective experts. “To some the zero option was impossibly visionary and unrealistic; to others merely a propaganda ploy. Well, with patience, determination, and commitment, we’ve made this impossible vision a reality.” General Secretary Gorbachev stated that this “first-ever agreement eliminating nuclear weapons . . . offers a big chance at last to get on the road leading . . . toward a nuclear-free world. . . . We can be proud of planting this sapling which may one day grow into a mighty tree of peace.” And not to be outdone by the president’s hyperbole, he offered: “May December 8, 1987, become a date that will be inscribed in the history books, a date that will mark the watershed separating the era of a mounting risk of nuclear war from the era of a demilitarization of human life.”

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The Reaganesque scene at the signing ceremony included lump-inthe-throat emotion, warm handshakes, and the good fellowship of lighthearted repartee: We have listened to the wisdom in an old Russian maxim. And I’m sure you’re familiar with it, Mr. General Secretary, though my pronunciation may give you difficulty. The maxim is: dovorey no provorey—trust but verify. THE GENERAL SECRETARY: You repeat that at every meeting. [Laughter] 36 THE PRESIDENT: I like it. [Laughter] T H E P R E S I D E N T:

TOWARD THE END OF THE COLD WAR? Seven months before the end of his presidency, Ronald Reagan finally made a trip to the capital of what early in his first term he had branded the “evil empire.” There on a balmy day in May he strolled Red Square laughing and bantering with the leader of the system he had earlier castigated for producing leaders trained to lie and cheat in the service of their MarxistLeninist revolutionary goals. Out of the Moscow summit came a spate of new agreements on arms control, cooperative nuclear research, maritime affairs, transportation, and student exchanges. Had America’s most articulate cold warrior changed, as some of his most ardent early supporters angrily charged? On the contrary, Reagan insists in his memoirs, it was precisely his administration’s worldwide and relentless opposition to Marxism-Leninism that finally brought home to Gorbachev and his associates the fundamental contradictions in the Soviet system and the futility of their persisting in a global struggle against democratic capitalism. If the Cold War was about to come to an end, it was because the Soviets, subjected to the full-court press, were finally ready to say uncle. Reagan’s memoirs do, of course, give some weight to the inherent internal weaknesses of the Soviet system: When Gorbachev came into power in March 1985, I believe, he would have continued on the same path as his predecessors if Communism had been working, but it wasn’t. . . . Seventy years of Communism had bankrupted the Soviet Union economically and spiritually. Gorbachev must have realized it could no longer support or control Stalin’s totalitarian empire; the survival of the Soviet Union was more important to him. He must have looked to

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the economic disaster his country was facing and concluded that it couldn’t continue spending so much of its wealth on weapons and an arms race—as I told him at Geneva—we would never let his country win.37

In Reagan’s view, the world was blessed by having the right leaders in the right places at the right time: in the West, a leader wise enough and tough enough to make the Soviet Union more aware than it had ever been before of the stark choices it faced; and in the East a leader with “the intelligence to admit Communism was not working, the courage to battle for change, and, ultimately, the wisdom to introduce the beginnings of democracy, individual freedom, and free enterprise.”38 Reagan left office heady with the conviction that his relationship with Gorbachev had profoundly changed the course of history.

PA R T

VII PRUDENTIAL STATECRAFT WITH GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH We’re not going to overexcite the American people or the world. And so we will conduct our diplomacy in a prudent fashion, not driven by excess, not driven by extremes. —George H. W. Bush

We should always be skeptical when so-called experts suggest that all a particular crisis calls for is a little surgical bombing or a limited attack. . . . This approach has been tragic for the nation. . . . Lincoln perceived war correctly. It is the scourge of God. We should be very careful how we use it. When we do use it, we should not be equivocal: we should win and win decisively. —General Colin Powell

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ICE PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH WAS one of those in the Reagan administration alarmed at the breathless pace of President Reagan’s rush toward full reconciliation with the Soviet Union. Whereas during Reagan’s first term Bush had worried that the president’s good-versus-evil approach to U.S.-Soviet relations could provoke unnecessary confrontations between the nuclear superpowers, Bush looked on in troubled amazement at Reagan’s fascination after 1985 with the idea that total mutual nuclear disarmament had become feasible and desirable since Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was no longer an enemy of the West. Unlike some in the Reagan administration who were convinced that Gorbachev’s bid to end the Cold War was only the latest Soviet attempt to dupe the West, Bush was willing to suspend judgment while the United States probed Soviet intentions—experimentally, pragmatically—in the arms control arena and in various regional conflicts, such as Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua. If elected president, Bush would have an open mind toward the prospect of reviving the détente relationship initiated by Nixon and Kissinger; like them, he could be indifferent to the form of government and human rights situation in the Soviet Union as long as the Kremlin was willing to play by the rules of the game internationally. But first he would have to win the Republican nomination against a field of more hawkish contenders,

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including Senator Robert Dole and former secretary of state Alexander Haig. Bush privately cautioned Gorbachev in late 1987 to ignore the antiSoviet rhetoric of his forthcoming election campaign.1

TESTING THE WATERS . . . PRUDENTLY After the election Bush encountered an impatient Gorbachev willing to forgive the American politician’s campaign statements but anxious to take up the building of the post–Cold War relationship where he and Reagan had left off. On December 7, 1988, in a remarkably forthcoming speech before the United Nations, the Soviet leader threw down a dramatic challenge to the president-elect to move beyond the Cold War. “New realities are changing the entire world situation,” said Gorbachev. “The differences and contradictions inherited from the past are . . . being displaced.” It had become obvious that “the use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of foreign policy.” The superpower disarmament process had commenced in earnest with the treaty eliminating U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF). The INF treaty was but one expression of “a new historic reality—a turning away from the principle of super-armament to the principle of reasonable defense sufficiency.” In accord with this principle, Gorbachev announced, the Soviet leadership had decided to unilaterally reduce its armed forces by 500,000 men and to withdraw and disband six tank divisions from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary by 1991, along with comparable reductions in artillery and combat aircraft in the European theater.2 But rather than reciprocate, Bush instinctively held back. He would consult with his top foreign policy aides and order studies of possible responses. If this was a historic juncture in world politics, he wanted some breathing space to formulate an appropriate set of policies. His cautious reaction was backed by both his designated secretary of state, James Baker, and his designated national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft—each skeptical of Gorbachev’s motives; they still viewed the charismatic Soviet leader as a master manipulator of international public opinion and a coldly calculating Marxist-Leninist. Gorbachev’s rhetorical embrace of a kind of “global humanism” and of détente and arms control, and his domestic perestroika (restructuring) were all possibly a rational grand strategy to provide for a temporary reallocation of resources and reordering of priorities to allow the Soviet Union—aided by Western technologies and

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financial credits—to renew its bid in the near future for global dominance from a stronger base. A different perspective came from Henry Kissinger. Bush’s former boss from the Nixon era proposed that Bush boldly seize the initiative with respect to the implications that Gorbachev’s new policies had for the situation in Eastern Europe and by so doing help bring the Cold War to an end. As with Khrushchev’s efforts at liberalization two decades earlier, Gorbachev’s policies could unleash a degree of revolutionary chaos among the East Europeans, particularly in East Germany. The results might lead to Soviet military intervention and West German threats to counterintervene. To prevent such situations, Bush should offer Gorbachev the following deal: the Soviets would agree not to use military force to suppress anticommunist regime uprisings in Eastern Europe in exchange for a NATO promise not to intervene or otherwise attempt to exploit the ferment there at the expense of “legitimate” Soviet security interests. This mutual forbearance accord would help Gorbachev hold off the Soviet hard-liners who were opposing his efforts to reduce Soviet foreign obligations, and it would allow the East European countries greater leeway to gradually dislodge themselves from Soviet hegemonic control. Bush should understand, however, and so should Gorbachev, that any public knowledge of such a deal at this time would be inadvisable, for it would invite charges from the American right wing that Bush and Gorbachev were engaging in a “Yalta”-type arrangement to preserve a sphere of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. Bush liked the idea and suggested that Kissinger explore it with Gorbachev and his advisers during Kissinger’s forthcoming trip to the Soviet Union.3 Meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow two days before Bush’s inauguration, Kissinger encountered a wary response. Still mistrustful of the incoming administration’s intentions, the Soviet leader suspected a ruse to get him to reveal too much of his own plans for Eastern Europe. The new administration did not have an agreed-upon basic policy toward Gorbachev. Over the next ten months, Bush’s lieutenants often contradicted one another while the president himself awkwardly straddled various positions—both in public and in deliberations with his advisers. Two days after the inauguration, Scowcroft publicly cautioned that “the Cold War is not over” and warned that Gorbachev’s plan (dubbed the “peace offensive”) might be a calculated strategy to get the West to let down its guard while the Soviet Union built up its power for a new global offensive.4

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At his first presidential press conference on January 27, Bush was asked about these expressions of mistrust by his national security adviser. He replied that the administration was engaged in a “reassessment” of U.S.Soviet relations: Let’s take our time now. Let’s take a look at where we stand on . . . our bilateral problems with the Soviet Union; formulate the policy and then get out front. . . . I want to try to avoid words like “Cold War” if I can because that has an implication. If someone says Cold War to me, that doesn’t properly give credit to the advances that have taken place in the relationship. So I wouldn’t use that term. But if it’s used in the context of—do we still have problems; are there still uncertainties; are we still unsure in our predictions on Soviet intentions—I’d have to say, yes, we should be cautious.5

The sub-cabinet and working-level officials who played an influential role in the administration’s Soviet policy review included unreconstructed cold warriors like Robert Gates (Scowcroft’s deputy) and Robert Blackwill (who had the Soviet portfolio on the National Security), skeptics like Lawrence Eagleburger (the impeccably professional deputy secretary of state), and pragmatic détentists like Dennis Ross (director of the policy planning staff at State). Of this group, Gates and Blackwill were the only ones who could claim to be experts on the Soviet Union. The analytical balance thus tended to tilt toward the naysayers and skeptics, with the burden of proof borne by those who believed the end of the Cold War was in sight. During the first few months of the Bush administration, the center of gravity of U.S. Soviet policy shifted back from the venturesome latter-day Reagan approach to a cautious conservatism—reflected neatly in Scowcroft’s remark; “There may be . . . light at the end of the tunnel. But I think it depends on whether the light is the sun or an oncoming locomotive.”6 The hard-line former CIA cold warriors, Gates and Blackwill, tended to discount the depth of the transformation taking place under Gorbachev. Well into the spring of 1989, as Bush began to appreciate the pervasiveness of the turbulence spreading through the Soviet sphere, they continued to voice doubts even of Gorbachev’s commitment to fundamental reform, citing his statements that he was still a loyal communist. By contrast, Dennis Ross, increasingly influential with Secretary Baker, saw the survival of Gorbachev as crucial to the dramatic positive changes that were taking

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place. But Eagleburger and other State Department professionals, including Ambassador Jack Matlock in Moscow, although persuaded that the revolutionary ferment was transforming the societies in the Soviet sphere from top to bottom, worried that Bush and Baker were becoming overly enthralled by Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, overlooking the shallowness of their domestic political base in the vast country they were trying to restructure. The hawks attributed Gorbachev’s pleas for an end to the Cold War (which they saw as only a temporary truce) almost entirely to Reagan’s U.S. military buildup and full-court press on the Soviet Union. This was no time to let up on the pressure. But Ross and his analysts understood Gorbachev’s perestroika to be the product of recognition by the new leaders in the Kremlin of fundamental contradictions in the Soviet system. The Gorbachev modernizers wanted to reorient the country’s material and human resources away from the arms race and worldwide power rivalry with the United States to the enormous task of restructuring facing them. For the United States to take a hard line would make it very difficult, if not impossible, for Gorbachev and his associates to pursue the historic transformation of Soviet society they were determined to bring about. Rather it was important to try once again, as Nixon and Kissinger had done, but now with a more enlightened group in the Kremlin, to give the Soviets positive stakes in a stable peace. Bush’s ambivalent posture toward the Soviet Union during the early months of his administration reflected these internal policy debates. He received no help from a vague mid-March report on the policy review he had ordered. And the lack of clear guidance from the Oval Office was license for others in the administration to put their own interpretations on what was happening in the Soviet Union and the implications for U.S. foreign policy. Thus Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney offered a “guess” in a television interview on April 29 that Gorbachev would ultimately fail in his reform efforts and would be replaced by a leader more hostile to the West. Secretary of State Baker’s anger at this comment prompted an explanation by White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater that Cheney was only expressing “personal observations.” Finally, chafing at the criticism that he was dragging his feet in responding to a historic opportunity to bring the Cold War to an end, the president used a commencement address at Texas A&M University on May 12 to announce that his administration’s review of U.S.-Soviet

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relations had just been completed and had produced a “bold” and “ambitious” new policy: Our review indicates that 40 years of perseverance have brought us a precious opportunity, and now it is time to move beyond containment to a new policy for the 1990s, one that recognizes the full scope of change taking place around the world and in the Soviet Union itself. . . . The United States now has as its goal much more than simply containing Soviet expansionism. We seek the integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations.

But the president made it clear he was not yet ready to fully welcome the Soviets into the world order. This would be the ultimate result of a process of which “we are only at the beginning.” Rhetoric and promises were not enough: The Soviet Union says that it seeks to make peace with the world and criticizes its own postwar policies. These are words that we can only applaud. But a new relationship cannot be simply declared by Moscow or bestowed by others; it must be earned. . . . The Soviet Union has promised a more cooperative relationship before, only to reverse course and return to militarism. Soviet foreign policy has been almost seasonal: warmth before cold, thaw before freeze.

Similarly, with respect to Gorbachev’s domestic reforms, the president was positive with respect to the potential, while maintaining his posture of wait and see before committing the United States to any initiatives to assist in the Soviet system’s modernization: We hope perestroika is pointing the Soviet Union to break with the cycles of the past—a definitive break. . . . And let no one doubt our sincere desire to see perestroika succeed. But the national security of America and our allies is not predicated on hope. It must be based on deeds. And we look for enduring, ingrained economic and political change.

The president then proceeded to outline the deeds the Soviets would have to perform to qualify for full participation in “the world order.” These included:

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First, reduce Soviet forces . . . to less threatening levels [than those already announced by Gorbachev] in proportion to their legitimate security needs. Second, adhere to the Soviet obligation, promised in the final days of World War II, to support self-determination for all nations of eastern and central Europe. . . . And third, work with the West in positive, practical—not merely rhetorical—steps toward diplomatic solution to . . . regional disputes around the world. I welcome the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Angola agreement. But there is much more to be done. . . . And fourth, achieve a lasting political pluralism [in the Soviet Union] and respect for human rights. We are impressed by limited but freely contested elections. We are impressed by a greater toleration of dissent . . . Mr. Gorbachev, don’t stop now. And fifth, join with us is addressing pressing global problems, including the international drug menace and dangers to the environment.7

The president, with an eye to the headlines, proposed an additional test of Gorbachev’s commitment to change and openness—a variation on the Open Skies proposal offered thirty-four years earlier by President Eisenhower to a post-Stalin leadership also professing a readiness to change. “Open skies” would allow unarmed aircraft from the United States and the Soviet Union to fly over each other’s territory to open up military activities of each side to mutual scrutiny. In 1955, said Bush, the Kremlin had failed the test by refusing Eisenhower’s offer. The willingness of the present Soviet leadership to embrace such a concept would “reveal their commitment to change.” In fact, the United States and the Soviet Union were already conducting such “open skies” military surveillance via orbiting reconnaissance satellites. But the president evidently realized he needed a dramatic gesture to counteract the impression that the rest of his speech was a rigidly unimaginative and unreciprocal response to Gorbachev’s bid to end the Cold War. As it turned out, the revived Open Skies proposal was a public relations failure: journalists, having interviewed Pentagon experts, revealed that it lacked any serious arms control or strategic rationale. The Texas A&M speech was reassuring to conservatives in the administration and Congress. But it was disappointing to those who wanted the president to step out boldly with a new, dynamic definition of the post– Cold War era. The aura of global leadership was gravitating toward the magnetic Gorbachev. Clearly George Bush was no Ronald Reagan.

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THE PUBLIC RELATIONS GAME The president’s increasing irritation at Gorbachev’s ability to upstage him was reflected in a public complaint by Fitzwater that Gorbachev was “throwing out in a kind of drugstore cowboy fashion one arms control proposal after another.”8 Privately, Bush complained to Scowcroft that he was “sick and tired of getting beat up day after day for having no vision and letting Gorbachev run the show.”9 Looking toward the NATO summit in Brussels at the end of May, Bush wanted to steal a march on the Soviet leader in the European arms control arena with new proposals that were both militarily prudent and imbedded in a vision of a post–Cold War Europe that would appeal to European and U.S. public opinion. Bush’s determination to push for a breakthrough on European arms control was welcomed by French president François Mitterrand and German chancellor Helmut Kohl who themselves were increasingly frustrated with the Americans for failing to appreciate the extent to which the NATO–Warsaw Pact military balance had become a matter of political symbolism rather than military security and that the West was losing the contest of public opinion to Gorbachev. The Soviets had captured the public imagination with their proposal to follow up the INF treaty with an agreement to remove all short-range nuclear weapons from the European theater. The United States had opposed any negotiations on short-range nuclear weapons, arguing that this would countenance the very denuclearization of Europe that had been a major part of Soviet grand strategy for decades. But sophisticated strategists understood the anachronism of the old rationale for the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons on the Central European front. This rationale had become obsolete with the realization that the Soviets no longer had any inclination to start a European war and that whatever residual deterrence was still needed to prevent a Soviet squeeze on West Berlin or attack on West Germany was best provided by a continued U.S. commitment to become militarily involved and by the maintenance of a capability to inflict unacceptable damage on the Soviet Union itself in a U.S.-Soviet war. Moreover, in a volatile post–Cold War period in which violent incursions across the East-West border in Germany were quite conceivable, Germans on both sides of the divide had the highest incentive to do away with deployments that guaranteed that local military encounters would trigger explosions of nuclear weapons on their soil. If the military balance of power in Europe still had relevance to important political issues, then why not respond positively to the Soviet bid to

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finally do away with Warsaw Pact superiority in conventional forces? There was a limit to what Gorbachev could do unilaterally without provoking a backlash from his own military; if he needed some reciprocal concessions from the West, perhaps this was the time for NATO to be more forthcoming in the conventional forces in Europe negotiations. If one-upmanship in arms control was now the name of the game and if the NATO partners did not mind—indeed, if they wanted it—then why not be truly bold? These considerations were reflected in the package of arms control proposals the president brought with him to Brussels and championed in speeches in Germany. The key elements of the new package were the invitation to the Soviets to agree to a ceiling of 275,000 troops each for the United States and the Soviet Union to station in the European theater, along with similarly substantial reductions down to common numerical ceilings on tanks, troop carriers, artillery, helicopters, and land-based combat aircraft. Although the Soviets had already agreed in principle to common numerical ceilings in some of these categories, the new levels Bush was proposing would require the Soviets to make vastly disproportionate reductions, particularly in troops and tanks. The president called on the U.S. and Soviet negotiators to reach a comprehensive conventional arms control agreement within six months to a year, with the reductions to be implemented at the latest by 1993. There was no reason, he said, for the five- to sixyear timetable suggested by Gorbachev. Bush also let it be known that the United States was dropping its opposition to a ban on the deployment of short-range nuclear weapons on the continent. Bush told his European audiences that his new proposals for a “less militarized Europe” were based on the premise that the Cold War could finally be brought to an end. But it would end, he said, only when Europe because “whole and free.” At Mainz, Germany, on May 31, he gave special emphasis to these themes. One idea was sweeping across Eurasia, he said, the “passion for freedom.” This was why the entire communist world was in ferment. This was why the very concept of a divided Europe was under siege. And in an attempt to take the high ground from Gorbachev’s slogan of “a common European home,” he intoned: “There cannot be a common European home until all within it are free to move from room to room.”10 To the surprise of the administration, the Soviets, instead of objecting to the asymmetrical U.S. formulae for arms reductions in Europe, agreed to proceed with the accelerated negotiations Bush was urging. Encouraged, Bush sent Gorbachev a parallel set of asymmetrical proposals in June for the strategic arms reduction talks (START): large cuts in heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles, relatively minor reductions in

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submarine-launched ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, and no concessions on SDI. And once again, although reports had it that Gorbachev was angered, the Soviets conceded to a resumption of negotiations basically under the U.S. terms of reference.

THE SMELL OF VICTORY Bush drew two lessons from his initial foray into the European disarmament arena with Gorbachev: The first confirmed the assumption of the détentists that Gorbachev was in fact sincere in wanting to call off the Cold War. The second confirmed the assumption of the anti-Soviet hawks that the Soviet economy was in such dire straits that the Gorbachev regime was willing to do virtually anything the West demanded in order to get out of the arms race. In other words, the time was ripe to press on to a full victory in the Cold War and to lock in Soviet concessions so that a postGorbachev regime would find it very costly to attempt to regain anything approaching military and geopolitical parity with the United States. But Secretary Baker appeared to have some qualms, fed by Shevardnadze’s expressed concerns that humiliating Gorbachev would play into the hands of hard-liners in the Soviet military and the Communist Party who were alleging that the Soviet reformer was a dupe of the West. Bush took these concerns seriously enough to deny himself any public gloating over his victories, but when it came to the larger issues still outstanding— the role of Germany in a post–Cold War Europe, a new pan-European security system, and the conditions under which the Soviet Union would be granted membership in the International Monetary Fund—he allowed Gorbachev no quarter. Indeed, the more the Soviet sphere of control began to crumble, the more imperious Bush became about the right of the United States—the only remaining superpower—to define the arrangements of the post–Cold War order. A dramatic indication of the depth of Gorbachev’s intentions to renounce a hegemonic role in Eastern Europe came in Poland in June 1989 with the stunning electoral victory of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement over the ruling Communist Party of President Wojciech Jaruzelski. Whereas in 1981 the Reagan administration had assumed that General Jaruzelski had been directed by Leonid Brezhnev to impose martial law to control the challenge to communist rule posed by the Solidarity Workers’ Party, now the tables were completely turned. Jaruzelski had been prompted by Gorbachev to allow Solidarity to legally contest for seats in the June 1989 parliamentary

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elections. Upon Solidarity’s victory, Gorbachev let Jaruzelski and the world know that as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, the election results had to be accepted, and the noncommunists had to be given power in the government commensurate with the election results.11 Bush, jumping the gun, suggested that it was time for the Soviets to pull their troops out of Poland; but when it got back to him that Gorbachev regarded this as meddling, he claimed no intention of trying to call the shots in Eastern Europe. Ironically, when Bush visited Poland a few weeks later (on a previously scheduled trip) he got along better with President Jaruzelski, still head of state, than he did with Walesa, and implied in some of his remarks and body language that he was more comfortable with order, even communist order, than he was with the potential chaos of revolutionary change, even toward liberal democracy.12 The historically most significant test of Gorbachev’s determination to end the Cold War centered on East Germany—since 1945 the Soviet empire’s most strategically significant, heavily fortified, and tightly controlled forward bulwark against the West.13 The East German communist leadership was not responding well to Gorbachev’s insistence on “new thinking.” The Honecker regime went so far as to censor from the country’s press passages of Gorbachev’s speeches it considered too liberal; but East Germans received the information through television broadcasts from the West. Beginning in May 1989, hundreds of thousands of East Germans eventually took advantage of the decision of the Hungarian government to remove its barbed wire barriers along the Austrian border (a decision countenanced by Gorbachev) and made their way into West Germany through Austria. Thousands of others encamped temporarily in the West German embassies in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland while awaiting entry visas from the West German government. In the past, when communist East Germans had fled in any numbers, the Kremlin had provided decisive help in stanching the flow (e.g., the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961); now the leader in the Kremlin was talking about a “common European home” and—echoing Bush—the free movement of people. In June, Gorbachev further energized the incipient reform movement in East Germany by signing a joint declaration with Chancellor Kohl of West Germany expressing “unqualified adherence . . . [to] the right of self determination.” On their television screens, East Germans along with viewers in Western Europe and the United States saw the Soviet leader being welcomed by West German crowds as if he were a conquering hero.14 The situation in East Germany came to a head in October 1989. Crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Berlin,

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Leipzig, and Dresden. Gorbachev let Honecker know that Soviet troops in East Germany would not participate in any effort by the East German government to suppress the demonstrations, warning his host that “life punishes those who come too late.”15 Amid continuing demonstrations, the East German Politburo replaced the elderly Honecker with a younger party leader, Egon Krenz, who pursued a surprisingly reformist policy—legalizing freedom of travel to the West, forcing many of Honecker’s associates to resign, and promising democratic elections. Bush administration officials saw the hand of Gorbachev in all of this. Then on November 9, 1989—in an act that more than anything else symbolized the end of the Cold War—the East German military, acting under directives from Krenz, began to dismantle the Berlin Wall. But the sudden opening of the wall only increased the force of the turbulent pressures. It was too late to salvage any legitimacy for the communist regime. The urgent question now for Germany’s neighbors, the United States, and the Soviet Union was how to contain the potentially explosive consequences of a total collapse of civic order. The old nightmare of West Germans and Soviets counterintervening in East Germany had become all too real a prospect. A logical alternative to anarchy and bloodshed was another “unthinkable”—now suddenly quite plausible—the voluntary reunification of Germany. For the rest of 1989, the West German politicians themselves did a dance around the issue, ever sensitive to the historic fear of the reappearance of a powerful German superstate in the center of Europe (the Germans during these months were careful to talk only of the possibility of “unification,” never “reunification”). But the popular enthusiasm for the prospect became irresistible, and by the turn of the year Kohl and his Christian Democrats were ready, despite the awesome economic burdens. It was not enough that the Germans were ready. The next question was whether the Soviets would agree to Germany’s unification on terms that were acceptable to the United States. For more than four decades, neither Washington nor Moscow would contemplate a reunification that would add the great material and human resources of Germany to the other side’s power. Nor, given the record of German imperialistic aggression, had the World War II victors been ready to countenance a totally independent and “neutral” Germany. Something had to give, and as far as Bush was concerned that meant Gorbachev’s opposition to NATO. The Soviets were now talking about the need to rethink their objections to a neutral Germany—belonging to no

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alliance but subordinated into a pan-European security system evolving out of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Neither Kohl nor Mitterrand opposed such a revamping of the entire European security apparatus once the Cold War was over. But Bush, convinced that Gorbachev was leading from weakness, would have none of it. He lobbied Kohl in particular to insist on NATO membership for a reunified Germany, hinting that the United States might rather see a perpetuation of two Germanys than see Germany defect from the alliance. Baker made it clear to Shevardnadze that NATO membership for a reunited Germany was a prime condition for U.S. acquiescence to full Soviet participation in world economic institutions and for direct U.S. economic help. As a World War II victor power over Germany the Soviet Union would have a role in defining the new Germany. The Soviets would be a part of the authorizing group of four in the “two plus four” process for achieving unification—a formula generated in the U.S. State Department by which the details of the incorporation of East Germany into an expanded Federal Republic would be negotiated by the two Germanys and then ratified by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France.16 Some policy planners at the State Department, and perhaps Baker himself, worried that this tough posture on the NATO issue would severely weaken Gorbachev’s ability to stand up to his hard-line reactionary opponents; but Bush sensed a virtually unconditional victory in the Cold War. Simultaneous with the efforts to settle the German issue, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged at all diplomatic levels (from Bush-Gorbachev summitry to private meetings between Baker and Shevardnadze and working-level commissions) in resolving the still outstanding Cold War issues. The frenetic diplomatic activity was taking place against a backdrop of growing turbulence in the USSR, as Gorbachev found himself caught up in a chaotic stampede towards political decentralization and economic privatization that was swifter and more radical than he could have anticipated or was capable of modulating effectively.17 Gorbachev needed some international success or at a minimum continuing international recognition of his importance to buttress his declining popularity at home. The Bush administration, playing on this need, was willing to give him the recognition but not the success—catering rather to the president’s own need to enhance a reputation for toughness in presiding over the end of the Cold War. At the Malta summit of December 2–3, 1989—nicknamed the “seasick summit” for its shipboard sessions in the storm-tossed harbor—the

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wide-ranging discussions between the two leaders encompassed the conventional forces in Europe and START negotiations, the still volatile Germany question, Soviet and Cuban support for the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, and the sensitive issue of self-determination for the three Baltic republics. Bush came away from this exercise in personal diplomacy confident that Gorbachev, more than ever anxious to obtain most favored nation (MFN) trading status and qualification for Export-Import Bank credits, was prepared to cooperate on all of these issues. More so than in any of the previous discussions between Bush and the intellectually aggressive Soviet leader (on the phone or in person), Gorbachev was now equally a listener, a respondent, with Bush increasingly setting the agenda and defining the parameters for future negotiation. By the time of the summit held in Washington and Camp David from May 30 to June 3, 1990, the shift in the relationship between the two countries was manifest in the contrast between Bush’s relaxed, almost imperious confidence and Gorbachev’s tense and often irritated demeanor at being reduced to the role of supplicant. In response to Gorbachev’s repeated emphasis on the importance for perestroika that the United States finally provide the USSR with MFN status and government backing for commercial credits, Bush continued to invoke his demands: in addition to the longstanding requirement that the Soviets rescind their restrictions on Jewish emigration, he included the new demands that Gorbachev accede to NATO membership for a reunified Germany, stop subsidizing Cuba and the Sandinistas, show more progress in instituting a market economy, and lift the economic sanctions that had been imposed on secessionist Lithuania. As the results of this Cold War endgame materialized over the next year, Bush was sustained in his view of himself as the impresario of the new world order. After all, during his presidency: t
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REACTING TO THE COLLAPSE AND DISINTEGRATION OF THE SOVIET UNION By the spring of 1991, the Soviet Union itself was on the brink of economic and political collapse. The gross national product was in a precipitous decline, Gorbachev was under challenge from both the “right” (unreconstructed communists) and the “left” (believers in radical decentralization of the political economy, rapid privatization, and full embrace of market capitalism)—an ironic reversal of the standard labelling of Marxists as leftists and free-market proponents as rightists. Also most of the fifteen member republics of the Soviet Union were threatening secession so as to become fully sovereign independent countries. Washington’s cold warriors were congratulating themselves: not only had the Soviets been forced to release their empire, but the whole MarxistLeninist experiment was imploding at its very core. At the highest levels of the Bush administration the elation was tempered by the realization that some of the spoils of such a total victory could be bitter, even dangerous— and fraught with great financial burdens for the United States. Gorbachev and his emissaries were now privately imploring the United States for massive aid—on levels comparable to the Marshall Plan assistance for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Without such help, the democratic restructuring that had been going on would be reversed, civic order would collapse, and a new Stalinist or fascist-nationalist dictatorship would be highly likely. Moreover, unless Moscow were provided the wherewithal for exercising major economic leverage over the restive republics, the USSR might well disintegrate into rival ethno-nationalistic states, some

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of which (particularly Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan) might try to gain control of the nuclear weapons and facilities on their territories. Academic experts on the Soviet Union and editorial writers in the United States also weighed in. The Bush administration was once again being accused of procrastinating and dragging its feet when the situation cried out for bold vision and decisive action. But the administration saw itself in a bind: if it poured resources into the existing, still largely unreformed Soviet political economy, the very sources of the worsening economic downturn would only be reinforced; on the other hand, if the administration continued to condition any substantial U.S. economic assistance on a more rapid adoption of democratic capitalism in the USSR than the Gorbachev regime was able to deliver, the increasingly unpopular Gorbachev would be further discredited without any real prospects that the necessary reforms would materialize in the near future. Given Bush’s understanding that the huge U.S. budget deficit would be a major issue in his bid for reelection, the administration was not prepared to ask Congress to authorize a massive U.S. financial bailout of the USSR—with or without new performance conditions. With the administration seemingly paralyzed by its inability to choose among unpalatable alternatives, some U.S. academic economists and political scientists, collaborating with a handful of radical free market reformers among Gorbachev’s advisers, worked up and energetically promoted a “grand bargain” designed to break the impasse. Graham Allison of the John F. Kennedy School of Government and his colleague, Robert Blackwill, formerly of the National Security Council staff, published the proposal in Foreign Affairs on the eve of the July 1991 economic summit, the Group of Seven (G7) meeting, in London. The industrial democracies, wrote Allison and Blackwill, should offer the Soviet Union a bargain of Marshall Plan proportions with substantial financial assistance to Soviet reforms conditioned upon continuing political pluralization and a coherent economic program for moving rapidly to a market economy. t
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initiative; (3) moving in stages to total price decontrol in which prices would reflect scarcity values, first within the Soviet Union and soon thereafter in the world economy; and (4) de-monopolization and privatization of state enterprises. t
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loans” to both the central government and the republics “to motivate and facilitate the rapid transition to a market economy.” The funds would go for balance of payments support, infrastructure projects (like transportation and communication), and the maintenance of a “safety net as a part of a general ‘conditionality program’ that followed basic IMF–World Bank principles.” The funds would not simply be given over to the Soviets; rather they would be allocated “step-by-step” and be “strictly conditional” on the recipients’ adherence to their side of the bargain.18 Although much of the U.S.-Soviet dialogue on economic matters during the late spring of 1991 was informed by the “grand bargain” proposal, neither the Bush administration nor the Gorbachev government tried to have it become an official part of their negotiations. Bush and Baker appreciated the logic of the idea but felt that it was politically unfeasible for either side to make the contemplated commitments. They were told that some of the young radicals in Gorbachev’s cabinet favored it, as did Gorbachev’s political rival, Boris Yeltsin; but they were also aware that Gorbachev himself, now struggling to avert the breakup of the USSR into separate states, was mending fences with moderate elements in the Communist Party; nor were there any signs from the author of perestroika that he was willing to abandon his preference for a state-managed transition to a hybrid form of market socialism. Moreover, Bush knew that to be able to credibly offer UIF
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Western leaders heard him out but offered no substantial tangible assistance. Gorbachev reportedly left feeling humiliated and angry; even his petition for Soviet membership in the International Monetary Fund had been denied (the G7 said they would agree to “associate membership” for the Soviets in the IMF, which Gorbachev found demeaning). The London encounter was not a complete failure—Bush and Gorbachev gave final approval to the START accord and confirmed plans for the treaty signing a few weeks later in Moscow. The treaty required both sides to reduce their strategic arsenals by roughly a third, leaving the United States with 8,556 and the USSR with 6,163 long-range nuclear warheads. A few years earlier this would have been celebrated with toasts all around; and prior to its approval, the highest officials on both sides would have pored over the details of the sublimits in various weapons categories to make sure the other side had not achieved even the slightest marginal strategic advantage. But it was a measure of the radical change away from their superpower rivalry that START had come to be regarded by the White House and the Kremlin as a sideshow to the central arena, which now featured negotiations on their economic relationship. The Moscow summit of July 29–31, 1991, was an awkward affair for Bush. Gorbachev was still smarting from his rebuffs by the G7 and accused Bush of undermining the success of perestroika. Most embarrassing was Boris Yeltsin’s manipulation of Bush. The Russian president used Bush’s presence in Moscow to enhance his own prestige: he refused to attend a reception for the American president where he would be merely a leader of one of the republics and instead obtained a private session with Bush, after which—to Bush’s dismay—he briefed the press on the progress of their talks about economic cooperation. The principal reason for the summit, the START signing ceremony, got good press coverage as Bush and Gorbachev both made the appropriate statements about reversing the arms race and exchanged pens made from the metal of missiles dismantled under the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty.19 The next leg of Bush’s trip—a visit to Kiev, the capital of secessionist Ukraine—proved to be a public relations disaster. Gorbachev wanted Bush to cancel the planned Kiev trip, given the explosiveness of the selfdetermination issues throughout the USSR. But Bush and his aides thought that to cancel would only inflame the Ukrainians more and would make Bush look weak back home. He reworked his speech to help produce a conceptual framework for both sides, the Ukrainians and Gorbachev, to come to a modus vivendi. Instead, the speech angered his Ukrainian hosts and

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received highly critical coverage back in the United States. The most controversial passages were obviously late additions to an earlier draft: “Some people have urged the United States to choose between supporting President Gorbachev and supporting independence-minded leaders throughout the USSR,” Bush intoned from the lectern in the Ukrainian parliament. I consider this a false choice. In fairness, President Gorbachev has achieved astonishing things, and his policies of glasnost, perestroika, and democratization point toward the goals of freedom, democracy, and economic liberty. . . . We will maintain the strongest possible relationship with the Soviet Government of President Gorbachev. But we also appreciate the new realities of life in the USSR. And therefore, as a federation ourselves, we want good relations—improved relations—with the Republics.

The president proceeded to give the Ukrainian legislators a lecture on the American concept of freedom as the ability of people to live without fear of government intrusion and without fear of harassment by their fellow citizens. The United States would support those who wanted to build democracy, “a system that derives its just power from the consent of the governed.” But first there was the pointed interjection that freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.20

To Bush’s dismay, these remarks and the lack of any invocation of the concept of national self-determination earned for this thoughtful address disparaging references as the “chicken Kiev” speech. Bush wanted to deal with those who were in power, in control. But this did not always serve him well where who was in control was up for grabs. Bush was vacationing at Kennebunkport on August 18 when he received the news that leaders of the Soviet army and several high government officials had staged a putsch in Moscow and put Gorbachev under house arrest in his holiday home on the Crimean coast. Bush’s initial reaction in a statement early in the morning of August 19 was that it was “a disturbing development” and that the leaders of the coup seemed to be “a very hardline group” that had taken over by “extraconstitutional means.” He was concerned about the possible setback to democracy in the Soviet Union

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and to the new era of U.S.-Soviet cooperation. But he wanted “to watch the situation unfold” before fashioning any particular response. I think it’s . . . important to know that coups can fail. They can take over at first, and then they run up against the will of the people. . . . All this stuff is unfolding, it just happened. . . . And let’s just remain open on this as to whether it’s going to succeed or not. . . . And it’s not a time for flamboyance or show business or posturing on the part of any countries, certainly [not] the United States. . . . We’re not going to overexcite the American people or the world. And so, we will conduct our diplomacy in a prudent fashion, not driven by excess, not driven by extremes.21

Bush’s first response to early reports that Boris Yeltsin was opposing the coup and calling for a general strike were also somewhat equivocal. “Well, we’ll just see what happens on that,” he said. “I think what he is doing is simply expressing the will of the people there to have . . . reforms and have democracy. . . . I hope that people heed his call.”22 Concerned that his reactions during the early hours of the crisis might be misconstrued as fence-sitting, the president had his staff issue a formal statement later on August 19 branding the coup as “illegitimate” and affirming “support [for] President Yeltsin’s call for ‘restoration of the legally elected organs of power and the reaffirmation of the post of USSR President M.S. Gorbachev.’ ”23 In his press conference the following morning Bush was even stronger, contending that the “unconstitutional seizure of power . . . puts the Soviet Union at odds with the world community and undermines the positive steps that have been undertaken to make the Soviet Union an integral and positive force in world affairs.” When pressed by reporters to indicate what kind of support he was going to give Yeltsin or whether he was just going to “stay on the sidelines and offer verbal encouragement,” Bush held back: “Well, we’re certainly going to offer encouragement in every way we can,” he said. “And we’re making it clear to the coup plotters and the coup people that there will not be normal relations with the United States as long as this illegal coup remains in effect.” He was putting all economic relations “on hold.” What did this mean? Was he going to suspend grain credits? Was he going to delay MFN status? The president’s answer: “It’s simply—we’ve got to just take our time. We’ve got to be prudent, a word I think is applicable here. And I think we’ve got to be strong.”

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The journalists also questioned the failure to give Gorbachev any hope of obtaining the financial help he had requested, particularly at the last G7 summit, implying in their questions that this might have been part of the reason for the coup. The president bristled: You get this from the left saying if you’d written out a better check this wouldn’t have happened, and I don’t believe that for one single minute. And you get hit on the other side by people that are suggesting that if we hadn’t been supportive of the duly constituted President of the Soviet Union that things would have gone more swimmingly for democracy. I reject that.24

Over the next few days as the coup fell apart—after Yeltsin’s courageous public defiance of the coup, massive demonstrations on the streets of Moscow, defections in the Soviet military, Gorbachev’s refusal to resign, a chorus of international condemnation, and simple ineptitude on the part of the coup leaders—Bush felt that his prudential posture had been vindicated. But he also realized that he had become too heavily vested in Gorbachev’s leadership. Over the next few months, the administration and its emissaries paid just as much attention to the president of the republic of Russia itself, Yeltsin, as they did to the president of the weakening center of the union and became increasingly supportive, openly, of Yeltsin’s policies favoring the dismantling of the USSR into a loose “commonwealth” of fifteen sovereign states and a radical and rapid “shock therapy” conversion to a market economy. On the weekend of December 20–21, 1991, the former republics of the USSR formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. On December 25, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the expired Soviet Union. That night, George Bush addressed the world from the Oval Office for a Christmas reflection of the meaning of these events. “For over 40 years,” he said, “the United States led the West in the struggle against communism and the threat it posed to our most precious values. . . . That confrontation is now over.” The president took a few minutes to praise Gorbachev for his contributions to world peace and to the revolutionary transformation of the Soviet Union, and then proceeded to recognize the independence of each of the former Soviet republics, citing each by name. He closed by asking God to “bless the people of the new nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States” as well as the United States of America.25 The Cold War, as far as the president of the United States was concerned, had ended.

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THE RESORT TO MILITARY POWER All right George, all right, but this is no time to go wobbly. —Margaret Thatcher

I

F YOU ARE A GENTEEL New England aristocrat, the way you handle a bully

who has been harassing you is to attempt to befriend him: invite him for a ride in your boat, buy him a drink, joke with him about sports and girls, even get him a job in the family business. Some people might say you are a wimp, but you do not let that bother you. You’ve taken boxing and wrestling lessons and regularly use the weight room at the country club. If despite your efforts he persists in his provocations and a fight becomes unavoidable, you go all out and give him the thrashing of his life. George Herbert Walker Bush was disappointed that even some members of his own party should still think him a wimp after the way he knocked off the overly aggressive Robert Dole in the presidential primaries and then went on to smash Michael Dukakis in a no-holds-barred campaign. Disappointed, but not deeply bothered, because George Bush knew himself; and when push came to shove, he would behave as president as he had before: he would stand tall and give the bullies the punishment they deserved. As it turned out, when sufficiently provoked—by Manuel Noriega, by Saddam Hussein, by the Somali warlords—Bush responded, for the most part, true to character. These episodes bear close examination, not only for what they reveal about the Bush approach to the use of military power

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but also as harbingers of new concepts emerging in the policy community about the role of the United States as enforcer of law and order in the post–Cold War world.

GOING AFTER NORIEGA President Bush had reasons that went beyond the national interest in protecting the Canal or breaking Panama’s link with international drug cartels for going after General Manuel Antonio Noriega. Noriega had almost ruined the Bush campaign for the Republican nomination in 1988 by telling reporters of their contacts, dating back to 1976 when Bush was director of the CIA and Noriega was the head of Panamanian intelligence, and including the December 1983 visit to Panama by then Vice President Bush when, according to Noriega, Bush had asked for his help with the Reagan administration’s Contra operations in Nicaragua. In February 1988, as Bush was putting his election campaign into high gear, U.S. grand juries in Miami and Tampa indicted Noriega for drug trafficking and money laundering; and stories surfaced in the press alleging that the vice president had known about these illegal activities even as he was enlisting Noriega as an agent for U.S. covert activities in Central America. Bush vehemently denied any such early knowledge of Noriega’s narcotics dealings; but reporters on the campaign trail kept bringing up the allegations. Bush’s main rival for the nomination, Senator Robert Dole, ridiculed Bush’s denial of knowledge of Noriega’s drug connections: “People have been playing footsie with this guy,” said Dole, “people who knew, or by virtue of their jobs and resumés ought to have known, that he was up to his eyeballs in dirty drugs and anti-American politics.”1 Bush found an opportunity to exploit all the fuss to the benefit of his campaign for the nomination when, in May, it became publicly known that the Reagan administration was offering to drop U.S. court proceedings against the Panamanian dictator if he would resign his office. Uncharacteristically (as vice president he had till then scrupulously refrained from differing in public with President Reagan), Bush’s office let it be known that he had been arguing against this in White House meetings; and in a Los Angeles campaign appearance, Bush took the high ground: “Drug dealers are domestic terrorists, killing kids and cops, and they should be treated as such. I won’t bargain with terrorism and I won’t bargain with drug dealers either, whether they’re on U.S. or foreign soil.”2 Noriega wasn’t interested in

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the deal; but Bush meanwhile had established his determination to punish the Panamanian dictator. The picture of Bush leading the battle within the Reagan administration for a tough anti-Noriega policy was contrived. By the summer of 1987, Noriega’s double-dealings (his relations with Castro, with Marxist revolutionaries in Colombia, and with Gaddafi) and reports that he rigged the Panamanian elections had angered Reagan. During the ensuing months, political instability and attempted coups dominated the news out of Panama, and the Pentagon reviewed its contingency plans for protecting the canal. In April 1988, following a series of brutally suppressed attempted coups, Reagan ordered economic sanctions against the dictator. Secretary of State Shultz urged military intervention, but Reagan was not ready to authorize an operation of the size the Pentagon claimed would be necessary to protect the lives of U.S. citizens in Panama. Finally, in July Reagan authorized covert operations against Noriega. During the first weeks of his presidency, Bush found an appropriate opportunity to turn the screws on the corrupt Panamanian leader. Noriega had reluctantly agreed to hold elections in May in response to rising domestic opposition to his dictatorship. In February, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing the CIA to covertly help the opposition candidates. Publicly, he demanded that Noriega conduct a free and open election and announced that he was appointing former president Jimmy Carter to lead an international team of observers. Despite widespread fraud verified by Carter’s team, the opposition soundly defeated the dictator’s handpicked candidates. But Noriega nullified the election, whereupon the opposition took to the streets in protest. On May 10, Noriega called out his paramilitary “Dignity Battalions” to put down the demonstrations. Presidential candidate Guillermo Endara and vice presidential candidate Guillermo “Billy” Ford were bloodied by iron bars wielded by Noriega’s forces, and Ford’s bodyguard was shot dead. Much of this was shown on television news programs in the United States. In a meeting with his top national security advisers on the evening of May 10, Bush made it clear that he wanted Noriega driven from power. He ordered a marginal augmentation of U.S. forces in the canal zone, but he did not want to make Noriega a martyr; any direct action against Noriega should be taken by the Panamanian military. He would, of course, use U.S. forces to protect the lives of U.S. military personnel and civilians in Panama and to protect the canal if it came to that.3

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Meanwhile, like his hero Theodore Roosevelt (who had also augmented his charisma by forceful action in Panama), the president would take to the “bully pulpit” and help whip up domestic and world outrage at Noriega’s thuggery. In statements and exchanges with reporters on May 11 and 13, he urged the Panamanians to rise up against their dictator—but held back specifying what help they could expect from the United States if they did so: “The United States stands with the Panamanian people. We share their hope that the Panamanian defense forces will stand with them and fulfill their constitutional obligation to defend democracy.”4 The journalists pressed him, unsuccessfully, to be more forthright about what exactly the administration was trying to stir up and contemplated U.S. responses: Aren’t you calling for a coup on the part of the PDF [Panamanian Defense Forces]? THE PRESIDENT: I would love to see them get him out. We’d love to see them get him out—not just the PDF, the will of the people of Panama. QUESTION: It sounds like you’re calling on the people of Panama to rise up and basically have a revolution. Is that what you’re trying to say? THE PRESIDENT: A revolution—the people rose up and spoke in a democratic election. . . . The will of the people should not be thwarted by this man with a handful of these Doberman thugs. QUESTION: What do you think the people should do now? THE PRESIDENT: The people . . . ought to just do everything they can to get Mr. Noriega out of there. QUESTION: The people could see that as inflammatory, like a call . . . to revolt. Would you add any words of caution— THE PRESIDENT: No, I would add no words of caution . . . QUESTION: If they ask for military support—if the PDF asks for military help, how can we respond? What would we do? THE PRESIDENT: If the PDF asks for support to get rid of Noriega, they wouldn’t need support from the United States to get rid of Noriega. He’s one man, and they have a well trained force. That’s my— QUESTION: What about if [the] opposition asked for military support? THE PRESIDENT: I’ve outlined what we’re doing. I’d love to see this be resolved diplomatically. And when you have overwhelming world opinion on your side, maybe something is possible in the shortrange future that has not been possible over the difficult past.5 QUESTION:

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During the summer and early fall, contingency planning started in earnest in the Pentagon for assistance to a coup from inside the PDF to remove Noriega, which in some versions involved a discrete involvement of U.S. special units to capture him. The main problem with these plans, in the eyes of Secretary of Defense Cheney and his planners, was that any neat and swift removal of Noriega would leave powerful proNoriega elements of the PDF intact. A large operation visibly involving U.S. forces, was probably required to do away with the Noriega regime. Was the president ready to consider a major U.S. military intervention? Clearly, this was Bush’s least preferred option, and he would consider it only as a response to a clear and present threat to U.S. citizens in Panama or to the Canal itself.

THE ABORTIVE OCTOBER 1989 COUP The discrete-coup scenario was tested during the first week in October when plotters within the PDF, led by Major Moises Giroldi (up to then a member of Noriega’s inner circle), tipped off the CIA in Panama that they were about to move on Noriega. The coup plotters asked that U.S. forces set up a military roadblock to prevent loyalist PDF units from reaching Noriega’s quarters at the Comandancia. The commander of the U.S. forces in Panama, General Maxwell Thurman, was suspicious of a Noriega trick to lure the United States into what would look like an attempted coup that, when foiled, would embarrass Bush. General Thurman expressed his concerns to Secretary Cheney and the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), General Colin Powell, and recommended that the United States stay aloof. Cheney and Powell suggested a course of action that would avoid embarrassment while helping to assure the success of the coup in case it was genuine: U.S. forces would openly stage a “normal exercise” on the road the coup plotters wanted blocked, but the United States would watch the coup develop before publicly committing to its success or involving U.S. forces in any definitive way. Bush agreed. On the morning of October 3, with the United States implementing the roadblock “exercise,” the Giroldi group reported from the Comandancia that they were holding Noriega captive but were looking for an honorable way for him to remain in Panama. The U.S. command wanted to take Noriega into custody and told those now in control to deliver

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him to U.S. military headquarters. But the coup leaders refused to turn him over. That afternoon, while Cheney and Powell were deliberating whether to ask Bush for authority to order General Thurman to employ U.S. forces to go in and get Noriega, word was passed from the Comandancia that the coup had failed. Elite PDF units, not dependent on the blocked road for access to the Comandancia, had been able to storm the building and rescue their leader. Noriega soon appeared on television condemning the coup and naming the United States as co-conspirator.6 White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater quickly tried to distance the president from the failed coup. He issued a statement claiming that the administration lacked advance warning, had only heard “rumblings,” and had “not been directly informed.” If the administration was in fact informed before the plotters moved, “the President doesn’t know about it, the Secretary of State doesn’t know about and the Secretary of Defense doesn’t know about it,” he averred.7 But Fitzwater could not protect the president from charges that he had let a golden opportunity slip away. In defending himself, Bush invoked his favorite decision-making concept—prudence: What . . . some people seemed to have wanted me to do is to unleash the full military and go in and—quote—get Noriega. . . . But . . . what could a Commander in Chief have done? I supposed you could have gone to general quarters. But that’s not prudent and that’s not the way I plan to conduct the military or foreign affairs of this country.8

And when asked if he would be inclined to use force more rapidly the next time, he replied, “I wouldn’t mind using force if it could be done in a prudent manner.” He was absolutely determined to get Noriega out, he insisted, but he was not going to give a “carte blanche commitment” of U.S. forces to support the next coup. “I have at stake the life of American kids, and I am not going to easily thrust them into a battle unless I feel comfortable with it and unless those general officers in whom I have total confidence feel comfortable.”9 The failed October coup and Bush’s explanation for the passive U.S. role elicited bipartisan congressional criticism—much of it implying that a “wimp” factor in the White House resulted in the missed opportunity. Conservative columnist George Will published a column titled “An Unserious Presidency.”10 The president resolved not to let Noriega slip his grasp again. He was not to be disappointed.

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OPERATION JUST CAUSE After having foiled the October 1989 coup, Noriega declared himself “maximum leader.” But aware that the U.S. government was now hatching schemes to capture him and bring him to the United States for trial, he ordered increased surveillance of U.S. citizens, using roadblocks, arbitrary searches, and interrogations. The killing of a U.S. serviceman at one of these roadblocks set off the crisis Bush needed to justify thrusting “American kids into battle” in Panama. On the night of December 16, 1989, a car carrying four off-duty U.S. servicemen made a wrong turn on a street near PDF headquarters and came upon a PDF roadblock. After PDF soldiers, with weapons drawn, tried to pull the U.S. servicemen from their car, the Americans tried to speed away. But the PDF opened fire, fatally wounding one. This confrontation was witnessed by a U.S. Navy lieutenant and his wife who had been detained at the same roadblock. Immediately after the shooting, the couple were blindfolded and taken to PDF headquarters, where the lieutenant was beaten and his wife was sexually threatened. They were released about 2 a.m. The lieutenant returned to the U.S. naval station and reported the incident. All of this was relayed to Washington, where it was immediately passed up to the highest levels. Cheney and Powell, particularly in light of recent statements by Noriega that Panama was in a “state of war” with the United States, agreed that military intervention was justified as there was now a clear and present danger to U.S. personnel in Panama. Meeting with President Bush on December 17, they recommended the activation of contingency plan Blue Spoon contemplating the use of 24,000 U.S. troops to overwhelm the 16,000 PDF, only 3,500 of whom were assumed to be combat capable. The president wanted to know why Noriega could not be captured with a smaller operation. General Powell explained that unless the PDF were destroyed, Noriega would simply be replaced by another PDF leader. The secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft all supported this assessment, and the president signed an order authorizing armed forces to apprehend and arrest Noriega and other Panamanians currently under indictment in the United States for drug-related offenses. Renamed “Just Cause,” the operation was publicly defined as being required to protect the lives of U.S. citizens and bring democracy to

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Panama. To satisfy international law and Latin American sensitivity to intervention, the winner of the May elections, Guillermo Endera, officially requested U.S. help. Endera would be secretly sworn in as president of Panama just before the invasion.11 Speaking from the Oval Office on the morning of December 20, the president informed the nation that U.S. forces, including new deployments from the United States, were engaged in action in Panama. “No President takes such action lightly,” he said, but there were compelling reasons: Last Friday, Noriega declared his military dictatorship to be in a state of war with the United States and publicly threatened the lives of Americans in Panama. The very next day, forces under his command shot and killed an unarmed American serviceman; wounded another; arrested and brutally beat a third American serviceman; and then brutally interrogated his wife, threatening her with sexual abuse. That was enough. General Noriega’s reckless threats and attacks upon Americans in Panama created an imminent danger to the 35,000 American citizens in Panama. As President I have no higher obligation than to safeguard the lives of American citizens.12

There had been some loss of life, said Bush, to soldiers on both sides and to innocent civilians. Fortunately, the key military objectives had already been achieved, and most organized resistance eliminated. But the operation was not yet a total success, Bush conceded, because General Noriega was still in hiding. The mission of subduing pro-Noriega units of the PDF, successfully completed in two days, had been as intense as it was rapid. Over 400 bombs were dropped on Panama City, some delivered by the new Stealth bomber. U.S. helicopters disgorged combat teams firing automatic rifles. Tanks rolled through the streets, demolishing wooden structures in poor barrios. According to the U.S. Southern Command’s (Southcom) initial casualty estimates, the military deaths were 314 Panamanians and 23 U.S. troops, with the wounded about ten times those numbers. Southcom’s report of 202 Panamanian civilians dead was contradicted by later news reports of thousands of civilian deaths (there was never a final official U.S. accounting of the civilian casualties).13 After an additional two weeks of anxiety in the White House, Noriega surrendered at the residence of the papal nuncio in Panama City. Noriega, armed with two AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, had entered the nunciature

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on December 24, evidently hoping for asylum and help from the church in arranging for his safe passage out of the country. U.S. troops surrounded the building in assault formations. From December 24 until January 3, Generals Thurman and Carl Stiner (the Joint Task Force commander) negotiated with the papal nuncio on arrangements for releasing Noriega into their custody and on the rules of military engagement should Noriega become violent inside the nunciature. To prevent eavesdropping on the negotiations, General Thurman ordered his troops to blast heavy-metal rock music at the nunciature (journalists at first thought they were witness to a unique form of psychological warfare). Noriega evidently felt he had been tricked into a humiliating surrender, for when he emerged from the building on January 3 in full military dress and was manhandled by the U.S. troops as if he were an ordinary criminal, he started shouting curses at the papal nuncio.14 Bush’s sweet taste of personal victory, however, could not compensate for the loss of international respect the United States incurred in acting, once again, as a self-appointed policeman in Latin America. On December 29, a UN General Assembly resolution stated that it: 1. Strongly deplores the intervention in Panama by the armed forces of the United States of America, which constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of States; 2. Demands the immediate cessation of the intervention and the withdrawal from Panama of the armed invasion forces of the United States.15

El Salvador was the only Latin American country to vote against the resolution (which passed by a vote of 75 to 20, with 40 abstentions) beside the U.S.-installed Panamanian government. Within the administration there were second thoughts about whether the deaths, destruction, and diplomatic costs of Just Cause, had been fully justified by the presumed threat to U.S. interests. Pentagon analysts admitted in internal assessments that the canal could have been easily defended by U.S. forces already in the canal zone. Bush, remorseful at the destruction to civilian areas in Panama City, announced a special $1 billion aid package to “repair the wounds, repair the damage” to civilian areas in Panama City.16 Months later, the hope for significant domestic reform in a post-Noriega Panama were fading. The drug trade had revived. Former

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members of Noriega’s PDF were again in positions of influence in the domestic police force. And anti-U.S. sentiment was greater than it had been before the invasion.17

DEALING WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN As Saddam Hussein escalated his verbal threats and deployed his forces on the Kuwaiti border in late July 1990, President Bush and other U.S. officials communicated their concerns in bland language couched in reassurances that the geopolitical interests the United States shared with Iraq in the region still constituted the controlling reality for Washington. Saddam’s impression that the United States considered Iraq a geopolitical partner had been nurtured in Washington throughout the 1980s. The common view among U.S. strategists was that Iraq’s September 1980 reopening of its war with Iran had been the crucial determinant of Tehran’s decision to settle the embassy hostage conflict with the United States. With the Khomeini regime in Tehran having become Washington’s new bête noire in the Middle East, the U.S. government did what it could to assure that Iraq would win its war with Iran and emerge from that war in a superior economic and military position. In 1982, the Department of State removed Iraq from its list of terrorist countries so it could qualify for U.S. aid and credits. In 1984 full diplomatic relations (severed in the 1950s when Iraq became a Soviet client state) were reestablished between Washington and Baghdad. The White House encouraged its allies to sell Iraq conventional arms and high-technology equipment that Saddam used to develop ballistic missiles and chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. A dramatic indication of how determined the Reagan administration was to secure Iraq as a counterweight to Iran was the mild reaction by the White House to the mistaken launching of a missile from an Iraqi jet aircraft against the USS Stark (which killed thirty-seven U.S. sailors and nearly sunk the ship). By the time of George Bush’s inauguration in 1989, trade between the United States and Iraq had grown to $3.6 billion a year. Despite allegations that Iraqi forces had used chemical warfare against the secessionist Kurds, reports of the worsening human rights situation in Iraq, and growing suspicions during 1989 that Iraq was attempting to develop nuclear weapons, President Bush resisted congressional efforts to get tough with Saddam Hussein. In January 1990 Bush signed an executive order certifying that it

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would be against the national interest of the United States to halt ExportImport Bank loans to Iraq.18 The developing cordiality in U.S. relations with Iraq was temporarily interrupted in April 1990, when Saddam threatened that in a renewed war with Israel he would use chemical weapons that would “eat up” half of Israel. High U.S. officials expressed dismay, and a State Department spokesperson called Saddam’s remarks irresponsible and outrageous. But relations were put back on track by a delegation to Baghdad of farm-state congressmen and senators headed by Robert Dole. They assured Saddam of their support of the president’s desire for friendly relations between the two countries (Iraq was the ninth largest customer for U.S. agricultural products). When Iraq began to openly threaten military action against Kuwait in mid-July 1990, the reaction of the Bush administration was ambiguous at best. Secretary of Defense Cheney told reporters on July 19 that American commitments made during the Iran-Iraq war to come to Kuwait’s defense were still valid; and on July 23, the administration ordered its naval vessels in the region to engage in joint exercises with the United Arab Emirates. But on July 24, Department of State spokesperson Margaret Tutwiler told reporters that “we do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.” In Baghdad, Saddam summoned U.S. ambassador April Glaspie for an interview in which the Iraqi president outlined his grievances with Kuwait, and the ambassador, following instructions from Secretary of State James Baker, assured Saddam that “we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”19 The Baker instruction to Glaspie reportedly asked her to remind the Iraqis that the United States would regard the use of force as “contrary to the U.N. Charter principles,” but there is no evidence that she said this to Saddam during her interview.20 Two days later, with intelligence agencies reporting a huge buildup of Iraqi troops just across the border from Kuwait, President Bush sent a mildly worded cable to Saddam emphasizing his desire for improved relations and advising that Iraq’s disputes with Kuwait be resolved peaceably. Defense Department officials tried to toughen up the tepid presidential message, but to no avail. Only three paragraphs long, the cable as dispatched read: I was pleased to learn of the agreement between Iraq and Kuwait to begin negotiations in Jedda to find a peaceful solution to the current tensions between you. The United States and Iraq both have a strong interest in preserving the peace and stability of the Middle East. For this reason,

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we believe that differences are best resolved by peaceful means and not by threats involving military force or conflict. I also welcome your statement that Iraq desires friendship, rather than confrontation with the United States. Let me reassure you, as my Ambassador, Senator Dole, and others have done, that my administration continues to desire better relations with Iraq. We will also continue to support our other friends in the region with whom we have had long-standing ties. We see no necessary inconsistency between these two objectives. As you know, we still have fundamental concerns about certain Iraqi policies and activities, and we will continue to raise these concerns with you in a spirit of friendship and candor, as we have in the past both to gain a better understanding of your interests and intentions and to ensure that you understand our concerns. I completely agree that both our Governments must maintain open channels of communication to avoid misunderstanding and in order to build a more durable foundation for improving our relations.21

On July 31, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, John Kelly, testifying before the Middle East subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was asked about Secretary of Defense Cheney’s July 19 statement to reporters about U.S. commitments to Kuwait. Secretary Kelly’s answer must have reassured Saddam: “I’m not familiar with the quotation that you just referred to, but I am confident in the administration’s policy on the issue: We have no defense relationship with any Gulf country. This is clear.” Kelly was pressed by the committee chairman to clarify what the U.S. policy would be in the event that “Iraq, for example, charged across the border into Kuwait . . . In that circumstance . . . is [it] correct to say . . . that we do not have a treaty commitment which would obligate us to engage U.S. forces there?” The secretary confirmed that the United States did not have a treaty commitment to cover that circumstance.22 The very next evening (1:00 a.m. August 2, 1990, in the Persian Gulf), two of Saddam’s Republican Guard armored divisions slashed into Kuwait followed by 1,800 tanks and 140,000 troops. By the end of the next day Kuwait was under the control of Iraq. Secretary of State Baker, in the Soviet Union conferring with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, got the Soviets to cooperate with the United States in pushing a resolution through the UN Security Council at 6 a.m. on August 2 condemning the invasion and demanding “that Iraq withdraw immediately and unconditionally all its forces to the positions in which they were located on 1 August 1990.”23

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THE COMMITMENT TO REVERSE IRAQ’S AGGRESSION The Bush administration had been caught completely off guard by news of the invasion. Before convening the National Security Council (NSC) early on August 2, the president told reporters that he did not believe the Iraqi move into Kuwait threatened other countries and that he was not contemplating intervention. But in the NSC meeting a more ominous interpretation was put on the events in the Gulf region: By taking over Kuwait, Saddam Hussein now controlled one-fifth of the world’s oil reserves, and this would be doubled if Iraq also conquered Saudi Arabia. At a minimum, Saddam would have to be blocked from crossing over into Saudi territory. The president asked for military options. The chairman of the JCS, Colin Powell, contended that if U.S. force were to be used, the best option would indeed be to defend the Saudi border with Kuwait. The president, however, indicated that he was not at all comfortable with accepting the occupation of Kuwait as a fait accompli.24 In Aspen, Colorado, on the evening of August 2 to attend a meeting on international affairs with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher among others, Bush’s public stance stiffened. He talked of Iraq’s “naked aggression” and told the press that “we are not ruling any options in, but we are not ruling any options out.”25 And when he returned to Washington a few days later, he promised, “This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.” He was determined “to reverse” it, he told reporters on the White House lawn. Then on August 6, buoyed by UN Security Council resolutions condemning the invasion and mandating comprehensive economic sanctions against Iraq, and standing at the White House side by side with Prime Minister Thatcher and NATO secretary general Manfred Woerner, the president said that he was “ruling out nothing at all” when it came to implementing the sanctions. “These things will be enforced, whatever it takes.”26 But in announcing the deployment of U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia on August 8, Bush was careful to delimit their mission to the “wholly defensive” one of deterring an attack on Saudi Arabia. “They will not initiate hostilities,” he said. It “is not the mission to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait.” While the “overall objective” remained to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, the “military objective is to see Saudi Arabia defended.”27 Within the NSC there was great skepticism that economic and diplomatic sanctions alone could convince Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait; the view was that sooner or later he would have to be driven out by military

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force—or at best a credible threat to use military force. Those arguing for war preparations felt confirmed in their prognosis when on August 8, hours before Bush’s public revelation of the decision to send U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia, Saddam’s Revolutionary Command Council announced that the merger of Iraq and Kuwait was accomplished and irrevocable. Operating from the premise that the United States might well have to go to war against Iraq to liberate Kuwait, the administration pursued a three-pronged political strategy over the next few months, consisting of 1. efforts to gain UN legitimation for the use of force against Iraq; 2. efforts to internationalize the military operation against Iraq without constraining U.S. combat effectiveness or flexibility while getting other countries to join a U.S.-led military coalition; and 3. a campaign to generate popular support in the United States for punishing Saddam, so that Bush would have a free hand to order U.S. forces into action without congressional interference. The Bush-Baker campaign to obtain UN resolutions condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and to generate international support for possible military operations focused on Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s immense international popularity at the time as well as the Soviet Union’s veto power in the Security Council made him a special target of the president’s efforts; his posture in the crisis would make a large difference in the kind of cooperation Washington could generate from other capitals and might even affect public attitudes in the United States toward the use of force in the Persian Gulf. Despite Bush’s considerable leverage with Gorbachev—the Soviet leader was in desperate need of Bush’s cooperation in obtaining international financial help for perestroika—Secretary Baker understood it could be counterproductive to pressure the Soviets to rubber stamp U.S. plans for dealing with Saddam. It would be enough at the outset to get Soviet support for an economic and weapons shipment embargo against their former client in Baghdad. To obtain this degree of Soviet cooperation, Baker reassured Shevardnadze on August 3 that Bush was not preparing to take unilateral military action against Iraq. The result was the U.S.Soviet statement of August 3, read aloud at the Moscow airport by Baker with Shevardnadze standing at his side, “jointly calling upon the rest of the international community to join with us in an international cutoff of all arms supplies to Iraq.”28

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Soviet and U.S. diplomats at the United Nations worked together to formulate the Security Council resolution of August 6 instructing all members of the United Nations to cooperate in a comprehensive embargo on Iraq’s oil exports and its export and import of other goods. Resolution 661—the most severe set of economic sanctions ever voted by the United Nations—stated that all States shall prevent: (a) The import into their territories of all commodities and products originating in Iraq or Kuwait or exported therefrom . . . ; (b) Any activities by their nationals or in their territories which would promote . . . the export or transshipment of any commodities or products from Iraq or Kuwait . . . ; (c) The sale or supply by their nationals or from their territories or using their flag vessels of any commodities or products, . . . but not including supplies intended strictly for medical purposes, and, in humanitarian circumstances, foodstuffs, to any person or body in Iraq or Kuwait.29

The embargo resolution was passed by a vote of 13 to 0, with only Cuba and Yemen abstaining. August 6, 1990, was also the day of Bush’s historic decision to undertake the Desert Shield deployment of U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia—now made possible by King Fahd’s agreement, which the royal family had been reluctant to give, to have a large and visible contingent of American troops on Saudi territory. Two days later, in announcing the dispatch of troops, the president claimed that their mission was “wholly defensive” and promised they “will not initiate hostilities.” Bush was not yet ready to define Iraq’s subjugation of Kuwait as sufficiently injurious to U.S. interests to warrant the use of military force to reverse it. This would only come after Saddam Hussein’s defiant insistence, despite UN resolutions and economic sanctions, that Kuwait was now permanently a part of Iraq. In the weeks immediately following the invasion, Bush’s threats to use U.S. force were restricted to the defense of Saudi Arabia, claiming that kingdom’s “sovereign independence . . . is of vital interest to the United States.” He talked of the crucial dependence of the U.S. economy on the region’s oil. “A line has been drawn in the sand,” he said. The troops were there to deter a move across the Saudi border.30

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Expecting the Soviets would oppose the deployment of U.S. forces into Saudi Arabia, Bush and Baker had refrained from consulting Gorbachev or Shevardnadze in advance. When Baker phoned Shevardnadze on the eve of the deployment, the irritated Soviet foreign minister proposed that the military units should be placed under the aegis of the United Nations— specifically the military staff committee of the Security Council. Baker knew this would be unacceptable to Bush since it would give the Soviets an effective veto of U.S. military operations; but to deflect Shevardnadze’s resentment, he promised to raise the idea with the president.31 The Baker-Shevardnadze exchange fueled worries in the U.S. and British governments that there was already too much of an apparent commitment by Bush to work through the UN and that this could come back to haunt him in the event of actual U.S. combat operations (particularly an offensive attack into Kuwait) when maximum secrecy and flexibility were required. State Department legal experts, however, pointed out that the United States could maintain flexibility for any unilateral military actions Bush might authorize by obtaining a request from the emir of Kuwait for U.S. military help under Article 51 of the UN Charter—the “self-defense” article—rather than defining the U.S. military operations as “collective security” actions (Articles 41 through 47), subject to direction and control from the Security Council. The U.S. diplomatic strategy henceforth was directed toward (1) securing a permissive mandate from the United Nations for the United States to use whatever means were necessary—including military action—to enforce the embargo and collateral UN resolutions demanding Saddam’s unconditional withdrawal of his forces and (2) obtaining commitments from as many countries as possible to join or financially support a U.S.led military operation to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Security Council Resolution 665 of August 25 authorized member states to use their maritime forces to ensure compliance with the economic embargo on Iraq established by Resolution 661. The maritime measures could include those “necessary . . . to halt all inward and outward maritime shipping in order to inspect and verify their cargoes and destinations.”32 Once again, the vote was 13 to 0 with Cuba and Yemen again abstaining. To placate the Soviets and Chinese, a direct reference to “minimum force” was deleted from the final text, and the phrase “with maximum use of political measures” was substituted.33 Bush and Baker were determined to avoid the pitfall of turning the anti-Saddam coalition into a predominantly NATO or “Western” grouping

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that would be seen as anti-Arab, anti-Islamic—which indeed was the way Iraqi propaganda was trying to portray the conflict in radio broadcasts to Arab masses throughout the region. Such a polarized definition of the conflict would not only discourage governments in the area from providing important basing, logistics, and communications support for the U.S. military buildup in the Gulf, but it would also make it virtually impossible to enforce the UN sanctions. The task of inducing other Middle Eastern governments to join the coalition, or at least remain neutral, turned out to be easier than the White House expected, as Saddam had managed to severely alienate most of his neighbors over time. And within the previous year or so, with the Soviets no longer creating and actively sustaining Middle Eastern clients, even the region’s traditionally anti-Western governments were prepared to accept U.S. action against Saddam Hussein. In addition to Saudi Arabia, the most crucial players in the regional power alignment would be Egypt, Syria, Iran, Jordan, and Israel. Each had its own set of considerations, which the Bush administration— concentrating on the imperative of organizing a balance of power against Iraq—tried to take into account. For Egypt, joining the anti-Iraq coalition involved a reversal of President Hosni Mubarak’s policy during the 1980s. Mubarak had provided Saddam with military supplies and economic support during the IranIraq war, and in return Saddam had been the main champion of Egypt’s reacceptance into the councils of Arab statecraft from which it had been excluded in reaction to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979. Mubarak felt personally betrayed, however, by Saddam’s violation of his pledges in the spring and summer of 1990 not to attack Kuwait (Mubarak had previously represented Saddam’s grievances and intentions toward Kuwait as understandable and deserving of negotiations).34 The Egyptian president, now embarrassed and furious, was a ready participant in the coalition being formed by Bush; but he was adamant that Israel be kept out of the coalition and that Bush commit himself to putting new pressures on Israel after the current crisis to adhere to its promises to negotiate political autonomy for the Palestinians. Putting aside Syrian president Hafez al-Assad’s terrible record on human rights and his notorious sponsorship of international terrorists, Bush and Baker were keen to exploit the long-standing and bitter rivalry between Assad and Saddam for pan-Arab leadership. According Syria a prominent role in the coalition would give the lie to the Iraqi dictator’s claim that his

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confrontation with the United States over Kuwait was the latest expression of the historic clash between Arab nationalism and Western imperialism. “It is very important,” Bush explained publicly, “that we cooperate with a major Arab country who happens to share the same goals that we do . . . on this very, very important issue.”35 Personal phone calls to President Assad from President Bush and visits to Damascus by high State Department officials, including Secretary Baker, produced a diplomatic initiative by Assad committing the Arab League to deploy an inter-Arab force, including some 15,000 Syrian troops, to Saudi Arabia. The Syrians also helped convince Iran (which Syria had supported in the Iran-Iraq war) to resist Saddam’s efforts to now ally with him against the Americans, the Saudis, and the Israelis. King Hussein of Jordan proved particularly difficult to deal with. Presiding over a population of ethnic Palestinians among whom Saddam was wildly popular, and over a weak economy highly dependent upon trade with Iraq, the normally pro-Western monarch was determined to keep out of the anti-Iraq coalition. From the outset of the crisis, the king offered himself as a mediator and tried to convince other regional leaders to effectuate an “Arab solution” instead of allowing the United States and its allies to re-impose a “Western imperial presence” in the region. He shuttled from capital to capital (including Washington) with various peace plans—essentially formulae for phasing Iraqi military withdrawals from Kuwait with the territorial and economic issues that were in dispute before the invasion. But the White House was totally opposed. Negotiations with Saddam could only take place, Bush insisted, following Iraq’s complete and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. Anything else would be “to reward aggression.” The White House and the State Department tried to deflect the impact of King Hussein’s mediation efforts. But they quickly realized that the Jordanian monarch’s role in any event would be marginal, for his credentials for state-managing regional diplomacy had lost credibility over the years and, especially with every country in the region trying to enhance its own post–Cold War relations with the United States, carried very little weight with the other Arab leaders. The role to be played by Israel was vexing to the Bush administration from the outset, as it would continue to be for most of the war. One of Saddam’s principal stratagems for sabotaging Washington’s efforts to include key Arab states in the coalition was to link the conflict to ArabIsraeli issues. Hoping to provoke a visible Washington-Jerusalem embrace (and later, through his Scud missile attacks, to provoke Israel’s entry into

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the war), Saddam also demanded a comprehensive “peace negotiation” encompassing a wide range of the region’s unresolved disputes, including preeminently the future of the Palestinians. Thus, on August 12, Saddam called for a resolution of the crisis by dealing with issues of “occupation” throughout the entire region. This would require a comprehensive regional agreement providing for “the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as the withdrawal of Syria, and the withdrawal of Iraq and Iran.” These outstanding issues should be settled in sequence, that is, as a precondition for the settlement of the situation in Kuwait, which should take into consideration “the historic rights of Iraq to its territory and the choice of the Kuwaiti people.”36 One of Secretary Baker’s recurrent tasks during the next eight months was to dissuade members of the coalition from granting the legitimacy of such attempts to link (and to establish a moral equation between) Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It also involved waylaying Gorbachev’s attempt to retrieve the Soviet Union’s flagging influence in the Middle East by championing the idea of a general peace conference where Iraq’s subjugation of Kuwait would be, in Shevardnadze’s words, “one of several highly complex, interlocking problems.”37 At the September 9 meeting between Bush and Gorbachev at Helsinki, the U.S. secretary of state and the Soviet foreign minister and their respective Middle Eastern experts worked behind the scenes to remove from the public communiqué any explicit calls for comprehensive multiple-issue Middle East negotiations in exchange for a secret promise by Bush to support such an international conference following the resolution of the current crisis over Kuwait.38 The Bush-Baker diplomacy toward America’s other coalition partners was also careful to respect their various situations and definitions of national interest. The West Europeans and the Japanese had their own legacies of dealings with countries in the Middle East (France, for example, was Iraq’s second largest military supplier next to the Soviet Union). Visible token military deployments from coalition partners were symbolically important, but in fact the U.S. military commanders were just as pleased to be able to run the show mainly with their own personnel and equipment— without having to deal with the tangled problems of command and control that substantial foreign military contributions would entail. From Germany and Japan, both constitutionally restricted from direct military

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participation, the Bush administration made it clear that it expected substantial financial contributions to help countries in the Middle East being economically hurt by the boycott of Iraq and to relieve the drain on the U.S. budget caused by the military operations. Although the president and his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft had concluded in the first week of the crisis that the United States would probably need to use major military force to reverse Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait, the Pentagon needed time to organize and put in place the military capabilities needed. This required Bush to modulate his rhetoric in the interim, lest he provoke Saddam to attack the Desert Shield forces in Saudi Arabia before the local military balance shifted drastically against Iraq. Such an early attack by Iraqi forces against the outnumbered and still underequipped U.S. forces in the Saudi desert could inflict levels of casualties on U.S. troops that would divide the American public and perhaps make it impossible for Bush to persist in his determination to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. In August, the Iraqi government prevented U.S. citizens and other foreigners from leaving Kuwait and Iraq—in effect, holding them as hostages to compel a lifting of the economic embargo and, even more starkly, as “human shields” at strategic sites to dissuade the United States and its allies from launching military attacks. The Iraqis also demanded that all countries close their embassies in Kuwait since it was no longer a sovereign state. The United States was among the countries that refused and ordered their embassy personnel to stay put. Another hostage crisis loomed. Saddam played his hostage card for its effects on public opinion in the West, inviting the media to interview the hostages in comfortable hotel accommodations. The administration tried to keep the names of the American hostages from the press and to minimize the publicity. As it turned out, however, the hostage ploy backfired on Saddam by undercutting whatever sympathy for the plight of the economically squeezed Iraqis he had been trying to generate. At the end of August, he announced that all foreign women and children were free to leave. Over succeeding weeks, the hostage issue was further defused as each of a succession of dignitaries from Willy Brandt to Jesse Jackson was allowed to leave the country with some of the captives. (The remaining hostages were released in late November and early December.) In October 1990, Bush had set in motion the Pentagon planning that would give the U.S. military an offensive option against Iraq, and by the

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end of the month he had approved the basic scenario that would be implemented the following January and February. Asserting the objectives of “complete and unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait . . . and restoration of security and stability in the Persian Gulf region,” Bush announced on November 8: I have today directed the Secretary of Defense to increase the size of U.S. forces committed to Desert Shield to ensure that the coalition has an adequate offensive military option should that be necessary to achieve our common goals.39

The term “offensive military option” was chosen with care, and the president would not allow reporters to push him into revealing that he had already decided for war. When asked “Are you going to war?,” his response was evasive: “I would love to see a peaceful resolution . . . [but] I don’t want to say what I will or will not do.”40 Up to November 8, there had been solid public and congressional support for Bush’s expressed determination to take a stand against the Iraqi aggression. Influential members of both political parties and editorials in the major newspapers endorsed the deployment and stated mission of the Desert Shield forces. Suddenly, however—with the addition of the “offensive option”—the consensus broke, especially as the huge number of troops (over 200,000) in the augmentation were revealed. Defense specialists critical of the apparent abrupt change in strategy, including Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn, pointed out that maintaining the new Desert Shield level of over 400,000 troops would preclude rotating a significant portion of them in and out of the Saudi desert; this meant that the offensive option would have to be used within the next few months: the military tail was now wagging the political dog. But the decision to violently force Saddam out of Kuwait was the president’s considered political decision. Other critics testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee at the end of November faulted the administration for not giving economic coercion enough time to work before resorting to military force. Among these were Paul Nitze, James Schlesinger, and two former chairmen of the JCS, General David Jones and Admiral William Crowe Jr. Crowe’s admonitions against rushing into war were widely televised. The issue, he said, “is not whether an embargo will work but whether we have the patience

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to let it take effect.” The U.S. was letting its dislike for Saddam crowd out other considerations, “selling our country short by jumping to the conclusion that we can’t stare down our opponent.” The be-medaled admiral chided the “armchair strategists” who were counseling a near-term attack on Iraq for forgetting that “War is not neat . . . And once you resort to it, it’s a mess.”41 In the face of the intensifying domestic debate, Bush and Baker sought another UN resolution to give international legitimacy to the president’s decision. State Department lawyers once again advised that it was unnecessary to obtain the Security Council’s imprimatur: the United States could do all it wanted under the self-defense clause in Article 51. And Margaret Thatcher continued to counsel against the precedent of seeking approval from countries like Russia and China, which might hesitate to actually use force against an Arab client. But Bush hoped that with a special UN resolution authorizing the use of force to drive Saddam out of Kuwait, coalition members would be less likely to defect when the United States actually implemented its offensive option. The original U.S. draft of the UN resolution contained an explicit authorization to employ “all necessary means, including the use of force.” To assure the required majority in the Security Council, however, Secretary Baker settled for a more ambiguous yet sufficiently elastic wording. As passed on November 29, 1990 (with only Cuba and Yemen voting no, and China abstaining), Resolution 678 stated that Iraq was being given a sixteen-day “pause of goodwill” in which to implement the standing Security Council demands that it withdraw from Kuwait and that if it had not done so by January 15, 1991, “Member States” were authorized “to use all necessary means to uphold and implement” the resolutions.42 The phrase “as a pause of goodwill” as well as the deadline of January 15 (Bush wanted January 1) were concessions to Gorbachev’s desire to allow Saddam to reconsider whether holding on to Kuwait was worth a war with the United States.43 To solidify support from the Soviets and other countries and to deflect the growing domestic criticism that the president had prematurely locked the country into a collision course, Bush announced on November 30 (just one day after the passage of the deadline resolution) that he was sending Secretary of State Baker to talk directly with Saddam Hussein. The announcement and press conference, more than any other public statement, revealed the president’s thinking about why he had no alternative

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but to lead the nation into a war against Saddam Hussein. There was too much at stake: We’re in the Gulf because the world must not and cannot reward aggression. And we’re there because our vital interests are at stake. And we’re in the Gulf because of the brutality of Saddam Hussein. We’re dealing with a dangerous dictator all too willing to use force who has weapons of mass destruction and is seeking new ones and who desires to control one of the world’s key resources. . . . Our objectives remain what they were since the outset. We seek Iraq’s immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. We seek the restoration of Kuwait’s legitimate government. We seek the release of all hostages and the free functioning of embassies. And we seek the stability and security of this critical region of the world.

The president contended that it was futile to rely entirely on economic sanctions to achieve these objectives. Moreover, there were substantial costs to the coalition from continuing the embargo on Iraqi and Kuwait oil. “Those who feel that there is no downside to waiting months and months must consider the devastating damage being done every day to the fragile economies of those countries who can afford it least.” The United States too was being hurt by the increase in oil prices: “Our economy . . . is at best in a serious slowdown, and if uncertainty remains in the energy markets, the slowdown will get worse.” Bush insisted that no one wanted peace more than he did, and he remained hopeful that a peaceful resolution of the crisis could still be achieved. “But yesterday’s U.N. resolution . . . properly says to Saddam Hussein: Time is running out. You must leave Kuwait. And we’ve given you time to do just that.” Consistent with the terms of the Security Council’s mandate, and “to go the extra mile for peace,” said the president, I will issue an invitation to Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz to come to Washington . . . to meet with me. . . . And I will suggest to Iraq’s President that he receive the Secretary of State. . . . I will be prepared, and so will Secretary Baker, to discuss all aspects of the Gulf crisis. However, to be very clear about these efforts to exhaust all means for achieving a political and diplomatic solution, I am not suggesting discussion that will result in anything less than Iraq’s complete withdrawal from Kuwait, restoration of Kuwait’s legitimate government, and freedom for all hostages.44

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When reporters pressed the president to say whether anything would be offered Saddam in these meetings in return for pulling out of Kuwait, Bush simply reiterated, repeatedly, that the only acceptable outcome would be Iraq’s fulfillment of the terms of the UN mandate. What then was the point of the meeting, he was asked. “Are you just delivering ultimatums?” Bush rejected the word but then proceeded to make the proposed BakerSaddam meeting sound precisely like such a confrontation: “the best way to get that across is one on one—Baker looking him [Saddam] right in the eye . . . When you’ve done what he’s done, I don’t see there’s room for concession . . . for giving something [to him] to save face.”45 Despite such insistence, new alarms about Bush’s steadfastness were raised by those who believed that, obsessed with the lack of a firm domestic consensus for war, Bush might succumb to a partial concession from Saddam. Henry Kissinger publicly warned Bush against the temptation to compromise. Richard Perle, the former Reagan administration strategist, speculated that from Saddam’s point of view, a U.S. initiation of negotiations at this point might confirm the theory that Bush had a “tendency to buckle under pressure.”46 Israeli officials also expressed strong concerns, as did Saudi King Fahd who having allowed his country to host an embarrassingly large Western military presence, now hungered to be vindicated in a swift desert war to liberate his northern neighbor. In attempting to allay these fears, national security adviser Brent Scowcroft revealed what the administration was really up to. “Basically the President has made up his mind,” he told the Saudi ambassador. The diplomatic efforts were “all exercises.”47 As it turned out, the “extra mile” offer failed to take James Baker to Baghdad. Saddam agreed to meet with the American secretary of state, but not before January 12. Bush rejected the transparent ploy to extend the UN deadline by beginning “negotiations” just three days before its expiration. The final prewar meeting took place in Geneva on January 9 between Secretary Baker and Iraqi foreign minister Aziz. Baker attempted to deliver a direct letter to Saddam from President Bush. When Aziz saw that the letter was essentially an ultimatum (comprising a forecast of defeat for Saddam’s military and calamity for his country if he did not unconditionally relinquish his occupation of Kuwait), he refused to accept it. This bit of diplomatic theater was followed by a lengthy oral confrontation between Baker and Aziz in which both reiterated their set positions and exchanged warnings of the terrible destruction each would inflict in a war, including mutual threats of devastating retaliation in the event the other side used its weapons of mass destruction (WMD).48

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DESERT STORM AND ITS AFTERMATH Bush had all he required now to order U.S. forces into action against Iraq. He saw no need to ask the Congress for a declaration of war. The combination of the UN deadline resolution and his prerogatives as commander in chief would be sufficient. As head of state of a signatory country to the UN Charter, which had been duly approved by the Senate, Bush could claim to be already authorized by the Congress to use military force to implement a collective security decision of the Security Council—just as Truman did in the Korean War. As commander in chief, he had the duty to take military action to protect the U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia from being attacked, which he was prepared to claim was imminent in light of intelligence on Saddam’s buildup of Iraqi forces across the border in Kuwait. But Scowcroft and White House chief of staff John Sununu persuaded the president that he would be in a much stronger position internationally as well as domestically if he could get the House and Senate to give him the advance backing in this instance that the Congress gave Eisenhower in the Formosa Strait crisis and Johnson at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin crisis. Accordingly, on January 8, Bush formally sent letters to both houses of Congress requesting them to adopt a resolution authorizing his use of U.S. armed forces to compel Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. The day after the Baker-Aziz confrontation in Geneva, the congressional debate began on Bush’s request. The main arguments had already been well rehearsed. The president’s congressional supporters echoed his rhetoric demonizing Saddam as a madman armed with WMD, and predicting dire economic consequences from a perpetuation of the crisis. The opponents for the most part agreed that there was a compelling national interest to get Iraq out of Kuwait, but they argued for more time for economic sanctions and diplomatic pressures to bring Saddam to his senses before committing unpredictable numbers of American soldiers to die in a desert war of unpredictable duration. The joint congressional resolution the White House wanted was approved overwhelmingly in the House on January 12 by a vote of 250 to 183 (the majority included House Armed Services Committee chairman Les Aspin and 82 other Democrats), but in the Senate it carried by only three votes (with only 10 Democrats in favor). The preamble justifying the resort to force left the language of the White House draft virtually unchanged—citing Iraq’s unprovoked aggression and occupation of Kuwait; its defiance of the UN demands for unconditional withdrawal

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and the January 15 deadline; and Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and its “demonstrated willingness to use weapons of mass destruction.” The authorization section was somewhat more assertive of continuing congressional monitoring than Bush preferred: (a) Authorization—The President is authorized, subject to subsection (b), to use United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) in order to achieve implementation of Security Council Resolutions 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, and 677. (b) Requirements for determination that use of force is necessary—Before exercising the authority granted in subsection (a), the President shall make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that (1) the United States has used all appropriate diplomatic and other peaceful means to obtain compliance by Iraq with the United Nations Security Council resolutions cited in subsection (a); and (2) that those efforts have not been and would not be successful in obtaining such compliance.49

Upon signing the resolution on January 14, Bush stated that “my request for congressional support did not, and my signing this resolution does not, constitute any change in the long-standing positions of the executive branch on the president’s constitutional authority to use the Armed Forces to defend vital U.S. interests.” The next day, January 15, 1991, with the expiration of the UN deadline, the president signed the national security directive authorizing the execution of war plans he had approved at the end of December. The directive was transmuted by Secretary of Defense Cheney and JCS Chairman Powell into operational orders to General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the U.S. central command for the Middle East and Southwest Asia. On January 16 Desert Shield became Desert Storm.50 In his address to the nation on the night of January 16, Bush held Saddam personally responsible for the terrible destruction that U.S. bombers had already started to rain on Iraq, claiming that the Iraqi tyrant had “systematically raped, pillaged, and plundered a tiny nation” and “maimed and murdered . . . innocent children.” Moreover, he had met every overture of peace with open contempt. “No president can easily commit our sons and daughters to war,” said Bush. But he wanted to reassure the American

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people that “this will not be another Vietnam. . . . Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world and they will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back.” Moreover, U.S. troops would be sent into battle knowing that they were helping the United States, once again, to do something great: This is an historic moment. . . . We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the rule of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful—and we will be—we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the UN’s founders.

The president quoted a U.S. paratrooper in Saudi Arabia as saying: “We’re here for more than just the price of a gallon of gas. What we’re doing is going to chart the future of the world for the next hundred years.”51 The “new world order” was added to the rationale for using force to help mobilize support for the changeover from Desert Shield to Desert Storm. But like the other add-ons to the objective of extracting Iraq from Kuwait— disarming Iraq of its WMD, offensive missiles, and capacity to launch any further aggression; punishing Saddam for his aggression; getting the Iraqis to depose him from power—it only created confusion on the part of the military and public alike about the ultimate mission of the U.S. forces. Bush devolved the primary responsibility onto Cheney, Powell, and Schwarzkopf for devising and carrying out the military missions necessary to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Most of the military actions during the forty-four days of Desert Storm were publicly justified as necessary for accomplishing this overriding objective as quickly as possible with a minimum of U.S. casualties. The unrelenting and withering bombing of Saddam’s military forces and military-related infrastructure—both in Iraq and in Kuwait—were designed not only to hobble Iraq’s ability to hold on to Kuwait against the forthcoming coalition ground attack, but also to drive home to Saddam that the longer he persisted the less he would be left with to sustain his power within Iraq. Bush’s most controversial decision of the war, his ordering Schwarzkopf to institute a cease-fire on February 27 (the fourth day of the massive ground assault into Kuwait), thereby allowing major elements of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard with their tanks and helicopter gunships to be pulled back deeply into Iraq, was portrayed as the result of the president’s determination to avoid an

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unnecessary climactic battle that would have multiplied U.S. casualties. (The final U.S. casualties were 148 killed and 849 wounded.) The actual reasons for the way the war was conducted and terminated were more complex than was suggested throughout the crisis by the administration’s rhetoric. Indeed, Brent Scowcroft was reportedly at odds with the president from the outset of the crisis on the consequences of branding Saddam a Hitler. He worried that Bush’s verbal attacks on his enemy would create public enthusiasm that might later trap Bush into driving on to Baghdad.52 Feeling betrayed by Saddam, Bush wanted to get rid of him—but not through an American invasion and occupation of Iraq (no more Vietnamtype quagmires), nor through bringing about full-scale insurrections by the Shiites and Kurds (creating a Lebanon-type cauldron that would tempt intervention by Iran). The White House hoped that the punishment inflicted on Iraq proper would stimulate a “palace revolt” among Baghdad’s military and political elite, disillusioned and angry with Saddam for stupidly bringing such a humiliating calamity on the country. Yet Bush’s rhetoric, for example, his February 15 plea to the people of Iraq to “take matters into their own hands to force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside,” continued to stimulate domestic hunger for a dramatic finale. Privately, Bush kept his cool. He called a cease-fire at the end of February not simply to avoid having to occupy Iraq militarily, but also to avoid the total collapse of a viable Iraqi state able to balance Iranian power—the original motive for Washington’s courtship of Baghdad after the Iranian revolution. Instead of completely smashing Saddam’s elite legions and forcing him out of power, Bush settled for Iraq’s acceptance of harsh cease-fire terms that subjected the country to an unprecedented degree of imposed disarmament and intrusive international control. The cease-fire terms, incorporated in Security Council Resolution 687 (April 3, 1991), included the requirements that Iraq unconditionally accept the destruction, removal and rendering harmless, under international supervision, of: (a) all chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents; and related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities; (b) all ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers and related major parts, and repair and production facilities. . . . [and] that Iraq shall unconditionally agree not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons or

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nuclear weapons-usable material . . . or components or . . . research, development, support or manufacturing facilities. . . . [and] to accept . . . urgent, on-site inspection and the destruction, removal, and rendering harmless of all [these] items.53

These disarmament requirements were supplemented by additional demands in Resolution 688, passed on April 5, that the government of Iraq cease the military repression of its civilian population in the Kurdish and Shiite areas and that it allow immediate access by international humanitarian organizations to all those in need of assistance.54 Resolution 688 was as far as Bush wanted to go to intervene in Iraq’s political affairs after the conclusion of the Gulf War—a considerable backtracking from his wartime encouragement of the people of Iraq to overthrow the Saddam dictatorship. Despite the fact that Bush’s earlier rhetoric was a major stimulus to the rebellions that broke out in the Kurdish and Shiite areas in March—a fact that critical editorial writers were now waving in his face—Bush insisted that his remarks about the people of Iraq throwing out Saddam had been misinterpreted. He had never implied that the United States would assist them militarily. It was important now to get humanitarian aid to the people of Iraq. “But I do not want one single soldier or airman shoved into a civil war that has been going on for ages.” His consistent position, he claimed, was that the United States was not going to intervene militarily in Iraq’s internal affairs and risk being drawn into a quagmire.55 The reasons for the controversial strategic decision—condemned by Margaret Thatcher, among others 56—not to march on to Baghdad are candidly revealed by Bush and Scowcroft in their joint memoir of their four years in the White House: Critics claim that we encouraged the separatist Shi’ites and Kurds to rebel and then reneged on a promise to aid them if they did so. President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people, . . . but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that a popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the United States nor the countries in the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have . . . incurred incalculable human and political costs. . . . We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.

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The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. . . . Furthermore, we had been selfconsciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post–Cold War world. . . . Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivable still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.57

But public outrage at the Saddam’s brutal slaughter of the Kurds prompted the Senate to pass, on April 11, a resolution stating that the United States had a “moral obligation” to help the United Nations enforce its demands that Saddam stop repressing the civilian population of Iraq. Responding to these pressures, and accepting the suggestions of the new British prime minister, John Major, Bush agreed to have some 5,000 U.S. troops join British, French, and Dutch military units in northern Iraq to secure “safe havens” (special encampments) for the Kurds where they would be free from attacks by Saddam’s forces and could receive food and medical help from relief agencies. The coalition also indicated that it was prepared to enforce “no-fly zones” above the thirty-sixth parallel and below the thirty-second parallel to prevent Saddam from using helicopters and other aircraft to harass the Kurdish and Shiite communities. All of this, Bush insisted, was “purely humanitarian,” and did not contradict his determination to refrain from intervening in the internal political affairs of Iraq. But at the same time he continued to insist that “the most important thing . . . is to get Saddam Hussein out of there”—removed from power in Baghdad.58 During the 1992 presidential election congressional Democrats alleged that the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture had cooperated with private banks to finance prohibited Iraqi military purchases out of credits that were supposed to have been restricted to purchases of agricultural commodities. Not only did these new allegations, and the administration’s attempt to rebut them, highlight the extent to which Reagan and Bush had assisted Saddam in the years prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but they called attention, once again, to the fact that more than a year after the cease-fire Saddam still ruled in Baghdad and was arrogantly acting in defiance of some of the terms of the cease-fire accords. By all accounts, Bush was sorely tempted to inflict additional punishment on Saddam in the fall of 1992 but was worried this might be viewed as motivated by

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electoral considerations—which could then only boomerang against him in November. After the election Bush had nothing to lose by another show of force. His final flurry of missile strikes in January 1993 against Iraqi military facilities were necessitated, explained the president, by Saddam’s continuing failure to live up to the UN cease-fire resolutions—the provocation being Saddam’s moving around Iraqi surface-to-air missiles in a way that threatened U.S. aircraft monitoring the no-fly zones established to protect Shiite and Kurdish enclaves. Bush was not in the least apologetic about launching these largely symbolic parting blows at his nemesis in Baghdad. He was acting no differently than he had during the past four years, said Bush, and “I have no intention of changing that approach to life in the last six or seven days of my presidency.”59

HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION IN SOMALIA Bush also waited until after the November 1992 election to commit U.S. power to control the deteriorating situation in Somalia. Since January 1991, the former Cold War client of the United States had been in a condition of virtual anarchy—the aftermath of a rebellion that had forced the U.S.supported dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, to flee the country. Rival warlords were fighting to gain control of the country by preventing the people in their enemy’s area from obtaining access to food. By the summer of 1992, the situation had deteriorated to the point where some 30 percent of Somalia’s 8 million people were on the verge of starvation. Attempts by international relief agencies to deliver food and medical supplies in convoys from the port city of Mogadishu were being blocked by armed gangs in the employ of the rival warlords. United Nations’ cease-fire efforts were being sabotaged. Scenes of little children dying of hunger and disease were on the nightly news. Moved by Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s complaint that the United States and the Europeans were evidently more willing to let Africans be the victims of enforced starvation than Yugoslavs (a reference to UN peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia), the Security Council on July 27 approved an emergency airlift of supplies into Somalia. The Bush administration cooperated by assigning U.S. Air Force cargo planes to fly food to the besieged towns. But efforts on the ground to distribute the supplies continued to be thwarted by the warlords’ gunmen.

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Into the fall, the administration received appeals from humanitarian organizations for the United States to participate more vigorously and visibly in the UN relief efforts—perhaps by contributing an American unit to the small UN peacekeeping operation in Somalia. But Bush’s national security advisers, and the president himself, were not ready to deal with the prospect of American military personnel getting caught in the cross fire of the rival gangs. Once the presidential election was over, the administration began to look carefully at its options. On Thanksgiving eve, to the surprise of the State Department, which had been arguing for a more modest approach, Bush decided to offer the use of U.S. combat troops to the United Nations to help get the relief supplies to the Somali people. But upon the insistence of the Pentagon, he attached the condition that the force be under American command.60 The result was the UN Security Council resolution of December 3 authorizing “the Secretary General and member States cooperating to implement the offer [by the United States] . . . to use all necessary means to establish as soon as possible a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia.”61 The day following the UN authorizing resolution, President Bush in a television address announced that he had ordered Secretary of Defense Cheney “to move a substantial American force into Somalia.” Designated “Operation Restore Hope,” this force (which background briefings revealed would comprise nearly 30,000 troops) was being dispatched for “humanitarian” reasons only. Its mission, in the words of the UN resolution, was “to establish a secure environment” against the armed warlord gangs that had been preventing international relief efforts from delivering food to the starving people in Somalia. The president made a point of reassuring the public that “the troops have the authority to take whatever military action is necessary to safeguard [their own] lives.” Yes, he was again asking the men and women of the armed forces to take on a “difficult and dangerous job,” but “it’s now clear that military support is necessary to insure the safe delivery of food Somalis need to survive. . . . The people of Somalia, especially the children of Somalia, need our help. We’re able to ease their suffering. We must help them live. We must give them hope. America must act. . . . When we see Somalia’s children starving, all of America hurts.” Anticipating criticisms that he was establishing a precedent for the United States to intervene militarily all around the world where local political conditions were causing people to starve—Bosnia, most urgently, but also Haiti, Mozambique, and Burma—Bush insisted that he understood

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“the United States alone cannot right the world’s wrongs, but we also know that some crises in the world cannot be resolved without American involvement, that American action is necessary as a catalyst for broader involvement of the community of nations.” The American military units involved in this mission, said the president, were “doing God’s work.”62

MAXIMS FOR THE USE OF FORCE IN THE POST–COLD WAR ERA The presidency of George Bush, no longer facing an adversary capable of posing a clear and present danger to the survival and well-being of the United States itself, might have been expected to substantially reduce the weight given to military power in the country’s foreign policy. Instead, what were supposed to have been the “kinder and gentler” Bush years featured a dramatic recrudescence of the reliance on force internationally. Indeed, George Bush ordered U.S. military forces into action abroad in more instances and in larger numbers than any president since the end of the Vietnam War. But Bush’s justifications for each of the military operations he ordered lacked the clarity of purpose that had characterized official justifications for using force during the Cold War. In an attempt to rebut criticisms that his “moment of truth” decisions as commander in chief had been impulsive and not informed by the kind of moral reflection and strategic assessment that should govern the choice to sacrifice human lives, Bush at the end of his presidency delivered a speech at West Point on his “principles” for using military force. The speech at the military academy on January 5, 1993, was trumpeted in advance by White House aides as likely to be equal in importance to other famous farewell addresses—Eisenhower’s, possibly even George Washington’s. The president would use the platform at West Point to counter allegations that his decisions on war and peace were arrived at in the absence of a well-thought-out concept of the national interest and were motivated by either electoral politics or personal psychological needs. Bush introduced his subject by talking of the mixed blessings of the end of the Cold War. It was a time of great promise: democratic governments had never been so numerous. The recently concluded U.S.-Soviet START II treaty diminished the likelihood of nuclear holocaust. But this did not eliminate the “specter of war,” the “threats to be reckoned with.” If the United States were to be passive and aloof, “We would risk the emergence

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of a world characterized by violence, characterized by chaos. One in which dictators and tyrants threaten their neighbors, build arsenals brimming with weapons of mass destruction, and ignore the welfare of their own men, women, and children. And we could see a horrible increase in international terrorism with American citizens more at risk than ever before.” To prevent this from happening, the United States must lead the world in bringing about a “new world order—one of governments that are democratic, tolerant, and economically free at home and committed abroad to settling inevitable differences peacefully, without the threat or use of force.” The leadership required of the United States “should not be confused with either unilateralism or universalism,” said Bush. “Nope, the United States should not seek to be the world’s policeman.” But in the wake of the Cold War, it was the role of the United States, “the only remaining superpower,” to promote a democratic peace. “There is no one else.” Such world leadership required “a willingness to use military force” as a “useful backdrop to diplomacy, a complement to it, or, if need be, a temporary alternative.” This was what he had done in the Gulf War and was now doing in Somalia. These cases demonstrated “the wisdom of selected use of force for selective purposes.” He then proceeded to offer his view of that wisdom: In the complex world we are entering there can be no single or simple set of fixed rules for using force. Inevitably, the question of military intervention requires judgment. Each and every case is unique. . . . But to warn against a futile quest for a set of hard and fast rules to govern the use of military force is not to say there cannot be some principles to inform our decisions. . . . Using force makes sense as a policy where the stakes warrant, where and when force can be effective, where no other policies are likely to prove effective, where its application can be limited in scope and time, and where the potential benefits justify the potential costs and sacrifice.63

Editorials the next morning hailed this statement as a sophisticated improvement over the Pentagon’s “all or nothing” conditions for using military power articulated by Secretary Weinberger in 1984 and reaffirmed in recent policy debates by Secretary Cheney and Chairman Powell. Upon closer inspection, the Bush principles are a set of abstract maxims against which no one could argue but which did nothing to advance the policy debate about the legitimate use of military power in the post– Cold War world. The problem still remained of determining which “stakes

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warrant” the use of force and under what conditions “force can be effective.” Moreover, no criteria of “effectiveness” were suggested. Given his failure to offer any substantive content to his maxims, Bush’s final, bottomline standard—“where the potential benefits justify the potential costs and sacrifice”—was an empty formula, providing no basis for judging whether the expected benefits of any contemplated use of force would indeed warrant the expected costs and sacrifice.

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THE NEW WORLD ORDER Let me assure you, the United States has no intention of striving for a Pax Americana. . . . We seek a Pax Universalis built upon shared responsibilities and aspirations. —George H. W. Bush

URING THE PERSIAN GULF CRISIS of 1990–1991, George Bush found a need for “the vision thing”—his disparaging term for the idealistic appeals politicians sometimes have to make to garner support. He needed it to help overcome the arguments from many quarters (including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) that Saddam Hussein’s forcible annexation of Kuwait did not pose a sufficient threat to vital U.S. interests to justify going to war. Oil? Jobs? Saddam couldn’t drink the additional oil he now controlled in Kuwait; if he charged too high a price, the industrial world could purchase its energy supplies elsewhere. Deter him from trying to grab control of Saudi oil (the justification for Desert Shield), but why sacrifice American blood and treasure to compel him to withdraw from Kuwait? The president knew that his early determination to reverse Iraq’s aggression was not just visceral or a personal reaction to having been diddled and defied by the Iraqi dictator. Nor was it that having publicly declared “this shall not stand,” to let it stand would revive all of the “wimp” allegations. It was much more than any of these things, but as usual it was difficult for Bush to find the right concepts to express his larger view of the matter.

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When Margaret Thatcher reminded him of the failure of the Western democracies to stand up to Germany prior to World War II, that rang a bell. So he compared Saddam to Hitler. And then there was Truman committing the United States to reverse the North Korean invasion of South Korea. But Iraq was no Third Reich and Kuwait was no democratic Czechoslovakia; nor was this a case anymore of a proxy or client of America’s superpower rival expanding the patron’s sphere of control. Something else was at stake: the rules of the game, the world order—the rules of international behavior for the post–Cold War era the world was now entering—the new world order.

HOMILIES IN SEARCH OF A SUBSTANTIVE CORE In introducing the concept of a “new world order” to explain his overarching objectives in the Gulf, Bush presented a loose conglomeration of preachments that failed to distinguish the new world order from any of the usual goals of statecraft that are equally embraced in the rhetoric of democrats and despots, conservatives and radicals, imperialists and defenders of the status quo alike. The “new world order,” he told a joint session of Congress on September 11, 1990, was to be “a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world . . . can prosper and live in harmony. . . . Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.”1 At the end of the Gulf War, returning to address the Congress, he claimed to be able to see a new world coming into view—“A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a world order in which ‘the principles of justice and fair play protect the weak against the strong.’ A world where the United Nations—freed from cold war stalemate—is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights finds a home among all nations. The Gulf war put this new world to its first test. And my fellow Americans, we passed that test.”2 Amorphous as it was, Bush’s new world order, when peeled back to its core—as revealed in his policy decisions and their more immediate

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justifications—was a revival of the old world order: the state-sovereignty system and its associated norms, which had been submerged for some four decades into the supranational and transnational coalitions organized by the Cold War superpowers. With roots extending back three centuries, the traditional system now manifesting itself as the new world order emphasized the sovereign equality of states, the sanctity of state borders, and noninterference by states in one another’s domestic affairs. It was an elitist order run, as ever, by and for the great powers—sometimes in informal concert (as in the Group of Seven industrial powers), sometimes through membership in international agencies (as in the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank), and sometimes unilaterally. To the rest of the world it might appear that this world order contained a double standard: the sovereignty and borders of the great powers could never be violated; but the weaker powers were subject to intervention, albeit intervention authorized by the international agencies controlled by the great powers— yes, there might be occasions for such apparent compromises with the principle of the sovereign equality of states, but these would only be for the purpose of upholding the norms of the system itself against radical states and movements attempting to overthrow the legitimate order. Bush identified Saddam Hussein’s violation of the sovereign independence of Kuwait as the first major test to the new—revived old—world order. All necessary means could and should be used to restore the independence of Kuwait. But actually Bush was describing only the first half of the test. The second half came at the end of Desert Storm when the United States forces, having pushed the Iraqis back out of Kuwait, were ready to move on toward Baghdad, and Bush said no. This was followed during successive weeks and months by another test in the form of appeals from the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites to the United States to intervene on their behalf against the brutal repression they were suffering at the hands of Saddam’s forces. In each of these situations, Bush was true to his view that the rights and obligations of states toward one another were the essence of world order, whereas how governments treated the people within their jurisdictions was, except in cases of actual or virtual genocide, normally their own business. But, characteristically, he was not always consistent in acting according to the precepts of this world order philosophy. Success in the world of statecraft as well as in domestic politics often required the subordination of principle to prudence.

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MORE THAN REALPOLITIK BUT LESS THAN GLOBAL LIBERALISM Despite the shallowness and plasticity of the new world order, the concept did provide an orientation—both for policy makers within his administration as well as for others who would have to deal with him—as to which considerations would move the president to act vigorously in international relations. The concept also provided Bush himself with the ballast he needed to stabilize his often oscillating impulses to be bold or cautious and, not incidentally, with some after the fact justifications for actions he found difficult to explain while events were unfolding.

Rationalizing Tiananmen The greatest embarrassment suffered by President Bush for his handling of foreign policy attached to his response to the Chinese government’s brutal repression of pro-democracy, student-led demonstrators in Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square during the first week of June 1989. Chinese soldiers killed hundreds of civilians, wounded thousands, and arrested thousands more. As reports and video coverage of the brutal crackdown flooded U.S. television screens on June 3, President Bush issued a brief public rebuke to authorities in Beijing, deploring “the use of force against Chinese citizens who were making a peaceful statement in favor of democracy.”3 The president wanted to let it go at that. “I know the Chinese,” he is quoted as telling his aides, invoking his experience as the Ford administration’s envoy to Beijing in 1974 and 1975. “I know how to deal with them, and it’s not through pressure or sanctions.”4 (Bush’s first foreign trip as president in February 1989 had included a visit to Beijing. Despite vocal criticism by U.S. human rights groups and congressional Democrats of the regime’s policies toward dissidents, Bush used the occasion to reestablish his old connections and to reassure his hosts that they had a good friend in the White House. The principal issues between the two countries— China’s missile sales to Middle Eastern countries and its textile marketing policies—were negotiable.) To avoid being outflanked on the human rights issue by the Democratic opposition in Congress and by the ideological right wing of his own party, the president called a press conference on June 5 to express his disapproval of the Tiananmen massacre more strongly than in his June 3 statement

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and to announce the imposition of a number of sanctions: suspension of U.S. weapons sales to China, suspension of technical exchanges between the military of the two countries, and suspension of visits by high-level U.S. and Chinese officials. Yet when asked why he was not also imposing economic sanctions, the president demurred: On the commercial side, I don’t want to hurt the Chinese people. I happen to believe that the commercial contacts have led, in essence, to this quest for more freedom. I think that as people have commercial incentive, whether it’s in China or other totalitarian systems, the move to democracy becomes inexorable. So what we’ve done is suspend certain things on the military side, and my concern is with those in the military who are using force. . . . QUESTION: Will you, Mr. President, be able to accommodate to the calls from Congress for tougher sanctions? Many lawmakers felt you were slow to condemn or criticize the violence in China before now, and many are pushing for much tougher action on the part of this country. THE PRESIDENT: I’ve told you what I’m going to do. I’m the President. I set the foreign policy objectives and actions taken by the executive branch. I think they know, most of them in Congress, that I have not only a keen personal interest in China, but that I understand it reasonably well. I will just reiterate . . . my conviction that this is not the time for anything other than a prudent, reasoned response. . . . So I would argue with those who want to do something more flamboyant, because I happen to feel that this relationship is vital to the United States of America, and so is our adherence to democracy and our encouragement for those who are willing to hold high the banner of democracy. So we found, I think, a prudent path here.5 THE PRESIDENT:

Privately, the president and his advisers considered even the limited sanctions policy—which they adopted reluctantly in response to domestic pressures—to be counterproductive. The suspension of high-level official exchanges prevented the administration from maintaining the dialogue with the Chinese leaders that Bush believed was crucial for inducing Beijing to pursue constructive policies internationally and to make further progress internally toward capitalism and democracy. Accordingly, in July 1989 Bush sent national security adviser Scowcroft and Deputy

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Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger on a secret mission to Beijing to reassure the Chinese leaders of Bush’s desire to put Sino-U.S. relations back on track and to suggest practical steps for how this might be done. Scowcroft made another secret visit in December, but this time the Western press discovered that the administration was acting in violation of its own sanctions and Associated Press wire stories carried reports of a Scowcroft banquet toast to the Chinese leaders in which he referred to the “negative forces” in both countries that “seek to frustrate our cooperation.” Secretary of State Baker compounded the domestic political damage by telling a television interviewer that this was the first time that any such high-level visit to Beijing had occurred since Tiananmen, only to be discredited when CNN reported the July trip of Eagleburger and Scowcroft.6 Bush’s determination not to let China’s poor human rights record interfere with his administration’s relations with the government in Beijing was periodically a subject of contention with Congress in connection with legislative efforts to suspend China’s most favored nation (MFN) trading status. Bush repeatedly threatened to veto the punitive legislation, and he felt strongly that he was doing the right thing by refusing to cave in to the popular view. The arguments for maintaining normal trading status for China were made time and again during the Bush administration: suspension of MFN would not only be perceived in Beijing as especially discriminatory against China (other countries with negative human rights ratings from the State Department still kept their MFN status) and produce a general worsening of U.S.Chinese relations, but it would also hurt important U.S. economic groups, including aircraft manufacturers, wheat farmers, and fertilizer companies.7 Paradoxically, the persistent congressional targeting of MFN actually helped the administration in some of its high-stakes international diplomacy with Beijing, especially during the Gulf War, by allowing it to credibly threaten the Chinese with the virtual certainty of a denial of MFN if they vetoed the key UN Security Council resolutions against Iraq. Domestically, however, Bush continued to suffer the political liabilities of a China policy that lent itself to charges of being a throwback to Kissinger’s realpolitik. In the presidential debates in the fall 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton recalled how “all those kids went out there carrying the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square, and Mr. Bush sent two people in secret to toast the Chinese leaders and basically tell them not to worry about it.” Bush’s rebuttal was a charge that Congress and Governor Clinton wanted to isolate China. By “putting conditions on MFN and kind of humiliating them, . . . you . . . turn them inward, and then we’ve made a terrible mistake. I’m not going to

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do it. I’ve had to fight a lot of people that were saying ‘human rights.’ We are the ones that put the sanctions on and stood for it.”8

Keeping Cool on Bosnia: Avoiding the Self-Determination Quagmire The Bush administration also found that the new world order concept (really the revived national sovereignty-centered old world order) failed to adequately comprehend the post–Cold War rise of national selfdetermination movements. It was all very well to talk about the sanctity of borders and noninterference by nation-states in each other’s domestic affairs as long as the location of borders and the identity of the “nation” was a settled matter. But these principles provided insufficient policy guidance for situations in which an ethnic group within the jurisdiction of a presumably sovereign nation-state was challenging the legitimacy of its control by the nation-state and demanding political independence. Yet these were the situations that were reemerging on Bush’s watch as a characteristic feature of international politics. A purely realpolitik U.S. policy would be to simply remain aloof from secessionist crises and other issues concerning the legitimacy of other states’ regimes—except in cases where the local instability might threaten America’s own geostrategic or crucial economic assets, or put the lives of its citizens in danger. Such aloofness characterized Bush’s early responses to the secessionist violence in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1991 even as it became clear that the federation was doomed to break up. (The first official U.S. response to Croatia’s vote of May 21, 1991, to secede was a standard formal reaffirmation of support for the “territorial integrity of Yugoslavia within its present borders.”9) For a time he could justify this posture as being consistent, or at least not inconsistent, with new world order principles since no aggression was taking place across established international borders. Lagging behind the European Community (EC), which by late 1991 and early 1992 had begun to recognize the independence of the seceding republics, the United States recognized Slovenia, Croatia, and BosniaHerzegovina as independent states on April 7, 1992. Up to then the Bush administration had contented itself with supporting UN mediation and peacekeeping efforts on behalf of a cease-fire between Serbs and Croats who had been fighting over disputed areas. But now that the United States had recognized the statehood of the former Yugoslav republics, Bush could not sit idly by—without compromising his new world order principles—as

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Serbia sent its military forces into newly independent Bosnia to help the ethnic Serbs in their own secessionist struggle against the predominantly Muslim Bosnians. On May 30, 1992, while not taking sides on the merits of the territorial disputes, and insisting that these be resolved by peaceful negotiations, the United States supported the UN Security Council condemnation of the Serbian actions in Bosnia and the application of economic sanctions against the Serbian regime in Belgrade.10 Unlike its reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Bush administration had no inclination to use U.S. troops in a military operation to push Serbia’s forces out of Bosnia. The United States would provide logistics support for UN relief convoys attempting to reach besieged Muslim enclaves in Bosnia, but the administration refused to deploy its own combat forces to protect the relief convoys. With popular outrage growing over the Serb policy of “ethnic cleansing” (forcible removal of Muslims to create Serb-majority areas in Bosnia), plus evidence of efforts to starve the people in Muslim enclaves and reports of mass rapes of Bosnian women, the Bush administration was hard-pressed to keep to its policy of no direct U.S. military involvement. Editorial columnists and Democrats, including presidential candidate Bill Clinton, argued that the United States should at the very least provide air cover for UN relief operations. But Bush and his advisers feared such a commitment carried a high risk of escalating to a large-scale U.S. military involvement if the Serbs tried to shoot down U.S. aircraft; it also became clear that air cover by itself could not adequately protect the relief convoys from Serb ambushes on the ground. It fell to Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to elucidate the administration thinking on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on August 28. Asked to explain why it was appropriate for U.S. aircraft to fly air cover for the Shiites in Iraq but not for the Bosnians, Eagleburger rejected the analogy: The proper comparison with regard to Iraq . . . is the fact that the President stopped at a point. He didn’t go chasing after Saddam Hussein through all of Iraq and getting us tied down; . . . there is a fundamental difference between [Bosnia and] the kind of activity that went on in [the Gulf War] . . . including the Iraqi invasion of another country. . . . [The Bosnian conflict] is in a sense a civil war—not that these aren’t different republics and different countries now, but it is interethnic conflict; it is massively mixed up; it is in territory that is extremely difficult to fight in.

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The secretary explained what U.S. Bosnian policy was and was not: “And the one thing we have decided clearly [that] we’re going to do is [that] we will use all necessary force to get humanitarian supplies in to these people. And that is critically important. What we have also said is [that] we are not going to involve ourselves militarily in trying to make peace and force this conflict to an end.”11 Eagleburger was being faithful to what he understood to be the “prudent” considerations in the White House: Bosnia was, if anything, not like Kuwait but like Lebanon—a cauldron of communal hatreds extending back centuries, in which politics was reduced to the most primordial of all issues, the ownership and control of land. Were the United States to involve itself as a military protector of any particular community, it would become the object of hatred and violent attacks by the others. If the United States did attempt to intervene with major military force to control the situation, it would find itself shooting at indigenous paramilitary units, even peasants (the Vietnam “quagmire”), not simply against the troops and aircraft of an invading country. Finally, the administration was fearful of setting a precedent, generating pressures for U.S. intrusion into similar ethnic conflicts exploding across the former Soviet Union—where the Russian government might employ its military forces on behalf of ethnic Russians who were contesting their subjugation by non-Russian regimes in the other republics—or even within the Russian Federation itself. Eagleburger’s comment about the Bosnian situation could be read as a metaphor for the administration’s realization of the predicaments inherent in the new world order. “Until you’ve seen what kind of country it is,” he said, “until you understand the terribly complex relationships between people in Yugoslavia, it is very dangerous to look for simplistic solutions.”12

ORDER AND DISORDER IN THE WORLD ECONOMY The new world order according to George Bush also differed from the realpolitik old world order when it came to international economic issues. The realpolitik model is essentially mercantilist: nation-states, especially the great powers, pursue self-sufficiency in at least their ability to make war, and therefore eschew the kind of economic interdependence (and specialization) that is supposed to result from an open world trading system. Yet Bush, like all of his post–World War II predecessors with the

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exception of Richard Nixon, was ideologically committed to the doctrine of global free trade. The concept of free trade, articulated with the greatest conviction by Ronald Reagan, holds that world and national prosperity and peace will be advanced to the extent that barriers are removed to the worldwide functioning of the economic laws of supply and demand; the greatest good for the greatest number of the world’s peoples will result from a global free market favoring those producers and distributors who can manufacture and sell their goods and services at least cost to consumers; the specialization of national export and import lines that result as countries pursue their comparative advantages in providing particular categories of goods and services will increase interdependence among nations and thus give them a vital stake in preventing international conflicts and domestic strife that could disrupt the peaceful functioning of the world market. With the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the bastions of Marxist socialism, and the stated acceptance of some form of market economics by the new leaders in most of the post-Soviet states, Bush could hope for an historic opportunity to finally put global free trade into practice. But free trade would be far from simple. No longer united against a common enemy, the governments of advanced industrial countries were faced with increasing pressures from recession-hit sectors of their economies for continued subsidies. Protected sectors within the EC (such as the French farmers) used their political power within their national governments to demand continuing protection against imports from countries outside the EC, especially the United States. The Japanese, excluded from the European market and facing increasing competition from the newly industrializing countries of the Pacific rim, were less and less inclined to accede to insistence from Washington that they “voluntarily” limit their exports of automobiles to the United States. The Japanese were also more overtly resentful than they had allowed themselves to be during the Cold War (when they feared the loss of the U.S. security umbrella) of the persistent hectoring from the United States that they should provide greater hospitality to American investments. Recession-plagued sectors of the U.S. economy, particularly the automobile industry, were demanding that the administration get tough with the Japanese or else Congress would be forced to pass protectionist legislation. Popular discontent with Bush’s unwillingness to play economic hardball with the Europeans and the Japanese was deflected during and immediately following the Gulf War as the president basked in the public’s approval

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of his leadership, which rose to over 70 percent in the opinion polls (even higher than Reagan’s best ratings). But as the recession persisted and deepened in 1991 and 1992 the opinion polls registered a precipitous drop in approval. Many felt the president was spending too much time on foreign affairs and neglecting domestic problems.13 Looking toward his forthcoming reelection campaign and trying to recast himself as now fully engaged with the country’s domestic predicaments, Bush abruptly canceled a planned December 1991 trip to Japan and other Asian countries. The visit was to have coincided with the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and the Japanese had hoped to use the occasion to purge the residual bitterness from that historical tragedy. The American media portrayed the trip cancellation as a panicky and clumsy reaction to his negative poll ratings. The president hurriedly rescheduled his trip for January 1992, with his mission being to persuade the Japanese of the benefits of U.S. investments and imports. He was going as America’s chief salesman, on behalf of American products. His trip, he said, was about “jobs, jobs, jobs.”14 At the president’s invitation, twenty-one business leaders, including the CEOs of the big three auto makers, joined him in his January visit to Japan to make the case for greater access to Japanese markets. If this was to be a media show for the audience back home, it failed dismally: the CEOs contradicted in public his claims of gaining significant guarantees from his hosts to sell American cars in Japan; and the media in both countries made his effort look like a whining plea to the Japanese to take pity on the United States for its competitive weaknesses. At the state dinner in his honor, president Bush took sick, vomited on the Japanese prime minister who was sitting next to him, slumped to the floor, and was comforted by the prime minister, who cradled the president’s head in his lap. The world media audience was treated to incessant replays of this all too symbolic scene for more than a week. An authoritative study of U.S. trade policy recounts the aftermath of the Japan trip: It unleashed a torrent of Japan-bashing (and America-bashing) . . . , together with a grassroots “Buy America” campaign. Suddenly, U.S. trade policy seemed again up for grabs. The multilateral Uruguay round [of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade negotiations] was again stalemated. . . . The President had both legitimized attacks on Japan and undercut his capacity to counter them.15

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The administration viewed the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Mexico, and Canada as a success for President Bush in the economic sphere. In his announcement on August 12, 1992, that the 14-month negotiations had been successfully concluded, Bush related the accomplishment to the new world order. “The Cold War is over,” he said. “The principal challenge now facing the United States is to compete in a rapidly changing, expanding global market.”16 In large measure a defensive reaction to the success of the EC and to Japan’s aggressive penetration of the markets of the Western Hemisphere, NAFTA would create a regional trading bloc of 370 million people producing $6 trillion worth of goods and services each year, greater than the combined gross domestic product of the EC. Basically an incorporation of Mexico into the free-trade zone agreed to in 1988 between the United States and Canada, the new accord, in its main provisions, stipulated that: t
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multinationals that could take advantage of the lower factor costs across the Mexican border to manufacture and then sell their now-cheaper finished products back in the United States. Leaders of the AFL-CIO said they would oppose congressional approval of NAFTA for exactly this reason, complaining the accord would throw hundreds of thousands of U.S. laborers out of work as companies previously based in the United States set up factories in Mexico to take advantage of the lower wages there. Environmental groups criticized the incentives for manufacturing firms to escape U.S. environmental controls by moving south of the border where such controls were lax or nonexistent, labeling this “the export of pollution.” Presidential candidate Bill Clinton said that while he favored NAFTA in principle, he would insist on adding provisions to ensure job protection for the U.S. worker and Mexican adherence to fair labor and environmental standards. In any event, he strongly objected to the Bush administration’s effort to obtain “fast-track” congressional approval of the accord before the end of Bush’s term of office. Sensing that a push for fast-track approval of NAFTA would lose him votes with some constituencies, and listening to the worries of many congressional Republicans concerned about their own chances for reelection, Bush pulled back from his insistence on quick approval. It would fall to Clinton to bear the brunt of the controversies during the ratification process—controversies reflective of the increasing intermeshing of domestic and foreign policies in the new world “order.”

OPPOSING A NEW WORLD ORDER FOR THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT The Bush administration’s ideological commitment to a global free market extended also to the environmental field, in contrast to most of the other advanced industrialized countries and a majority of the Third World countries who had accepted the premise that the health and wellbeing of their peoples required substantial international regulation of economic activity. The isolation of the United States on issues of the global environment during the Bush years was starkly revealed at the UN Conference on the Environment and Development (popularly called the “earth summit”) attended by over 100 heads of state in Rio de Janeiro during the first two

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weeks of June 1992. The leaders signed a collection of treaties and documents holding them all accountable to a set of international rules (to that extent limiting their sovereignty) on their activities affecting ecologies and environments that they shared in common. The earth summit reflected the growing scientific and popular consensus that a laissez-faire, business as usual approach was no longer acceptable as population growth and industrialization accelerated the depletion and abuse of the world’s air, water, fertile soil, and interdependent biological species that have sustained human life on Earth. Fears centered on holes in the stratospheric ozone layer that filters out the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays, and the phenomenon of global warming resulting from the buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere (the “greenhouse effect”). The central theme of the Rio earth summit was the concept of “sustainable development” developed by the World Commission on Environment and Development (often called the “Brundtland commission,” after its chairperson, the former prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland). The biologists, meteorologists, earth scientists, and economists who did the backup studies for the Brundtland commission and the earth summit maintained that the presumed conflict between ecological care and economic growth was a myth: economic development that was ecologically efficient and conserved the natural resources on which agriculture, industrial production, and the health of the planet ultimately depend would produce sustainable (meaning durable) economic growth; moreover, programs to discover and implement such sustainable economic growth could themselves be designed and financed in ways that would stimulate job-creating enterprises and projects. This was a logic that even the ideologically conservative Reagan administration, after some hesitation, had come to embrace in the negotiations leading toward the 1987 Montreal Protocol for phasing out substances that were depleting the ozone layer. When DuPont and other major U.S. companies developed efficient ozone-safe substitutes in response to domestic legislation, the State Department suddenly became a convert to internationally binding agreements that would limit other countries’ production of ozone-damaging chlorofluorocarbons, thus creating a ready market for the already developed U.S. substitutes.17 Bush’s director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), William Reilly, wanted to build on the experience of the Montreal Protocol to fashion progressive U.S. domestic and international policies and evidently took at face value Bush’s 1988 campaign pledge to be the “environmental”

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president. But Reilly ran into determined opposition from others in the Bush administration, notably chief of staff John Sununu and Vice President Dan Quayle, head of the president’s cabinet-level Council on Competitiveness (a group with a mandate to reduce the costs to businesses of government regulations). Outranking Reilly, they were able to persuade the president to oppose key aspects of a number of the treaties and resolutions being readied for the earth summit. In the weeks leading up to his appearance at the June summit at Rio, Bush came out against the binding controls on CO2 emissions in the draft Convention on Climate Change, claiming that more scientific research was needed on the “greenhouse effects” of CO2 before states should be required to adhere to specific limits. He also opposed the Convention on Biodiversity, claiming that its provisions would stifle innovation in the biotechnology industry. Bush’s positions on the draft agreements, accompanied by his rhetoric on the need to protect U.S. jobs, effectively pulled the rug out from under EPA chief Reilly in his role as principal U.S. representative and negotiator at the conference. Reilly was further undercut and publicly embarrassed when some of his opponents in the administration leaked to the press one of his confidential memoranda to the White House requesting authorization to agree to certain minor modifications in the Biodiversity Convention that would allow the president to sign it.18 To keep the American president from withdrawing entirely from the historic earth summit, the negotiators agreed to a watered-down Framework Convention on Climate Change, which Bush did sign, along with an agreement on seventeen nonbinding principles on the care and management of forests and a broad “Agenda” of nonbinding commitments to pursue a wide range of sustainable development objectives ranging from combating desertification and drought to safely managing the disposal of radioactive wastes. 19 Efforts to achieve a compromise on the Convention on Biodiversity failed, and Bush, alone among the major heads of state, refused to sign it—earning him the sobriquet of “the Darth Vader of the Rio Meeting.”20 Playing more to his home audience than to the delegates in Rio, Bush proclaimed to the conference that “America’s position on environment protection is second to none, so I did not come here to apologize.”21 Environmental Protection Agency administrator Reilly put the best public face possible on the U.S. performance, focusing on the unprecedented range of the commitments by countries to cooperate with one another to protect the global commons. With the employees of his agency

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he shared his more candid assessment of the self-isolation of the United States at the Rio summit: We assigned a low priority to the negotiation of the biodiversity treaty, were slow to engage the climate issue, were last to commit our President to attend Rio. We put our delegation together late, and we committed few resources. No doubt, this contributed to negative feelings toward the United States. For me personally, it was like a bungee jump. You dive into space secured by a line on your leg and trust it pulls you up before you smash into the ground. It doesn’t typically occur to you that someone might cut your line.22

Those in the administration who undercut Reilly opposed on ideological grounds the worldview that underpinned the earth summit. Sununu and Quayle were determined to prevent any U.S. acquiescence to what they regarded as the internationalist/Socialist premises of the environmental movement—an internationalism that would erode the nation’s sovereign independence and subject the United States to decisions by world organizations run by groups hostile to the American way of life; and a socialism antithetical to free enterprise and market capitalism based on the profit motive. Sununu and Quayle deliberately attempted to sabotage Reilly’s efforts to identify the United States with the new global environmentalism. The fact that President Bush’s views on the major environmental issues were unformed and ambivalent meant that, by default, the anti-environmental zealots would succeed in isolating the United States from the emergent global consensus in favor of international controls on environmentally damaging activities of states and firms.

START II The new world order continued to have more coherence in the realm of superpower relations—but here too, it was more a departure from the Cold War system than a design for a successor system. Yet Bush was able to announce at the end of his tenure in office that he and President Yeltsin of Russia had come to an agreement unprecedented in the history of international relations: as a follow-on to the START I accord, the United States and Russia were taking another huge step to mutually divest themselves of the bulk of their massive strategic nuclear arsenals.

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Signed in Moscow on January 3, 1993, by the two presidents, START II committed the United States and Russia to drastically slash their strategic systems and to have completed the process no later than January 1, 2003, retaining one-quarter of the nuclear warheads they had at the beginning of the 1990s. They would be left with 3,000 to 3,500 warheads each. As significant as the numerical limits was the new treaty’s ban on the deployment of multiple-warhead ICBMs—the principal “first strike” weapons in each side’s arsenal. This ban made real the standard claims that strategic forces existed only for the purpose of deterring a strategic attack from the other side.23 “Today, the Cold War is over,” proclaimed President Bush at the signing ceremony—apparently forgetting that he had made that same proclamation on at least five major international occasions over the previous year and a half. But both presidents had reason to wax hyperbolic. In its scale and importance, the treaty goes further than all other treaties ever signed in the field of disarmament. . . . I would like to pay tribute to my colleague and friend, George. His remarkable personal and political qualities and competence have contributed to a successful transition from the cold war to a new world order. . . . BUSH: We meet at . . . a moment that is also a new era for our two nations and for the world. We stand together . . . at the threshold of a new world of hope, a widening circle of freedom for us and our children.24 YELTSIN:

The euphoria of the moment covered over the worries in the Bush administration during its last days that Yeltsin and his reformist policies— perhaps even his commitment to radical disarmament—were faced with growing opposition in Russia. Not the least of these concerns attached to the continuing inability of Yeltsin to get Ukraine and Belarus to implement the START I requirements that all former Soviet republics except Russia remove all strategic nuclear weapons from their territories. The increasing political instability in Russia and the problem of arms control in the former Soviet republics were part of the large agenda of unfinished new world order business Bush would have to pass on to his successor in the Oval Office.

PA R T

V III CLINTON’S GLOBALISM When we took office . . . we found the agenda overflowing with crises and potential disasters. —Warren Christopher

Because . . . I had been raised to value all people, and, as governor, had seen both the bright and dark sides of globalization, I felt I understood where my country was and how we needed to move into the new century. I knew how to put things together, and how hard it would be to do. —Bill Clinton

27

FROM DOMESTIC POLITICIAN TO GEOPOLITICIAN I’m sure he’s interested in foreign policy, but right now it’s just not where he’s focused. It’s not where he’s immersing himself in the details. —A senior aide to President Clinton

LLEGING DURING HIS CAMPAIGN FOR the presidency that George Bush had been too preoccupied with foreign policy and had squandered the opportunity provided by the end of the Cold War to reorder the country’s priorities, Bill Clinton was ready to interpret his election as a mandate to devote most of his energies to neglected domestic needs. The principal threats to the security, well-being, and basic way of life of the people of the United States no longer came from foreign adversaries but from the worsening economic condition of the country. The domestic economic crisis and the spreading crime and drug problems tearing apart the social fabric of the country produced widespread cynicism about the capacity of the American democratic system to cope with the societal problems of the late twentieth century. The adverse international trade balance—targeted by the Democratic congressional leadership during the Bush years as one of the principal causes of the domestic economic crisis and by some of Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic nomination as the cause of the abnormally high levels of unemployment—was, for Clinton, a glaring symptom of the need for domestic economic restructuring. If the United States was falling behind Japan and the European Community in the international economic competition, and if this was part of the reason why U.S. workers were losing their jobs, the remedies lay not so much

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in international trade policy (getting the Japanese and the Europeans to reduce their barriers to U.S. imports and investments) as it did in rejuvenating the U.S. economy to revive the competitiveness of U.S. products at home and abroad. The country was indeed in trouble, but sources of and remedies for the trouble were to be sought more in domestic policy than in foreign policy. Consistent with his preoccupation with the country’s economic condition, the president-elect’s earliest choices for top posts in the new administration were in the domestic sector, or for those international functions primarily directed toward strengthening the country’s domestic economy, such as secretaries of treasury and commerce. His choices for secretary of state, secretary of defense, national security adviser, and the director of central intelligence were not announced until just before the inauguration. In a pre-inaugural address on foreign policy (echoed in numerous statements thereafter by Secretary of State Warren Christopher), president-elect Clinton pointed to “the economic security of our own nation” as “the first pillar” of his foreign policy; the second pillar would be a “restructuring of our armed forces”; and the third, “the spread of democratic values.”1 Yet the world as of January 20, 1993—though very different from what it was upon the inauguration of each of his predecessors—would demand the same close attention to international affairs from this president no less than it had of the Cold War presidents. And this domestically honed politician would be expected in his press conferences and in his daily contacts with his foreign counterparts to be no less informed about international developments affecting the interests of the United States than about the country’s domestic situation. Foreign policy was not something he could delegate to the internationally knowledgeable vice president, Albert Gore, or to his top foreign policy team, no matter how competent; for only the president could authoritatively commit the country to courses of action abroad, and the electorate would properly hold him responsible for acts of commission or omission in the international arena that affected their daily lives. Most of what was on Bill Clinton’s uncomfortably full foreign policy agenda on day one of his administration was in the form of unfinished business passed on to him by the Bush administration: t
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or accommodative responses to the protectionist policies of the major economic competitors of the United States—Japan and the European Community The new president could not blame these burdens of decision (and demands on his time and attention) on his predecessor. Clearly, the predicaments and dilemmas now facing Clinton emanated from developments and forces that were part of structural changes affecting virtually every country in the post– Cold War era. Instead of reducing the need of the United States to concern itself with the security and well-being of the wide array of countries allied with the United States against the USSR, the demise of the Cold War, by bringing the peoples of the erstwhile Soviet sphere into the world community, enlarged the circumference of practical interdependence and potential moral concern. Former wards of the Kremlin and its client regimes now looked to the United States and the other advanced capitalist countries to assist them with their sustenance and security.

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CLINTON’S RUSSIA PROBLEM Bill Clinton’s hope to be first and foremost a domestic president was based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War would release both financial resources (the “peace dividend” from reduced military expenditures) and human resources within the policy community that could now be mobilized for the daunting task of restructuring the American economy. In his campaign for the presidency, Clinton had criticized George Bush for procrastinating and finally offering too little help to Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin in their efforts to transform the Soviet system into a modern market-based economy and political democracy. But his complaints about the inadequacy of the Bush response to the needs of the former Cold War enemy were essentially rhetorical flourishes designed to tarnish Bush’s image as a lustrous foreign policy president. Clinton carefully avoided creating the impression that he favored anything like the huge resource transfers proposed by champions of the “Grand Bargain” or other assistance programs modeled on the Marshall Plan. The Cold War was over, and while the people of the United States might prefer the transformation of the ex-Soviet states into democratic capitalist societies, there was little popular support for the United States to assume the burden of this transformation as if it were a vital interest of the United States. The new wisdom in the policy community discounted the possibility of a renewal of the Cold War. Russia and the other republics might suffer economic dislocation and political instability in the process of reforming themselves, but apart from the hypothetical dangers of a breakdown in command and control of the former Soviet Union’s strategic nuclear arsenal, such turbulence would not translate into dire threats against the United States and in any event would only further draw the energies of the ex-Soviet republics inward, denying them the capability for foreign adventures. Yet after only two months in office, the Clinton administration appeared to have drastically revised its assessment of the importance to the United States of what was transpiring in Russia. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, not noted for overstatement, was now calling the task of helping the Russians to build a free society and a market economy “the greatest strategic challenge of our time.” On March 25, in a major speech before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Christopher argued that it was essential to “change our mind-sets” concerning Russia and its fellow republics. For America and the world, “the stakes are just

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monumental,” he said. “Bringing Russia . . . into the family of peaceful nations will serve our highest security, economic, and moral interests. . . . If we succeed, we will have established the foundation for lasting security into the next century. . . . We must understand that helping to consolidate democracy in Russia is not a matter of charity but a security concern of the highest order.”2 This sudden upgrading of the stakes was a response to the danger of the imminent collapse of the reform-minded government of Boris Yeltsin. As put by Christopher, “If Russia falls into anarchy or lurches back to despotism, the price that we pay could be frightening. Nothing less is involved than the possibility of renewed nuclear threats, higher defense budgets, spreading instability, the loss of new markets, and a devastating setback for the worldwide democratic movement.”3 There was considerable worry in the Washington policy community about the risks in the Clinton administration’s investing so much political capital in the survival of Yeltsin himself. But the administration stuck to its position. In his testimony on March 30 before the appropriations subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, Christopher tied the implementation of START I and START II, and therefore the ability to substantially reduce the U.S. defense budget, to the success of democracy and market reforms in Russia—both of which, he said, would be likely to suffer a setback if Yeltsin were deposed. But public opinion polls were running against the United States providing economic aid to Russia. A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted from March 28 to March 31, 1993, showed that 51 percent opposed and 41 percent favored giving aid to help reform Russia’s economy. When the question was whether economic aid should be given “to help Boris Yeltsin remain in power,” 61 percent opposed and 21 percent were in favor. There was a 52 percent to 40 percent response in favor of giving economic aid to Russia “to help avoid a civil war there.”4 On April 1, two days before traveling to Vancouver for a summit with Boris Yeltsin, President Clinton delivered a major address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he tried to warm the country’s still cool attitude toward a major program for helping Russia. Like the secretary of state, he cast the issue not so much in altruistic terms of helping the plight of another people but rather in terms of the threats and opportunities posed to U.S. interests: especially the chance to “improve our own security,” to reduce spending on defense, and to help create a vast new market for American business. It was essential, he said, that the United States act

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urgently “to strike a strategic alliance with Russian reform.” Mindful of the need to support Yeltsin as well as of the risks of becoming too closely identified with his political success or failure, Clinton devoted only a few short phrases of this widely broadcast speech to the man he would be meeting that weekend, referring to him as “the man who stands as the leader of reform—Russia’s democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin.” Clinton also avoided giving the impression that he was considering anything like a Marshall Plan aid package for Russia or the other former Soviet republics. His speech emphasized U.S. business investments and people-to-people technical assistance programs.5 Allusions to financial aid were couched mostly in references to cooperative international efforts to be funneled primarily through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In background briefings, administration officials informed the press that the package he would present Yeltsin in Vancouver would focus less on the infusion of money into the Russian economy and more on the exchange of goods, expertise, and training.6 Constrained by Clinton’s commitment to reduce the federal deficit and by a public less enthusiastic about the dramatic experiments in democratization underway in the former Soviet Union, the secretary of state nevertheless worked assiduously over the next few months with his counterparts from the Group of Seven industrial nations to put together a package of nearly $30 billion in pledged funds to assist in Russia’s economic development. Much of the funding would be approved on a project-by-project basis by the parliaments of the donor countries or by the international lending agencies.7 This portended continued debate in the U.S. government—including members of Congress—between those who were insistent on a credible and swift privatization of Russia’s state run economy as a precondition for the release of funds (claiming this would give Yeltsin leverage over the communist reactionaries) and those who saw the need to allow the Russians room to work out their own evolution into a market system (fearing that too much external pressure would galvanize an anti-Yeltsin, “red-brown” coalition between the communists and traditional Russian nationalists). How closely the U.S. government should associate itself with the fate of Yeltsin’s leadership became a front-burner issue again late in September 1993 as the Russian president, frustrated with legislative opposition to his economic reforms, summarily dismissed the Russian Parliament and called for new parliamentary elections in December. When Yeltsin’s parliamentary opponents responded by naming their own leader “acting

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president” of Russia and the prospect of civil war loomed, Clinton and other high administration officials (correctly guessing that the Russian armed forces would not defect to the opposition) reiterated their support of Yeltsin. In the days following Yeltsin’s military suppression of this revolt on October 4, the chorus of support for him from Washington was more unified and vigorous than ever. There was also bad news from Poland, the presumed showcase for rapid transition to a market economy and democracy: The fall 1993 elections gave control of the Parliament to the Democratic Left Alliance, led by former officials of the communist government, and the Peasant’s Party, formerly a rural communist organization. Together these parties had won over 35 percent of the popular vote and two-thirds of the seats in Poland’s lower house, compelling President Lech Walesa to designate Aleksander Kwasniewski, a minister in the former communist government, as the country’s prime minister. Next came the surprising—and alarming—results of the December 1993 elections in Russia, which the Clinton administration had hoped would reestablish a popular mandate for Yeltsin’s reforms. The new constitution strengthening the president’s powers vis-à-vis the parliament was approved by a narrow margin, but in the balloting for the new parliament, the biggest winner was the party of ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky (the “Liberal Democratic Party”), garnering 24 percent of the party-preference vote. The principal pro-Yeltsin bloc, Russia’s Choice, obtained only 14.5 percent, just ahead of the communists with 14 percent. Although a two-tier system of apportioning seats (combining district returns with the partypreference vote) gave Russia’s Choice and various moderate parties a slight plurality of the seats in the Parliament, Zhirinovsky’s supporters, if they combined with the communists, could act as a blocking coalition to stop reformist legislation—which might induce Yeltsin to use the authoritarian powers granted the president in the new constitution. The most worrisome aspect of the election results was the apparent popularity of Zhirinovsky’s chest-thumping nationalism: his threats to punish republics that mistreat their Russian minority populations, his boasts of reestablishing the imperial span of control of the former USSR and historic Russia, even (was it simply a joke?) taking back Alaska from the United States and most ominously, his warning that nuclear weapons might be used against Germany and other countries that tried to prevent the restoration of greater Russia’s territorial integrity. The Clinton administration, while reluctant to enhance Zhirinovsky’s appeal by making a big issue of his extremist

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views, once again affirmed its support for Yeltsin and his commitment to democratic reform. Clinton himself characterized the election outcome as most likely “a protest vote” against the hardships inevitably associated with the transition to democratic capitalism, and not really indicative of a widespread endorsement of Zhirinovsky’s ideas. But Vice President Gore, in Moscow for a meeting with Yeltsin, told reporters (undoubtedly having cleared it with the White House) that “the views expressed by Zhirinovsky on issues such as the use of nuclear weapons, the expansion of borders, the treatment of ethnic minorities, are reprehensible and [an] anathema to all freedom-loving people in Russia, in the United States and everywhere in the world.”8 The political backsliding in Russia and Poland coincided with and gave additional impetus to fresh questioning in Washington of the efficacy of the “shock therapy” prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund and other international lenders. Perhaps the West had been naïvely optimistic about the popular acceptance in the ex-communist lands of the unemployment and inflation and new social inequalities that would accompany the swift privatization of industry and the decontrol of prices. Perhaps for the institutions and norms of the market and democracy to take root, they needed to be implanted more gradually and experimentally cultivated, respecting the indigenous cultural soil of each country—as Gorbachev had recommended for the Soviet Union and as the Chinese (with considerable foot-dragging on the democracy side) were attempting. The growing uncertainty over the course of reform in Eastern Europe and the recrudescence of xenophobic nationalism in Russia also prompted second thoughts on the design for a post–Cold War European security system. Whereas previously the dominant view in Washington, carried over from the Bush administration, was that an enlarged NATO should be the core of the new European system—the enlargement to start with the admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—the revised view contemplated an extended period of quite limited association rather than membership for qualified East European countries and possibly also for Russia. This diluted enlargement (named “Partnership for Peace”) reportedly was urged on the Clinton administration by Strobe Talbott, the U.S. ambassador at large to the former Soviet republics, in response to President Yeltsin’s need following the abortive October coup to cater to the Russian military. Yeltsin’s new view was that his military were correct in regarding a NATO that included the East Europeans, and not Russia, as potentially hostile. The success of Zhirinovsky in the December elections,

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however, was invoked by champions of membership for the East Europeans as reason for including especially those states that previously had been threatened by Russia and might be once again. But Clinton’s appointment of Talbott in late December 1993 as deputy secretary of state (second in command to Warren Christopher) was an indication that the alternative view—namely, that this was no time to exacerbate Russian fears of encirclement—was to be the premise of any NATO enlargment.9 The problem of suppressing and containing the ethnic violence in Bosnia also gave urgency to the question, deferred during the Gulf War, of the military role of the United Nations in the post–Cold War era. Even more than in Somalia, when it came to applying military force to compel the warring communities in Bosnia to adhere to cease-fires or a political settlement, the national security officials in the Clinton administration insisted that the U.S. government retain operational command and control of any U.S.-deployed forces (either directly or through NATO). But this posture would contradict an important aspect of the worldview that most of the Clinton foreign policy team brought into office with them. One of their key assumptions—highly congenial to a president intending to devote most of his attention to domestic matters—was that the end of the Cold War would simultaneously reduce the need for the United States to take sides in international conflicts and increase the availability of the United Nations as a neutral presence. During his election campaign, Clinton supported the concept of a permanent UN rapid-deployment force to which the United States would commit military units, and Warren Christopher endorsed the idea during his confirmation hearings. An early National Security Council draft of a presidential directive on the subject contemplated that the nationally contributed units would be under the operational control of the UN commander responsible to the UN Security Council via the UN Secretary General. But as international and domestic controversy heated up in the summer of 1993 precisely over the question of the international command and control of the UN peacekeeping contingents then in Somalia and being considered for Bosnia, national security adviser Anthony Lake asked for a redraft of the proposed presidential directive. Advance notice that President Clinton’s maiden address before the UN General Assembly would not be, as widely anticipated, a set of proposals for substantially enhancing the organization’s peace and security functions, was provided in a speech by the secretary of state on September 20. Countering allegations that Clinton had allowed himself to be

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captivated by the ideologues of “multilateralism” in his administration, Christopher averred that “this country will never subcontract its foreign policy to another power or person.”10 Clinton’s September 27 address to the United Nations indeed did feature more reservations concerning the peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations than ringing endorsements of its role in the post–Cold War world. The most quoted passages, cautioned that our nation has begun asking harder questions about proposals for new peacekeeping missions. Is there a real threat to international peace? Does the proposed mission have clear objectives? Can an exit point be identified for those who will be asked to participate? How much will the mission cost? From now on the United Nations should address these and other hard questions for every proposed mission before we vote and before the mission begins. . . . The United Nations simply cannot become engaged in every one of the world’s conflicts. If the American people are to say yes to U.N. peacekeeping, the United Nations must know when to say no.11

And in a follow-up press conference the president revealed more rigid criteria based on new deliberations in his administration and consultations with congressional leaders that would constrain his deployment of U.S. forces as a part of international peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia (or elsewhere): I would want a clear understanding [of] what the command and control was. I would want the NATO commander in charge of the operation. I would want a clear timetable for . . . the right to terminate American involvement. I would want a clear political strategy along with a military strategy. . . . And I would want a clear expression of support from the United States Congress. . . . We have to know how we are going to fund it, and then we would have to know that others were going to do their part as well.12

PROMOTING SOCIAL JUSTICE ABROAD Clinton’s embrace of the universal validity of human rights was a natural posture for a politician spawned by the Kennedy and Carter wings of the Democratic party. Like those presidents, he too would find it difficult

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to translate these impulses to do good in the world the democratic way into concrete policy and programs in unfolding chaotic situations where human rights and democracy were obviously being violated, but it was not at all clear who were the offenders and who were the credible defenders of justice. Moreover, the dilemmas faced by Kennedy and Carter when it came to diverting resources away from domestic programs to “humanitarian” imperatives abroad would be compounded for Clinton. Denied the ability to fall back on the “national security” rationale, given the end of the Cold War, he also faced a greater crunch than did his liberal predecessors in simultaneously having to deal with questions of poverty and human rights issues at home and not having the wherewithal to generate public funds to apply to these problems. A new administration needs to take some time to develop its approach to dealing with these dilemmas (as the Kennedy administration did in working out its foreign aid program and Carter did in fashioning a pragmatic human rights policy), but Clinton would have no breathing space. There were too many unresolved, urgent “humanitarian” crises left over from the Bush administration—some of which Clinton, perhaps too rashly, had already taken positions on during his presidential election campaign.

CLINTON’S CHINA PROBLEM The competing demands of justice, world order, and national economic self-interest were particularly difficult for the new administration to manage—often embarrassingly so—when it came to dealing with China. Once again, the embarrassments were in large part a function of the gap between Clinton’s rhetoric on the campaign trail, which had excoriated Bush for putting old-fashioned geopolitics ahead of human rights, and his more complicated view of the matter from the Oval Office. Despite congressional and public criticism, the Bush administration continued after the Tiananmen Square massacre to extend most favored nation (MFN) trading status to China, while indicating there should be an improvement in Beijing’s performance on human rights if normal commerce was to be sustained. During the 1992 election campaign Clinton promised to pursue a much tougher policy toward the regime in Beijing: He definitely would deny MFN status to China unless there was clear evidence of substantial betterment of the human rights situation in the country. Consistent with his pledge, a few weeks after inauguration Clinton sent

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a strongly worded letter to the Chinese government stipulating various steps they had to take in order to qualify for a further extension of MFN privileges; but by late spring, he appeared to be moving much closer to the position of his predecessor. Obligated to inform Congress by June of his position on a continuance of China’s MFN status, the president worked out an agreement with Democratic congressional leaders in May to allow him to keep it alive for yet another year on condition that he would indeed cancel it in June 1994 in the absence of significant progress by Beijing on human rights. But when the annual ritual of considering MFN status for China came around again in the spring of 1994, Clinton recommended the extension with virtually no conditions attached for future extensions—this despite China’s human rights record having shown little if any improvements over the year. Administration spokespersons explained to human rights advocacy groups that this “de-linking” of human rights issues from commerce did not mean that the cause of human rights in China was being abandoned. It merely reflected a tactical switch to a more productive path of stabilizing the basic relationship with Beijing and of providing incentives for the Chinese to further transform their socialist system into a market economy, while efforts to persuade them to enlarge the scope of political freedom would rely mostly on quiet diplomacy and private channels. With increasing Sino-American commerce not translating into political liberalization, displeasure with China’s human rights violations were prominently voiced in the 1996 elections by Republicans and Democrats alike, including Bill Clinton. But after re-inauguration Clinton continued to put the objective of integrating China into the global economy ahead of inducing Beijing to adopt a more open and just political system. The administration’s evolved position on this issue was strongly put by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in testifying before the Senate Finance Committee: If the United States, the world’s largest and most open economy, were to deny China’s normal trading relationship, China’s stake in the international system would shrink. The consequences would be grave indeed. First, .  .  . we would lose China’s critical cooperation on dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program . . . Second, . . . it would disrupt our initiatives to curtail China’s transfers of advanced weaponry to unstable regions.

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Third, we would risk losing Chinese support for U.S. initiatives at the UN —including . . . peacekeeping and sanctions on Iraq. And China, destined to displace the United States as the largest producer of greenhouse gases, could withhold its participation in a global agreement on preventing climate change. . . . Fourth, the withdrawal of MFN would devastate our economic relationship. It would invite Chinese retaliation against our exports . . . [and] would also damage future opportunities for American investment, as China would steer contracts to our many economic competitors. . . . Fifth, the damage to our commercial ties would well spill over into our efforts to improve human rights in China. Because non-state firms account for half of China’s exports, the revocation of MFN would weaken the most progressive elements of Chinese society. It would also create a tense atmosphere in which Chinese leaders might even be less likely to take the actions we have been encouraging to release political dissidents, to allow international visits to prisoners, and to open talks with the Dalai Lama on increasing Tibetan autonomy. . . . In sum, revoking a normal trade relationship could seriously undermine our ability to influence China’s development and instead turn China further in the direction of isolation, suspicion and hostility.13

Although they themselves did not use the term in defending their subordination of human rights to U.S. economic and geostrategic interests, President Clinton and his foreign policy team had come full circle to embrace the Bush administration’s concept of “constructive engagement” for dealing with undemocratic or human rights–abusing regimes. In this domain of foreign policy too, there was more realpolitik than reform, more constancy than change.

PREVENTING THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: THE SPECIAL CASE OF NORTH KOREA A nonalienated China had become one of the highest-value objectives of the Clinton administration for a crucial reason alluded to by Secretary of State Albright: As one of the five officially recognized nuclear weapons states, each of which also has a veto in the UN Security Council, China is in a position to either obstruct or assist the United States in its effort to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons—a post–Cold War imperative

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that had ascended to the top of the list of the Clinton administration’s international security interests. Russia and the other two nuclear powers, the United Kingdom and France, had cooperated with the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in disarming Iraq of its nuclear weapons potential and also in bringing pressure on Kazakhstan, Belarus, and a recalcitrant Ukraine to transfer to Moscow’s control those parts of the Soviet nuclear arsenal left in their jurisdictions upon the breakup of the USSR. China, however, had not been a sufficiently reliable ally in the global nonproliferation regime—a major uncertainty being whether China would be willing to join the United States in promoting the denuclearization and possible demilitarization of the Korean peninsula. The issue suddenly became acute for the Clinton administration in March 1993 as the communist North Korean government announced its intention to withdraw from the 25-year-old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Pyongyang was reacting to IAEA insistences on inspection routines that the North Koreans claimed were in violation of national sovereignty. (U.S. intelligence agencies and the IAEA had suspected for some time that North Korea was manufacturing enough plutonium to make a bomb; and Pyongyang’s surprise announcement was read as a virtual admission that this was the case.) Facing the first major defection from the NPT in the post–Cold War era, and given the implications for Japan, let alone South Korea, military and arms control experts in the United States were adamant in their advice to Clinton that he could not afford to let Pyongyang thumb its nose at the rest of the world. But was it feasible to get the regime of the aging dictator Kim Il-Sung to reverse his decision, and if so, what would he ask in return? Clinton was convinced that the United States had to play it tough. He demanded that the North Koreans submit to a new round of IAEA inspections to verify they were not producing nuclear weapons. And in a trip to Japan and South Korea in July 1993, he issued a threat more chilling than anything heard from the top of the U.S. government in decades: “When you examine the nature of the American security commitments in Korea and Japan, to this region,” warned the president, “it is pointless for them [the North Koreans] to try to develop nuclear weapons, because if they ever use them it would be the end of their country.”14 But pointless or not, insisted the president and other administration officials, the North Koreans had to accept an appropriate degree of IAEA inspection now, and if they refused, they would be subject to international sanctions of the strongest sort.

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Pyongyang countered with tough statements of its own, implying the United States was dangerously courting a reopening of the Korean War, in which North Korea would smash South Korea even if this meant once again having to fight against the nuclear-armed United States. If the United States was determined to remove the threat of war from the Korean peninsula as it claimed, argued the North Koreans, then why was it continuing to conduct joint military exercises each year with the South Koreans? And if it was anxious to denuclearize the region, then why didn’t the United States offer to subject its military deployments in and around South Korea to international inspection? During the rest of 1993 the war of words continued between Washington and Pyongyang, and it looked as if the two sides had locked themselves into a game of chicken likely to end in disaster. Hawks in the Clinton administration began to prepare military contingency plans, including the possibility of aircraft or missile strikes against North Korean facilities suspected of harboring the nuclear bomb or its components. Clinton himself would not publicly rule out any options. But beneath the level of the public histrionics, cooler heads in both countries and in the UN arena explored through quiet diplomacy various formulae for diverting the antagonists from an impending head-on collision. A conflict-resolution package receiving serious consideration in both capitals at the beginning of 1994 would have North Korea freshly renounce any intention to acquire or develop nuclear weapons and open up its facilities to the kinds of IAEA verification required in return for a U.S. agreement to dispense with its annual joint military exercises with South Korea and to undertake normal commercial relations with the North. Hard-liners in the Clinton administration reportedly were counseling the president that in light of the impossibility of obtaining foolproof verification that the North Koreans were not hiding some bombs (the CIA speculated that they already had two), Pyongyang was probably engaged in a delaying ploy by seeming to accept international inspection while continuing to build its nuclear arsenal. Support for the conflict-resolution package was centered in the State Department, where the dominant view emphasized the need to slow down the escalating confrontation; the objective of avoiding a catastrophic war was presumably worth the risk that Pyongyang was pursuing a strategy of systematic deception. The crisis came to a head in the middle of June 1994, when North Korea officially withdrew from the IAEA and in defiance of U.S. warnings, unloaded fuel rods containing plutonium from its nuclear reactor. The

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plutonium, if separated out from the rods, could be used to make nuclear bombs, possibly as many as five.15 President Clinton and his advisers met on an emergency basis to give serious consideration to a range of punitive responses: obtaining a stiff UN Security Council resolution on economic sanctions to squeeze and isolate Kim Il-Sung’s regime; sending more U.S. troops to the Korean peninsula to reinforce the 37,000 regularly deployed there; an air strike on the North Korean nuclear facilities. Any of these, Clinton realized, could precipitate a full-scale war in which the 10 million inhabitants of the South Korean capital of Seoul, including thousands of American citizens, were within range of the North’s artillery. Perhaps U.S. citizens in South Korea should be evacuated—not only for their protection but to signal Pyongyang that its moves had driven things to the brink of war; such a move, however, could turn into a self-confirming threat, with the North, convinced that war was no longer avoidable, deciding to launch a preemptive attack. “No one will know just how close the two sides were to a catastrophic second Korean War,” write three former officials in the Clinton administration who were intimately involved in the deliberations, “because just as the president was weighing a decision to send more American troops to defend Korea, former president Jimmy Carter intervened in the crisis through a fateful meeting with North Korea’s aging leader Kim Il Sung.”16 Former president Carter’s involvement—characteristic of his selfappointed role since leaving office as international peacemaker, elections monitor, development assistance generator—set in motion a flurry of official negotiations led by Ambassador-at-Large Robert Gallucci that resulted in the Agreed Framework Between the United States of America and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea of October 21, 1994, temporarily de-escalating the nuclear crisis. The Agreed Framework committed the North Koreans to an IAEA-monitored freeze of their graphite-moderated nuclear reactors (the culprits in plutonium separation) and related facilities and to eventually dismantle them. In return, the United States would replace these reactors and related facilities with light-water reactor power plants (that did not have a weapons-producing potential). Meanwhile, the United States would help North Korea to obtain alternative energy in the form of heavy oil for heating and electricity. The Agreed Framework also contained pledges by both sides to work together for peace and security on a “nuclear-free Korean peninsula” plus a promise by the United States to provide formal assurances that it would not threaten or use nuclear weapons against North Korea. In return, Pyongyang would remain a party to the NPT, and permit the resumption

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of ad hoc and routine “safeguard” inspections by the IAEA. The United States and North Korea also promised to move toward full normalization of political and economic relations, including the reduction of barriers to trade and investment and the removal of restrictions on telecommunication services and financial transactions.17 The basic quid pro quo in the Agreed Framework—North Korea’s freeze on its nuclear weapons development in return for the United States providing it with efficient (light-water) nuclear reactors—set the parameters for additional implementing negotiations and bickering. Washington’s suspicions of possible North Korean clandestine continuation of its weapons program and Pyongyang’s charges of U.S. bad faith holding up the provision of the advanced reactors and technologies were predictable consequences of the lack of explicit sequences for the elements of this deal in the text of the Agreed Framework. But the Clinton administration officials who built on Carter’s initiatives to construct this diplomatic breakthrough, however imperfect, were convinced that without it the Korean peninsula would have again become engulfed in bloody war that could destabilize the entire international system.

TRADE POLICY DILEMMAS No president can avoid being subjected to cross-pressures on trade policy, for the national constituency comprises on the one hand sectors who are convinced they will benefit most by allowing foreigners to compete freely in the U.S. market (and by allowing Americans to freely export to other countries) and on the other those who are convinced they will suffer declining income or loss of jobs from the reduction of tariffs and other import barriers. Not only would President Clinton not escape these crosspressures, but he would take office in the midst of a major national debate over free trade versus protectionism—a debate generated by the economic recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which many commentators attributed in large measure to the chronic trade deficits the United States had been running ($84.3 billion in 1992). The debate was exacerbated by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed near the end of the Bush administration but not yet ratified. In his campaign for the presidency, Clinton was compelled to relate to intense concerns of voters that their jobs were highly dependent upon the trade policies that would be pursued by the next administration. Philosophically a devotee of international free trade, Clinton as a practical politician

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was nonetheless constrained to respond to the fact that in the short-term at least, thousands of workers in vulnerable sectors of the economy were being laid off by firms that were losing out to foreign competition. Candidate Clinton had been unwilling to go as far as some of his rivals for the Democratic nomination—especially Jerry Brown, Thomas Harkin, and Bob Kerrey—and embrace the strong protectionist ideas being propounded by the leaders of organized labor. But he did come out against quick congressional approval of NAFTA and said he would insist on amendments to the accord to ensure that U.S. workers did not lose their jobs to workers in Mexico because of the relocation of U.S. firms across the border where low wages and the lack of environmental standards reduced manufacturing costs. And while continuing to insist that the basic sources of the decline in the global competitiveness of U.S. products lay in the misguided domestic policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations, he promised (again following the lead of congressional Democrats and his rivals for the nomination) to work aggressively to get Japan to reduce its barriers to U.S. imports and services. The new president’s appointments to top economic policy posts reflected and perpetuated this ambivalence on free trade: Lloyd Bentsen, a relatively consistent supporter of free trade, as secretary of the treasury; Laura D’Andrea Tyson, a devotee of “managed trade” agreements, as chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers; and Mickey Kantor, the Clinton election campaign chairman, noted for a combative negotiating style, as United States trade representative. During the first few months of his administration, Clinton’s basic trade policy predicament—how to provide a “level playing field” for U.S. industries vis-à-vis their international competitors without provoking retaliatory protectionist measures from foreign governments—was manifest in debates among his advisers over how to handle the following issues:18 t
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competitors), or should the United States emulate the Europeans and subsidize its own aircraft producers? t
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persuasion and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade disputeresolution processes to get other countries to remove government contracting rules that discriminate in favor of their own national producers or should it impose retaliatory “buy USA” rules in its own government contracting? t
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amended to require Mexican adherence to fair labor standards and environmental protective measures, or should the United States attempt to provide a more level playing field by unilaterally imposing compensatory taxes on various imports from Mexico (especially from U.S. multinational firms with subsidiaries south of the border)? Also, should the U.S. government provide special adjustment benefits to workers displaced by business relocations to Mexico? However these particular issues were handled, the Clinton administration would not be able to avoid the larger questions of the extent to which the United States—harboring huge budgetary and trade deficits—should soften the blow to sectors injured by free trade though an “industrial policy” of publicly funded worker-retraining programs and businessretooling incentives to encourage displaced firms to enter product lines in which they would be more competitive.

THE PERSISTENCE OF SUPERPOWERISM? At a luncheon gathering of Washington reporters on May 25, 1993, Under Secretary of State Peter Tarnoff, speaking on condition of anonymity (which held for no more than a day), claimed that there was now “a very different context for American foreign policy” than that which determined U.S. commitments and action during the Cold War. It was a mistake to view the Gulf War the way the previous administration did as the first

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battle of the new world order. Rather it was the last battle of the Cold War. With the collapse of the Soviet Union “there are fewer heavyweight bad guys but more middleweight bad guys” who are “enormously complicated” to deal with. “We simply don’t have the leverage,” said Tarnoff. “We don’t have the influence. We don’t have the inclination to use military force. We certainly don’t have the money to bring to bear the kind of pressure which will produce positive results any time soon.”19 A chorus of administration officials quickly disavowed the under secretary’s comments. Secretary of State Christopher gave a press interview to affirm that “our need to lead, our determination to lead, is not constrained by our resources.” The primary consideration determining U.S. foreign involvement, said Christopher, will be, as always, “where our vital interests are threatened. . . . we will find the resources” to accomplish what needs to be done, either multilaterally or unilaterally. The secretary added a special section in his May 27 address at the University of Minnesota, lamenting that “some say . . . our nation is on a course of decline, that we can no longer afford to lead.” Certainly, he said, “it is true that the United States faces many challenges unlike our nation has ever felt before in our history. But to me, that means that we must be more engaged internationally, not less; more ardent in the promotion of democracy, not less, and more inspired in our leadership, not less.”20 A day after Christopher’s speech, a New York Times editorial opined that Mr. Tarnoff ’s argument did indeed “describe what we’ve seen of the Clinton approach.” The editorial averred that the Tarnoff doctrine was “defensible, even sensible” and “less foolish than the charade it provoked. . . . it needs to be acknowledged and explained by Mr. Tarnoff ’s bosses, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and Bill Clinton.”21 The president did not like what the Times was saying. He understood, better than those who had never run for public office, that the here-andnow domestic interests with well-organized constituencies will win out over the country’s international interests and obligations in the competition for resources unless the international imperatives are spelled out to the public in a coherent and dramatic way. Like Truman, whose presentation to Congress in March 1947 finally provided him with the moral authority and bipartisan support he needed to act effectively in a new era of world politics, Clinton too might require a “doctrine” to relate the country’s irreducible interests and basic values to the changed world of the 1990s so as not to be paralyzed in particular cases by his own ambivalence or congressionally imposed gridlock.

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Hard-pressed from all sides after eight months of apparent flip-flops on issues such as Somalia, Bosnia, Haitian refugees, and trade with China, and challenged by a new crisis of democracy in Russia and an exciting new breakthrough toward peace in the Middle East, the administration fired off a fusillade of foreign policy concepts at the end of September 1993. In rapid succession in the course of a week, Secretary Christopher, national security adviser Anthony Lake, UN ambassador Madeleine Albright, and the president himself each gave major speeches obviously designed to counter criticisms that the Clinton foreign policy was rudderless. The most comprehensive formulation was articulated by the national security adviser. Clearly inviting it to be labeled the “Clinton Doctrine” (though not applying the term himself), Lake told his audience at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies that “the successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement, enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.” The new strategy had four basic imperatives: First, we should strengthen the community of major market democracies— including our own—which constitutes the core from which enlargement is proceeding. Second, we should help foster and consolidate new democracies and market economies where possible, especially in states of special significance and opportunity. Third, we must counter the aggression—and support the liberalization— of states hostile to democracy and markets. Fourth, we need to pursue our humanitarian agenda not only by providing aid, but also by working to help democracy and market economics take root in regions of greatest humanitarian concern.22

Once again, as so frequently happened during the Cold War, starting with the Truman Doctrine, the temptation of domestically responsible decision makers to garner popular support by simplifying and sloganizing the complexities of international relations trumped the objections of diplomats like George Kennan in 1947 and now Peter Tarnoff that the rhetorical bifurcation of the world into friends and foes would interfere with an intelligent and efficient pursuit of the national interest. If the incongruence between simplistic doctrine and complex reality was excessive even during the Cold War, when there was at least a rough worldwide bipolarization of the Marxists and anti-Marxists, the gap between the

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new rhetoric of the Clinton administration and the actual post–Cold War experimentation with very different political and economic systems was enormous. As Kennan prophesied, the rhetoric could nevertheless become self-confirming as statespersons attempted to close the gap by bending reality to match their doctrines—a tendency that surfaced in the days following Lake’s address in the form of the almost automatic endorsement by the Clinton administration of Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s confrontation with his parliamentary opponents, explained on the grounds of Yeltsin’s championship of market democracy. A potentially problematical aspect of the new “enlargement” doctrine was its explicit obligation to counter or attempt to reform states “hostile to democracy and markets.” Our policy toward these “backlash states,” said Lake, “must seek to isolate them diplomatically, economically, and technologically.” And when the actions of such states directly threaten our people, our forces, or our “vital interests” (a term left undefined), “we clearly must be prepared to strike back decisively and unilaterally.”23 In so conceptualizing Clinton’s evolving foreign policy philosophy, the national security adviser was perhaps more revealing than he intended of the extent to which for this young president (face relatively unlined, mostly smiling, optimistic) geopolitics was, in the early days of his administration, still primarily U.S. domestic politics. But given the intense intermeshing of domestic and international interests—an unavoidable fact of the late twentieth century—this could get the country, and the world, into a lot of trouble. If moment-of-truth decisions failed to measure up to the domestically oriented rhetoric because of a lack of national will or tangible resources to support the grandly defined obligations, the country’s will and commitments were likely to be doubted thereafter, even when irreducible national interests were at stake. Alternatively, if overly ambitious formulations propelled the country’s leaders into ventures in advance of adequate real-time assessments of the material and human costs, there would be hell to pay—not only internationally but domestically—for years to come. This fundamental issue of international undercommitment versus international overcommitment following the Cold War was reflected in Clinton’s sometimes aggressive (toward Serbia, toward Saddam), sometimes restrained (toward Rwanda, toward North Korea) foreign policy during the eight years of his presidency. And they were famously expressed in the quite different formulations of Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright.

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Powell: My constant, unwelcome message at all the meetings on Bosnia was that we should not commit military forces until we had a clear political objective. . . . This debate exploded at one session when Madeleine Albright, our ambassador to the UN, asked me in frustration, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” I thought I would have an aneurysm. American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global chessboard.24 Albright: If we have to use force, it’s because we are America! We are the indispensable nation, and we see further into the future.25

28

OPPORTUNITIES AND FRUSTRATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST I knew Arafat was a great showman and might try to kiss [me and] Rabin after the handshake . . . Tony Lake said he knew a way I could shake hands with Arafat while avoiding a kiss. . . . We all laughed about it, but I knew avoiding a kiss was deadly serious for Rabin. —President Clinton

engaged with events in the Middle East for a combination of sometimes incompatible reasons: containing Soviet expansionism, maintaining access to the petroleum resources of the Persian Gulf, helping to maintain the viability of the state of Israel. This region—the scene of President Carter’s most agonizing frustration (the embassy hostage crisis in Tehran) and his proudest triumph (the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty), of President Reagan’s greatest embarrassments (the massacre of U.S. marines at the Beirut airport and the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran), of President Bush’s most popular undertaking (the Desert Storm operation to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait)—topped the agenda of unfinished business passed on to Clinton’s foreign policy team by the outgoing administration.

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RESIDENT CLINTON’S PREDECESSORS WERE INTENSELY

DEALING WITH SADDAM For George Herbert Walker Bush, having demonized the Iraqi tyrant as another Hitler, amicable relations with the government in Baghdad were virtually intolerable as long as Saddam remained in power. A new president could have attempted to experiment cautiously with a normalization

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of relations—conditioned on a creditable adherence by Saddam to the UN cease-fire accords—but during the last month of the Bush administration, Bush and Saddam maneuvered themselves into a new confrontation that compelled the president-elect to define his alternatives more rapidly and rigidly than be might have preferred. While supporting the military actions against Iraq that Bush ordered during the last week of his presidency (air strikes against Iraqi antiaircraft missile sites in no-fly zones and the dispatch of a battalion of troops into northern Kuwait to prevent Iraqis from removing equipment), Clinton tried, but failed, to allow himself negotiating room. In an interview quoted in the January 14 edition of the New York Times, Clinton said that his grievances were with Saddam’s failure to implement the cease-fire accords and he was absolutely in agreement with President Bush’s insistence that they be adhered to. But the president-elect also insisted that he was “not obsessed with the man.” He averred that “the people of Iraq would be better off if they had a different leader. But my job is not to pick their rulers for them. I always tell everybody, ‘I’m a Baptist; I believe in deathbed conversions.’ If he wants a different relationship with the United States and with the United Nations, all he has to do is change his behavior.”1 Bush administration officials, editorial writers, and privately, even members of Clinton’s own foreign policy entourage immediately criticized Clinton for seeming to differentiate himself from President Bush in the midst of a new military confrontation and for giving the impression that the incoming administration might be willing to normalize relations with Saddam, thus undercutting Bush’s coercive leverage. Clinton responded to these criticisms, claiming he had no expectation of normalizing relations with the Iraqi dictator and that it was a misinterpretation of his remarks to suggest that he had any such intention. “I said what I’ve said many times,” Clinton insisted, “that I will judge him by his conduct. That’s precisely what the Bush administration has done. . . . They decided to bomb him because he violated the United Nations cease-fire accord. That is my position.”2 To underline his promise to be no less tough on Saddam than was Bush, Clinton authorized a continuation of the attacks for twenty-four hours following his inauguration. Television news reports juxtaposed the inauguration night barrage on weapons facilities in the Baghdad suburbs with celebratory fireworks over the skies of Washington, DC. On February 2, the Pentagon acknowledged the cessation of combat flights as of January 23, after Iraq turned off its target acquisition radars and in the absence of any direct challenge to U.S. and allied aircraft policing

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the no-fly zones. “The Iraqis have changed their behavior,” the Pentagon spokesman said.3 A period of relative quiescence in which Iraq formally complied with the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire accords would face Clinton with a set of problems. Saddam was still in power: there was little chance that he would reform his brutal dictatorship or that he would allow substantial self-determination to the Kurds or Shiites; and he would surely insist that the United Nations at some point call off its intrusive inspections of potential Iraqi weapons facilities. But continuing to treat Iraq as a pariah while other countries in the region with terrible human rights records and a history of unscrupulous international power plays (Syria and Iran, for example) were granted full sovereign rights might create new sympathy for Saddam among Arab populations throughout the region. Moreover, to remove Iraq for the foreseeable future as a counterweight to the hegemonic pretensions of fundamentalist Iran would not augur well for regional stability. There were press reports near the end of March 1993 that the British and U.S. governments were considering relaxing their stand against Saddam by indicating that a lifting of the sanctions on Iraq and eventually the restoration of normal relations would follow Baghdad’s adherence to the terms of the UN war-terminating agreements. These were immediately denied by administration spokespersons. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, testifying before the appropriations subcommittee of the House Government Operations Committee on March 24, insisted there had been “no softening” of the government’s position that it would be good if the people of Iraq themselves ended Saddam’s regime. There would be “no relenting,” he said, in the Clinton’s administration’s insistence that there be full and total compliance with the UN cease-fire resolutions.4

ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS While inexperienced in the intricacies of Arab-Israeli relations, Clinton, like any nationally successful U.S. politician, was quite aware that there could be major domestic political ramifications from any positions he might take on the issues. He had deftly avoided some of the minefields during his campaign. But even before taking office, he had to deal with the expressed dissatisfaction of some domestic Jewish groups over his nominations of Warren Christopher as secretary of state and Anthony

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Lake as national security adviser. Christopher and Lake had been high State Department officials in the Carter administration (under secretary and head of policy planning, respectively) and were suspected of carrying with them into the new administration the sympathies for the Palestinian cause harbored by the former president. To counter the discontent, Clinton personally phoned several Jewish members of Congress to assure them that he would be appointing some mainstream members of the Jewish establishment to senior sub-cabinet posts with major foreign policy responsibilities.5 Of course more than domestic politics was involved. The new administration’s effectiveness in dealing with Iraq and a whole complex of issues in the region would be affected by its performance on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Clinton’s predicament was no different than that faced by his predecessors: to the extent that U.S. positions on the Palestinian question supported Israel against a solidifying camp of Muslim countries, it would weaken Washington’s diplomatic influence with other countries in the region and indeed throughout the Third World. And to the extent that Washington revealed a lack of influence over the Arabs, it would lose its leverage over the Israelis, which in turn would feed back into a further loss of influence over the moderate Palestinians in the peace process. Clinton faced this predicament from the very outset of his administration. The Arab-Israeli negotiations over the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were at a standstill and threatening to collapse after Israel, on December 17, deported to Lebanon 415 Palestinians from the West Bank it accused of being Islamic terrorists. The Israeli authorities had summarily arrested the men at their homes, driven them in vans across the Lebanese border into the demilitarized security zone, and abandoned them there. The government of Lebanon and the Arab states denounced the action, refused to accept jurisdiction over the deportees, and demanded that Israel immediately take them back. The next day, Bush authorized the U.S. representative to the UN Security Council to vote along with the majority in support of a resolution condemning the deportation and demanding the immediate return of the deportees. Over the next few weeks the deportees captured worldwide public sympathy through media reports of their hunger and cold in the hills of Lebanon while the Israeli and Lebanese governments insisted it was the other’s responsibility to care for them. Immediately after being sworn in as secretary of state, Warren Christopher engaged in urgent negotiations with the Israelis to soften their rigid stance on the deportation in the hope of deflecting the Arab states from

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bringing a resolution to apply sanctions against Israel to a vote in the Security Council. Prime Minister Rabin agreed to allow 101 of the deported Palestinians to return immediately and to initiate a review process that would repatriate the rest by December 1994. Meanwhile, Christopher tried to convince dissatisfied Arab governments to refrain from taking action in the United Nations that would force a U.S. veto. An essential objective of the new administration’s strategy on the deportation issue, as well as on the larger complex of issues involved in the Israel-Palestinian peace process, was to maintain the U.S. government’s credibility as honest broker between the protagonists. Moderate Arabs and Israelis understood this, and would work cooperatively with U.S. diplomats, in the knowledge that the U.S. government would sometimes have to take positions in opposition to their preferences. By contrast, the extremists on both sides (including parts of the American Jewish community) were ever anxious to push the U.S. government to choose between the “right” and “wrong.” Then suddenly, at the end of August 1993, to the surprise of the White House no less than to the rest of the world, the Rabin government and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chief Yasir Arafat revealed that they had secretly negotiated the basis for mutual recognition and peace. The honest broker had been neither the United States nor Russia (the cosponsors of the on-again-off-again Madrid/Washington peace negotiations between the Israelis and moderate Palestinians), but rather Norway, in the person of Foreign Minister Johan Jørgen Holst. As when the Carter administration’s peace initiatives were preempted in November 1977 by Anwar Sadat’s dramatic démarche to initiate negotiations with Israel, the Clinton administration, initially embarrassed by being taken completely unawares, quickly regained its diplomatic composure and offered its blessings and services to the two sides to assist in the historic breakthrough. But this time the president had much less to do than did Carter, who played an active and ultimately crucial role in mediating the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty and the associated Framework for Peace in the Middle East. President Clinton hosted and officiated at the White House ceremony at which the two heretofore implacable enemies signed their Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements for the Israelioccupied Gaza and the West Bank and mutually pledged to beat their swords into plowshares. U.S. diplomatic support in attempting to draw Jordan and Syria into a similar reconciliation with Israel would yet be

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crucial, as would be U.S. financial aid in giving incentives to the peoples of the region to cooperate in building webs of positive interdependence. Clinton’s role was more that of after-the-fact implementer and facilitator than of superpower impresario—a not unwelcome gift to a president who would rather concentrate on domestic affairs. This assumed, of course, that the enemies of the peace process in the Middle East did not again get the upper hand. And, predictably, they did. The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a radical Israeli nationalist and the revived strength of the right-wing Likud party under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu (a vitriolic critic of the Oslo accords), plus Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat’s own growing political insecurity—prompted Clinton to take on a central catalytic role. In emulation of President Carter’s 1978 mediation, Clinton convened his July 2000 summit with Israeli president Ehud Barak and Arafat at the retreat in Camp David, Maryland. Unlike Camp David 1979, however, Camp David 2000—despite the very active participation of Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright— was unable to regenerate the peace process, let alone produce anything resembling a peace treaty. Clinton’s strategy, resembling Carter’s, was not to have the parties bargain to achieve separate agreements issue by issue— on territory, security, refugees, Jerusalem—and then paste them together in a final document; for this, it was assumed, would more likely exacerbate the disputes and stall the whole process. Rather, operating on the principle that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” the deliberations on these issues would be combined to facilitate compromises and trade-offs among them, leading to a omnibus accord reflecting the fact that concessions were made by both sides in order to achieve peace.6 In order for this process to have succeeded, the parties would have needed to be more committed to the goal of peace than to being able to bring home unambiguous victory on every issue. President Clinton found that Prime Minister Barak was of such a mind but Chairman Arafat was not. Frustrated with the Camp David mediation, which went on for thirteen days (and nights!), Clinton was not willing to give up. He continued to engage in intensive private talks with Barak and Arafat and to prod their negotiating teams during the final months and weeks of his administration. On December 23, convinced that unless big compromises were agreed to up front, there would never be an agreement, Clinton brought the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams to the White House to read them his “parameters,” as he called them, which he derived from the private talks he

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had been having with each side since Camp David. He told the assembled group that they had four days to accept the parameters for proceeding with the negotiations. If they did not, there was no basis for going forward. With respect to territory, Clinton recommended 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank would be part of Palestine, the rest would contain 80 percent of the Israeli settlers, and Israel would give the Palestinians a small “land swap” in return. With respect to the security issue, Israel would withdraw forces over a three-year period, giving way to an international peacekeeping force. The new state of Palestine, although “nonmilitarized,” could have a strong security force, plus sovereignty over its airspace. East Jerusalem would be the capital of Palestine and the rest the capital of Israel, and the city’s neighborhoods would be part of each, with the Palestinians having sovereignty over the Temple Mount and the Israelis retaining sovereignty over the Western Wall. Palestine itself, including the land received from Israel in the swap, should be the main homeland for the refugees, who could be resettled with international financial help. And Israel should release its Palestinian prisoners. “I said these parameters were nonnegotiable,” Clinton recounts in his memoir. He told the U.S. team they could talk further with the other teams to clarify misunderstandings, but not to hear complaints. “I knew the plan was tough for both parties, but it was time—past time—to put up or shut up.”7 Prime Minister Barak got his cabinet to endorse the parameters with some reservations that Clinton was willing to accept. But Arafat was balking, primarily over the “right of return” of the Palestinian war refugees to their original home areas now in Israel. It was just weeks before Clinton’s last day in office, yet he hosted Arafat in the White House on January 2 in a last desperate effort to convince him that the Israeli’s of course could not accept what would transform Israel into an Arab-majority state. Although most of the young people on Arafat’s team wanted him to accept Clinton’s parameters, Arafat would not budge. “At times Arafat seemed confused, not wholly in command of the facts. . . . Perhaps he simply couldn’t make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman,” Clinton writes. “Arafat’s rejection of my proposal after Barak accepted it was an error of historic proportions.” Clinton’s recollection of his personal endgame with Arafat merits a verbatim quote: “Right before I left office, Arafat, in one of our last conversations, thanked me for all my efforts and told me what a great man I was. ‘Mr. Chairman,’ I replied, ‘I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.’ ”8

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Ironically, nearly a year after rejecting Clinton’s initiatives, and now having to defend the Palestinian cause against Prime Minister Barak’s hardline successor Ariel Sharon, Arafat indicated he was ready to negotiate on the basis of the parameters Clinton had proposed. But it was too late, for neither the incoming George W. Bush administration nor the government in Israel felt that the old man, even if he could be trusted, could anymore deliver his compatriots on the issues.

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LEAVING SOMALIA AND LEAVING RWANDA ALONE Somalia was something close to anarchy. Rwanda was planned mass murder. Somalia counseled caution; Rwanda demanded action. — Madeleine Albright

UNFINISHED BUSINESS IN SOMALIA One of the large worries of the Clinton’s foreign policy advisers was that Bush’s public promise that the U.S. military deployment in Somalia was to be swiftly completed—a promise that Clinton as president-elect had endorsed—would not be fulfilled before Bush left office and would haunt the incoming administration. The premise of the Bush intervention was that once the U.S. forces had established a modicum of order by separating or partially disarming the warring warlord factions and had provided security for the delivery of humanitarian relief, the United Nations would take over the long-run peacekeeping and relief tasks. But Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had disputed the Bush administration’s timetable for the completion of the initial pacification efforts by the U.S. forces, claiming that the United Nations did not presently possess either an adequate mandate or the peacekeeping resources that would be required to substitute for the U.S. presence. However, the UN Secretary General was faced by the determination of Clinton’s administration to implement Bush’s promise. The result was the Security Council’s unanimous passage on March 26, 1993, of the U.S.drafted resolution for turning over the basic functions (and more) of the

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U.S.-led Operation Restore Hope to the United Nations on May 1. The authorized UN operation in Somalia would be one of the largest and most ambitious peacekeeping or humanitarian operations in the organization’s history. Costing an estimated $1.5 billion during its first year and involving a planned 28,000 blue-helmeted UN troops and another 2,000 civilians, the world organization’s operation in Somalia would be mandated to virtually run the country. The UN military force would include an American contingent that—in a departure from the Bush administration policy of maintaining U.S. command and control of any U.S. forces—would be subject to the authority of the UN operation’s commander, a general from Turkey. Operating under authority of Security Council resolutions ordering the capture of warlord Mohammed Aidid and the confiscation of his arms caches, the UN force was the target of increasing numbers of violent attacks in the summer and fall of 1993. Clinton’s moment of truth about the Somalia mission came at the beginning of October 1993 when, under orders to capture Aidid, a beefed-up U.S. Ranger contingent, with support from Blackhawk helicopters, got into an intense firefight in Mogadishu. They captured two dozen of Aidid’s group, but not Aidid. One of the Blackhawks was shot down and the U.S. forces trying to rescue the downed crew were held off by Somali fighters, who surrounded the downed helicopter and a small contingent of U.S. troops. Rescue helicopters and truck convoys were fired on and could not get through. A second Blackhawk was shot down. It took fifteen hours before U.S. forces assisted by Pakistani and Malaysian soldiers were able rescue the besieged still-surviving U.S. troops near the first downed helicopter, scores of whom had been wounded. At the site of the second downed helicopter, all the U.S. troops—killed, wounded, or captured—had been removed by their Somali assailants. One of the captured crew was shown on television being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu; another was held hostage for days. All in all, eighteen American troops were killed and over seventy wounded in the encounter.1 Clearly, the original mission of the UN and U.S. forces—to ensure the delivery of food and medical supplies—to besieged communities could not be adequately performed without defeating the warlords who were the cause of the country’s humanitarian disaster. But the resulting mission creep, as it was called, turned the intervening forces from “peacekeepers” into active belligerents. To fulfill their expanded mission of subduing the warlords and taking over the country to establish peace and security, the deployments would have to be substantially augmented. Unable to point

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to U.S. geopolitical or economic interests in Somalia at the time that would warrant such a commitment of blood and treasure, the president decided to terminate Operation Restore Hope and withdraw the U.S. forces. “Americans were outraged and astounded,” Clinton recalls in his memoir. “How had our humanitarian mission turned into an obsession with getting Aidid?” Why were American forces doing the UN’s job? “Senator John McCain said, ‘Clinton’s got to bring them home.’ ”2 After Black Hawk Down, Clinton wrote, “whenever I approved the deployment of forces, I knew much more about what the risks were . . . The lessons of Somalia were not lost on the military planners who plotted our course in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and other troubled spots of the post–Cold War world, where America was often asked to step in to stop hideous violence, and too often expected to do it without the loss of lives to ourselves, our adversaries, or innocent bystanders.” 3 Nor were the “lessons” of Somalia lost on the president and his aides who decided not to step in to try to stop the hideous violence in Rwanda.

NO BUSINESS IN RWANDA With the bloody skirmish between U.S. “peacekeepers” and Somali militias still fresh in their minds, when the UN Security Council authorized a peacekeeping mission for Rwanda in the fall of 1993, they made sure to write into its mandate that it was not to take sides in the conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis and definitely not to engage in any of the fighting, other than what was necessary for self-defense. This was consistent with the new and stricter guidance being worked up in the Clinton administration for U.S. participation in multilateral peacekeeping missions, eventually published as Presidential Decision Directive (PDD-25). And the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright had no hesitancy in supporting the restrictive mandate for the UN force. So when reports of extremist Hutu militias secretly arming themselves in violation of the existing Rwanda cease-fire accord were received early in 1994 by the Canadian commander of the UN peacekeepers, General Roméo Dallaire, there was very little he could do about it other than to inform the Rwandan president and ask him to investigate. Washington at the time was focused on other crises, including Saddam’s violations of the Gulf War cease-fire accord. It took the shooting down of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane on April 6, and the murder the next day

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of the prime minister and ten Belgian peacekeepers who were guarding her to get Ambassador Albright and her bosses to begin to pay attention to the horrendous disaster unfolding in Kigale. Still, Albright confesses in her memoir, “It would be weeks before most of us understood the nature and scale of the violence.” 4 Meanwhile there were plausible grounds for believing that President Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down by Hutu extremists, trying to make it look like the assassination of the moderate Hutu president was committed by Tutsis, thereby giving the Hutu radicals the excuse to kill the prime minister who was a Tutsi, which would provoke reprisals by the Tutsis—which in turn would generate intense anger in the Hutu community that the radicals could mobilize for a widespread rampage against the Tutsis. To make sure that U.S. personnel and nationals did not themselves become targets or get caught in the cross fire, the United States quickly decided to evacuate its people. The director of the task force in Washington managing the evacuation, Acting Assistant Secretary of State Prudence Bushnell, recalls, “I was sorry about the Rwandans, of course, but my job was to get our folks out. . . . Then again, people didn’t know it was a genocide. What I was told was, ‘Look, Pru, these people do this from time to time.’ We thought we’d be right back.” 5 To deal with the escalating carnage, in which UN personnel were also likely to be victims—indeed, the ten Belgian peacekeepers guarding the prime minister had been hacked to death—General Dallaire requested permission from the UN Secretariat to use arms. But, “Fearing another Somalia,” recounts Albright, “UN Headquarters didn’t want to be viewed as taking sides, so it turned the request down.” 6 Even if Dallaire did get an okay, he would have had very little to work with. Belgium, the bestequipped contingent, was pulling out its troops. Others, like the Tutsis and Ghanians, were woefully underequipped. As the UN and Washington dithered, the interethnic violence mushroomed to genocidal proportions—as many as 500,000 people already killed, estimated the International Committee of the Red Cross. The debates in the international community and the Clinton administration polarized between those advocating a complete UN pullout and those urging full peace enforcement ( as distinct from peacekeeping), which would have required some 40,000 heavily armed troops and would have to depend centrally on U.S. participation, if not direction. In retrospect, Madeleine Albright regrets not having advocated such a role for the United States—even in the wake of Somalia. “Many people would have thought

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I was crazy and we would never have won support from Congress, but I would have been right, and possibly my voice would have been heard.” 7 All that came of the months of agonizing over what to do was a weak UN resolution to create secure humanitarian areas “where feasible.” Some countries decided to act largely on their own to save lives—France with 1,500 troops, joined by Senegal with 500, set up a security zone in southwest Rwanda, and belatedly the United States sent a small contingent to care for refugees fleeing the killing fields. By the time the conflict wound down in late July, some 800,000 people had lost their lives in mutual genocide. Looking back, Clinton is consumed by regret. “We were so preoccupied with Bosnia, with the memory of Somalia just six months old, and opposition in Congress to military deployments in faraway places not vital to our national interests that neither I nor anyone on my foreign policy team adequately focused on sending troops to stop the slaughter. With a few thousand troops and help from our allies, even making allowances for the time it would have taken to deploy them, we could have saved lives. The failure to try to stop Rwanda’s tragedies became one of the greatest regrets of my presidency.” 8

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GETTING TOUGH WITH SADDAM AND OSAMA If we turn our backs on his defiance, the credibility of U.S. power as a check against Saddam will be destroyed. We will have fatally undercut the fear of force that stops Saddam from acting to gain domination in the region. . . . That is why I have ordered a strong sustained series of air strikes against Iraq. —Bill Clinton

When [CIA] field agents or the Afghan tribals were apparently uncertain of whether they had to try to capture bin Laden before they used deadly force, I made it clear that they did not. . . . I extended the lethal force authorization by expanding the list of targeted bin Laden associates and the circumstances under which they could be attacked. —Bill Clinton

T

HE SOFT SIDE OF BILL Clinton’s foreign policy face—economic global-

ization and support for human rights and democracy, his efforts to mediate between the Israelis and the Palestinians, plus his reluctance to put U.S. troops in harm’s way in the Balkans, Somalia, and Rwanda— was complemented by a hard side: a stern refusal to let the United States be pushed around, visceral outrage against acts of terrorism, and a willingness to apply U.S. material power coercively (through economic sanctions and, if driven to it, the use of military force with capabilities and strategies that did not entail a lot of U.S. casualties). The harder aspect of the Clinton face was revealed particularly in response to belligerent provocations by Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

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EDGING TOWARD REGIME CHANGE IN BAGHDAD A half year into the Clinton presidency, tensions between Baghdad and Washington escalated dramatically. On June 15, Ambassador Madeleine Albright presented the UN Security Council evidence that Iraqi intelligence agents had plotted to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush in April during his visit to Kuwait to commemorate the second anniversary of the Gulf War. Albright’s revelation was followed by a nighttime raid, ordered by President Clinton, with twenty-three Tomahawk missiles that demolished the Iraqi intelligence headquarters in central Baghdad.1 Clinton’s recollection of this experience in exercising his power as commander in chief show him to be deferential to military judgment, but also wary of how things can go awry in war: I asked the Pentagon to recommend a course of action, and General Powell came to me with the missile attack on the intelligence headquarters as both a proportionate response and an effective deterrent. I felt we would have been justified in hitting Iraq harder, but Powell made a persuasive case that the attack would deter further Iraqi terrorism, and that dropping bombs on more targets, including presidential palaces, would have been unlikely to kill Saddam Hussein and almost certain to kill more innocent people. Most of the Tomahawks hit the target, but four of them overshot, three landing in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood and killing eight civilians. It was a stark reminder that no matter how careful the planning and how accurate the weapons, when that kind of firepower is unleashed, there are usually unintended consequences.2

It was not clear that Saddam himself had ordered the 1993 assassination attempt. But from then on, throughout his first term, Clinton warily focused on the Iraqi leader as if they were engaged in deadly high-stakes game of poker. Iraq’s continuing violation of the Gulf War cease-fire accords and Saddam’s machinations against the inspection efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) continued to raise Clinton’s ire. In October 1997, when Saddam blocked UN inspections and demanded the U.S. inspections personnel be fired, Clinton both tightened economic sanctions on Iraq and visibly augmented U.S. military deployments in the Gulf. Finally, after a year of on-again, off-again feints from Baghdad with respect to UNSCOM and IAEA access to the nuclear facilities, Saddam on October 31, 1998, summarily and completely shut down all the

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international inspection activities. The U.S. response—military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf and strong verbal hints from U.S. officials speaking on background that a major strike on Iraq was being prepared—produced the typical promises from Baghdad to resume cooperation with the UN inspectorate. But Clinton had enough. He signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act (passed by unanimous consent in the Senate and 360–38 in the House), which declared, “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” But, as yet, according to the act, U.S. Armed Forces were not authorized by Congress to effect such regime change.3 For a more restricted purpose, on December 16, 1998, the president unleashed Operation Desert Fox—a 70-hour campaign of 650 bomber and missile sorties against a wide range of Iraqi targets. “Earlier today,” he announced to the world, “I ordered America’s armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq’s nuclear chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capability to threaten its neighbors.” The decision to use force, he said, was in response to Saddam’s repeated failure to cooperate with the UN weapons inspectors mandated to oversee Iraq’s adherence to its Gulf War cease-fire agreement to dismantle and not re-create its weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. If Saddam was allowed to get away with this defiance, Clinton contended, “he would conclude that the international community—led by the United States—has simply lost its will. He will surmise that he has free rein to rebuild his arsenal of destruction, and someday—make no mistake—he will use it again as he has in the past.”4 (The reference was to Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war and against Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq, also his firing of Scud missiles against Israeli cities.) The air strikes, explained the president, “are designed to degrade Saddam’s capacity to develop and deliver weapons of mass destruction and to degrade his ability to threaten his neighbors.” This was not a one-time response. It was part of a long-term strategy: First, we must be prepared to use force again if Saddam takes threatening actions. . . . The credible threat to use force, and when necessary, the actual use of force, is the surest way to contain Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program, curtail his aggression, and prevent another Gulf War. Second, so long as Iraq remains out of compliance, we will work with the International community to maintain and enforce economic sanctions.

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And then, there was the ultimate objective of regime change. Clinton did not use that phrase but did say, “The hard fact is that so long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his region, and the security of the world.”5 In her memoir, Madeleine Albright recalls that Operation Desert Fox “marked a turning point in what had become an international soap opera. The United States shifted its policy toward Saddam from containment with inspections to an approach we called containment plus. We counted upon allied military forces in the region to keep Saddam in his box, while we took other steps to weaken him. In practice, this meant enforcement of the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. When provoked, we did not hesitate to hit Saddam’s radar and antiaircraft facilities. . . . We took steps to unite and strengthen the Iraqi opposition, And we adopted ‘regime change’ as an explicit goal of U.S. policy.”6 At that time, it should be noted, the Clinton administration’s “regimechange” policy, consistent with the Iraq Liberation Act, did not include plans for an actual invasion of Iraq with U.S. troops. Aerial bombardment, yes; aiding and abetting internal dissidence, yes; but a full-scale war and occupation, no.

GOING AFTER BIN LADEN Informed at 5:35 a.m. on August 7, 1998, by his national security adviser Sandy Berger that the U.S embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had just been bombed, President Clinton, like Berger, CIA director George Tenet, and the rest of the national security team quickly focused on Osama bin Laden. The CIA had been tracking bin Laden since 1993 as a major financier of extremist jihadists worldwide, and in 1996 the agency had set up a special unit to analyze intelligence and plan offensive operations against him and a terrorist group he appeared to be directing called al-Qaeda. Although bin Laden was residing in Afghanistan in August 1998, the CIA, which had been monitoring al-Qaeda’s activities in Nairobi, was able to definitively fix responsibility for the embassy bombings on the wealthy Saudi entrepreneur.7 Clinton believed that the simultaneous bombings, reportedly killing over 200 people, including 12 Americans and 40 local employees of the embassies, and injuring nearly 5,000 Americans and Africans, clearly warranted a forceful response—directly at bin Laden if possible. The CIA learned that several hundred terrorist leaders were to be meeting with Osama at a

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camp near Khost, Afghanistan, during the third week in August, and this encampment became the prime target to attack. There was debate in the administration, however, over whether to strike targets outside Afghanistan that were al-Qaeda and/or bin Laden assets. A consensus developed around hitting such assets in Sudan, the locale of Osama’s organizational activities in the years before he moved his headquarters to Afghanistan. Clinton rejected one of the Sudan target options, a tannery thought to be owned by bin Laden, on the grounds that striking it could kill ordinary workers who were not necessarily terrorists, and anyway bin Laden himself and his chief lieutenants were no longer there. The president settled, rather, on targeting a Khartoum pharmaceutical plant that was believed to be manufacturing, with bin Laden’s support, a precursor ingredient for nerve gas that could have terrorist uses.8 On August 20, U.S. Navy vessels in the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea shot some seventy-nine cruise missiles at the selected targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. And President Clinton publicly announced that the United States had launched an attack on “one of the most active terrorist bases in the world” located in Afghanistan and operated by groups affiliated with Osama bin Laden. “We also struck a chemical weapons-related facility in Sudan,” which he said was “the terrorists’ base of operation and infrastructure.” He gave four reasons: evidence that the target groups had played the key role in the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania; that the groups had executed terrorist attacks against Americans in the past; that they were planning additional terrorist attacks; and that they were seeking to acquire chemical weapons and other dangerous weapons.9 The attacks destroyed the chemical plant in Khartoum and killed 20–30 people in the al-Qaeda encampment in Afghanistan. But the big prize, bin Laden, was missed by a few hours, according to CIA director Tenet.10 The retaliatory action was not all that popular in the United States. Some opinion leaders regarded it as a disproportionate response. Others criticized the claim that the Sudanese chemical plant was producing a nerve gas component as insufficiently demonstrated. Still others complained that the air strikes did not accomplish their main purpose of killing bin Laden and decapitating al-Qaeda. Clinton’s political opponents alleged that the whole thing was hyped up to divert media attention from the scandal involving his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. All members of his national security team angrily denied that the president’s military response to the embassy bombings, and their own advice to him, was driven by any considerations other than the nation’s vital interests.

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INTO HAITI AND THE BALKANS The Responsibility to Protect General Cédras and his thugs had intensified their reign of terror, executing orphaned children, raping young girls, killing priests, mutilating people and leaving body parts in the open to terrify mothers, and slashing the faces of mothers with machetes while their children watched. . . . I was fed up. . . . I thought we had to go forward. —Bill Clinton

The Western mistake . . . had been to treat the Serbs as rational people with whom one could argue, negotiate, compromise, and agree. In fact they respected only force or an unambiguous and credible threat to use it. —Richard Holbrooke

LINTON’S PREDECESSOR, GEORGE H. W. Bush, being the first post–Cold War president, had no tradition of U.S. diplomacy to draw on when trying to determine the international responsibilities of the United States as the only superpower in a still largely anarchic world. In situations in which U.S. security and economic well-being were not at stake, did this country nevertheless have an obligation to defend and enforce basic world order and justice—that is, the norms of the international system itself: the sanctity of national borders; the rule of no military interventions into another country’s territory (unless the target country were violating these norms)? In responding to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, President Bush had answered the question of U.S. responsibilities in the affirmative with respect to the world order norms. And in the Somalian humanitarian military intervention he veered into the more controversial realm of using force to shape

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the internal situation of other countries when doing so was not required by the security or economic condition of the United States. Ironically, it fell to Bush, Realist disciple of Henry Kissinger, to usher in a new foreign policy era of liberal interventionism—at least in the relatively easy cases of dealing with small powers. President Clinton inherited the post–Cold War Wilsonian disposition that in the early 1990s was more prevalent among the Democratic party elite than among the Republican leadership (which was then split between the George Bush–Brent Scowcroft realists and the neoconservative disciples of Ronald Reagan). The Wilsonian disposition was elevated to doctrinal status in the “enlargement” speech of national security adviser Anthony Lake and the two National Security Council (NSC) national security strategy documents issued over Clinton’s signature, which included promoting democracy and halting gross human rights violations among the U.S. interests that could require the use of U.S. military power.1

WHAT TO DO WITH THE HAITIAN REFUGEES . . . AND WITH HAITI As with so many other issues, the view from the Oval Office on the issue of how to deal with the boatloads of refugees from Haiti’s repressive regime looked different than it had from the campaign bus. The Haitian refugees had started coming in great numbers following the October 1991 military coup in Haiti against the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Amid persistent reports of brutal repression and abuse of Aristide’s supporters by the military regime, more than 30,000 Haitians headed for the United States in small boats between the coup and the end of the Bush administration. Approximately 20,000 of these were turned back by the U.S. Coast Guard while still outside U.S. territorial waters. During the 1992 election campaign Clinton had excoriated as “inhumane” and “immoral” Bush’s policy toward the Haitians and Bush’s rationalization that most of the boat people were not really political refugees seeking asylum but people fleeing economic hardship, whom the United States was in no position to absorb. Bush claimed that the proper way to deal with the Haitian exodus was to have U.S. authorities in Haiti screen all potential emigrés to the United States to determine whether they were indeed proper candidates for political asylum.

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Clinton had pledged to modify the Bush refugee policy if elected president and also to intensify efforts to restore democracy in Haiti. But shortly after his inauguration, evidently worried that a more welcoming attitude toward the refugees might unleash a veritable flood of them upon Florida’s shores, Clinton averred that he might have been “too harsh” in his criticism of the Bush policy and announced that he would continue the policy of interception “for the time being” but would make it “easier and safer” for Haitians seeking political asylum to apply through the U.S. embassy in Haiti. White House spokesperson George Stephanopoulous told reporters that administration lawyers had determined the Bush repatriation policy was not in violation of U.S. or international law and that the president had “reconsidered his position. . . . He believes that this is the right thing to do. It is the best way to save lives.”2 Meanwhile, the president said he was putting his administration to work to arrange for a restoration of Aristide to the presidency and of democracy on the island and also to help Haiti with its economic development. The first step was to throw U.S. support behind the diplomatic initiative of the United Nations in July 1993, which grew out of a meeting on Governor’s Island, New York, between UN envoy Dante Caputo and representatives from Haiti. The Governor’s Island agreement provided for a lifting of UN sanctions on Haiti as the reward for the appointment of a new Haitian prime minister, Haiti’s hosting of a U.S. and UN peacekeeping contingent of 1,300 troops, and finally, in October 1993, the return of Aristide to the island. However, contrary to the spirit of the Governor’s Island accord, when the peacekeepers arrived in Haiti in October 1933 on the ship Harlan County, they were blocked from coming ashore by Haitian paramilitary forces. Not wanting to have a test of arms at that point, the president ordered the Harlan County to turn around. It was a humiliating moment for the United States, and Clinton briefly considered military intervention but decided to rely on further diplomatic persuasion instead. It took a year of futile diplomatic efforts to bring the Clinton administration to the realization that General Raoul Cédras would continue to block the restoration of democracy unless faced with a credible threat of intervention. Clinton was finally moved to act upon this premise by strong remonstrations from the Congressional Black Caucus and the hunger strike of Randall Robinson, the director of TransAfrica. In July 1994, UN ambassador Madeleine Albright mobilized other members of the Security Council to support Resolution 940 authorizing member states to use force

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if necessary “to facilitate the departure from Haiti of the military leadership, . . . the prompt return of the legitimately elected president, and the restoration of the legitimate authorities of the Government of Haiti.”3 This was an unorthodox UN action, but it was reflective of the new strength of the human rights movement and the evolving doctrines of conditional sovereignty and of the responsibility of the wider community to intervene to protect human rights when the country in which they are being violated lacks the capacity or will to provide such protection. Under the authority of Resolution 940 and related Security Council resolutions, President Clinton ordered the U.S. military to prepare to invade Haiti in September to forcibly remove General Cédras and then, backed by a UN peacekeeping force, to establish the conditions for the restoration of democratic processes. On September 15, 1994, Clinton addressed the nation to prepare the public for the forthcoming military action. He maintained that all diplomatic efforts had been exhausted and issued a warning to the Haitian military leaders that they must relinquish power immediately, explaining that “Haiti’s dictators . . . control the most violent regime in our hemisphere. Cédras and his armed thugs have conducted a reign of terror, executing children, raping women, killing priests.”4 In this speech and statements during the next few days preceding the planned invasion, due to commence on September 18, the administration reiterated its case for military intervention: (1) It was intolerable that democratic governments in the Americas be overthrown by military coups; (2) terrible human rights violations were being committed by the Haitian military regime; and (3) continuing waves of immigrants from Haiti would destabilize the hemisphere. On the day of the planned invasion, three Clinton emissaries—former president Jimmy Carter, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, and Senator Sam Nunn, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee—were in Haiti trying to convince General Cédras to relinquish power and not to oppose the restoration of President Aristide in time to allow a peaceful entry by the U.S. troops. Carter’s principal aide on this trip, Robert Pastor, describes the tense scene: By 1 p.m. on Sunday (18 September), the Carter-Nunn-Powell team succeeded in gaining agreement to allow peaceful entry of the US forces into Haiti and restoration of President Aristide. However, with details still remaining to be negotiated, President Clinton’s deadline had now passed. Suddenly, Haitian General Philippe Biamby burst into the room with the news that the 82nd

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Airborne was being readied for attack. . . . Biamby accused the US negotiating team of deception and informed them he was taking Cédras to a secure area where they would prepare for the invasion. . . . Because the Carter-Nunn-Powell team had conveyed the threat with credibility, but without brandishing it, Cédras had been ready to sign the agreement; once he learned the attack was already underway, however, he refused to sign or even negotiate further. Because Carter could not persuade the generals to complete the agreement, he changed the venue of the negotiations . . . to the Presidential Palace, and he asked Cédras to accompany him. There, the de facto president, Emile Jonaissant, was willing to sign the agreement . . . With the US Air Force halfway to Haiti, President Clinton finally ordered their recall and asked Carter to sign the agreement on his behalf.5

As part of the last-minute deal for calling off the invasion, the Cédras group were to be granted amnesty and the United States would provide them with financial assistance (“golden parachutes”) for leaving the country and settling elsewhere. This feature angered human rights groups. Why not a trial to prosecute Cédras for brutal human rights crimes? But former president Jimmy Carter and Colin Powell defended the deal they negotiated on the grounds that if sacrificing full justice bought the avoidance of the bloodshed of a military invasion and also a restoration of democracy in Haiti, it was worth it.

WHETHER AND HOW TO INTERVENE IN THE BALKANS The Balkan crises posed questions concerning the purposes and power of the United States in the emerging system of world politics for which the Clinton administration had no answers at the outset and for which it would need to evolve an appropriate conceptual apparatus along the way. It had problematic ramifications for developments in other regions. Any overt definition of the Serbs as the U.S. or Western enemy in Bosnia and Kosovo could play into the hands of the antireform nationalists in Russia for whom a pro-Serbian policy was a cultural, religious, and geopolitical given; accordingly, Yeltsin and the proreform elements would be reluctant to support UN or NATO actions that punished the Serbs. But opposed to this constraint on U.S. policy was the growing frustration throughout the Muslim world with the failure of the West to support their

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Bosnian religious brethren against blatant aggression at the hands of the Euro-Christian Orthodox Serbs—a potentially dangerous polarization of attitudes that could undermine U.S. interests throughout the Middle East.

TAKING SIDES IN BOSNIA Having criticized President Bush during the election campaign for not doing enough to arrest the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” campaign in Bosnia and to compel the warring ethnic groups to peacefully settle their disputes over the structure of the Bosnian state, Clinton began his presidency under considerable pressure to come forward with an activist policy to end the civil war. Each week that went by, the better-armed Serbs (having inherited most of the heavy arms and equipment from the disintegrated Yugoslav federation) were getting their way. At the start of February 1993, they had already captured about 70 percent of Bosnia and were starving out enclaves of Muslims who refused to leave the Serbdominated areas. As many as 150,000 Bosnians had already lost their lives, and 1.5 million had been driven from their homes during the past year of intercommunal strife. Clinton thus inherited a set of interlinked dilemmas in that troubled area at least as painful as those that had paralyzed the Bush administration. At the political and diplomatic level, should the United States insist the Bosnian Serbs relinquish the bulk of the territory they had captured as a condition of a settlement? The Serbs were bound to reject this, making it necessary for outsiders (including the United States) to provide military assistance to the anti-Serb forces. Clinton was advised that such an equalization of fighting capability would likely prolong and intensify the civil war and that the only way to avoid this consequence would be to credibly threaten direct military intervention by the West with enough forces to decisively turn the tide of battle against the Serbs. Alternatively, should the United States give highest priority to an immediate cessation of hostilities—a cease-fire in place—and the negotiation of a compromise settlement (along the lines of a plan developed jointly by the UN mediator Cyrus Vance and the European Community mediator David Owen) that would carve up Bosnia into essentially autonomous provinces based on current concentrations of the different religious groups? The Vance-Owen plan would appear to reward the Serbs’ brutal aggression and to legitimize their holding on to much of the territory they had taken by force.

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Moreover, given the bitter grievances that such a partition of Bosnia would leave among minorities within each of the ethnic-majority provinces, the arrangement would require long-term enforcement by large and uniquely powerful international peacekeeping units. What about direct U.S. military engagement? President Clinton’s military advisers attempted to disabuse their new commander in chief of his notion, expressed during the election campaign, that limited and selected air strikes against Serbian artillery or counter–air enforcement of “no-fly” zones against Serbian aircraft would be sufficient to break the Serbian siege of Bosnian Muslim enclaves. The French commander of UN peacekeeping and humanitarian relief forces also opposed these moves as likely to subject his lightly armed units to retaliatory attacks; and UN military authorities objected to lifting the arms embargo on supplies to the Bosnian Muslims on grounds that this would only encourage them to reopen hostilities against the Serbs in areas where the cease-fire was currently holding. The consensus among the military—national and international—was that any enforcement objectives had to be precisely defined and then provisioned with unambiguously sufficient forces to accomplish their missions. But whether the objective was the imposition of withdrawal demands upon the Serbs or the enforcement of a negotiated settlement, the military requirements would be large—at least 50,000 and as many as 200,000 ground troops, in addition to substantial air cover. Would the United States be willing to participate in this effort, contributing not just air support but also troops to a UN or NATO command? The administration could not escape the realization that while it was agonizing over what to do, the civil war in Bosnia was intensifying. Press reports that Clinton found the Vance-Owen plan unfair to the Muslims and the announcement that he was appointing his own mediator, Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew, to join the UN mediation effort had the unintended effect of delaying Muslim acceptance of a negotiated compromise, which in turn allowed the Serbs to intensify their military efforts to grab even more of Bosnia before the imposition of a firm cease-fire.6 Clinton became increasingly frustrated with the vicious pattern the situation was exhibiting: lightly armed UN peacekeepers with the mission of enforcing cease-fires but with a mandate not to take sides, and thus standing by virtually paralyzed as one side or the other violated a cease-fire; persistent and spiraling brutality by whichever side was dominant in a locality against the other religious community (“ethnic cleansing” being practiced by the militaries and paramilitaries of each of the three

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religious communities against one another); and when cease-fires were broken, because of the US and other outside powers’ respect for the UN Security Council mandate of an embargo on weapons deliveries into all of the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Serbs, well and continuously supplied with arms from Serbia, a Russian client state, reaped a large asymmetrical benefit. The Croats got some help in circumventing the ban. Meanwhile, the Muslim Bosnians were the most disadvantaged by the embargo. United Nations’ ambassador Madeleine Albright got the White House to let her introduce a Security Council resolution lifting the arms embargo; however, even the United Kingdom and France joined Russia in abstaining, thus defeating the effort. Unwilling to let it go at that, Albright, joined by Vice President Albert Gore and the national security adviser Anthony Lake, on the strength of the Republicans having captured control of both houses of Congress in the November 1994 elections (Senator Dole had been a leading critic of the embargo and was now sure to get his way), was able to convince the president to unilaterally suspend the embargo despite objections of the European allies and some holdouts in the administration for strict “neutrality.” Things came to a head in the spring and summer of 1995. In May, in response to a severe shelling of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo by the Serbs, UN authorities acquiesced in the U.S. initiative to have NATO planes bomb ammunition dumps in Pale, a Serb stronghold. The Serbs retaliated by shelling what were supposed to be Muslim safe havens and, most provocatively, by taking hostage nearly 400 UN peacekeeping personnel. To deter further NATO bombing raids, the Serbs chained their captive UN peacekeepers to potential targets—air defense sites, bridges, other obvious military facilities—and demanded as a condition for their release that the UN guarantee there would be no more NATO air strikes. An agreement to that effect was negotiated between the UN peace force commander and the commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, ending the immediate hostage crisis; but it was apparently never formally accepted at UN headquarters.7 A brief period during which NATO air strikes were suspended and various peace options were floated, including Serb cessation of hostilities in return for a withdrawal of the UN peacekeepers, ended on July 6, 1995, with the massive Serb attack on Srebrenica, one of the remaining Muslim enclaves in Bosnia. After shelling the town for five days, General Ratko Mladić’s legions swarmed into the town, taking the Dutch UN peacekeeping contingent hostage while forcing the women and children to leave. The Dutch, upon agreeing to withdraw their UN soldiers, thought they

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had obtained a promise from General Mladić not to harm the men of the town. But following the peacekeeper’s withdrawal, the men of Srebrenica— more than 7,000 of them—were slaughtered and dumped into mass graves. The extent of the “ethnic cleansing” massacre was not immediately known. But as intelligence investigators pieced together the story over the next few weeks, anger at the horror of Srebrenica—which behind closed doors in the White House Vice President Gore called “genocide”—resulted in a NATO-UN commitment to respond forcefully to further Serb assaults on any of the other Muslim safe areas in Bosnia.8 The president ordered an intensification of diplomatic efforts to convince the Serbs to agree to an independent Bosnia in a constitutional arrangement reflecting the demographic fact of its being a predominantly Muslim province of the former Yugoslavia. The contemplated structure could allow a degree of autonomy for the areas of Bosnia heavily populated by Serbs, but it should be a real federation. “We must commit to a unified Bosnia,” Clinton insisted to the involved members of his administration. “And if we can’t get that at the bargaining table, we have to help the Bosnians on the battlefield.”9 Indeed, a successful Croatian military surge in late summer 1995 against the Serbian forces in the Krajina region showed the world that the Serbs did not yet own the battlefield. A major escalation of the conflict came in response to the August 28 shelling by the Bosnian Serbs of the Markale market in Sarajevo killing scores of people and injuring nearly 100. The largest military action in NATO’s history up to then, Operation Deliberate Force commenced at 2:00 a.m. on August 30 with more than 60 aircraft flying off the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt and from bases in Italy to destroy Bosnian surfaceto-air missiles and positions around Sarajevo that were the source of the mortar attacks on the market. French and British artillery units joined in, attacking Serb military barracks in the vicinity.10 A temporary pause was ordered to allow a UN negotiating team to arrange a cessation of hostilities with the Bosnian Serbs. The violence broke out again on September 5 over the incompatibility of each side’s demands. But now the pace and intensity of negotiations also increased. The first breakthrough agreement was reached on September 8 by the foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia, producing an agreement on September 8 vaguely defining the structure of the new Bosnia as two entities (one Bosnian-Croat and the other Serb) within a single state. Then on September 13, the U.S. negotiating team, led by Richard Holbrooke, landed in Belgrade for a series of marathon meetings with the

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Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and the notorious Bosnian Serb perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing campaigns President Radovan Karadžić and General Ratko Mladić to hammer out a cease-fire for the Sarajevo area that was announced on September 14. It took another twenty days to negotiate a countrywide cease-fire (which did not hold) and for Holbrooke to get the contending parties to come to Dayton, Ohio, to negotiate the final settlement.11 The Dayton accords, initialed on November 21, 1995, and signed on December 14, established an independent Bosnian state essentially along the lines of the September 8 agreement, with supreme international supervisory authority over its implementation, civilian and military, to be exercised by NATO, with the United States contributing a large share of the troops.

KOSOVO: MADELEINE’S WAR . . . AND THE DIPLOMATIC DANCE Four years after Dayton, the unrepentant sponsor of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Slobodan Milošević, was at it again in Kosovo—this time against the Albanians, the mostly Muslim, linguistically distinct people who make up 90 percent of the population of the province. The demands of the Kosovar Albanians for independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had been festering for decades. Even the communist dictator Josip Broz Tito had decided to accommodate to that reality by responding to Albanian violent self-determination agitations in 1968 with a grant of substantial autonomy for the province. But in reaction to renewed rebelliousness by the Kosovar Albanians in the 1980s, President Milošević abolished Kosovo’s autonomy and instituted direct rule from Belgrade. Milošević’s harsh attempts to suppress further nationalistic agitation by the Albanians included measures to make sure that all governmental and government-sponsored functions in Kosovo were defined and conducted as Serbian. Outraged, the Albanians only intensified their activities, forming a province-wide dissident society, the Democratic League of Kosovo. Although their leader at the time, Ibrahim Rugova, was a devotee of nonviolent resistance, increasing frustration with peaceful protests (and even these being suppressed by the Serb authorities) plus envy of the independence the Bosnians had achieved, turned many in the movement toward more radical means and ends. The vehicle for this was the

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Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) with its harassment attacks against Serbs in Kosovo and its call for full independence, not just the restoration of Kosovo’s autonomy within the Serbian state. Hearing reports in January 1998 that Milošević was preparing a military crackdown on the Kosovo dissidents, Madeleine Albright, now secretary of state, swung into action. As UN ambassador during the first Clinton administration, she had become the point person for organizing the U.S. response in the Bosnian crisis, not because the United Nations was that heavily involved but because of her own knowledge of the area and its peoples (her father having been posted there when she was a girl), her energetic and emotionally driven opposition to the unconscionable human rights abuses that were coming to light, and the fact that, more than anyone else in the administration, she had made it her cause. And as the Bosnian crisis unfolded, she emerged as the most hawkish of Clinton’s advisers on the issue of using force. Now, building on her success in the Bosnian crisis, she immediately, firmly, and apparently with the president’s full blessing became the first among equals in the administration for directing U.S. strategy against Milošević’s new aggressiveness. She made sure that the Serb president was reminded of the so-called “Christmas warning” President Bush had delivered at the time of similar rumblings in December 1992, informing Milošević that the United States would be prepared to respond militarily if the Serbs initiated an armed conflict in Kosovo, a warning also reiterated by Secretary of State Christopher in early 1993. And she publicly affirmed, “We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with in Bosnia.”12 The NSC, under Sandy Berger, and the Defense Department, under William Cohen, were not particularly comfortable with these statements of resolve. The Pentagon, having reluctantly acceded at the end of the Bosnian crisis to the deployment of U.S. peacekeeping troops in Bosnia, was not eager for another mission in the Balkans. But Albright kept arguing in the NSC discussions that the danger of a major confrontation was rapidly increasing and Milošević would not be amenable to a deal unless the threat of NATO or U.S. military force was kept prominently on the table. Albright quotes the exasperated national security adviser as saying, “The way you people at the State Department talk about bombing, you sound like lunatics.”13 But the secretary of state kept at it, also with her counterparts in NATO, with whom she formulated the essential features of the settlement that

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both the Serbs and the Kosovars had to be persuaded to accept: a negotiated agreement between Milošević and the Albanians that would grant a substantial measure of self-rule to the province of Kosovo. Autonomy, not independence. In her memoir, Albright explains that Our reluctance to endorse independence was shaped less by principle than by a pragmatic assessment of attitudes in the region. Macedonia and Greece strongly opposed independence for Kosovo because they feared it might inflame separatist ambitions within their own ethnic Albanian populations. Other countries also had minorities with aspirations for independence, including Russia’s Chechens, Georgia’s Abkhaz, Turkey’s Kurds, and Spain’s Basques. More generally, some Europeans feared that an independent Kosovo would become a hotbed of Islamic extremism and organized crime. We couldn’t achieve our goals in Kosovo without support from Europe, and we wouldn’t have Europe’s support if we backed independence for Kosovo.14

The problem with the autonomy-not-independence formula for peace was that neither Milošević nor the militant KLA—that is, both belligerent parties—found it acceptable. Both now, particularly the increasingly confident KLA, thought they could achieve their aims without a negotiated settlement. The rebel group was also indiscriminate in its attacks and apparently eager to provoke a massive Serb response that would generate international outrage and a willingness by the United States and NATO to enter the fray as they had in Bosnia. Its go-for-broke “summer offensive” in July 1998 did provoke an overwhelming Serb counterattack, driving the KLA plus hundreds of thousands of Kosovars out of their homes and into the woods. But the international response was neither that vigorous nor that swift. Would the displaced people, come winter and afraid to return to their homes, present the world with a spectacle of thousands starving and freezing to death and finally activate a counter-Serb or at least a humanitarian intervention? Albright continued to insist that it was essential to back diplomacy with force. She had a measure of success in getting the UN Security Council on September 23 to declare that the situation in Kosovo was a threat to the peace and security and to demand that Milošević cease his attacks on civilians. And on September 24 the NATO Council warned that it would authorize air strikes if the Serbs continued with their offensive.

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Finally the Serbs did overplay their hand in the dead of winter with a brutal massacre in the town of Račak on January 16, 1999, shelling the town, herding women and children into a mosque, rounding up the adult males, whom they shot or mutilated and threw into a frozen ravine. Now the threat of air strikes assumed a credibility that had been lacking. And Milošević, likely fearing a repeat of something like Operation Deliberate Force, agreed to participate in talks with the Albanians convening on February 6 in Rambouillet, France. Albright mobilized her diplomatic counterparts in the so-called Contact Group consisting of the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy to coalesce behind a plan that would grant autonomy to Albanian Kosovo implemented by a NATO peacekeeping force. Again, however, the sticking point for the Albanians was the status of mere autonomy, and for the Serbs it was having their sovereignty compromised by an outside military force deployed indefinitely on their soil. By deft maneuvering Albright was able to get the Albanians to agree to the draft agreement by persuading some of their delegation that autonomy, although the starting status for Kosovo, could evolve, perhaps through some kind of referendum after three years, into something more closely approaching independence. But the Serbs dug in their heels on the issue of a NATO force presence. Just weeks after the collapse of the Rambouillet negotiations, the Serbs began their spring offensive, flouting repeated warnings from Albright and others. And on March 23, NATO Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, consistent with the now-standing NATO Council directive, ordered NATO Commander General Wesley Clark to initiate the preplanned air attack on Serbian military assets. The next day, with the attack already underway, President Clinton informed the nation what had been happening: My fellow Americans, today our Armed Forces joined our NATO allies in air strikes against Serbian forces responsible for the brutality in Kosovo. We have acted with resolve for several reasons. We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive. We act to prevent a wider war; to diffuse a powder keg at the heart of Europe that has exploded twice before in this century with catastrophic results.

The president recited the history of the conflict and related how in the round of negotiations the previous month the Kosovar leaders were willing

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to sign a peace agreement to end the fighting, but the Serbian leaders refused even to discuss key elements, while stationing 40,000 troops in and around Kosovo in preparation for a major offensive. Now, they started moving from village to village, shelling civilians and torching their houses. We’ve seen innocent people taken from their homes, forced to kneel in the dirt and sprayed with bullets; Kosovar men dragged from their families, fathers and sons together, lined up and shot in cold blood. This is not war in the traditional sense. It is an attack by tanks and artillery on a largely defenseless people, whose leaders already agreed to peace. . . . Today, we and our 18 NATO allies agreed to do what we said we would do. . . . In short, if President Milošević will not make peace, we will limit his ability to make war. . . . If he decides to accept the peace agreement and demilitarize Kosovo, NATO has agreed to help implement it with a peacekeeping force. If NATO is invited to do so, our troops should take part in that mission to keep the peace. But I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war.15

I have italicized the last sentence because the administration suffered criticism for taking off the table the possibility of deploying U.S. ground forces to Kosovo as a part of the military action against Serbia. Many strategists and political analysts have argued that this made it easier for Milošević to continue to prolong his fight.16 In response to the NATO bombing, the Serbs went on a rampage in Kosovo. Albright and her fellow advocates of the coercive diplomacy strategy, she later admitted, had underestimated the speed, scale, and ferocity of the Serbs’ terror campaign. Homes in hundreds of villages were burned. Scholars, journalists, and political leaders who had advocated independence were tracked down and killed. Tens of thousands of people were made to board trains which were sealed from the outside and sent to the Albanian border. Thousands of others were herded along the same route by car or on foot. Serb security forces stripped the departing Kosovars of birth certificates, driver’s licenses, car registrations, and other proof of identification.17

NATO replied with its own escalation, hitting an expanded target list in Serbia itself, and the authors of the strategy as well as its critics began wondering where the spiraling paroxysm of violence would go next.

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Time magazine ran a feature article titled “Madeleine’s War,” with a caricature of Albright on the cover wearing an air force leather jacket and talking into a cell phone. She and the president considered strategies of de-escalation, like a bombing pause with an invitation to the Serbs to reciprocate, but they rejected it as likely to be seen by Milošević as a sign of weakness. “Instead we concluded that the air campaign would succeed if we continued to make it faster, harder, and smarter. Along with the British [Prime Minister Tony Blair had been a staunch supporter of the coercive strategy from the start], we pushed the Alliance to intensify bombing and further expand the circle of targets.”18 In addition to the standard military targets, including factories producing defense equipment and ammunition, Operation Allied Force attacked Serbia’s electricity infrastructure and disrupted water supplies in several cities.19 Ominously, the Russians, who had been largely cooperative in the earlier phase of the crisis in trying to find diplomatic formulas for resolving the crisis, were now warning that some of their military commanders were lobbying President Yeltsin to allow them to intervene on Serbia’s behalf. And Yeltsin himself was accusing the West of dangerously repolarizing the world, which might compel him to retarget Russia’s missiles toward NATO. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov complained to Secretary Albright that Russia could not “sit around and watch NATO destroy a sovereign nation.”20 To compound the growing international political difficulties, an error in targeting intelligence by the CIA caused an embarrassing accidental strike on China’s embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese and injuring twenty. The CIA targeters mistook the embassy for a building holding Serb military communications facilities. To sooth Beijing’s anger and to deflect Russian attempts to exploit it, Secretary Albright acceded to the request of the Chinese ambassador in Washington that she make a formal apology on Chinese television. On the ground in Kosovo, however, the bombing was taking its toll on the Serb ability to bring its heavy equipment into play against the KLA resourcefulness in devising asymmetric guerilla tactics. And there were reports of increasing numbers of Serb soldiers deserting. Antiwar demonstrations in Belgrade were also occurring. The Russians were getting back into the act of trying to broker a cessation of hostilities, hoping to get NATO to allow them to have their own peacekeepers in parts of in postwar Kosovo, which they were probably telling Milošević could protect the Serb minority there from Albanian revengeful retaliation. Meanwhile, there were leaks in Washington,

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probably deliberate and unchallenged by the White House, that the Pentagon was preparing ground troop options. Madeleine Albright’s memoir relates the diplomatic endgame to the war: Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott was dispatched to Bonn to meet with Russian diplomats to see if a common position on a war-ending deal could be worked out with the Russians. With a deft reconstruction by Talbott of the Russian formula for having its own peacekeeping role—the Russians were told this was an issue to be hammered out between NATO and Russia and did not have to involve Milošević at this stage—a common position was worked out to present to the Serb leader stipulating the conditions he would have to meet for the bombing to end.21 “Now we had to choreograph the next steps,” Albright recalls. Once the fighting stopped, a NATO-led force would maintain order in Kosovo as the Serbs withdrew. The UN would authorize the peacekeeping mission and take charge of civilian administration. The EU would coordinate reconstruction. The OSCE . . . would help organize elections and train civilian police. To put all these elements in motion, and in the proper order, requires a complicated diplomatic dance.22

And she proudly concludes her story of the Kosovo crisis with the compliment she received from the German foreign minister: “Well, if it was Madeleine’s war, it is now Madeleine’s victory.”23

PA R T

IX THE FREEDOM AGENDA OF GEORGE W. BUSH We seek to create a balance of power that favors human freedom. —National security strategy of the United States (2002)

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in the world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. —George W. Bush

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NEOCONSERVATIVES SEIZE THE DAY We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration’s success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities. . . . t

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carry out our global  responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future; t

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regimes hostile to our interests and values; t
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abroad; t
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modest definition of U.S. foreign interests that the Bush foreign policy team had called for in the 2000 elections—a “realist” lowering of expectations of what the United States could and should attempt to do abroad, foreswearing nation-building

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HE RETURN TO THE MORE

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interventions—had a very short half-life.1 The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the president’s perceived need to mobilize the nation in a this is war response, provided the opportunity for the coterie of so-called neoconservatives at sub-cabinet BOE
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foreign policy, the Reagan of 1980–1984, that is. The shock of 9/11 provided just the opening the neoconservatives had been seeking—a responsiveness by the president and his professedly realist vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security adviser to the assertive international agenda the neoconservatives had been urging on their bosses. Up to then, it had been only the unilateralist aspect of neoconservatism that was reflected in White House policy démarches: the “unsigning” of the statute of the new International Criminal Court; the renunciation of the Kyoto Protocol restricting greenhouse gas emissions; and the announced intent to slough off international arms control constraints—most notably, the antiballistic missile treaty—on U.S. weapons programs. But now, 43 (the shorthand policy makers and pundits used to distinguish President George W. Bush from the forty-first president) proved totally receptive to the compelling world-transforming ideology of the neoconservatives. And these intellectuals in the administration, with prodding from colleagues in conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, seized the day. None of the cabinet-level officials reentering the government in January 2001 (Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld at Defense, Colin Powell at State, and Condoleezza Rice at the National Security Council) had been ideological neoconservatives before 9/11. Yet for them too, the demonstration of the country’s vulnerability to catastrophic terrorist attack was, as for the president, a moment of epiphany, leading to their embrace (with Powell the only real holdout) of much of the worldview of their neoconservative subordinates. The latter included, most prominently: at Defense, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretaries Douglas Feith (for policy) and Dov Zakheim (controller); at State, Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton; in the vice president’s office, chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, plus regional and national security experts, Eric Edleman, John Hannah, William Luti, and Nina Shokraii Rees; and at the National Security Council, Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs Elliott Abrams. Prominent neoconservative guru and former Reagan administration assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle wielded influence as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.2

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Intensely intellectual, these second- and third-tier policy makers were hardly of one mind about the priorities in the neoconservative agenda. But sensing that their time had finally come to decisively set the course of post–Cold War U.S. foreign policy, they were able to push aside their doctrinal differences and wage a concerted campaign across agency lines to move the top policy makers—crucially the president—to embrace the set of core beliefs that they did share.

REAGANISM REDUX? The worldview now being pushed on their bosses in the Bush administration by the neoconservatives had been evolving over decades, shaped largely through out-of-power debates among some of the most articulate public intellectuals on the American scene. The activist political orientation that they shared, despite their differences, found potent expression in the 1970s alliance between Democrats in the camp of Senator Henry Jackson and Republicans in the camp of Ronald Reagan in opposition to the détente and arms control policies of Nixon and Kissinger. A proud result of this trans-party alliance of Cold War hawks had been the Jackson-Vanick Amendment denying normal trading relations with the USSR on grounds of its poor human rights performance. During the 1970s, the Jacksonians and the Reaganites continued to see the Cold War as a global struggle for ascendancy between the forces of good and the forces of evil: democratic capitalism versus Marxist-Leninist (and Maoist) socialism. Anything that added to the strength of the Marxist side was therefore to be resisted, and anything that weakened them supported. The supposed mutually beneficial commerce and technological cooperation that the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations had been fostering across the global ideological divide was in the eyes of the neoDPOTFSWBUJWFT
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geopolitics. The communists had no intention of terminating the global struggle, and neither should we. The overall game, at least as being played by Moscow and Beijing, was still zero-sum: as Lenin put it, “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” And the growing penchant in the Politburo and the Soviet Ministry of Defense for strategic arms control agreements? An easy way to get the West to let down its guard, while the revolutionary forces husbanded and grew their capabiliUJFT
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verify the Soviet military’s adherence to the negotiated agreements without a degree of intrusive inspection the Kremlin would never accept. Accordingly, coming after the Carter administration’s further elaboration of relations with the Soviet Union and China, the neoconservatives were euphoric over the election of Ronald Reagan and happy to accept appointments in an administration unapologetic about reviving the Cold War. In Reagan, finally, they had a president willing to brand the Soviet sphere of control an “evil empire” and to pledge interventionist help to anti-Marxists (whether in power or fighting to gain power) all around the world—a president committed to regaining and maintaining across-theboard military superiority, not just parity, vis-à-vis the rival superpower. Although disappointed in the final years of the Reagan era by their hero’s political love affair with Mikhail Gorbachev and the couple’s pas de deux around nuclear disarmament, and chagrined at Reagan’s backing away GSPN
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look back nostalgically to the 1980s as their decade of creative influence— JO
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of the elder Bush and their exile in conservative think tanks during the Clinton era.

MARGINALIZED AND PUT OUT TO PASTURE The neoconservatives were to be hugely frustrated in the “realist” interregnum between the Reagan and Clinton administrations under the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, whom many of them nonetheless continued to serve. Their strongest grievance had been with the way President Bush, the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, and even Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney managed the endgame of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead of capitalJ[JOH
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in Kuwait and rolling on to Baghdad to liberate the country from Saddam’s CSVUBM
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border—this despite the calls by President Bush during Operation Desert 4UPSN
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against the oppression of Saddam’s Sunni-run dictatorship. Undersecretary of Defense Wolfowitz and his neoconservative cohorts were not at that time, or ever, convinced by the Bush-Scowcroft-Powell position that B
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nor feasible at acceptable cost. The cabinet-level consensus that a miliUBSJMZ
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even more dangerous Iran and that moreover, a U.S. military intervention into the Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish cauldron could turn into an uncontrollably messy imperial adventure, was seen by the neoconservatives as a cop-out, one they vowed to rectify if ever given the chance. Especially during the Clinton years, the exiled neoconservatives, now heavily populating Washington’s right-of-center think tanks and consulting firms, made it their business to further develop a shared agenda, a compelling philosophical rationale for it, and a network of influential supporters through whom they would be able to determine the direction of U.S. policy when the Republicans next gained control of the White House.3

THE NEOCONSERVATIVE WELTANSCHAUUNG The neoconservative worldview that set the tone and largely defined the substance of U.S. grand strategy between 9/11 and the last half of George W. Bush’s second term as president was more an orientation toward the role the United States should play in the world than a self-consistent philosophy of politics and statecraft. Indeed, the influential keepers of the neoconservative flame, both inside and outside the government, regarded their vocation as public policy more than political philosophy. While differing among themselves on the details of particular policies, these post–Cold War neoconservatives constituted a rather solid phalanx in support of the following objectives and strategies—championed as mutually supportive: 1. Doing whatever is necessary to protect the homeland against terrorist attacks 2. Maintaining across-the-board decisive U.S. military superiority over all other countries or plausible coalitions 3. Being ready to use force as a normal, not exceptional, instrument of policy and, when strategically useful, to employ it early in a conflict, even preventively, not just as a last resort 4. Proactively supporting political and economic freedom (democracy and free market capitalism) as universal goods, including intervening to effectuate regime change in other countries where feasible 5. Freeing the United States from multilateral constraints on counterterrorist and military intervention decisions and operations

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Notably, all but the fourth of these could readily be embraced by geopolitical realists—at least by hawkish realists. Did this mean that the distinguishing characteristic and essence of the neoconservative foreign policy was democratization and the spread of free markets, what the Bush administration often called “the Freedom Agenda”? Not entirely. For this commitment to democracy and freedom, although very strongly asserted as general doctrine, became subordinated in practice to the perceived need to enlist allies—some of whom were autocratic and had dismal human rights records—in the war against terrorism. The “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” posture toward human rights abuses in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, for example, are cases in point. When faced with this apparent contradiction at the heart of their core values, the neoconservatives granted that there needed to be some here-and-now tactical trade-offs but insisted the larger objective of transforming the world into a system of peacefully interacting democratic republics remained an overarching goal. George W. Bush’s persistent commitment to the neoconservative Freedom Agenda as the centerpiece of his foreign policy, despite the complexities, was nowhere more passionately expressed than in his second inaugural address. While granting almost routinely that “my most solemn duty is to protect this nation and people against further attacks and emerging threats,” his rhetoric was devoted mainly to affirming that America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. . . . So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.4

Ideally, the president’s “right brain” passion for universalizing democracy and the free market was consistent his “left brain” calculus for effectively prosecuting the so-called war on terrorism. And at times the subjective commitment and the rational strategic calculus did reinforce one another. But as often as not the president’s felt need to convert others to the presumed good and righteous political and economic life resulted

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in policies that contradicted his administration’s counterterrorism policies and vice versa. Ultimately, according to neoconservative Freedom Agenda advocates, these temporal contradictions would be transcended as the spread of democracy and economic prosperity removed the sources of alienation of peoples from their governments and between communities—the fodder of extremist movements. Similarly, Bush administration officials responsible for the military aspects of the war on terrorism were apparently able to convince the president that alliances of convenience with various dictators BOE
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of virtue. Accordingly, as put by Bush, “we would advocate for freedom while maintaining strategic relationships with nations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia, and China.”5 When the here-and-now contradictions between democracy promotion and the pursuit of the wide range of U.S. geopolitical interests became increasingly evident and embarrassing during the final years of the Bush presidency, it fell to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s successor—a reputed realist—to provide the needed public rationale. “It is neither hypocrisy nor cynicism,” explained Secretary Robert Gates, “ to believe fervently in freedom while adopting different approaches to advancing freedom at different times along the way—including temporarily making common cause with despots to defeat greater or more urgent threats to our freedom or interests.” Moreover, it was important to realize that implementaUJPO
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openly our desire for democratic values to take hold across the globe, we are describing a world that may be many years or decades off. Though achievement of this ideal may be limited by time, space, resources, or human nature, we must not allow ourselves to discard or disparage the ideal itself.” But neither should the pursuit of this ideal prevent the sometimes “grubby compromises and marriages of convenience” that are necessary in the short term. An underlying theme of American history, insisted Gates, has been “that we are compelled to defend our security and our interests in ways that, in the long run, lead to the spread of democratic values and institutions.”6 By the time the prudential Gates line (echoed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen Hadley) became the dominant definition of the evolving foreign policy of the Bush administration, most of the previously influential, and more impatient, neoconservatives—such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton—had left the government. For the previous six years,

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been substantial. Yet even during his first term, George W. Bush could not be pigeonholed into either the neoconservative or “realist” camp or a synthesis of the two. He, like the country, was more complex than that—or than the stereotype popular among critics as “Joe Six-Pack” devoid of any deep reflection and capacity to deal with the nuances of international politics in the post-Cold War era. As recounted in his memoir, “I considered America a generous nation with a moral responsibility to do our part to relieve poverty and despair. The problem was how to do it effectively.” Highly critical of existing foreign aid programs that were designed during the Cold War to keep anticommunist regimes in power but “had a lousy track record” and “didn’t do much to improve the lives of ordinary people,” Bush directed his subordinates to reform the system to make it more efficient, not to junk it. The economic development needs of Africa, more severe than on any other continent, became his principal humanitarian focus, with a greater proportion of U.S. foreign aid going there than had been the case previously. He was particularly moved by the HIV/AIDS crisis. “The statistics were horrifying. Some ten million people in sub-Sahara Africa had died. . . . The total number infected was expected to exceed one hundred million by 2010.” Yet when he took office, the United States was spending only a “paltry” $500 million a year. Overriding the objections of the neoconservatives to working through multilateral institutions, Bush, upon the urging of Secretary of State Colin Powell, funneled a substantial augmentation of U.S. support to the new Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, being organized by UN secretary general Kofi Annan.7 This, the more compassionate face of George W. Bush, although obscured from public view after 9/11 by the nation’s preoccupation with UFSSPSJTN
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was reflected in his refusal to cut development assistance even as the costs of the war on terror abroad and at home skyrocketed. Similarly, he was more troubled than some members of his administration, most notably Vice President Dick Cheney, by the dilemmas thrust upon the nation by the war on terror: the apparent need to make at least temporary alliances abroad with tyrants, and to countenance methods of surveillance of U.S. citizens and interrogation of detainees in violation of U.S. traditions of civil liberty, in the name of national security.

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9/11, THE WAR ON TERROR, AND A NEW STRATEGIC DOCTRINE We’re at war . . . somebody’s going to pay. —George W. Bush (on cell phone to Dick Cheney, 9:45 a.m., September 11, 2001)

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TANDING OUTSIDE A CLASSROOM AT the Emma E. Booker Elementary

School in Sarasota, Florida, George Bush was told by his senior advisor, Karl Rove, that a small plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. The president averred that it must have been a case of pilot error. Just before entering the classroom, where he was scheduled to read to the children and talk about education, the president was informed by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (who was at the White House) that it was apparently a commercial jetliner, but this was all she knew at the moment.1 Having begun his presentation to the elementary school students, the president was interrupted at 9:05 by chief of staff Andrew Card, who whispered in his ear: “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” The president remained in the classroom for a few minutes as the children took up the reading. Bush later explained that his instinct was to project calm, not an excited reaction, at this moment of crisis. “The nation would be in shock; the president could not be. If I stormed out hastily, it would scare the children and send ripples of panic throughout the country.”2 Escorted to a nearby room, he was briefed by his staff, saw television coverage of the crashes into the Twin Towers, held phone conversations with the vice president, the director of the FBI and others, and consulted

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with his senior staff about what he should say to the nation. At 9:30 he announced over television that the country had suffered “an apparent terrorist attack,” that “terrorism against our nation will not stand,” and that the resources of the government were being fully deployed to find those responsible for the act.3 It was not until during his ride back to the airport between 9:35 and 9:45 that President Bush learned about the crash of a third airplane, this time into the Pentagon. He was rushed aboard Air Force One, which took off before 10:00 without any fixed destination, for there was fear that the three suicide attacks with hijacked airliners were part of a larger operation designed to paralyze or “decapitate” the United States. And if so, shouldn’t the topmost command authorities (at least the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense) be dispersed? The president wanted to return to Washington, but Vice President Cheney, now in the White House underground bunker, was strongly urging him not to. Meanwhile, just after 10:00 a.m., reports from the Secret Service of yet another—presumably hijacked—airliner (United flight 93) heading toward the District of Columbia compelled some quick decisions. “We needed to clarify the rules of engagement,” recalls the president, “I told Dick [Cheney] that our pilots should contact suspicious planes and try to get them to land peacefully. If that failed, they had my authority to shoot them down. Hijacked planes were weapons of war. Despite the agonizing costs, taking them out could save countless lives on the ground. I had just made my first decision as a wartime commander in chief.”4 The vice president thereupon authorized the U.S. Air Force to “engage” or “take out” the incoming aircraft. As it turned out, the U.S. military never had to execute the awful order to shoot a civilian airliner out of the sky, for a heroic midflight assault by passengers against the hijackers of United flight 93 forced the plane to crash in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all those aboard. Still another report of a possibly hijacked aircraft heading toward the federal complex in DC activated another order from the vice president to shoot it down if necessary; but it proved to be only a nonthreatening medevac helicopter.5 Despite later assurances by both Bush and Cheney that the engage-ortake-out orders were authorized by the president before the vice president issued them, the documented logs of the timing of the phone conversations when such delegation of authority was supposed to have taken place do not fully validate the subsequent insistences of the two men.6 Yet the

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adamancy of their affirmations that the commander in chief ’s role was not usurped was in itself testimony to the persistence of the tradition that it should not be and indicated a determination on Bush’s part to maintain his authority over such crucial matters. Indeed, the president insisted on taking charge of both the immediate and larger strategic responses to the 9/11 attacks—and being seen as taking charge. Overruling his aides’ reluctance to have him return to Washington before the smoke and confusion of the day’s events had cleared, he ordered Air Force One to fly him back to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland from which he helicoptered over the destroyed section of the Pentagon in time to address the nation from the White House at 8:30 p.m. With uncharacteristically somber and stern demeanor, he stressed that the first priority was to help those injured and to protect the nation against any further attacks. The United States would respond, he promised; and laying the rationale for a military intervention of Afghanistan, his government would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”7 In this case, those deemed to be harboring the terrorists were the Taliban, then in power in Afghanistan.

DEFENDING THE HOMELAND The highest priority objective of the U.S. military and all national security agencies and personnel is to protect the nation at home (that is, the people and assets of the country located within its borders) against attack and destruction. But for most of the country’s history, even when at war, this elemental imperative had not been given the immediate, intense, and systematic activation that the 9/11 attacks provoked. During the Cold War, as the Soviets developed intercontinental striking power with weapons of mass destruction, national security policy and planning did assume that the continental United States was vulnerable, as never before, to direct and devastating attack. Preventing any such attacks on the homeland, largely through deterrence by threats of devastating U.S. counterattacks, became the centerpiece of the country’s national security policy. Limiting the damage the nation would suffer in the event that deterrence failed—air defense, civil (population) defense, and plans for evacuation of targeted cities, pre- and post-attack—received more rhetorical than programmatic attention. The exceptions have been

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President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative to develop antiballistic missiles capable of destroying Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles headed for the United States and post–Cold War efforts to develop missile defenses against the more limited offensive missile capabilities of nuclear wannabe states like North Korea and Iran. Terrorist attacks abroad over the past few decades, when directed against U.S. personnel, citizens, or assets, had periodically activated the highest levels of the U.S. government to dramatically punish the presumed perpetrators. But the responses—like Reagan’s raid on Gaddafi’s compound in Libya in retaliation for the terrorist attack on a discotheque in Germany frequented by U.S. troops and Clinton’s bombing of al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and Sudan in reprisal for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania—were characteristically ad hoc and seemingly designed mainly to give the policy makers and the public a one-time catharsis. Now, however, the shock of an unprovoked, highly coordinated terrorist attack using four commercial airliners hijacked almost simultaneously within the United States and incinerating more than 3,000 people, most of whom were just going about their daily jobs, elevated homeland defense to the highest national interest, to be given precedence over everything else—in fact, not just in planning documents. The problem was that the capabilities that needed to be marshaled for beefing up and streamlining homeland defense (and recovery from attack) were scattered throughout the government—not only among the agencies responsible for military and policing operations and intelligence, but also in agencies responsible for managing transportation, commerce, telecommunications, border control, immigration, emergency medical services, and disaster relief; and not only at the national level, but also at the state and local levels. Alarmed at the dispersion in Washington and throughout the federal system of the functions that needed to be performed in sync for effective homeland defense, Vice President Cheney just a few days into the crisis proposed the creation of a Homeland Security Council within the White House to coordinate all the necessary activities. The president agreed and announced in his September 20 speech before Congress that he had created such a council, called the Office of Homeland Security, and that the country’s first homeland security adviser would be Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. Vice President Cheney, while adamant about the need for tight interagency coordination, had been wary of creating an entirely new

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department, with all of the cumbersome and competitive interagency maneuverings that the bureaucratic reshuffling would involve. But the Congress was of a different mind and on November 25, 2002, voted the biggest reorganization of the U.S. government in American history, incorporating twenty-two agencies—ranging from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service to the Secret Service—with over 200,000 employees into the new Department of Homeland Security. In the words of the legislation establishing it, The primary mission of the Department is to: (A) prevent terrorist attacks within the United States; (B) reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism; and (C) minimize the damage, and assist in the recovery, from terrorist attacks that do occur within the United States.8

The reorganization was potentially problematic not only because of all the disparate agencies it consolidated into one mammoth department (third in size only to the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs) but also because of the agencies left out. To implement its primary counterterrorism mission, it absorbed the U.S. Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and various border control and transportation security agencies. Yet it kept hands off the FBI, the CIA, the intelligence agencies in the Department of Defense and the Department of State, and, of course, all operational military commands. Clearly, the president signed the Homeland Security Act not for its organizational logic but for its political realism of accommodation to entrenched bureaucratic interests. At least the initiative helped sustain the symbolism of doing something to reduce the vulnerability of the homeland to terrorism. The most controversial of the homeland security measures instituted by the Bush administration were those designed to discover and apprehend individuals who, although ostensibly engaged in innocent pursuits, might, like the 9/11 hijackers, be plotting or preparing to carry out terrorist attacks against Americans. The protective measures included security screenings at flight check-in areas at airports and at public buildings that, even if bothersome, most people put up with without protest. But the heightened security initiatives also included enhanced surveillance powers for counterterrorism agencies; warrant-less arrests, detention, and incarceration of suspected terrorists; and aggressive interrogation of prisoners—much of

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this bypassing various standard due-process requirements, yet according to administration lawyers, fully consistent with both the Constitution and the letter and spirit of the Patriot Act of October 2001. The constitutionality of the Patriot Act and official actions taken pursuant to it were challenged in lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and various human rights organizations. However (as detailed in chap. 35), throughout the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, administration officials in various agencies—the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency—and various influential members of Congress from both parties continued to defend the abridgment of some of the citizen liberties embedded in the Bill of Rights and in international human rights covenants to which the United States was party on grounds of the security emergency the country was facing from international terrorism. The president himself never publicly countenanced violating the Bill of Rights. He did, however, accept the counsel of Vice President Cheney and attorneys in the Department of Justice and in the White House that the derogation of certain rights for reasons of national security was his prerogative to order as commander in chief (under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution), even in the face of congressional and judicial objections.

GOING AFTER THE TERRORISTS In the flurry of National Security Council meetings and special war councils in the few days following the 9/11 attacks, the administration hammered out its basic global “war on terror” response, consistent with the premise articulated by the president in his September 11 address that the United States would punish both the perpetrators of the suicide hijackers’ attacks and those who harbored them. Crediting FBI and intelligence agency reports that the attack had been masterminded and directed by the top echelon of al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, who was now holed up in Afghanistan, the State and Defense Departments were tasked to implement a political-military game plan to deal with the implications. Meanwhile, the government had to be readied to act in a unified way. With Vice President Cheney quarterbacking the effort, Congress was pressed into giving the president an emergency grant of special powers. The resulting joint resolution of September 14, approved by a vote of 98 to 0 in the House and 420 to 1 in the Senate, stated that

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the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.9

A companion document was issued by the White House for mobilizing the executive departments. National Security Presidential Directive 9, “Defeating the Terrorist Threat to the United States,” mandated all agencies to give highest priority to the global war on terrorism, reiterating the president’s formulation that the enemy was not just the terrorist operatives themselves but also those who harbored them (code words for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan) and authorizing the employment of all instruments necessary, including major military force, to rout them out and defeat them.10 More as a means of garnering domestic and international support for the military operations being planned than out of any expectation that it would be complied with, the Bush administration issued an ultimatum to the Taliban, insisting that that the regime hand over bin Laden and his al-Qaeda cohorts for prosecution or else the United States would directly attack the al-Qaeda enclaves and Taliban forces who might be protecting them. Within the administration there was pressure to include Iraq among the enemies against whom major military force would now be warranted. Richard Haass, then director of the policy planning staff in the Department of State, reports that “the first instinct of the president was to push the bureaucracy to find a connection between Saddam and the attacks.”11 The 9/11 Commission in its interviews of high officials involved in the immediate post-9/11 deliberations found the president to be very interested in determining whether there was such collusion. As yet, however, given the flimsy evidence, neither he nor Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were ready to endorse Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz’s recommendations for seizing the moment to strike at Iraq.12 Bush did tell national security adviser Rice, though, that he wanted plans for action against Iraq drawn up in case it was determined that Saddam’s regime had in fact been involved in the 9/11 attacks; and he ordered the Defense Department to be ready with military action, including possibly to occupy Iraqi oil fields, if Baghdad acted against U.S. interests.13

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However, within ten days of the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, President Bush decided: The first target country in the war on terrorism would be Afghanistan on the grounds that it was the primary base from which the terrorists were operating (see chap. 34 for how this campaign would be conducted). The argument for a major military operation against Iraq, only temporarily deferred, would soon be revived by Wolfowitz and others and embraced by the president in the form of a new strategic doctrine.

THE NEW STRATEGIC DOCTRINE The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, provided powerful support for champions of the view that in this still largely anarchic world, force had to be a readily available instrument of statecraft. Those who would have the United States threaten or engage in war for reasons other than immediate self-defense or to repel an attack against an ally still bore the heaviest burden of justification in the counsels of decision. But military operations to oust hostile governments and install friendly ones—regime change, by preventive war if necessary—though not totally absent in the post–World War II foreign policy of the United States, did not attain the pride of place they achieved under George W. Bush. True, the “rollback” of Communism, not just its containment, had been a major theme in the Republican 1952 election campaign, but once in office the Eisenhower administration dropped it as much too expensive and risky. And yes, some regime-change operations to shrink the sphere of control of the communist powers were attempted during the Cold War, and some succeeded. The unsuccessful attempts were the effort to liberate North Korea in 1950 after repelling its invasion of South Korea, the proxy operations of the Bay of Pigs assault on Cuba in 1961, and the support of the Contras against the Marxist Nicaraguan government in 1985. The successes were the CIA-engineered coup in 1953 against the pro-Soviet Mossadegh regime in Iran in order to reinstall the shah, the clandestine direction and support of the military ouster of the Soviet-supported government in Guatemala in 1954, the Nixon administration’s covert backing of General Pinochet’s coup against the elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende in 1977, and the invasion of Panama in 1989 to oust the drug-trafficking dictator Manuel Noriega. There was also the Clinton administration’s threat and readiness to invade Haiti in 1994 to compel the dictator, General Raoul Cédras to leave the country and cede control

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of the government and give way to a UN-supervised election to restore civilian rule. Despite these exceptions, the basic grand strategy remained that of containment: not allowing the further expansion of the Soviet and Chinese spheres of influence. Such containment would be sustained largely through the deterrent threat of U.S. military action should the communist powers actually engage in expansionary aggression, a threat to inflict costs on the aggressors far outweighing any benefits they could hope to achieve. The two major military campaigns the United States engaged in during the Cold War—in Korea and Vietnam—were largely consistent with this grand strategy, although the aggressors in both cases were proxies of the Soviet Union and China, and the two Communist giants were spared being direct targets of the U.S. military response. And the objective of the Gulf War’s Operation Desert Storm was to expel Saddam Hussein’s invasion forces from Kuwait; once this “containment” objective had been achieved, those pushing for an expanded regime-change operation (including British prime minister Margaret Thatcher) to throw Saddam out of power could not convince the elder President Bush of its necessity or wisdom. The core of the a new strategic doctrine was given early articulation by President George W. Bush in his June 1, 2002, address to the graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “For much of the last century,” said the president, giving the cadets a preview of the basic national security document still being drafted, “America’s defense relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment.” In some cases these strategies still applied, he granted. But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence—the promise of massive retaliation against nations—means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. Homeland defense and missile defense are part of stronger security. . . . Yet the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. Our security will require transforming the military you will lead—a military that must be ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forwardlooking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.14

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The president used the term preemptive to describe actions the country had to be ready to take; but in the context of his remarks on confronting threats “before they emerge,” the new strategy could be interpreted as a justification for preventive war. And indeed it was—as revealed doctrinally in the September 20, 2002, publication of the National Security Strategy of the United States and confirmed in practice the following April by the regime-change invasion of Iraq. Now openly embracing the concept of preventive action, but still conflating it with preemption, the national security strategy document announced that “the United States can no longer rely solely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. . . . We cannot let our enemies strike first.” Moreover, the new doctrine went beyond the traditional justification for preemption of an enemy first strike—namely the existence of imminent aggression—such as an enemy’s visible mobilization of its armed forces in an obvious preparation to attack: For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. . . . We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists . . . rely on weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning. . . . The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary act preemptively.15

The president returned to this theme in his January 2002 State of the Union address, in which he branded Iran, North Korea, and Iraq as members of an “axis of evil” and promised to prevent such regimes from threatening America and its allies with weapons of mass destruction. “I will not stand by , as peril draws closer and closer,” he warned.16 By the summer of 2002, under the assumption that Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban was already a success—which turned out to be a premature judgment—and with the president now a full convert to the new strategic doctrine, the primary focus of the administration shifted

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to Iraq. But whereas there had been almost automatic public approval and broad international backing for the forcible regime-change operation in Afghanistan, the Taliban being seen as allies of, if not co-conspirators with, those responsible for 9/11, it would be a harder sell to garner domestic and foreign support for military action to topple Hussein’s regime. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, regarding the academic “preemption” versus “prevention” debate over the controversial strike-first doctrine as fatuous, preferred to call the policy “anticipatory self-defense.”17 The three-front war initiated early in the administration of George W. Bush in response to 9/11—against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan; against Saddam Hussein in Iraq; and against terrorists and their suspected supporters within the United States itself—persisted all through his tenure in the White House and defined his presidency. It was a face of U.S. power that majorities of people in most countries around the world did not find attractive. He knew that; yet as will be detailed in the subsequent chapters, he remained convinced he was doing the right thing for the country.

34

FROM CONTAINMENT TO FORCIBLE REGIME CHANGE Afghanistan and Iraq In addition to declaring and destroying all of its weapons of mass destruction, Iraq must end its support for terrorism. It must cease the persecution of its own civilian population. It must stop all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It must release or account for all Gulf War personnel. . . . These steps would. . . change the nature of the Iraqi regime itself. America hopes the regime will make that choice. Unfortuntely, . . . we have little reason to expect it. And that’s why two administrations— mine and President Clinton’s—have stated that regime change is the only certain means of removing a great danger to our nation. —George W. Bush

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HE NEW STRATEGIC DOCTRINE JUSTIFYING war to prevent future attacks

against the United States—a rejection of the prevailing international legal norm restricting military action to situations when an enemy’s attack was underway or imminent—was essentially a codification of the brainstorming of the top officials of the Bush administration in the hours and days immediately following the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon. Not only containment but also the corpus of international law prohibiting violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of countries were about to be upended in the U.S. responses to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

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OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM: OUSTING A TERRORIST-HARBORING REGIME The target of the president’s repeated warning that the United States would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them” was the ultra-Islamist Taliban movement, then the governing power in Afghanistan. But the formulation was sufficiently elastic to include other regimes, notably Iraq.1 The administration’s intelligence agencies and terrorism experts were convinced that the 9/11 attack had been masterminded and ordered by terrorist al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was assumed to be residing somewhere in Afghanistan in an al-Qaeda enclave. Accordingly, Bush’s September 20 address to a joint session of Congress contained an ultimatum to the Taliban regime, demanding that it deliver to the United States authorities all of the leaders of al-Qaida who hide in your land. Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. And hand over every terrorist and every person in their support structure to appropriate authorities. Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating. These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. The Taliban must act and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.2

The president couched his ultimatum to the Taliban in a global definition of the war on terror. It was “civilization’s fight.” Yet he wanted to make clear that “the enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists.” This meant, however, that “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” Thus every nation had to choose: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”3 As expected, not having received a satisfactory reply from the Taliban, on October 7, 2011, Bush ordered the start of Operation Enduring Freedom with American and British air strikes against suspected al-Qaeda training camps and surrounding Taliban forces. From the start, the aim of the military assault was not simply to decapitate the terrorist network but also to remove the Taliban from power.

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Of course, bombing al-Qaeda and/or Taliban encampments could not by itself accomplish the regime-change goal. Ousting the existing Taliban power holders in Kabul and around the country would require a full-blown military takeover of Kabul and other important cities. The plan was to have the Taliban’s main domestic enemy, the multiethnic Northern Alliance, accomplish this on the ground, calibrated with U.S. tactical air support and special operations units. By early December 2001, after just eight weeks of warfare, the operation appeared to be succeeding—the Taliban having evacuated both Kabul and Kandahar, and Pashtun leader Hamid Karzai having been designated by the United States and its allies as the interim head of the post-Taliban government. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was exultant. His lean-andmean high-tech strategy based on his military “transformation” concept was working.4 A high point for him was the battle of Mazar-i-Sharif, a Taliban stronghold, which he triumphantly recounted: “What won the battle for Mazar—and set in motion the Taliban’s fall—was a combination of the ingenuity of U.S. Special Forces, the most advanced precisionguided munitions in the U.S. arsenal, delivered by U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps crews, and the courage of valiant one-legged Afghan fighters on horseback.”5

THE ESCAPE OF AL-QAEDA Deposing the Taliban regime appeared to be a doable task that could be accomplished rapidly. But the driving objective of delivering a knockout blow to al-Qaeda by killing or capturing Osama bin Laden and his deputies, then assumed to be hiding in the Tora Bora area south of Jalalabad, proved more difficult. A combination of U.S. air strikes and attacks by Afghan units on the ground drove al-Qaeda fighters out of Tora Bora, but the Afghan soldiers were unable to block their escape into the mountains nearby, through which they could cross into Pakistan. The failure to deploy U.S. troops to cut off the escape of al-Qaeda from Tora Bora was widely regarded by military experts as a serious mistake. The senior CIA operative in the region had requested such a deployment, but General Tommy Franks, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, turned down the request, consistent with Secretary Rumsfeld’s philosophy of winning wars without involving large contingents of U.S. troops.6

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In his memoirs, however, Rumsfeld cites a memo he wrote to CIA director George Tenet, indicating they might be missing an opportunity in Tora Bora and perhaps should reconsider the policy against bringing in more U.S. forces. Rumsfeld also recounts that he made it clear to Franks that if the general requested more troops he would get them as soon as possible.7 As one prominent commentator on military affairs put it, “Operation Enduring Freedom [the initial military campaign that routed the Taliban from Kabul] is likely to go down as a masterpiece in the annals of U.S. military history. But if bin Laden really got away from Tora Bora in December and lives to attack us again, it will go down as a very flawed masterpiece.”8 Bin Laden, whether or not he actually had been in the Tora Bora caves, did live on to inspire the al-Qaeda/Taliban insurgency for nearly a decade until he was killed on May 2, 2011, in Abottabad, Pakistan, by U.S. Special Forces.

COUNTERINSURGENCY AS NATION-BUILDING The failure to trap the Taliban in Tora Bora was a product of the assumption in Operation Enduring Freedom that the Taliban could be driven from power with a relatively modest deployment of U.S. troops—the premise on which the Bush administration, prematurely confident of having succeeded in Afghanistan, turned to in Iraq. As this premise proved to be faulty, the Bush administration embraced another questionable assumption: that shortfalls developing in U.S. capabilities for Afghanistan as resources were devoted to the war in Iraq would be compensated for by NATO allies. But these resources also failed to materialize. Moreover, the multilateralization of Operation Enduring Freedom, while conferring legitimacy on the invasion and the regime-change objectives, soon came to be viewed as an encumbrance by Pentagon strategists. Although the secretary of defense expressed gratification for the willingness of NATO allies to share the burdens of the campaign in Afghanistan, he was not pleased that some of the countries planning to contribute troops were placing caveats on their participation. One of his reiterated formulations was that “the mission determines the coalition, and the coalition must not determine the mission.”9 Increasingly frustrated by what the caveats were doing to the ability of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to conduct counterinsurgency operations, Rumsfeld complained: “Clearly if you’re a NATO commander in an area of operations and there are different rules of engagement, different restrictions on

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national forces, it makes it enormously difficult for the commander to have the flexibility to function.”10 The Bush administration realized early on in Operation Enduring Freedom that if the freedom it promised the Afghans from Taliban oppression was to endure, both security and economic development had to be sustained over the long run. And this required, in turn, the building or rebuilding of institutions of law and order and governance—the very “nation-building” that the Bush election campaign in 2000 had castigated the Clinton-Gore administration for embracing in its efforts to rescue failed or failing states. But it was not inconsistent with the neoconservative ideology of spreading freedom though democratization and market mechanisms. Nor was it inconsistent with the new commitment in the army and marine corps, following the breakdown of the rudiments of civil life in Iraq in the wake of the invasion, to train their troops for postcombat missions of stabilization and reconstruction. But the provincial reconstruction team (PRT) effort, initiated by the Department of Defense and subsequently melded into the NATO ISAF mandate, where responsibilities were allocated to each of 26 participating nations, was compounding the coordination problems. Now, not only were there often differences in tactical priorities and sequencing between the counterterrorism missions of the U.S. Special Forces and the military and civic missions in the counterinsurgency operation, but there were also conflicts over tactics and local jurisdictional authority between and within the various PRTs. Making matters worse were the conflicting strategies among the countries and among different agencies in the U.S. government over how to deal with Afghanistan’s economic dependence on opium production and commerce. With one-third to one-half of its overall economy and more than one-half of its GDP generated by opium production (amounting to 90% of the total world production of the drug), contemporary Afghanistan was a country where a local leader’s economic and political power significantly correlated with his involvement in and exploitation of opium poppy production, trafficking, and marketing. Warlords were often drug lords, as were many members of government. Since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001, the Taliban, despite their fundamentalist Islamic ideology, had also profited greatly from the drug trade, which generated possibly as much as 40 percent of their income in 2008. The resulting increase in the Taliban’s fighting strength could be countered and reversed, the Bush administration deduced, by an aggressive campaign to

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eradicate the poppy crops. But an unintended consequence of the eradication campaign was an increase in the political capital of the Taliban, allowing them to assume the role of protectors of the basic livelihood of the population in poppy-growing areas.11 The worsening situation in Afghanistan during the last year of the Bush administration was revealed in authoritative reports collected by ISAF and U.S. military and civilian organizations, showing dramatic increases in both military and civilian fatalities: The 155 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan during 2008 were three times the annual rate of U.S. military fatalities in the 2001–2004 period; more than half of the deaths in 2008 were caused by the soaring rate of attacks with improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)—over 3275 reported in 2008. A similar trend in fatalities, but at lower levels, was suffered by other NATO contributors to the ISAF: Britain, Canada, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Spain. There had also been a major spike in Afghan civilian fatalities in 2008 directly resulting from the conflict—estimated to be over 2100, more than double the deaths in 2006.12 Moreover, even where the intensification of the battle seemed to have driven the Taliban out of areas they had controlled, the reality was messy. As put by Ronald Neumann, the Bush administration’s ambassador in Kabul from 2005 to 2007, “ISAF could capture population centers at will, but really securing the population was often impossible. Taliban control. . . could be maintained by showing up occasionally to threaten individuals, kill government and development workers, and burn schools. Protection, on the other hand, needed to be full-time if Afghan civilians were to take the risk of supporting the government.”13 The talk in Washington and other capitals in 2008 was that, despite sporadic gains by the U.S. and ISAF forces, the tide had turned in favor of the Taliban insurgents, giving credence to a central theme of Barack Obama’s election campaign that it had been a huge mistake for the Bush administration to divert substantial U.S. counterinsurgency and counterterrorism resources to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM The determination to oust the Taliban from power was a response to 9/11 and the shock of recognition that the United States was a prime and quite vulnerable target for attack directed by terrorists based in Afghanistan. No

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other rationale was required. The president made his decision rapidly and with very little debate. By contrast, the determination to knock Saddam Hussein out of power had been festering in the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton and in the Congress throughout the decade following the Gulf War; but those itching for an opportunity to do so with military force had not yet been able to develop a persuasive case that it would be a just war—even in the angry days immediately after 9/11. They tried to convince President George W. Bush with flimsy circumstantial evidence of an alleged connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, but the president wanted more definitive information.

THE LEGACY OF THE GULF WAR A decade before, the elder President Bush, to the dismay of some officials in his administration, had been essentially satisfied with the outcome of the 1991 Gulf War and had resisted the temptation to capitalize on the military momentum of Desert Storm to march on to Baghdad and liberate the Iraqis from Saddam’s dictatorship. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was also dismayed. But the president, his national security adviser, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) regarded the cease-fire accord with Iraq as sufficient, as long as Saddam would adhere to the stringent WMD and missile-dismantling provisions. The president was willing to have the U.S. aircraft police the no-fly zones over the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south to prevent the Iraqi military from punitively striking against those anti-Saddam enclaves; but Bush would not be pressured into taking on an open-ended and messy mission of supporting the self-determination claims of those communities—even though during the war he had urged the Shiites and Kurds to rebel against the Sunni-run autocracy in Baghdad. His forbearance was supported by “realists” in his camp, especially his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who wanted to preserve a functioning state in Iraq, dictatorship or not, that could continue to balance the power of Iran so as to deter the radical Islamists in Tehran from establishing Iran’s hegemony in the region. Bill Clinton had continued the elder Bush’s policy of containing Iraq through selective punitive or deterrent responses to Saddam’s violation of the post–Gulf War arrangements or aggressive threats. Just before his inauguration as president, Clinton tried to fend off journalistic exaggerations of some of his statements rejecting efforts to remove Saddam from power

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and indicating a willingness to normalize relations with Iraq if Saddam’s behavior improved. As commander in chief, Clinton showed himself to be not as reluctant to use force against Saddam as some of his critics— and supporters—expected. Periodically during his eight-year presidency Clinton approved missile strikes in response to Iraqi violations of the 1991 cease-fire agreements and no-fly zones—the largest of these being the Desert Fox seventy-hour barrage of cruise missiles and bombs on military bases and military-related facilities in Iraq to punish Saddam for expelling UN inspectors who were there to determine Iraq’s compliance with its obligation not to produce or obtain weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

THE CASE FOR THE MILITARY INVASION OF IRAQ George W. Bush wanted to blame Saddam Hussein as well as Osama bin Laden for the 9/11 acts of terrorism, and in response to take military action to remove the Iraqi dictator from power. “The first instinct of the president,” writes Richard Haass (at the time director of policy planning in the State Department), “was to push the bureaucracy to find a connection between Saddam and the attacks.”13a The president appeared to be disappointed at the lack of convincing evidence of such a connection and settled on hitting back first at the Taliban in Afghanistan. But according to the 9/11 Commission Report, at the September 17 meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) at which these priorities were firmly established, “President Bush ordered the Defense Department to be ready to deal with Iraq if Baghdad acted against U.S. interests, with plans to include possibly occupying Iraqi oil fields.”14 Donald Rumsfeld recalls his private meeting with the president fifteen days after 9/11 as the occasion of the president’s serious request for military options for the possibility of toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime.15 Bush himself dates such a request to Rumsfeld as two months after 9/11.16 While the war in Afghanistan consumed most of the attention of the highest-level officials dealing with national security during the rest of 2001 and the first few months of 2002, the determination to also launch a regime-change invasion of Iraq was as strong as ever on the part of Vice President Cheney, Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle. At their urgings, the NSC staff convened a series of meetings attended by representatives from the vice president’s office, the JCS, State,

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Defense, Treasury, and the CIA to discuss the Iraq war option. And in May 2002 the NSC asked the CIA to produce an unclassified publication on the state of Iraq’s WMD programs—a sign of the growing recognition in the administration that President Bush wanted to be able to credibly warn the nation that Saddam had war on his mind, a war in which the revengeful aggressive dictator would be prone to use WMD. To be able to point to that threat would allow Bush to persuade the people and the Congress that forcibly effecting a change of regime in Baghdad was a vital U.S. interest. Haass reveals that “by July the president had reached the conclusion that it was both necessary and desirable that Saddam should be ousted, and that he was prepared to do what was necessary to bring it about. . . . Although the formal decision to go to war would not be made for six more months, by mid-2002 the president and his inner circle had crossed the political and psychological Rubicon.”17 Evidently aware of the trend of thinking in the administration, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft published an article in the Wall Street Journal on August 15, 2002, arguing that going to war against Saddam Hussein would divert U.S. resources away from the fight against terrorism. “An attack on Iraq at the time” contended Scowcroft, “would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken.”18 Exercised, Vice President Cheney decided to go public. In a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, he sounded the alarm: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is simply no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.” With respect to nuclear weapons specifically, the vice president said that Saddam had resumed his efforts to acquire them and that he would have them “fairly soon.” To avoid this, Cheney strongly implied that the administration was contemplating a military operation not simply to disable the Iraqi WMD capability but to invade and “liberate” Iraq from Saddam’s dictatorship. “Our goal would be an Iraq that has territorial integrity, a government that is democratic and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights of every ethnic group are recognized and protected.”19 The director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, recalls that Cheney’s speech caught him and his top people off guard. The vice president’s staff had not sent an advance text to the CIA for clearance, which would have provided an opportunity for the intelligence analysts to indicate that what Cheney was about to say went well beyond what they could support. Tenet

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confesses that following Cheney’s presentation, “I should have told the vice president privately that, in my view, his VFW speech had gone too far. Would that have changed his future approach? I doubt it, but I should not have let silence imply agreement.”20 Juxtaposed with what President Bush had said in his commencement address at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, the vice president’s public ringing of alarm bells was clearly part of a campaign to prepare the nation for a planned preventive war to remove Saddam from power. A politically important part of the campaign to legitimize the invasion of Iraq now being planned in the Pentagon was a congressional resolution authorizing the president to take such action. Realizing that the administration’s principal public justification for the invasion would echo the vice president’s VFW speech, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked the CIA to produce a national intelligence estimate (NIE) on the status of Iraq’s WMD programs and delivery systems and on Saddam Hussein’s likely response to a U.S. military operation to effect a regime change in Iraq. The senators asked that an unclassified summary of the NIE be issued to inform the public. They also insisted that the NIE should be delivered to the intelligence committees of Congress by October 1 since the use of force resolution would be up for a vote on October 10. This meant that the normal period for producing an NIE, usually six to ten months, had to be drastically compressed to less than three weeks. Director Tenet attributes some of the admitted flaws in this crucially important NIE to the fact that “the narrow time-frame, combined with often highly-technical material, pushed standard procedures to the breaking point”21 The “Key Judgments” summary of the October 2002 NIE the CIA delivered to the Congress (and released in unclassified form to the public in July) contained the following language about Iraq’s WMD programs: We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade . Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, energized its missile program, and invested more heavily in biological weapons; in the view of most agencies, Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

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The NIE summary also stated: We have solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’ida going back a decade. Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qa’ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression. Since Operation Enduring Freedom [the invasion of Afghanistan], we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qa’ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad. We have credible reporting that al-Qa’ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qa’ida members in the area of poisons and gases making conventional bombs.22

The rest of the seven-page report elaborated on these judgments and findings and estimates on which they were based. For most senators and members of the House of Representatives the summary of the NIE was sufficient to vote on the night of October 10–11 in favor of the joint resolution stating The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to— Defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and Enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.23

The Senate passed the resolution 77 to 23 with many Democrats (including presidential aspirants John Kerry and Hillary Rodham Clinton) joining their Republican colleagues in approving it. In the House it passed 296 to 133. The administration also strengthened its international legal case for war—that Iraq was in material breach of its obligations under the 1991 cease-fire and a string of UN Security Council resolutions over twelve years—by obtaining another Security Council vote on November 8, 2002. Resolution 1441 (approved unanimously, 15 to 0) threatened “serious consequences” if Saddam failed within thirty days to provide a currently accurate complete report of his WMD-related programs. “The conclusion that Saddam had WMD was nearly a universal consensus,” Bush recalls.

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“My predecessor [Bill Clinton] believed it. Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill believed it. Intelligence agencies in Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, China, and Egypt believed it.”24 Bush claims in his memoir that he still hoped diplomacy would succeed, but that Saddam’s report just before the expiration of the thirty-day deadline comprised “reams of irrelevant paperwork clearly designed to deceive.” He recounts a Christmas-time conversation with his father a few weeks later: “ ‘You know how tough war is, son, and you’ve got to try everything you can to avoid war,’ he said. ‘But if the man won’t comply, you don’t have any other choice.’ ”25 British prime minister Tony Blair, Bush’s main international ally, wanted an additional Security Council resolution, one that would explicitly authorize member countries to use “all necessary means” to bring Iraq into compliance with existing UN resolutions. But diplomatic soundings indicated it was almost a certainty that the Chinese, the Russians, and even the French would veto what amounted to an authorization to forcibly destroy Saddam’s WMD. Nor, with vocal opposition to war now being expressed by French president Jacques Chirac and German chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder, was a NATO endorsement even possible—despite NATO’s post-9/11 invocation of Article V. So the Bush administration decided not to bring such a resolution to a vote; rather, it would sound the clarion call on its own. The president decided to rely on Secretary of State Colin Powell—not a Bush-Cheney insider, but at the time the most widely respected U.S. official—to make the case to the world in a speech at the United Nations. Secretary Powell worked closely with CIA director George Tenet and his team to marshal the intelligence on Iraq’s programs for developing WMD and missiles in violation of the 1992 cease-fire accords ending Operation Desert Storm. Vice President Cheney’s office kept feeding Powell drafts of the speech they wanted him to make, but the secretary and the CIA director discarded them as insufficiently based on the hard evidence. The text of the speech that Tenet and Powell and their respective staffs produced on their own was, in Tenet’s evaluation at the time, “a solid product.”26 This was also the judgment of the State Department’s director of policy planning, Richard Haass: “I myself harbored no doubts,” wrote Haass in his memoir. “All involved at the time thought they had done . . . excellent . . . work and included only what was certain. The sense was that we had held the line against those who were prepared for him to stretch the facts.”27

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Powell’s historic address to the UN General Assembly on February 5, 2003, was widely viewed as a “home run” recalls Haass. “A great presentation,” affirms Tenet, “but unfortunately the substance didn’t hold up. One by one, the various pillars of the speech, particularly on Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs, began to buckle. The secretary of state was subsequently hung out to dry in front of the world, and our nation’s credibility plummeted.”28 Haass, in retrospect, admits that some of what Powell stated turned out to be an exaggeration or false, but blames the CIA for approving such material.29 Tenet’s story is that the information he gave Powell was scrupulously in conformity with the October 2002 NIE, which he later admitted was flawed; but this, he claimed, was largely due to the rush in which the NIE had to be produced.30 But the fact that the fundamental premise of the NIE and Powell’s speech—the existence in the spring of 2003 of active Iraqi programs to produce WMD—was wrong was not discovered until the U.S. invasion and occupation of the country, Members of the Bush administration emphatically deny there was any effort on their part to exaggerate the threat in order to generate support for war. As put by Donald Rumsfeld, “Powell was not duped or misled by anybody, nor did he lie about Saddam’s suspected WMD stockpiles. The president did not lie. The vice president did not lie. Tenet did not lie. Rice did not lie. I did not lie. The Congress did not lie. The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong.”31 Although it was doubtful that a “coalition of the willing” that would respond to the call would have anywhere near the numbers that his father was able to attract in 1991, George W. Bush was convinced that the war was just and necessary: to rid the world of a tyrant with a record of international aggression who was developing a WMD arsenal, who had already used chemical weapons against his enemies, and who was willing to give aid and cover (and possibly WMD) to terrorists; and to establish a postSaddam democratic regime that would live in peace with its neighbors (including Israel) and serve as a model for the undemocratic regimes in the region to emulate.

THE INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF IRAQ “My fellow citizens,” President Bush began his address from the Oval Office at 10:16 p.m. on March 19, 2003, “at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to

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free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” It would be a broad and concerted campaign against “an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality.” Knowing that he should not create expectations of a quick and easy victory (even though Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the military who were put in charge of the operation were planning for a rapid “shock and awe” success), the president cautioned, “A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict. And helping Iraqis achieve a united stable and free country will require our sustained commitment.” He went on to express publicly the conviction he had held for some time that a preventive war (though he did not call it that) to change the regime in Baghdad was both just and necessary: Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly—yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.32

Three weeks after the war began, U.S. forces triumphantly entered Baghdad, claimed control of the city, and helped the Iraqis topple the huge statute of Saddam in the central square. Three weeks later, on May 1, President Bush piloted a Navy jet onto the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and in front of a Victory Accomplished banner proclaimed that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”33 But this early triumphalism did not take account of the insurgent violence yet to be faced by the U.S. and allied forces in Iraq and the enormous difficulty U.S. military and civilian officials were to encounter in trying to tamp down the brewing civil war among the contending religious and ethnic communities. The flare-up of resistance against the occupation forces by paramilitaries and volunteer jihadists who flocked to Iraq, the breakdown of public order (manifested in large-scale looting), the escalation of intercommunal conflict, the breakdown in the provision of necessary human services, and the delays in development of the ability of the Iraqis to construct and operate viable institutions of democratic governance—all of these problems, Bush administration officials came to realize, were insufficiently anticipated in the planning for both the military combat phase and the stability and reconstruction phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

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Much of the reverse “shock and awe”—the unanticipated difficulties of the occupation forces that should not have been such a surprise—were again traceable, as in Afghanistan, to the almost ideological commitment by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and a few of his loyal aides to his philosophy of military “transformation.” The transformed military, according to Rumsfeld, would take full advantage of the so-called revolution in military affairs (RMA)—that is, the technological revolution, especially in electronics, responsible for dramatic advances in the acquisition and dissemination of battlefield information and the precise guidance of weapons to target from remote commands and stand-off (even unmanned) platforms; also the advances in the speed and lift capacities in transporting military equipment and personnel. Cumulatively, these revolutionary advances were translated into a lean and mean military with a capacity for rapid get-in, get-out deployments and operations such as were manifested in Desert Storm and contemporaneously in the (prematurely) presumed success in Afghanistan. Applying their military “transformation” ideas to the forthcoming invasion of Iraq, which the Saudis and Egyptians were insisting should be a quick-in, quick-out operation with only a small residual U.S. military footprint, Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz deflected any alternative planning assumptions of a protracted conflict and messy occupation.34 Rumsfeld’s memoir emphatically denies the pre-invasion press reports that Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki had argued for a much larger invasion force than was deployed and was forced to retire early because of this. But the secretary does admit to some crucial miscalculations in the war plan, which he attributes to intelligence failures: the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency failed to anticipate that Saddam’s paramilitary forces, the Fedayeen, would “emerge as the core of an irregular enemy that attracted . . . thousands of foreign fighters from across the Muslin world looking to fight the West.” Not warned of the possibility, “the fact is that our forces were not well prepared for it.” This failure to anticipate the existence and capabilities of the Fedayeen and foreign jihadists to wage an asymmetric war against our troops “posed daunting consequences for the coalition effort. American forces that were prepared to fight more conventional forces had to adapt to an enemy that hid among civilians and fought by means of ambushes, car bombs, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs).”35 Military chronicles and analyses of the combat phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom are still being written, and some of them can be expected

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to attribute many of the inept strategies to Rumsfeld’s RMA assumptions— not merely faulty intelligence. The indisputable fact, however, is that what was widely believed in the Bush administration to lead to a scenario of a swift victory followed by a temporary occupation morphed unexpectedly into a protracted insurgency/counterinsurgency conflict requiring the kind of operations for which much of the “transformation” doctrine and many of the new capabilities were not well designed.

THROWING OUT THE BABY WITH THE BA’ATH WATER Even larger unanticipated problems were encountered in the misnamed “aftermath” of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The biggest mistakes— comprehended only after the fact by some of its Bush administration authors—were the de-Ba’athification program and the dissolution of the Iraqi military. Given that Saddam had ruled Iraq through his control of the Ba’ath Party, the disciplined political arm of the Sunni Arab community to which Saddam belonged, supplanting his dictatorship by a democratic regime seemed to require that Ba’ath Party members be prevented from holding positions of leadership. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld admits in his memoir that “Though the policy later found few defenders at the top level of the administration, de-Ba’athification initially had broad support among the relevant cabinet departments and agencies.”36 President Bush was briefed on the policy at an NSC meeting two weeks before the war began, and none of the NSC principals at the meeting raised any objections. It fell to L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, the U.S.-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, to institute and carry out the policy. Originally conceived of as targeting 1 to 2 percent of the Ba’ath Party members—those who had positions of leadership under Saddam— as implemented by Bremer, it rapidly morphed into a wholesale purge of most government officeholders and the prevention of former Ba’athists from being appointed to any civil or military positions in the occupation or provisional government institutions being set up. The Shia, Iraq’s previously persecuted religious majority, now being given positions of authority under the American occupation, were more than happy to help. The disbanding of the Iraqi army, which had enormous consequences for post-invasion security and stability, was a runaway effect (figuratively and literally) of the U.S. invasion and not something initially planned by

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the Pentagon. The plan, according to Rumsfeld’s account, did include the dissolution of the most brutal elements of Saddam’s regime, the Republican Guard and the secret police, plus some of the senior officers of the regular army who were responsible for the repression of the Kurds and Shia; but the bulk of regular army was supposed to be retained to maintain security and public order. What was unanticipated was the gross desertions of the country’s conscript soldiers as the U.S. and coalition troops drove north to Baghdad. Rumsfeld, in retrospect, endorses Bremer’s claim that the Iraqi army essentially “disbanded itself.”37 Yet he does admit to insufficient oversight from Washington of Bremer’s failure to rapidly reconstitute and reform the military. Cumulatively, the result of de-Ba’athification and the collapse of the Iraqi army was disastrous on two counts: incompetent government and intensified sectarian violence. Without the services of the Sunni Ba’athists who for decades ran the state under Saddam, the successor government was bereft of the experience and skills needed to effectively provide the public goods of security on the streets and elementary social services, such as the provision of electric power, management of hospitals and schools, public transportation and communication, mail delivery, and garbage collection. Moreover, grave and potentially fatal threats to peace and security in post-Saddam Iraq flowed from the de-Ba’athification, as disaffected Sunnis, many of them now unable to find gainful employment, mobilized into hostile militias in various localities to harass and intimidate the Shia population. Their purpose was to wrest back control from the Shia and/or to make it impossible for them to govern. In response, many of the Shia formed their own militias, sometimes led by radical clerics determined to ensure the Americans and the new governing authorities did not backtrack on the policy of limiting Sunni participation in the new regime. When U.S. forces intervened to stop particularly bloody encounters, the American soldiers often became the object of attack themselves. It seemed that the only relatively peaceful locales in Iraq were in the Kurdish region, where that ethnic community was providing its own largely autonomous system of governance. Within the Bush administration, the Congress, and think tanks, the idea began to gain adherents for transforming Iraq into a confederation of three largely autonomous regions—one Kurdish, one predominantly Shia, one predominantly Sunni. Each province would have responsibility for maintaining law and order and essential services in its own jurisdiction, and the federal center would

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retain authority for the country’s external relations and for allocating oil revenues and maintaining and financing necessary transregional infrastructures for transportation and communication. Upon closer study, the confederal or loose-federal option was rejected by the administration as unworkable, given the mixed ethnic makeup of Baghdad and other cities and the absolute rejection of the idea by the Shia majority, who regarded it as subversive of their deserved opportunity to preside over a democratically constituted nation. In order to stanch demands from the Sunnis for such a tripartite division of the country, however, the Bush administration tried to pressure the Shia leadership to provide new rules and procedures for allowing former Ba’athists to participate in elections and to be re-integrated into any future government. Unfortunately, such reconciliation initiatives inflamed passions among the more radical Shia groups, leading to an intensification of intercommunal violence. A growing worry in Washington and among the U.S. military and civil authorities in Baghdad was the increased presence of al-Qaeda operatives, many of them foreign, in Sunni communities and their role in provoking violence between the Sunni and Shia militias and in goading the Sunnis into open insurgency against U.S. occupation forces. Three years after the American invasion, the increase in sectarian violence, bordering on fullscale civil war, the apparent inability of the elected coalition government headed by Nouri al-Maliki to bring about intercommunal reconciliation, and the reports of growing al-Qaeda influence put the Bush administration on the defensive and according to the president’s political advisers, led to the Democrats taking control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 election.

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS, THE SURGE, AND THE NEW FACE OF COIN Regarding the 2006 election in the United States as a referendum on the Iraq War, leaders of both parties, analyzing the results, called for a major change in policy. So did the December report of the prestigious bipartisan Iraq Study Group cochaired by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton and encompassing such leading lights as Lawrence Eagleburger, Vernon Jordan Jr., Edwin Meese III, Sandra Day O’Connor, Leon Panetta, William J. Perry, Charles S. Robb, and Alan K. Simpson. “If current trends continue,”

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wrote Baker and Hamilton in their letter of transmission to the president, “the potential consequences are severe.” One of the core recommendations of the Iraq Study Group was a blockbuster: if the Iraqi government does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government.38 Presidential spokespersons promptly let it be known that Bush was reviewing the study group report, but also new studies by the JCS and the NSC, and he did not want to be rushed, particularly as he wanted his new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, to have time to freshly evaluate the situation. He was also said to be studying a report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which its authors called “the real Iraq Study Group report,” and which in contrast to the Baker-Hamilton group, advocated a major augmentation of the U.S. military and economic effort in Iraq. Most Washington pundits speculated at the turn of the year that President Bush might well go either way but was leaning toward accepting the Baker-Hamilton recommendations for a reduced U.S. military footprint and accelerated Iraqi responsibility for providing security. In actuality, the president had made up his mind well before Christmas.39 Overriding the preferences of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, General George Casey (the U.S. commander in Iraq), and Secretary of State Rice, Bush embraced the view of a group of military strategists led by General David Petraeus who had been arguing for troop increases combined with a basic overhaul of U.S. doctrine and operational guidance for conducting counterinsurgency (COIN) missions. Secretary Rice, having traveled to Iraq and consulted intensively with the coalition’s military commanders and political leaders, had worried that the longer U.S forces stayed in the country, the more they would be regarded as alien “occupiers” by all sides and increasingly become prime targets of the hydra-headed insurgency. Like General Casey, although she had little confidence in the Shia-run government of Nouri al-Maliki to contain the growing intercommunal violence, she had been convinced it was time for the United States to reduce the size of its footprint, rather than increase it. Despite these concerns, which she did not hesitate to express to President Bush, it became evident that he had become a convert to the new strategy.

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Rather than concentrating on killing and capturing the enemy insurgents, the principal COIN objective henceforth, while it might take more troops, would be the protection of the population. As stated in the new U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, issued by both services in December 2006, of which General Petraeus was a principal author, Ultimate success in COIN is gained by protecting the populace, not the COIN force. If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents. Aggressive saturation patrolling, ambushes, and listening post operations must be conducted, risk shared with the populace, and contact maintained. . . . These practices ensure access to the intelligence needed to drive operations. Following them reinforces the connections with the populace that help establish real legitimacy.40

Secretary Rice, although still unconvinced that the United States should enlarge its military footprint, was impressed by the Petraeus counterinsurgency doctrine. Yet, as she reveals in her memoir, “I worried that the Pentagon leadership was not prepared to implement the new strategy.” More importantly, “I wasn’t sure of the . . . will of the Shia-led government to crack down on the violence.” And if they lacked the will to do so, “it seemed ill advised to put more U.S. forces in the middle of the slaughter.”41 (Characteristically, though, once the president decided on the troop surge, Rice became one of its most unequivocal defenders—publicly and within the administration.) Bush ended the public suspense on January 10, 2007, announcing, “The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people—and it is unacceptable to me . . . It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq . . . So I’ve committed more than twenty thousand additional American troops to Iraq.”42 Paying little attention to the overall shift in strategy, the House passed a concurrent resolution on February 16 by a vote of 246–182 stating that “Congress disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush . . . to deploy more than 20,000 additional United States combat troops to Iraq.”43 The Senate vote on the concurrent resolution was tabled when its proponents failed to obtain a sufficient majority to close the debate and bring it to a vote; but prominent Democrats, including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, voiced doubts about the surge.

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The president and his national security team claimed to be vindicated as the increased troop deployments correlated with a decline in incidents of intercommunal violence and attacks on U.S. soldiers throughout Iraq and a substantial improvement in the security situation in Baghdad. However, General Petraeus, now commander of the U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and responsible for implementing the surge concept, was careful not to claim too much. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2008, General Petraeus pointed to a number of factors that in addition to the increased number of U.S. forces, had contributed to the decline in violence: “Less recognized is that Iraq has also conducted a surge, adding well over 100,000 additional soldiers and police to the ranks of its security forces.” Another important factor was the “Sunni Awakening,” in which Sunni communities rejected al-Qaeda–Iraq’s indiscriminate violence and extremist ideology. This “Awakening” had prompted “tens of thousands of Iraqis—some former insurgents—to contribute to local security as socalled ‘Sons of Iraq.’ ”44 These opponents of al-Qaeda, now numbering over 91,000, were being paid by the United States to help coalition and Iraqi forces protect their neighborhoods and secure infrastructure and roads. Even Democrats who had previously opposed the surge were impressed. After obtaining the nomination of his party for president, Barack Obama admitted that although the surge strategy had not yet led to the needed political stability in Iraq, the reduction of violence there had greatly exceeded his expectations.45 Moreover, it could permit him, if elected president, to implement his expressed intention to transfer U.S. resources from Iraq to the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.

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NATIONAL SECURITY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES As we faced a new kind of enemy . . . , the Bush administration put in place programs that were critical to securing the nation. . . . We enhanced our ability to intercept terrorist communications and track money that had financed them. And we developed a program to gain intelligence from detained terrorists that saved lives and prevented future attacks. . . . No program was more bitterly denounced than the CIA’s procedures for interrogating high-value detainees. . . . The program was safe, legal, and effective. —Dick Cheney

W. Bush and his foreign policy team operated under the assumption that of the three legs of the irreducible national interest the security of the nation against attack takes precedence over the other two: the economic well-being of the country and “the blessings of liberty” enshrined in the Constitution. Especially during war, or in order to prevent war, national security may well require a diversion of resources that strains the economy; even so, however, administrations in power at such times usually bear a heavy burden of proof to convince the electorate and the Congress that the economic sacrifices are necessary. By and large, this is also the case with respect to the constitutional separation of powers and basic political and civil liberties; and an administration that tries to override these on grounds of national security will be pressed to show that it has no alternative but to do so. September 11 and the ensuing war on terror convinced President Bush that the existential threats now confronting the country warranted unprecedented restrictions of traditional American liberties and modifications of standard legal processes. But given the country’s deep and

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enduring commitment to a government of laws, the administration went to unusual lengths to make the case, often in the form of detailed internal memoranda from the Department of Justice, that the new counterterrorism legislation it was proposing, the executive orders it was issuing, and the interrogation techniques the CIA and the military were using on detainees were in accord with domestic law, international treaties, and the Constitution. Much of this effort to ensure that the government could fight a noholds-barred war against the terrorists—at home and abroad—was spurred on by Vice President Cheney and his allies in the Office of Legal Council in the Department of Justice. They were able to convince the president that as commander in chief he was accorded virtually unlimited authority by Article II of the Constitution to do whatever was necessary to wage the war, even if some of the measures might appear to violate the Bill of Rights. These programs—including the interception, without judicial warrant, of terrorist communications; the incarceration of suspects without due process; harsh interrogation of detainees—were critical to securing the nation, Cheney argued. They were, he insists in his memoir, “part of a broad effort that enabled us, for seven and a half years, to prevent any further mass casualty acts against the United States.”1

LOOSENING RESTRICTIONS ON SURVEILLANCE In reaction to the shock of 9/11, the Bush administration moved rapidly to get Congress to modify the existing rules restricting government surveillance of U.S. citizens. Derived primarily from the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, ensuring that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search and seizures, shall not be violated” and that any searches and seizures required a specific warrant by a judicial authority, these rules, as of 2001, had been given post-Watergate elaboration in the Privacy Act of 1974 (as amended in 1988), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the Financial Privacy Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333 of 1981, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. Amendments of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) were designed to deal specifically with the new intrusive capabilities for electronic surveillance. No such surveillance against U.S. persons was to be permitted unless it was approved by a group of judges with the appropriate expertise sitting as the FISA court.

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Cumulatively, this body of law constrained how the government could use personal information on U.S. citizens and resident aliens. It required that any collection, retention, or use of such information must be in accord with procedures established by the head of the agency doing it, and that these procedures must be approved by the U.S. attorney general, to make sure that the privacy rights and civil liberties of the American people are protected. The centerpiece of the Bush administration’s efforts to loosen these constraints on counterterrorism surveillance in the United States was the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, commonly referred to by its acronym, USA PATRIOT Act. Drafted in the Department of Justice and passed by large majorities in both houses of Congress only 45 days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Patriot Act gave extensive new authority and flexibility to government agencies to tap into, record, and search individual and private-group communications and records— including e-mail messages and telephone conversations and data maintained by doctors, hospitals, banks, financial institutions, and libraries. Much of this intrusive spying—which the administration argued was needed gain intelligence on planned acts of terrorism early enough to prevent their materialization—could now be legally undertaken even without warrants from a FISA court.2 With the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Congress made a move to address some of the accountability shortfalls in the Bush-approved surveillance programs without substantially hamstringing those programs. Allowances for aggressive search and seizure mechanisms, as long high executive branch officials certified they were required by national security, remained intact. Highly classified aspects of the intelligence gathering, such as the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program and the Pentagon’s domestic intelligence-gathering activities, continued to operate outside of public, Congressional, and judicial scrutiny (the judges being held at arm’s length on the basis of the administration’s claimed “state secrets” prerogative). Given the supersensitive nature of the spying activities, recalls Condoleezza Rice, “even some of the administration’s top security officials had been left out of the loop.”3 The vice president was the principal driver of efforts to keep these programs alive and strengthen them even as some members of the administration tried to convince Bush of their dubious constitutionality. In his memoir Cheney calls the Terrorist Surveillance Program “one of the most important success stories in the history of American intelligence” and “one of the things of which I am

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proudest. I know it saved lives and prevented attacks, If I had it to do all over again, I would in a heartbeat.”4

THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES The Bush administration’s “this is war, but a different kind of war” paradigm led to policies for dealing with terrorists or suspected terrorists— whether captured on the battlefield or arrested domestically—that were difficult to square with the country’s traditional commitment to due process of law and to rules requiring the humane treatment of prisoners. One way for the U.S. government to avoid accusations of inhumanely attempting to gain information from terrorists in its custody was to transfer them to other countries, where they were subjected to torture. This practice of “extraordinary rendition” was not new with the Bush administration, but in the wake of 9/11 it became more prevalent. The administration chose not to deny, however, journalistic reports that in secret U.S. detention facilities around the world the CIA and the Defense Department were themselves detaining suspected terrorists without trial and engaging in harsh interrogation practices. Spokespersons for the United States, while rejecting allegations of torture, insisted that such detentions and harsh actions were essential to U.S. security and fully consistent with the laws of war, human rights law, and the U.S. Constitution. The administration’s legal rationale for suspending many domestic law and international law protections for captured terrorists and suspected terrorists was that they were not merely “criminals” (who would have to be accorded the standard U.S. due process of law protections for detainees, like habeas corpus) nor simply “enemy combatants” (who would be covered by protections in the Geneva conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war). Rather they were “unlawful enemy combatants” and consequently could be incarcerated indefinitely without trial and wherever the U.S. determined was best for national security. The president, in a memorandum to his national security team on February 7, 2002, embraced this legal formulation, stating that the war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm, one in which groups with broad, international reach commit horrific acts against innocent civilians, sometimes with the direct support of states. Our nation recognizes that this new paradigm—ushered in not by us, but by terrorists—requires new thinking in the law of war . . . .

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Pursuant to my authority as commander in chief, . . . I accept the legal conclusion of the Department of Justice and determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world. . . . 5

The president and other administration officials, however, did assert that while the treatment of the “unlawful enemy combatants” was not legally governed by the Geneva conventions, their treatment by U.S. authorities would nonetheless be in conformity with the Geneva standards of decent treatment of prisoners of war. Guantánamo, the U.S. naval base on the island of Cuba—not being on U.S. soil and therefore, according to the administration’s lawyers, even more conclusively beyond the reach of U.S. criminal law—became the preferred facility for incarcerating the terrorists and suspected terrorists. Moreover, if and when the detainees were brought to trial so they could be found guilty of war crimes and punished, the trials would be conducted by specially constituted military commissions. Meanwhile, the Bush administration wanted the U.S. military and the CIA to have maximum latitude for interrogating the detainees—with whatever interrogation procedures might work—so as to gain information for disrupting further terrorist attacks and destroying the terrorist networks. But U.S. statutory law and the military justice system, having incorporated the International Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, was unequivocal in disallowing torture, with no exceptions whatsoever, and in making it a punishable criminal offense for any official to order it or participate in such acts. Accordingly, U.S. Justice Department lawyers were put to work to assist the interrogating agencies in developing guidelines that would shield their personnel from any future prosecution for violating the law against torture.6 The top secret Justice Department memoranda produced in this exercise (subsequently declassified under Freedom of Information Act petitions) informed the officials involved in potentially problematical interrogations exactly where they had leeway to proceed with techniques they found to be most efficacious and where there might be red lines that could subject them to prosecution if crossed. These demarcations of “enhanced interrogation” techniques that were acceptable from those that might be in violation of the law were couched in a definition of torture that permitted a wide range of harsh interrogation practices—including sleep deprivation, long periods in contorted standing or sitting positions, confinement in small containers, very uncomfortable temperature fluctuations, and waterboarding.

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First of all, the Justice Department lawyers found that the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment as incorporated into the U.S. Criminal Code “prohibits only the most extreme acts by reserving criminal penalties solely for torture and declining to require such penalties for ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.’ ”7 Next they argued that for an “extreme act” to reach the level of torture, it must inflict physical or mental pain that is very difficult to endure: “Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death. For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture . . . it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.” Moreover, for an official to be found guilty of committing an act of torture, the law, as interpreted by the Justice Department attorneys, required that the official must have acted “with the specific intent to inflict severe pain”—that the infliction of such pain must have been “the defendant’s precise objective.”8 Working from these assumptions, the Justice Department advised the CIA that a series of escalating coercive techniques, up to and including waterboarding, being used in the summer of 2002 in the agency’s interrogation of a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative (Abu Zubaydah), were legally permissible. Waterboarding came close to being defined as torture, but not quite—thus, the Justice Department attorneys, counseled the CIA operatives: You have informed us that this procedure does not inflict actual physical harm . . . although the subject may experience the fear or panic associated with the feeling of drowning. . . . Although the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death, prolonged mental harm must nonetheless result to violate the statutory prohibition on infliction of severe mental pain or suffering. . . . Based on your research, . . . you do not anticipate that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard. Indeed you have advised us that the relief is almost immediate when the cloth is removed from the nose and mouth. In the absence of prolonged mental harm, no severe mental pain or suffering would have been inflicted, and the use of these procedures would not constitute torture within the meaning of the statute.9

Evidently feeling shielded by such sophisticated legal arguments— despite complaints by the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights groups who were demanding more access to those incarcerated in

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Guantánamo and other prison facilities—the administration proceeded apace with its tough detention policies. But then in April 2004 (it is no exaggeration to use the colloquialism) the shit hit the fan. Photos and accounts of gross mistreatment of prisoners in the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were obtained and broadcast by the media. The graphic pictures and stories revealed that the prisoners were routinely subjected to physical abuse and sexual humiliation by U.S. military personnel, intelligence agents, and civilian prison staffers hired by the military. The administration was put on the defensive, insisting that the situation in Abu Ghraib was not at all representative of conditions in Guantánamo and other U.S. military prisons. The Pentagon ordered court-martial proceedings against the U.S. soldiers who participated in the abuses, while administration spokespersons denied charges by critics that responsibility for the behavior of the soldiers and contractor personnel lay in the climate of permissiveness toward such behavior prevailing in the office of the secretary of defense and other cabinet-level offices, including that of Vice President Cheney. Spring 2004 also marked the start of greater Supreme Court cognizance—possibly stimulated by the embarrassments of Abu Ghraib— over the post-9/11 detention regime. In a series of cases—notably Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Rasul v. Bush, and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld—the court began to restore habeas corpus rights to the detainees, even for those branded “unlawful enemy combatants,” and simply by taking up these cases challenged the administration’s contention that the president, as commander in chief, had virtually unlimited authority to act to protect the nation against terrorism. The administration counterattacked by persuading Congress to pass the Military Commissions Act of 2006, allowing it to avoid bringing detainees to trial in the federal courts. But in Boumediene v. Bush, decided in 2008, the Supreme Court, without yet finding the Military Commissions Act unconstitutional, reaffirmed the constitutional right of all detainees to be protected by the writ of habeas corpus. Meanwhile, during George W. Bush’s second term, the White House— reportedly over the objections of Vice President Cheney and other war on terror hawks—asked for and received fresh Department of Justice rulings countermanding some of the advice to the CIA on the legality of various enhanced interrogation techniques the department’s lawyers had provided during Bush’s first term. Consistent with the army’s newly revised Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations, waterboarding would no longer be regarded as an acceptable means of inducing recalcitrant prisoners to provide information.

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But the president and the civilian members of his National Security Council would not go along with the urgings of top military brass that he prohibit all interrogation techniques not approved in the army’s Field Manual. Nor would he or other administration officials grant that waterboarding or the other “enhanced interrogation techniques” were illegal or morally wrong at the time they were employed by the CIA or the U.S. military. Indeed, their standard response to critics was that these techniques played a crucial role in avoiding additional major terrorist attacks. As Bush averred in an October 2007 talk at the National Defense University, “This program has produced critical intelligence that has helped us stop a number of attacks, including a plot to strike at the U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, California, and a plot to fly passenger planes into Heathrow Airport and buildings in downtown London.”10 And with respect to the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding in particular, as he put it in his memoir, “I would have preferred that we got the information another way. But the choice between security and values was real. Had I not authorized waterboarding on senior al Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk I was unwilling to take.”11 Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for president, was not about to draw the choice between the country’s “security and values” that starkly. Neither was the Republican candidate, John McCain, who had been subjected to waterboarding as a prisoner of war in Hanoi and had no doubt that it was torture and therefore both illegal and immoral. Accordingly, one of Obama’s earliest acts as president, not expecting a backlash from the Republican leadership, was to sign an executive order limiting interrogation of detainees to the basically noncoercive techniques stipulated in the army’s Field Manual. But the larger issue of the treatment of detainees— including their continued incarceration in Guantánamo, due process for them, and whether they should be tried in military commissions or the federal court system—would not go away. Moreover, this legacy of the war on terror would pit civil libertarians against the security-first types not so much between the political parties as within each party and in the new administration.

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X OBAMA’S UNIVERSALISM VERSUS A STILL-FRAGMENTED WORLD As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that we’re all basically seeking the same things; that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness. . . . And yet somehow, given the dizzying pace of globalization, the cultural leveling of modernity, . . . people fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities—their race, their tribe, and perhaps most powerfully their religion. —Barack Obama

I know what side of history I want the United States of America to be on. We are ready to meet tomorrow’s challenges . . . firm in the belief that all men and women are, in fact, created equal, each individual possessed with a dignity and inalienable rights that cannot be denied. That is why we look to the future not with fear, but with hope. —Barack Obama

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ENGAGING THE WORLD To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist. —Barack Obama

AKING OFFICE ON JANUARY 20, 2009, President Barack Hussein Obama inherited a slew of international political crises that intruded upon the incoming administration’s frantic efforts to deal with a domestic and international economic crisis more serious than anything experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The international political challenges handed off to him by President Bush included: the unfinished and still precarious military and political stabilization of Iraq; a scary recrudescence of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan; brink of war tensions between India and Pakistan; escalating violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians; the defiance by Iran and North Korea of international community demands that they dismantle nuclear facilities that could fuel nuclear weapons programs; Russia’s continuing occupation and political absorption of the two Georgian provinces that it had invaded during the summer’s mutual provocation by Tbilisi and Moscow; the genocidal slaughter in the Darfur region of the Sudan; drug-related violence in Mexico, and U.S. immigration policies—to mention some of the situations most covered by the media. Then too there were the secret intelligence reports the White House was receiving daily on new terrorist plots, many of them apparently masterminded by Osama bin Laden from an al-Qaeda

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command center somewhere in Pakistan. Not much room for fashioning anything like an “Obama Doctrine.” During the previous summer and fall, as his campaign for the presidency went into high gear, Obama gave few indications of how the “change” he insistently called for would be expressed in U.S. foreign policy in any fundamental way, other than promising to work more with allies and through multilateral institutions, in contrast to Bush’s alleged unilateralism, and pledging to vigorously pursue arms control and disarmament agreements with the goal of eventually achieving a world free of nuclear weapons.1 The closer he got to the electoral finish line, however, the less he featured the common humanity/one world concepts prominent earlier in his campaign. The principal difference on foreign policy Obama could establish between himself and his main rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and then his opponent in the general election, Senator John McCain, was over whether and when he would negotiate with declared enemies of the United States—particularly with Iran or North Korea or with extremist movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Taliban. Adapting President Kennedy’s orientation—never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate—Obama opined it was better to engage your opponents than to isolate them, even if only to confront them with the clearest picture of your own vital interests and priorities. Such diplomacy would not mean abandoning the country’s commitment to human rights. He was not adopting the amoral realpolitik philosophy that how governments treat the people in their jurisdictions should be of no concern to outsiders. Rather, as the new president put it in the mostquoted phrase from his inaugural address: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”2 Indeed, the emphasis on a diplomacy of engagement with the country’s adversaries, not just its allies, was for the first weeks of the new administration just about the only grand-strategy concept the president and his newly assembled foreign policy team were able to articulate to sustain an image of change. And in actuality, the Bush administration in its last year and a half, reflecting the pragmatic realism of Robert Gates, Donald Rumsfeld’s successor as secretary of defense, had itself moved considerably in this direction—to the chagrin of Vice President Dick Cheney and the coterie of neoconservatives at the sub-cabinet level, many of whom resigned well before the November election.

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There were reaffirmations from the top levels of the incoming administration of plans to substantially withdraw U.S. combat forces from Iraq in the summer of 2009 and to increase U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan even before the completion of a sixty-day review of Afghanistan policy ordered by the new president. But these actions too were carryovers from decisions made in the last few months of the Bush administration and hardly reflected a fundamental change in grand strategy. Some of the inherited problems did appear to demand bold departures from the way they had been handled by the departing administration. There were new and alarming reports about the pace of global warming and the need to act urgently to avoid its very costly and irreversible consequences. Obama’s campaign speeches had been full of promises to exercise determined leadership domestically and internationally to forge a vigorous response to the threat. He had also promised that from day one of his presidency he would act to reverse the infringement of civil liberties and legal due process the previous administration had instituted in the name of fighting the war on terror. In the realm of domestic economics, the collapse of credit markets and major financial institutions pushed the new administration to rapidly and massively intervene in the economy to prevent the 2008–2009 recession from spiraling into a full-blown depression. But in the realm of foreign policy and national security policy, President Obama’s “first hundred days” (pundits kept invoking the analogy of FDR’s period of emergency responses in early 1933 to the ongoing depression) featured less drama and more cautious scripting. His retention of Secretary of Defense Gates was emblematic of this approach, as was his appointment of General James Jones (formerly supreme allied commander Europe) to be his national security advisor. Hillary Clinton at State would be a strong and visible presence but on the basis of her record on the Senate Armed Services Committee, a no-nonsense realist. Susan Rice, often described as Obama’s top foreign policy adviser during the election campaign and very much a Wilsonian liberal, was deployed to New York as ambassador to the United Nations where, despite her formal status as a member of Obama’s cabinet, she would be more of a policy implementer than formulator. It soon became obvious to insiders, however, that Obama’s closest advisers on foreign policy, more often than not, were the younger second-tier officials Obama brought to the National Security Council—Mark Lippert, Denis McDonough, Benjamin Rhodes, and Samantha Power—with whom he had felt most comfortable during his election campaign.3

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Seven weeks into the new administration, David Axelrod, the president’s senior White House adviser, explained the absence of a definable Obama Doctrine: “He’s not an ideologue. . . . He’s a pragmatist. He’s someone who’s interested in ideas that will work. Some may have their roots in one doctrine, some may have their roots in another. But he’s not concerned with that. He’s less concerned with how he’s described than [with] what he can accomplish.”4 The White House appeared content for the time being to let the terms “pragmatist,” “realist,” “pragmatic realist” carry the burden of distinguishing the Obama foreign policy from the neoconservative ideological thrust of Bush’s foreign policy. On issue after issue—the tension between counterterrorism policies and civil liberties, Russian muscle flexing toward Georgia and Ukraine, Chinese human rights violations, Iranian and North Korean flouting of UN resolutions concerning their nuclear programs, escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, genocidal killings in Darfur, piracy off the Somalian coast, and of course, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan—the claim of pragmatism provided the rationale for proceeding step by step, fashioning compromises, and effecting trade-offs among often competing national interest imperatives. The nickname “no-drama Obama,” which had surfaced during the election campaign to characterize the disciplined cooperation among his staff and advisers, now appeared to be a description of the substance of his foreign policy as well as the process. But perhaps displeased by the characterizations of his actions in the international arena as nothing other than a cool and cautious pragmatism, lacking any compelling “vision,” the president in late spring and early summer of 2009 moved to seize the high ground. In a set of soaring speeches delivered abroad, he embedded the strategy of engagement in expressions of deep empathy for the trials and tribulations of others—Muslims, Russians, Africans—and clarion calls for a transformative enhancement of multilateral approaches and institutions for dealing with humanity’s common problems. This, the idealistic face of Obama’s basic policy of engagement, with adversaries as well as allies, was one of openness and inclusiveness— working toward a world community in which disputes are resolved on the basis of bargaining and adjudication and moral suasion rather than through violent encounters. The policy’s realistic face, however— cognizant of the prevalence of ideological and religious fanaticism and interethnic hostility, of uncompromising aggressiveness in territorial conflicts, of belligerent governments whipping up nationalistic support

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for war—would convey a readiness to rely on sticks as well as carrots in the conduct of U.S. diplomacy. These were not new worldviews for Obama, only dawning on him now from the perspective of the presidency. Back in 2007, New York Times columnist David Brooks, having been impressed by similar realistic statements in Obama’s writings, asked the senator if he had ever read Reinhold Niebuhr. “I love him.” Obama responded. “He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” And he went on to endorse what he said was Niebuhr’s “compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate such things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away [from reading Niebuhr] . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing that they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”5 Niebuhr could have been on his mind again in the fall of 2009 during those agonizing days of deciding among competing strategies for prosecuting the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. In the midst of these deliberations he had to compose the address he would give on December 10 in Oslo accepting the Nobel Peace Prize—a prize that he conceded, in response to many critics, was premature in that his work for peace was still aspirational and as yet without substantial accomplishment. Moreover, he was about to order a major intensification of the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. “Perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize,” he granted to the gathering in Norway, “is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. . . . And so I come here . . . filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.” He asked the assemblage and the worldwide television audience to acknowledge “ the hard truth,” which he went on to describe in Niebuhrian terms: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago. “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem. It merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is

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nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing naïve—in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

But Obama would not leave it at that. Like Niebuhr, he insisted that “We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of depravation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.”6

A “NEW BEGINNING” WITH ISLAM Addressing a predominantly Muslim audience at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, President Obama had called for “a new beginning, based on mutual respect, a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other,” and the belief that “the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.” When a financial system weakens in one country, prosperity is hurt everywhere. When a new flu infects one human being, all are at risk. When one nation pursues a nuclear weapon, the risk of nuclear attack rises for all nations. When violent extremists operate in one stretch of mountain, peoples are endangered across the ocean. When innocents in Bosnia and Darfur are slaughtered, that is a stain on our collective conscience. That is what it means to share this world in the 21st century. That is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings. And this is a difficult responsibility to embrace. For human history has often been a record of nations and tribes—and, yes, religions, subjugating one another in pursuit of their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably

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fail. . . . Our problems must be dealt with through partnership, our progress must be shared.7

The president went on to admit that U.S. foreign policy might at times have appeared to be violating this stricture, acting not only as if America were globally omnipotent but also omniscient in telling people everywhere how they should organize their socioeconomic and political systems. “I know,” he said, there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected with the war in Iraq. So let me be clear. No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other. That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone. . . . But I do have an unyielding belief that all people everywhere yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere.8

Before very long, however, Obama had to deal with events in Egypt and other Muslim countries—the so-called Arab Spring—that got out of control and compelled him to reluctantly compromise the American support for the primacy of human rights he was promising.

“RESETTING” RELATIONS WITH RUSSIA Also high on President Obama’s “engagement” agenda was his July 2009 meeting in Moscow with Russian president Dmitri A. Medvedev and prime minister Vladimir V. Putin to “reset” (U.S. officialdom’s favored computer analogy) the U.S.-Russian relationship back on the more positive post–Cold War course from which it had wandered during the previous few years. True, the contemporary rumblings in the relationship were no longer along the democratic capitalism versus autocratic communism fault

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line of the Cold War. But Putin’s assertions of a Russian sphere of influence in the near abroad (those countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that used to be parts of the Soviet Union) and the U.S. sponsorship of NATO membership for the Baltic states and for Ukraine and Georgia portended a revived geopolitical rivalry. While not a direct threat to the security and well-being of the United States—although Russia still retained enough lethal power in its intercontinental nuclear forces to totally destroy the United States—Russia’s postSoviet regime was capable of being a spoiler of U.S. international policies and programs. Moscow’s acquiescence to, and at best cooperation with, Washington’s initiatives was needed for dealing with the nuclear weapons programs of Iran and North Korea, stabilizing Iraq and prosecuting the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, suppressing terrorism, and countering the threat of global warming. Particularly for any actions the Obama administration hoped to pursue through the UN Security Council, the Kremlin’s cooperation was crucial. The July 2009 Moscow summit, preceded by an announced agreement to permit U.S. military transports headed to Afghanistan to overfly Russian territory, did seem to mark a constructive turn in U.S.-Russian relations. There was certainly a change in the tone of the bilateral discourse. As President Obama put it in his joint news conference with President Medvedev: The president and I agreed that the relationship between Russia and the United States has suffered from a sense of drift. We resolved to reset U.S.Russian relations so that we can cooperate more effectively in areas of common interest. . . . President Medvedev and I are committed to leaving behind the suspicion and the rivalry of the past, so that we can advance the interests that we hold in common. . . . That’s the purpose of resetting our relations.9

Elaborating on this theme, President Obama told the graduates of the New Economic School in Moscow that the old view that rival imperial powers are destined to vie for spheres of influence and forge competing blocs to balance one another was obsolete. “In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonizing other countries. The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chess board are over. . . . The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game—progress must be shared. That is why I have called for a ‘reset’ in relations between the United States and Russia.”10

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Pressing the reset button was relatively easy. Negotiating the complex programs that would allow the needed cooperation to materialize was still pervaded by considerable suspicion, lack of trust, and very real conflicts of interest. Notably, on the most contentious matters—dealing with Iran, Russia’s support of Georgia’s secessionist provinces and opposition to Ukraine’s growing identification with the West, and, of course, missile defense—there was little more than agreement to disagree and to work toward resolving the issues. One aspect of the putative reset in U.S.-Russian relations that the Kremlin obviously wanted—pushing the “delete” button on external criticisms of the regime’s suppression of dissidence—was not happening. Prominent among Hillary Clinton’s remarks during her mid-October 2009 official visit to Russia were pointed observations of the necessity of people being “free to take unpopular decisions, disagree with conventional wisdom, and to know they are safe to peacefully challenge accepted practice and authority. That’s why attacks on journalists and human rights defenders are of such great concern.”11 Again there were “no linkage intended” insistences from the White House, but the juxtaposition in time of these complaints by the secretary of state with Kremlin foot-dragging on the Iranian issue was an unmistakable signal that engagement might well include both an olive branch and arrows. Tangible progress, however, did materialize in the push President Obama and President Medvedev both gave to the negotiation and mutual ratification of the successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which was about to expire. New START would limit each side’s deployment of nuclear warheads to somewhere between 1500 and 1675 (down from earlier commitments to reduce them to 2000) and of delivery vehicles to between 500 and 1100 (down from 1600). The fact that work on obtaining the new agreement had begun under Bush helped Obama overcome some of the partisan opposition in the Senate in 2010 to its ratification, but it also reduced his ability to showcase it as a hallmark of the changed foreign policy he claimed to have initiated. Obama and Medvedev also announced their commitment to finally open a joint early warning center to monitor and share data on missile launchings, fulfilling the agreement originally negotiated in 1998 by Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin and reaffirmed but not implemented by Clinton and Putin in 2000 and then again by Bush and Putin in 2007. Other arms control arrangements agreed to by previous administrations but still not fully implemented—such as the agreement to discard weapons-grade

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plutonium—were re-endorsed and presented in the package of accomplishments of the 2009 Moscow summit.12 Notably, there was agreement at the Moscow summit to proceed with New START even though Obama at the time refused to go along with the standing Russian insistence that U.S.-Russian new arms control agreements be linked to some compromise on the missile defense projects the United States was pursuing with Poland and the Czech Republic. But three months later, a few days before President Medvedev’s arrival in New York for the UN September 2009 heads of state meeting and a week before the resumption of U.S.-Russian negotiations in Geneva on finalizing New START, Obama announced the United States was abandoning its plan to base missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic.13 In response to immediate criticisms from defense hawks, high administration officials insisted that the missile defense decision was not motivated by a desire to placate Russia. The principal determinants were new intelligence on Iran’s missile development program (the threat the planned East European deployments were designed to counter) and technological developments in the U.S. missile defense program that made other basing and system alternatives (initially, mainly at sea) more cost-effective.14 “Russia’s attitude and possible reaction played no part in my recommendation to the president on this issue,” said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.15 “The Russians don’t make determinations about what our defense posture is,” the president confirmed in a Face the Nation television interview. “We have made a decision about what will be best to protect the American people as well as our troops in Europe and our allies. If the by-product of it is that the Russians feel a little less paranoid and are now willing to work more effectively with us to deal with threats like ballistic missiles from Iran or nuclear development in Iran, you know, then that’s a bonus.”16 Whether or not, behind the scenes, there was any explicit linkage of the U.S. about-face on the planned missile defense deployments and Washington’s other issues with Moscow, the administration, as Secretary Gates indicated, was obviously looking for some reciprocal pragmatism from the Kremlin. And President Obama had been making it clear since taking office that where he was particularly eager for such reciprocity was on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, given Russia’s considerable commerce with the Islamic republic. Without the Kremlin’s participation, a regime of strict economic sanctions against Tehran would have little chance of being effective. And the administration did worry that the missile defense issue could yet derail ratification of the treaty on the offensive weapons. Indeed, it

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almost did, as Senate opponents of New START complained that the treaty’s preambular statement pointing to the “interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms” could be subsequently invoked by the Russians as a required linkage—especially in view of current comments coming out of Moscow to that effect. But the administration, wary of having to renegotiate the treaty, successfully resisted amendments that would have explicitly prevented any such linkage.

UKRAINE: DISABLING THE RESET Despite a persisting agenda of disagreement, the “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations appeared to be operating on many levels during Obama’s first term—the good-spirited engagement evident in his exchange of warm smiles and prolonged handshakes with President Medvedev. But Obama, like Bush before him, was soon to find that a potent determinant of the Kremlin’s grand strategy was the deep discontent of Russian nationalists with the post-Cold War status of their country: its drastically shrunken sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the centuries’ old empire that used to be run from Moscow. Calling the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century”, Vladamir Putin (re-elected president in 2012) was again making it clear (as he had in Georgia in 2008) that he would come to the aid of the peoples in Russia’s “near abroad” who wanted to overcome that tragedy by reuniting with the motherland. Putin’s most tempting opportunity, but the biggest international crisis yet for the Obama administration, fell into his hands like ripe fruit in February, 2014 when massive protests in Kiev forced Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to flee the capital and seek asylum in Moscow. The Ukrainian nationalists were furious with Yanukovych for succumbing to Moscow’s pressure on Kiev to reject an offer from Brussels for closer EU-Ukraine economic relations. Counter-demonstrations in cities with Russian-ethnic majorities—especially in Crimea and eastern Ukraine—seized the day to demand reunification with Russia, and threatened to plunge the country into civil war. Putin moved deftly to exploit the turmoil: backed by a vote of the Russian parliament on March 1, he dispatched military units toward the Crimean border and warned that he might have to intervene forcibly to guarantee the self-determination of peoples and to protect Russian interests. Over

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the next few days, denying reports that Russian troops had already invaded Crimea, he maintained that the armed men attacking Ukrainian forces there were Crimean self-defense forces. Acting as if on cue, Crimea’s parliament voted to join Russia, and scheduled a referendum for March 16 to validate Putin’s claim that this was true self-determination. President Obama and his European allies knew there was little, if anything, they could do to prevent Putin’s power play from becoming a fait accompli. Their threats of economic sanctions against Russia would be essentially punitive and after the fact with respect to Crimea, but might yet have some deterrent effect on Kremlin efforts to stir up secessionism in eastern Ukraine. Predictably, 97 percent of the voters on the referendum in Crimea favored seceding from Ukraine and re-uniting with Russia. Obama immediately condemned it as a violation of Ukranian constitutions and international law, announced a series of sanctions on Russian officials and threatened more to make clear to Russia that further provocations would achieve nothing except to further isolate Russia and diminish its place in the world. As violent encounters between pro-Russian militias and Ukrainian government troops spread across eastern Ukraine in April and May of 2014, and the Kremlin increased its deployment of its troops at the RussianUkrainian border to some 40,000, the Obama administration stiffened its posture. The Pentagon announced a strengthening of NATO capabilities for any encounter with the Russians in Eastern Europe: the Baltic Air Mission would be augmented with additional aircraft, ships were being moved into the Baltic Sea and Black Sea, new troop exercises were planned with Poland and with Latvia and Estonia. Everyone knew, however, that the demonstrative military deployments and exercises by the United States and its allies, while warning Russia that the NATO treaty’s Article 5 (an attack on one member would be regarded on all) was still operative, would be unlikely to seriously alter Putin’s calculus as to what he could get away with in Ukraine (not a member of NATO). If anything might dissuade Putin from further stirring up trouble in and bullying Ukraine, it would have to be a concerted and very tough application of Western economic sanctions, in particular against Russia’s natural gas exports. Indeed, organizing such a boycott was the Obama administration’s basic default strategy if coercive diplomacy against Russian power plays became necessary. But some of the key natural gas importers—most

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openly Germany—were not at all eager to cut off that hose to spite Putin’s face. Then in a blockbuster move by Russia and China, America’s two principal Cold War adversaries announced on May 14, 2014 that they had successfully negotiated a huge natural gas deal. For some $400 billion, the Russians would provide the Chinese with their natural gas needs, using new trans-Siberian pipelines, for thirty years. The negotiations had been initiated prior to the Ukrainian crisis, and were probably undertaken principally for economic considerations, but their culmination may well have been hastened by Putin’s quest for a counter to Obama’s effort to mobilize allies to economically sanction Russia. And this—rendering almost superfluous a Western boycott of Russian petroleum sales—was its effect, whatever its motivations. Another effect was to generate unprecedented anxiety in the Obama administration that a fundamental restoration of the Sino-Russian alliance was occurring (their “re-set”). As strategists in Washington and other capitals sought to develop other so-called smart sanctions they could brandish to dissuade Putin from direct military intervention in Ukraine and other parts of the former Russian empire, Russian-armed militias in Ukraine on July 17, using a sophisticated Russian surface-to-air missile, shot down a Malaysian airliner overflying the government versus separatist battle zone in Eastern Ukraine, killing all 238 aboard. President Obama and other world leaders immediately called for an international investigation to determine who was responsible; but there was already enough circumstantial evidence for him to lay at least part of the blame on Putin, charging that time and again, Russia had refused to take concrete steps to deescalate the situation, and instead had continued to violate Ukrainian sovereignty and to support the violent separatists. During the ensuing weeks, tensions between Washington and Moscow rose to their highest levels since the end of the Cold War. Fighting between Ukraine loyalist and separatist forces prevented full access to the crash site by international investigators. Meanwhile, U.S. reconnaissance satellites revealed the return of previously withdrawn major Russian military contingents to the border with Ukraine and transborder transfers of heavy Russian military equipment to the separatists. Also, and most ominously, as divulged by Secretary of State Kerry on July 29, “We now have clear evidence of artillery and rocket fire from Russia into Ukraine.” But when asked. “What exactly the United States is going to do if Russia invades Ukraine?” Kerry would go no further than to threaten “the most

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severe possible kinds of isolation possible.”17 Later that day, the president announced a set of sanctions on Russia more punitive than any applied since the Cold War. The new sanctions, now largely invoked also by America’s European allies, included not only closing Western capital markets to Russian state banks, and an embargo on new weapons sales, but—the most severe measure yet—a ban on transferring petroleum-extraction technology to the Russian government and firms. The latter (if tightly implemented) would significantly constrict Russia’s ability to be the principal energy supplier for China and other importers of oil and natural gas, for which Russia needed to purchase advanced drilling and pipeline technologies in the United States and Europe (even Reagan wasn’t able to get the Europeans to cooperate in such an embargo on petroleum-technology sales to the Soviets during the 1980s). “Is this a new Cold War,” a journalist asked. “No, it’s not a new Cold War,” responded the president. “What it is, is a very specific issue related to Russia’s unwillingness to recognize that Ukraine can chart its own path.”18

But what were the implications for Obama’s engagement policy? From the perspective of the White House, Russia’s revived imperial expansionism gave the United States even more cause to cultivate and maintain amicable relationships with a wide variety of regimes, whatever their ideological predispositions, so as to limit the ability of the Chinese and Russians to draw others into their sphere of influence in a repolarized international system.

THE NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION AND MAD PARADOX The administration’s foreign policy and national security team and Obama himself were committed to the nuclear arms reduction philosophy and agenda in New START, not simply as a part of the reset in relations with the Kremlin (and therefore a potential casualty the renewal of U.S.-Russian tensions) but also as a necessary condition for arresting the global proliferation of nuclear weapons and for eventually making progress toward a world disarmed of nuclear weapons. But in order to reassure the Kremlin that the reductions in New START would not undermine

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the Russian deterrent, Obama’s national security team reaffirmed a set of strategic doctrines that had become problematic for the nonproliferation objective itself. The paradox was embodied in the president’s dramatically unequivocal embrace in Prague on April 5, 2009, of the goal of total nuclear disarmament, while at the same time insisting on the need to maintain a robust nuclear arsenal as an instrument of U.S. national security policy on the way toward the goal: I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I am not naïve. The goal will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime. . . . Now let me describe for you the trajectory we need to be on. First, the United States . . . will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same. Make no mistake. As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies—including the Czech Republic. But we will begin the work of reducing our arsenal.19

Indeed, the New START Treaty, while committing both countries to significant numerical reductions over seven years, continued to preserve the Cold War’s balance of terror—dubbed “mutual assured destruction” or “MAD” by strategists and arms controllers and, euphemistically, “stability” by the diplomats.20 It was the treaty’s implications for maintaining this deterrent capability, and also for “extended deterrence” (deterring attacks on U.S. allies)—not its contribution to nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament objectives—that the administration emphasized during the ratification process. The administration’s grand-strategy explanation for its simultaneous maintenance of MAD, security guarantees for allies, and pursuit of eventual global nuclear disarmament was articulated in its interagency Nuclear Posture Review Report (NPR) of April 2010 published by the Department of Defense over the signature of Secretary of Defense Gates. While endorsing the president’s promise to “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” with the qualification that “such an ambitious goal could not be reached quickly—perhaps . . . not in his lifetime,” the NPR was devoted mostly to what it said were the president’s priorities for advancing “broader U.S. security interests.” Accordingly,

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the country’s nuclear weapons policies and posture would focus on five key objectives: 1. Preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism 2. Reducing the role of U.S. nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy 3. Maintaining strategic deterrence and stability at reduced nuclear force levels 4. Strengthening regional deterrence and reassuring U.S. allies and partners 5. Sustaining a safe, secure, and effective nuclear arsenal21 And of these five objectives, the NPR and testimony of high administration officials seeking Senate approval for the New START Treaty gave most attention to points 3, 4, and 5—the effect of which was to reemphasize (not reduce) the importance of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy. This meant, preeminently, maintaining a nuclear arsenal with “an assured second-strike capability” for the foreseeable future.22 It also meant deferring for the time being a no nuclear first-strike policy. In the words of the NPR, “The United States is . . . not prepared at the present time to adopt a universal policy that the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack on the United States and our allies and partners.” For this would be inconsistent with the “extended deterrence” guarantees the administration was continuing to promise allies and partners who adhered to their Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) pledges not to obtain their own nuclear weapons. The “sole purpose” posture would also be inconsistent with warnings to states possessing nuclear weapons or states violating their nonproliferation obligations that “U.S. nuclear weapons may still play a role in deterring conventional or CBW [chemical and biological weapons] attack against the United States or its allies and partners.”23 This did not mean, insisted the administration, that the U.S. willingness to use nuclear weapons had in any way increased. Their use would be considered only “in extreme circumstances.” And even for such extreme circumstances—for example, an immediately impending or alreadyunderway attack with weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its allies—the president issued directives to the Pentagon to accelerate the development of capabilities and war plans that would rely as much as possible on conventional and other nonnuclear (possibly

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cyber-) strategic weapons.24 Obama conceded, however, that for the time being, a robust although numerically reduced nuclear arsenal remained a necessity and that neither New START nor other arms control treaties the administration was championing (the Comprehensive Nuclear TestBan Treaty and the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty) would be allowed to undercut that imperative.

DEALING WITH CHINA: “ENGAGEMENT” OR BALANCING WITH A “PIVOT” The relationship with China was the classic model for diplomatic engagement with regimes with whom the United States has continuing serious clashes of interest and basic value differences. It was the realism of such mixed adversarial-cooperative relationships that moved President Nixon to accept Henry Kissinger’s counsel to negotiate a rapprochement with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1972; that motivated Jimmy Carter to “normalize” relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China in 1979; that prompted Ronald Reagan (in playing “the China card” against the Soviets) to countenance discussions about high-tech developments between U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts; that constrained George Herbert Walker Bush from applying harsh sanctions on Beijing in 1989 after its brutal crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrators; and that drove President Clinton to justify his extension of normal trading privileges to China even though its human rights record remained dismal. And after 9/11, even the ideologically motivated neoconservatives in the administration of George W. Bush assumed a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach toward China’s brutal repression of uprisings in Tibet and Xinjiang, now regarding Beijing as a major ally in the war on terrorism. But the incoming Obama administration inherited festering political and commercial conflicts with Beijing that could be explosive and also a degree of economic interdependence crucial to the healthy functioning of both societies. The clashing political interests included: continuing U.S. arms sales to Taiwan; major Chinese investments in and purchases of Iranian and Sudanese petroleum (thus complicating any U.S. efforts to apply sanctions on either of those two countries); China’s aggressive assertion of jurisdiction over various islands and the seabed surrounding them in the East China and South China Seas; and China’s aggressive patrolling of the

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airspace and waters off its coasts (the latter producing a dangerous confrontation in early March 2009 between Chinese vessels and a U.S. oceanic surveillance ship, which the Chinese alleged had penetrated their exclusive economic zone without permission). Ominously, there were also charges back and forth of industrial espionage and cyberwarfare. The Sino-American commercial conflicts included charges by the United States that China was subsidizing (to the point of “dumping” in violation of World Trade Organization rules) various of the goods it markets in the United States, which had produced a $268 billion trade deficit with China in 2008 and led to the Obama administration’s imposition on tariffs on Chinese tires—and Beijing’s announcement that in retaliation it was restricting imports of U.S. cars and chickens; unresolved disputes over intellectual property rights (allegations of Chinese electronic copying of intellectual and artistic products without paying obligatory royalties); and the undervaluation of the renminbi as a means of reducing the price of Chinese exports. The Obama administration had to face these unresolved issues in the context of China having become the largest holder of U.S. Treasury bonds and dollar-denominated assets—cumulatively growing to some $2 trillion dollars as the financial crisis in the United States forced the government to go deeply into debt. Anxiety that China might try to cash in its U.S. Treasury bonds to preempt a drastic decrease in their value resulting from a depression in the United States, or even as a means of exerting political leverage, could weaken Washington’s overall bargaining power across the range of Sino-American issues. But the realization among Obama’s economic advisers that such a move by China could actually bring about the feared U.S. depression was, paradoxically, reason to be confident that Beijing would be deterred from doing so; for that calamity would not only dry up the U.S. market for Chinese goods but would also catalyze economic meltdowns in other industrial economies around the world, thus pulling the plug on China’s export-dominated economic growth. The incentives in Washington (and presumably also in Beijing) were therefore high, perhaps higher than ever, to prevent any of the particular disputes between the two countries from escalating into an across-theboard confrontation. Reflecting this concern, Secretary of State Clinton during her trip to China one month into the Obama administration cautioned that while the issues of human rights and Tibet were important, “our pressing them [China] on these issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate-change crisis, and the security crisis.”25

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Accordingly, the White House decided against having President Obama meet with the Dalai Lama until after the president’s November 2009 visit to China, in effect denying the exiled Tibetan leader, who was to be in Washington in October, the kind of high-level recognition he had been accorded by Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. In an effort to explain what was happening and what the administration wanted to happen in the Sino-American relationship, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg offered the concept of “strategic reassurance.” Given China’s growing capabilities and influence, the United States has an “especially compelling need to work with China,” he averred. “Yet China’s very size and importance also raises the risk of competition and rivalry that can thwart that cooperation.” The emerging situation was fraught with risks of misperception of one another’s intentions. Thus, the need of a clarifying concept: Strategic reassurance rests on a core, if tacit, bargain. Just as we and our allies must make clear that we are prepared to welcome China’s “arrival” . . . as a prosperous and successful power, China must reassure the rest of the world that its development and growing global role will not come at the expense of security and well-being of others. Bolstering that bargain must be a priority in the U.S.-China relationship.26

The first reactions from Chinese officials to the concept were not at all enthusiastic, complaining that the “reassurance” in Steinberg’s formulation seemed to require more from China than from the United States. In Beijing’s view, it was the continuing U.S. military support of Taiwan and the U.S. Navy’s “hostile surveillance” activities in China’s coastal waters that were prime causes of tension.27 Although Steinberg’s term dropped out of the official discourse, the mutual need to prevent the conflicting interests in the Sino-American relationship from overwhelming the cooperative aspects was the central theme of President Obama’s mid-November 2009 visit to China. Repeating one of his favorite formulations, Obama averred that power in the 21st century is no longer a zero-sum game; one country’s success need not come at the expense of another. And that is why the United States insists we do not seek to contain China’s rise. On the contrary, we welcome China as a strong and prosperous and successful member of the community of nations.28

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And he continued to talk of “the strategic partnership between the United States and China.”29 The U.S.-China joint statement issued during the Obama’s visit promised ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty and the Fissile Missile Cut-Off Treaty; and commitment to the eventual realization of a world free of nuclear weapons. It also contained pledges to substantially reduce carbon emissions; promises of increased cooperation in counterterrorism and counternarcotics programs and combating transnational crime, smuggling, and human trafficking; enhanced bilateral communication to avoid confrontations over disputed maritime areas; and pledges to use outer space for peaceful purposes. The joint statement’s section on human rights was obviously crafted to prevent that issue from interfering with progress on other matters: “The United States and China underlined that each country and its people have the right to choose their own path, and all countries should respect each other’s choice of a development model. Both sides recognized that the United States and China have differences on the issue of human rights.” They agreed to address the issue “in the spirit of equality and mutual respect” (China’s formulation) and to promote human rights “consistent with the international human rights instruments” (the U.S. formulation).30 So it turned out to be largely a symbolic visit—with no immediately tangible results concerning Chinese currency revaluation, the recent selective imposition of tariffs on each other’s goods, or the details of dealing with North Korean and Iranian intransigence on their nuclear programs. Moreover, on the symbolic level there were problems with Obama’s having to accept his hosts’ unwillingness to broadcast or publish his remarks uncensored in China and with their preventing him meeting with dissidents or indeed with anyone not handpicked by the regime. Critics charged that Obama had let China set the terms of engagement. But no less than with Russia, Iran, or North Korea, the Obama administration soon after the start of its second year made it clear to Beijing as well as to critics at home that engagement was a far cry from kowtowing. The White House let it be known that the president would be hosting the Dalai Lama after all. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a major address on Internet security and freedom underscored Google’s public complaints about Chinese censorship and harassments of dissidents by naming China as one of the countries “that restrict free access to information or violate basic rights of Internet users.”31 Secretary Clinton and other U.S. diplomats took every occasion possible to lecture their Chinese counterparts about

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the risks to China’s access to Iranian oil that would result from the severe instability in the Persian Gulf that would be generated by Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Most galling to Beijing was the Obama administration’s decision to continue selling military helicopters, Patriot missiles, and other defense equipment to Taiwan under the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. Responding to the toughening tone out of Washington, Beijing further ratcheted up its own rhetoric, threatening in particular that contacts and cooperation between the two countries would be in jeopardy if the administration did not reverse its position on arms sales to Taiwan. But President Obama, reminded by China specialists that Beijing’s tantrums in connection with the Taiwan Relations Act come and go, kept his cool, expecting that President Hu Jintao would still visit Washington during the year as planned, in keeping with the mixed cooperation-rivalry relationship that continued to be in both countries’ strategic interest. Thus in his handling of the Sino-American relationship, arguably now the world’s most important economic and geopolitical relationship, Obama was an exemplar of constancy, not change, in the basic assumptions of the policy put in place by Nixon and Kissinger and carried forward by successive administrations—namely, that the two powers, at the most basic level of the security and well-being of their peoples, as Obama liked to reiterate, were not involved in a zero-sum conflict (where one’s gain was the other’s loss). Rather, the evolving relationship would be either positive-sum or negative-sum (mutual gain or mutual loss). But to keep the equilibrium positive and not disastrously negative, continued engagement was indeed necessary. China, however, had its own agenda, particularly in the Asia/Pacific region, which it was determined to pursue whether Washington liked it or not. And some of it, involving Beijing’s assertion of territorial claims to resources and islands in the South China Sea and East China Sea, was hardly benign. Countries in the region with counterclaims—particularly Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan—facing China’s refusal to engage in the dispute-resolution processes prescribed by the Law of the Sea Treaty for dealing peacefully with such conflicts, had no alternative but to compete with China in deploying boats into the contested waters to fish or engage in resource exploration and in constructing facilities on the islands. But in the ensuing confrontations, especially in the South China Sea, it was clear who would have the upper hand if lethal skirmishes broke out. And ominously, confrontations between Japan and China over their rival

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claims in the East China Sea were fraught with the potential for extremely dangerous escalation. In part to counter Beijing’s hegemonic posturing in the Asia/Pacific region but also to adjust U.S. grand strategy to the expectation that this was to be the Asian century in the field of global commerce, the Obama administration announced in November 2011 a “pivot” in its grand strategy to “rebalance” its attention and resources away from a primary focus on Europe and the Middle East and toward the Asia/Pacific region. Despite the administration’s denial that this démarche was designed primarily to counter Chinese military assets and power plays and that the talk of “rebalancing” had to do with allocations internal to the U.S. defense posture, Beijing took strong umbrage and charged the Obama administration with re-instituting a Cold War–type “containment” policy toward China. The reality, of course, was that the Obama administration’s China policy was essentially a continuation of the policy begun by Nixon and Kissinger in their 1972 rapprochement with communist China—actually containment via engagement—which had been carried forward by successive administrations. The objective was to induce Beijing to refrain from aggressive hegemonic moves by drawing the People’s Republic into a web of normal international relationships (mainly commercial) with the United States and the other industrial countries—to give the Chinese a stake, so to speak, in a peaceful world order. The positive engagement process could take various forms, ranging from high-level “summits,” to working-level joint commissions in particular economic sectors for facilitating trade and investments, to cultural exchanges. Continuing to be ready to resort to less peaceful forms of engagement vis-à-vis China was also part of the emergent post–Cold War relationship, however, and such prudent readiness involved U.S. military plans and deployments for preserving unambiguous superiority over the Chinese military capabilities, especially as Beijing built up its own strategic forces. A test of the pivot and possible harbinger of confrontations to come was China’s announcement at the end of November 2013 that it was establishing an air defense identification zone in the East China Sea, and anyone flying over a major group of islands there (called Senkaku by Japan and Diaoyu by China) had to first file a flight plan with Chinese authorities. Persisting in a previously planned training mission, two U.S. B-52 Stratofortress bombers flew over the islands anyway, as Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel objected to the Chinese effort to exercise its claimed sovereignty as “destabilizing” and warned that China’s move

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“will not in any way change how the United States conducts its military operations in the region.”32

DEALING WITH PROVOCATIONS AND POSTURING BY PYONGYANG Obama’s engagement policy of continuing to dialogue also with those who declare themselves to be your enemy was sustained with regard to North Korea—even in the context of Pyongyang’s provocative behavior in the spring and early summer of 2009, which included a nuclear weapon test and test launches of long-range missiles in defiance of a succession of UN Security Council resolutions; denunciations of the NPT; and withdrawing from the six-nation talks on the security situation in the Korean peninsula. Administration spokespersons tried to make clear that engagement did not preclude tough countermeasures nor would tightening the screws on North Korea rule out the provision of positive benefits for the regime’s compliance with its nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation obligations. But this carrot-and-stick diplomacy would be carefully calibrated with tangible and verifiable evidence of Pyongyang’s compliance. Under the Proliferation Security Initiative, which had been designed by the Bush administration and adopted by the UN Security Council in 2006,33 the Obama administration warned Pyongyong that it had reason to believe North Korea was transporting nuclear weapons components to clients by sea and that the U.S. Navy would apprehend any vessel suspected of containing such contraband. High officials of Kim Jong Il’s regime warned that any apprehension of their vessels would be an act of war. But in July when a U.S. Navy destroyer persisted in tailing a North Korean cargo ship, the Kang Nam, believed to be transporting weapons and heading toward Myanmar (Burma), the Kang Nam turned around and headed back to North Korea without delivering its cargo. A physical confrontation avoided, the verbal confrontations escalated during the ensuing weeks. In retaliation for Secretary of State Clinton comparing Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile tests to the attention-seeking behavior of a teenager, the North Koreans called her remarks vulgar and undiplomatic and proceeded to denigrate her intelligence and appearance, saying “Sometimes she looks like a primary-school girl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.”34

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Apart from such comic-opera exchange of insults and military posturing, however, the diplomats of both countries were engaged in backchannel talks to secure the release of two U.S. journalists who allegedly had entered North Korea illegally and had been sentenced by regime to twelve years in prison. As it turned out, the price for the release of the two women into U.S. hands was a high-visibility visit of former President Bill Clinton with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang—a visit that the White House and State Department insisted was 100 percent about freeing the journalists. Mr. Clinton, claiming that he carried no message for Mr. Kim from President Obama and that his mission was only “humanitarian,” nonetheless spent over three hours with the North Korean dictator during which, as it was later revealed, the outstanding political issues between the two countries were discussed.35 The central North Korean issue for the Obama administration, as for the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and regardless of the mode of diplomacy, remained: how to dissuade North Korea from maintaining (and enhancing) a nuclear weapons arsenal; and if such dissuasion failed, how to deter Pyongyang from ever using the weapons. During Obama’s first term, the North Koreans continued their game—initiated during the Clinton years and persisting during the Bush administration—of using the U.S. posture of unequivocal opposition to their deployment of a nuclear arsenal as a bargaining ploy to obtain assistance not only in dealing with their food shortages but also in obtaining fuel supplies for their civilian nuclear power reactors. More ominously, they punctuated the on-again, off-again negotiations with a series of missile and satellite test launches and underground nuclear explosions followed by highly belligerent rhetoric in reaction to South Korean and U.S. complaints that the tests were in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. With the death of Kim Jong Il in September 2011 and the ascension to power of his young son Kim Jong Un, there was a slight window of hope in Washington that a more positive mode of engagement might ensue. And indeed, at the end of February 2012 following a few days of talks between U.S. and North Korean negotiators in Beijing, Kim Jong Un agreed to suspend nuclear weapons tests and uranium enrichment to allow IAEA monitoring of its main reactor—in return for a U.S. pledge to ship food aid to North Korea. But on April 12, perhaps to counter speculation that Kim was not as tough as his father in standing up to U.S. and South Korean pressures, North Korea test-launched a satellite that though it failed, was regarded

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by U.S. and other intelligence agencies as part of a project to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States. And defying international criticism, this provocative act was followed just a few weeks later by North Korea’s resumption of the construction of the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon that was the source of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Then on December 12, 2012, North Korea successfully launched a long-range missile that flew past the Philippines and placed an object into orbit—the precursor of what now seemed like a determined effort to develop a long-range nuclear arsenal. The resulting tightening of economic sanctions on North Korea by the Obama administration and the United Nations only produced a cluster of explosive rhetoric from Pyongyang about its determination to continue with its nuclear and missile programs to obtain the capability of hitting the U.S. mainland. As if to amplify its “don’t mess with President Kim Jong Un” stance, North Korea conducted its third underground nuclear test on the on the eve of President Obama’s first State of the Union address for his second term. As with the Iranian nuclear program, the administration’s public discourse, as distinct from its secret contingency planning, did not deal with the very real possibility of North Korea’s development of a strategically significant nuclear arsenal. For even to conjecture about how to live with and contain a North Korea armed with weapons of mass destruction might weaken Washington’s ability to convince the Pyongyang that such a development was intolerable.

ENGAGEMENT WITH THE BURMESE JUNTA The strategy of engaging diplomatically with those who view the United States as a hostile power was also on display in mid-August 2009 in the form of Senator James Webb’s visit to Burma to secure the release John Yettaw, a U.S. citizen recently sentenced by the military dictatorship to jail and seven years of hard labor. The bigger prize was the permission the junta granted Senator Webb to meet with Nobel Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the Burmese pro-democracy movement, who had been resentenced to an additional eighteen months of house arrest ostensibly for having hosted Yettaw upon his clandestine visit to her residence. Senator Webb claimed he was not acting as an emissary for the Obama administration in arranging for the ailing Mr. Yettaw’s release or in persuading the junta to let him visit with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi. But the

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White House was aware of the senator’s mission and of the fact that Secretary of State Clinton shared the senator’s view that the existing U.S. sanctions on Burma because of its deplorable human rights record had not produced any liberalization of the regime’s policies nor any indication of the regime’s willingness to cease its suspicious nuclear-related commerce with North Korea. At a news conference on his way back to the United States, Webb talked of his discussions with junta leader General Than Shwe as possibly part of a foundation for a relationship “of goodwill and confidence building so we can have a better situation in the future.”36 The thinking behind the Senator’s mission, though not yet officially adopted by the Obama administration, was articulated by Webb himself in an op-ed piece a few days later in the New York Times. The policy of tightening economic sanctions against Myanmar (the regimes’ preferred name for the country), he wrote, “has been overwhelmingly counterproductive. The ruling regime has become more entrenched and at the same time more isolated. The Burmese people have lost access to the outside world.” Moreover, there were geopolitical reasons to be concerned: “Sanctions by Western governments have not been matched by other countries, particularly Russia and China. Indeed, they have allowed China to dramatically increase its economic and political influence in Myanmar, furthering a dangerous strategic imbalance in the region.”37 The balance of power consideration was also a major concern of India, itself actively competing with China for influence and privileges in Burma, including naval basing and servicing facilities, and therefore very much on the minds of the strategically oriented realists in the Obama administration who were eager to build up India as a counterweight to China. At the end of September 2009, the State Department revealed it had been reviewing its Burma policy for the last seven months and that a dialogue had begun with the Burmese regime. “The Burmese leadership has shown an interest in engaging with the United States,” explained the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs Kurt M. Campbell, “and we intend to explore that interest” because the policy of isolating Burma was not working. Burma’s continued estrangement from the international community harms the country and has direct negative consequences beyond Burma’s borders. Burma’s engagement with the outside world has the potential to encourage new thinking, reform, and participation in the work of the international community. 38

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The goals of the engagement policy were the same as the previous policy that had emphasized negative sanctions: a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic Burma that respects the human rights of its citizens, a country that complies with its international obligations, particularly on nuclear weapons nonproliferation. “Ultimately, . . . we recognized that . . . we need to change our methods but not our goals,” even though “we will maintain existing sanctions until we see concrete progress toward reform.” Meanwhile the administration would engage in a “direct dialogue with the Burmese authorities to lay out a path towards better relations.”39 The next step was Assistant Secretary Campbell’s trip to Burma in November 2009 to conduct the first official U.S. discussions with the Myanmar government in over a decade. In addition to conferring with the prime minister, General Thein Sein, and other ministers, Campbell was permitted to meet for two hours with the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, still under house arrest. The U.S. diplomat indicated that an improvement of relations with Myanmar would depend on the regime’s demonstration, especially in the elections it had scheduled for 2010, that it was instituting “national reconciliation and a fully inclusive political process.” Campbell reported that he had also pressed the junta leaders to honor their non–nuclear proliferation obligations. Thus, the “engagement,” U.S. officials emphasized, did not involve any concessions by the United States—the ban on trade and investments in Myanmar by U.S. companies was not yet being lifted—but provided an opportunity to clarify what the Obama administration and the Congress expected of the Burmese regime if progress were to be made toward further normalization of the relationship.40 Then in 2012, with the regime freeing Aung San Suu Kyi and allowing her political party to compete in the national elections in which she won a seat in the parliament, Myanmar became the poster child of Obama’s engagement policy. Myanmar was not about to become an ally of the United States, however, nor was it about to disengage from China, which was its principal patron. Beijing, in sponsoring of some of the some of the country’s autonomy-seeking tribal regions but also supporting Myanmar’s efforts to fight off secessionist movements in other regions, would continue to have both more political stakes and direct leverage over issues critical to Myanmar than would the United States. But for the first time in decades, Myanmar was able to turn also to the United States as a source of assistance for its economic development and modernization and neither country had to accept that Myanmar was a client state of China.

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Thus the administration’s so-called pivot had diplomatic as well as military implications. Hillary Clinton’s mobilization of the State Department’s talent to effect the rapprochement with Burma was spotlighted as evidence of what focused engagement in Asia could produce. The problem in defining the engagement with Burma as proof of what this shift could accomplish, however, was that except for the South and East China Seas issues and North Korea’s brandishing of nuclear weapons, most of the current crisis situations that could crucially affect U.S. geopolitical and overall world order interests were still located in the Middle East.

IRAN AND THE U.S.-ISRAEL NEXUS Returning to Washington after his first major intercontinental presidential tour in 2009, and consistent with his engagement policy, President Obama authorized U.S. negotiators to join with the Russians, Chinese, French, British, and Germans in meeting with their Iranian counterparts at the beginning of October 2009 in Geneva to discuss, without preconditions, the outstanding issues the so-called P5 plus 1 (permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) had with Tehran. But on the way to this presumably conciliatory forum, the Iranians dropped a bomb, so to speak (figuratively, but potentially and ominously literally), that Obama felt he had to deal with first. On the eve of the 2009 meeting of heads of state at the United Nations in New York, Iran revealed in one of its reports to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that a uranium enrichment facility had been secretly under construction for some time at Qum (97 miles from Tehran). United States’ intelligence agencies regarded the Qum facility as potentially able to and probably designed to produce nuclear weapons. Informed of the contents of the Iranian report, the UN Security Council, chaired on September 24 by President Obama, passed a strong resolution on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament; but they waited until the next day, during the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh on the global economy, to individually and publicly voice their fresh concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. In his strongest statement on Iran since becoming president, Obama put Iran “on notice that when we meet with them on October 1 they are going to have to come clean and they will have to make a choice.” The alternative to giving up their weapons program, he warned, was to “continue down a path that is going to lead to confrontation.”41 Joining Obama on the platform, British

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prime minister Gordon Brown affirmed, “The international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand.” And President Nicolas Sarkozy of France gave Iran no more than two months to meet the international demands.42 Even Russia’s president Medvedev reportedly told President Obama he would be amenable to tougher sanctions on Iran.43 Perhaps trying to signal that Tehran was not to be intimidated, the Sunday before the October 1 Geneva meeting of Iran and the P5 plus 1, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards reported a test-firing of three of its missile types in a military exercise named Great Prophet IV. Iranian radio claimed that one of them, the Shabab-3, had a range of up to 1,200 miles that would allow it to reach Israel, parts of Europe, and U.S. bases around the Persian Gulf. “Iranian missiles are able to target any place that threatens Iran,” said a senior Revolutionary Guards official.44 The nuclear negotiators nonetheless did convene as scheduled in Geneva at a rather high official level (the U.S. delegation included Under Secretary of State William J. Burns) under the chairmanship of the European Union’s policy chief, Javier Solana. The expectation was that the governments would restate their respective positions and would agree to continue meeting at the working-group level. In his own widely broadcast comments upon the start of the process, President Obama was adamant that “we expect to see swift action” and that Iran “must grant unfettered access” to the Qum facilities within two weeks. “We’re committed to serious and meaningful engagement, but we’re not interested in talking for the sake of talking.” If Iran does not take steps to live up to its obligations, he warned, “we are prepared to move towards increased pressure.”45 Surprisingly, by the end of the session on October 1, the Iranians had evinced more accommodation to the Obama administration’s demands than was anticipated: They had agreed to open the uranium enrichment plant near Qum to IAEA inspection in the coming weeks and to send most of Iran’s already-declared enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be turned into fuel for small reactors that produce medical isotopes. But the president was unready, simply on the basis of these seeming concessions by the Iranians, to claim victory or even hail the development as a breakthrough. The nuclear plant at Natanz, which was not included in the Geneva agreement, was continuing to enrich uranium in defiance of recent UN Security Council resolutions. And arms control experts were warning that there could be other uranium enrichment facilities hidden throughout Iran that its scientists were not yet admitting to. Moreover, old Iran policy hands in and out of the government were reminding Obama of

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Iran’s record of duplicity concerning her nuclear program and cautioning that Tehran could be emulating Pyongyang’s stratagem: acting belligerent, then making a set of concessions, and ultimately backtracking on them, having meanwhile deflected or delayed the imposition of sanctions while clandestinely carrying forward nuclear weaponization. Yet Obama’s orchestration of the diplomatic reactions to Iran’s disclosure of the Qum nuclear reactor—whether or not Tehran would ultimately decide to forgo building a nuclear arsenal—had a side benefit for the United States. It gave the president himself an opportunity to demonstrate—in demeanor, posture, and arm-around-the-shoulder mobilization of the British, French, and Germans—that engagement would not always be an exercise of soft power but also had a tougher side. The president, the secretary of defense and other high national security officials, when questioned, were unwilling to endorse Israeli contingency plans for militarily attacking Iran’s nuclear plants, but neither were they willing to explicitly take all such military action off the table. Moreover, there were other hard (coercive) power tools being readied by the administration to turn the screws on Iran. Alluded to in backgrounders by government spokespersons, these included “crippling sanctions” such as cutting off sales of energy equipment and technology and even natural gas and refined fuel that Iran needed to import to keep its economy functioning. The United States still could not be sure, however, that its European allies would agree to participate in sanctions that could hurt ordinary Iranians and that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could therefore exploit domestically and internationally. Nor was it clear that the Russians—and certainly not the Chinese—were any more ready now than in the Bush years to go along with sanctions that would significantly disrupt their own substantial commercial relations with the Iranians. The administration’s argument with those countries, particularly Russia and China, whose commercial relations with Iran discouraged them from taking a strong stand with Tehran on its nuclear weapons program, was that the consequence of permitting Iran to weaponize its nuclear capability was a profound destabilization of the region, which would severely interfere with everyone’s commerce. The case against letting Iran continue to avoid full international accountability for what was going on in its nuclear program was reiterated by the president himself in his meetings with Mr. Medvedev at the Asia economic summit in mid-November and with Mr. Hu during his visit to China.

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Obama could claim that this give-diplomacy-a-chance strategy paid off when Russia and China, at the board of governors of the IAEA meeting in late November joined the United States and most of the board members in demanding that Iran, which appeared to be reneging on its promises of October, immediately cease all further construction of its nuclear enrichment plant at Qum. “This is the product of engagement,” pronounced the White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.46 But it was still uncertain whether the Russian and Chinese support of this get-tough IAEA resolution would translate into their support for a strong sanctions resolution by the UN Security Council. Then on February 11, 2010, the thirty-first anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, following months of strident announcements by the government in Tehran interspersed with conciliatory diplomatic maneuvers obviously designed to delay any further U.N. vote on sanctions, President Ahmadinejad boasted that Iran had the capability to enrich uranium more than 20 percent—the threshold for weapons-grade nuclear fuel. Although reiterating that the nuclear program was entirely for peaceful purposes, Ahmadinejad warned the United States and its allies: “Please pay attention and understand that the people of Iran are brave enough that if it wants to build a bomb it will clearly announce it and build it and not be afraid of you.”47 Running out of patience, the Obama administration, in the person of Secretary of State Clinton during visits to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, claimed that Iran was moving toward becoming a military dictatorship under the control of Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard and called for an alternative leadership to rise up against them. Meanwhile, General Petraeus, commander of the Central Command, and Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were also in the Persian Gulf region arranging for military assistance deals—including sales of missile defense systems—with the Saudis and other regimes wary of Iran’s nuclear intentions. These deals, Clinton asserted, indicated the United States was prepared to protect its friends in the region against Iranian aggression. Questioned whether this was the “security umbrella” she had talked of during her campaign for the presidency, Clinton in effect said yes, without mentioning the concept. The Gulf countries had three choices in responding to Iran’s defiant behavior, she said: “They can just give in to the threat; or they can seek their own capabilities, including nuclear; or they ally themselves with a country like the United States that is willing to defend them.”48

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In mid-February 2010 background explanations by U.S. officials (usually on condition of anonymity), the prospect of subjecting Iran to “crippling sanctions” was frequently invoked as were indications that the “military option,” perhaps initiated by Israel, although not part of U.S. plans, was still not being taken off the table. The officials also insisted that this was not inconsistent with “engagement”—which could have a tough aspect as well as a benign aspect. The country most determined to influence the content of the U.S.-Iran engagement was, of course, Israel—a principal target in Iran’s aggressive effort to be the region’s hegemon (including Tehran’s sponsorship and arming of Hezbollah) whose nuclear arsenal gave the mullahs justification for having their own deterrent. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak let the Obama administration know that they believed the day was fast approaching when the Iranians would have a bomb-ready nuclear capability that would render a military strike to disable Iran’s nuclear program more urgent, but more risky, than it was now. The Israelis at every opportunity pressed for a firm commitment of support—possibly also of joint action—by Obama, if and when Tehran’s crossing of that “red line” would warrant a preventive strike against the Iranian nuclear weapon facilities. The Israelis worried that despite frequent statements by high U.S. officials that an Iranian nuclear arsenal was “intolerable,” Obama (briefed by the CIA and the Pentagon on the infeasibility of a strike doing more than setting back the Iranian program a few years) would instead fall back to a strategy of deterring Tehran’s use of the bomb, given the unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable military and political fallout from an attack. The Israelis finally got the commitment they wanted from Obama— almost, that is—during his speech to the American Israel Public Action Committee Conference on March 4, 2012. Reiterating the standard position “that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say,” he went on to declare: “Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”9 But then, in a remark that got even more attention in various media and press accounts, particularly in Israel, he went on to say that “Already, there is too much loose talk of war. Over the last few weeks, such talk has only benefited the

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Iranian government, by driving up the price of oil, which they depend on to fund their nuclear program.”50 Behind the scenes, however, there was a clandestine U.S.-Israeli program, code-named “Olympic Games,” in operation and being further developed to cyber-attack and disable the Iranian nuclear program before it became bomb-ready. Stories began to surface, starting in 2010, of a computer worm nicknamed “Stuxnet” that had been temporarily disabling the Iranian nuclear centrifuges at their Natanz plant. But is was not until June 2012 that the public was informed by an article in the New York Times that the virus infecting the centrifuges had been deliberately dispatched through cyberspace by the U.S.-Israeli “Olympic Games” team and that this had been authorized by the highest levels of government of the two countries. It was unclear whether Obama was disturbed or pleased to have the program leaked to the press (the Times article by David Sanger was published in the midst of the 2012 election campaign and therefore could add to Obama’s image of being tough on matters of national security). However, it did take the sting out of criticisms by U.S. pro-Israel hawks that the administration was too wedded to a nonmilitary engagement strategy to have his “no containment” remarks taken seriously in Tehran.51 And it gave additional credibility to Obama’s frequent statement that he was a devotee of President Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim: “Speak softly and carry a big stick”—the stick being invisible, but potentially very powerful. President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu began their new terms of office in 2013 with expressions of mutual understanding of one another’s approach to Iran but with considerable disagreement over how to respond to the posture of negotiation rather than confrontation assumed in the fall of 2013 by the newly elected Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani. There was also persisting tension between Obama and Netanyahu with respect to how to deal with the standard unresolved Israeli-Palestinian issues, including: the Israeli government’s authorization of new construction of housing in the West Bank and Jerusalem; the exact location and shape of a Palestinian state, and how East Jerusalem would fit into it; the nature of, preconditions for, and parties to be included in the peace negotiations; and Israel’s harsh strategies of retaliation in Gaza for Hamas rocket attacks on Israel—which in the summer of 2014 included Israeli attacks on Hamas military assets located in schools, hospitals, and UN facilities. Overriding strong objections from the Israeli and Saudi governments to both the process of negotiating with the Iranians and the substance of the emerging deal, the P5 plus 1 powers (the five permanent members of

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the UN Security Council, all nuclear-armed countries, and Germany) and Iran meeting in Geneva announced a joint plan of action on November 24, 2013, by which Iran would limit its nuclear program during the ensuing six months in exchange for a reduction in the punitive sanctions it had been enduring. This interim agreement was defined as “the first step” in a negotiating process “to reach a mutually-agreed long-term comprehensive solution that would ensure Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful.”52 The preamble to the interim accord stated that “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran even seek or develop any nuclear weapons.” The deal (whose precise modalities would need to be worked out during the following six months) would require Iran to dilute its stockpile of uranium that had been enriched to 20 percent and to halt all enrichment above 5 percent and to dismantle the technical equipment used for that. Iran would also cut back on the construction of enrichment facilities, including centrifuges. Work would also cease on the heavy-water reactor at Arak, which could be a source of plutonium, an alternative to uranium-based nuclear weapons. International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors would be granted unfettered access to all relevant sites, including uranium mills, centrifuge facilities, and the Arak reactor to verify the dilution of uranium and freeze on centrifuges and operation of the heavy water reactor.53 And what would Tehran get out of the deal? Most important, according to Secretary of State John Kerry (who had been involved in the final marathon negotiating sessions in Geneva) would be Iran’s relief from some of the “crippling” economic sanctions, his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, had pushed through the U.N. Security Council—especially those preventing Iran from selling oil and gold abroad. But that was exactly what Iran shouldn’t be given, argued critics, most vociferously Prime Minister Netanyahu, who branded the agreement a “historic mistake.” Netanyahu’s argument, supported by some members of the U.S. Congress, was that the economic strangulation of Iran had driven them to the bargaining table and that, if anything, additional sanctions should be applied until Tehran conceded to cease all uranium enrichment and plutonium production and totally dismantle all such suspect programs. And if the Iranians don’t? Then the international community—with the United States supporting or cooperating with Israel in a military operation—should exercise its legitimate right to destroy them. Secretary Kerry was ready for such objections; and indeed attempted to preempt them in his announcement from Geneva. To the charge that

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Iran was not giving up its capacity to enrich uranium, but was being accorded a right to enrich, and was only putting its plutonium-producing reactor on hold—thereby retaining a “breakout” capability any time it chose, Kerry contended that at the prescribed reduced enrichment levels any such breakout would take longer and the international community would be given more warning, just as they would have advance warning if there was any reneging on IAEA inspections. “Let me be clear,” he insisted, “This first step does not say that Iran has a right to enrichment. No matter what interpretative comments are made . . . there is no right to enrichment within the four corners of the NPT.” With respect to complaints that Iran was being given substantial economic relief on the basis of mere promises and that it would be very difficult to get the international community to re-impose the sanctions, Kerry pointed out that the partial removal of the boycott on Iran’s petroleum sales was only a small fraction of what might be allowed later, and even this was “most importantly, reversible.”54 President Obama backed up the Secretary of State, interpreting the November 2013 deal as leaving “the broader architecture of sanctions . . . in place” and pledging to “enforce them vigorously. And if Iran does not fully meet its commitments during this six-month phase, we will turn off the relief and ratchet up the pressure.” As president and commander in chief he would do what was necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. “But I have a profound responsibility to try to resolve our differences peacefully, rather than to rush towards conflict.”55 By the summer of 2014, with the basic implementation accord negotiated among the P5 plus 1 and Iran in January 2014 yet to be fully fleshed out, a four-month extension agreed to by the Obama administration was running into a barrage of criticism from Democrats as well as Republicans in the congress. This criticism took the form of objections to the administration having pulled off the deal with Iran, and indeed the forthcoming final agreement, as an executive démarche rather than as a treaty requiring congressional ratification. The president was reportedly chagrined. Castigated for failing to exercise international leadership, almost all of his programs requiring congressional authorization blocked by partisan maneuvering (especially in advance of the 2014 elections), and now, when through adroit statesmanship he was able to bring home a remarkable arms control breakthrough, lesser politicians were threatening to hold up the deal which, more than any other recent international initiative, was restoring U.S. prestige.

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President Obama was well aware that his diplomacy of engagement was having a mixed record of success, failure, and, at times, irrelevance. Indeed, he had never regarded it as a panacea for mellowing all hostile relationships (although caricatured as such by many of his critics). It had not been deemed appropriate for dealing with a number of outlier countries—including two in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba and Venezuela, and one in Africa, Zimbabwe. It hardly provided sufficient guidance for how the Obama administration should respond to the upheavals in the Arab world that presented the country with some of the most profound foreign policy dilemmas (analyzed in chap. 39) in its history. The president was under no illusions that his approach merited the badge of an “Obama Doctrine” that journalists and some of his spokespersons tried to give it. Engagement was, after all, another name for high-level interaction—an option in the diplomatic tool kit of all of the administrations covered in this narrative, even though they might differ on the most appropriate mixture of positive and negative incentives and the timing ofparticular engagement opportunities.

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ENDING TWO WARS I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. . . . What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. . . . A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. —Senator Barack Obama

The insurgency in Afghanistan didn’t just happen overnight and we won’t defeat it overnight. This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. —President Barack Obama

Richard Haass to distinguish wise from unwise decisions to go to war, Barack Obama regarded the war to prevent the Taliban from providing a safe haven to al-Qaeda terrorists as a war of “necessity” and therefore a just war. By contrast, the war to throw Saddam out of power in Baghdad was a war of “choice”—not Obama’s choice; he opposed it from the start—and not worth the expenditure of material resources and human lives it would entail. Yet for the fiscal year when he assumed the presidency, the United States would be spending $95 billion on the war of choice in Iraq as compared with $55 billion on the war of necessity in Afghanistan. And cumulatively, over the eight years of the Bush administration, by the end of fiscal year 2009, of the nearly $1 trillion already spent on both wars, the nation would have spent three times as much prosecuting the Iraq War as the Afghanistan War. Also, by the time Obama was sworn in as president, more than 4,000 U.S soldiers had lost their lives in Iraq as compared with fewer than 600 in Afghanistan. Obama was determined to bring both wars to an end during his presidency; but clearly this misallocation of material cost and human sacrifice as

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between the two wars had to be urgently changed. Accordingly, Secretary of Defense Gates’ budget request for fiscal year 2010 projected for the first time in eight years that U.S. expenditures for Afghanistan (some $73 billion for the year) would be more than for Iraq (just over $65 billion). These estimates reflected projected reallocations of troop deployments between Iraq and Afghanistan then being intensively discussed in the administration.

THE IRAQ WAR: CHOOSING TO END IT Five weeks after his inauguration, President Obama, addressing an audience of U.S. Marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, said he needed to talk with them and the nation about the “simple reality that America can no longer afford to see Iraq in isolation from other priorities: . . . the challenge of refocusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan; of relieving the burden on our military; and of rebuilding our economy.” The war would be brought to an end by transferring full responsibility to the Iraqis for their own security. United States’ combat brigades would be withdrawn from Iraq over the next eighteen months. And consistent with the status of forces agreement negotiated between the U.S. and Iraqi governments near the end of the Bush administration, Obama reaffirmed Bush’s commitment to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011 and promised they would come home “with the honor that they have earned.”1 This plan, the president reiterated, was part of the larger agenda he was initiating to refocus on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and to actively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Arab world. The end of the war in Iraq, he predicted, “will enable a new era of American leadership and engagement in the Middle East.”2 The pullout plan, which in advance of its public announcement Obama had briefed to the political leadership of both parties in the Congress as well as to foreign leaders, was generally well received. Senator John McCain called it “reasonable,” but not surprisingly, he and former members of the Bush administration attributed the improved situation in Iraq that made the projected U.S. pullout possible to the success of the troopaugmentation/surge strategy that Obama had initially opposed. No matter. More important to Obama now was his ability—admittedly because of the success of the surge—to implement his campaign promise to rapidly wind down the war in Iraq.

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Aware that the situation in Iraq was far from stabilized, that the Sunnis were still very dissatisfied at the exclusionary policies the Shia-dominated government had not yet rescinded, and that the withdrawal of U.S. forces—even on a phased basis—could result in a power vacuum the various extremist sectarians would fill with their violent encounters, Obama continued to emphasize that the long-term solutions in Iraq would have to be political—not military. And he was adamant that the most important decisions for dealing with their political predicaments would now have to be made by the Iraqis. In the last half of 2011, as the remaining U.S. troops prepared to depart and sectarian violence again began to intensify, the U.S. and Iraqi military entered into exploration of some formula by which some U.S. forces could remain as “trainers” or be redeployed to Iraq to assist Iraqi forces in the continuing tasks of pacification. But the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki balked at allowing the remaining U.S. military the standard immunity from prosecution by legal authorities of the countries in which U.S. military are deployed; without the immunity proviso, no U.S. government would countenance continuing to station U.S. forces in Iraq. Neither government, however, ruled out the possibility of the Iraqis contracting with U.S. private security firms (whose employees are mostly veterans with combat experience) to assist in the training (and perhaps supplemental support) of the Iraqi forces. After 8 years, the death of some 4,500 U.S. soldiers and more than 32,000 returning home severely wounded, and U.S. expenditures for the war topping $1 trillion, the United States was leaving Iraq with a democracy of sorts, but hardly a model for the rest of the Middle East. While in theory the political situation in Iraq was best left to the Iraqis themselves to deal with, there were persisting worries in the White House that a political collapse there, with Iran and al-Qaeda groups picking up the pieces, could have serious negative consequences for U.S. global interests and national security. Cognizant of the problems, Obama made Vice President Biden—who as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had developed considerable expertise on Iraq—the administration’s de facto diplomat in chief for dealing with the Iraqi government and politicians. In numerous consultations with the Iraqis, Biden, in an effort to contain the recrudescence of sectarian violence, tried to get the Shia-dominated regime in Baghdad run by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to rectify its discriminatory and exclusionary policies against Sunnis, especially when it came to government jobs. But the parliamentary coalition that sustained al-Maliki’s prime

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ministership depended on the support of the radical Islamist party led by the fiery Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who was adamantly opposed to making amends with the Sunnis. Frustrated, Sunni communities proved susceptible to calls for a resumed insurrection from their radical wings who, prior to the 2007 “Sunni Awakening,” were willing to ally with alQaeda groups. The interethnic strife was also escalating at the political level between Kurdish and Arab Iraqis over the distribution of revenues from the petroleum-rich Kurdish region, where the Kurds were entering into their own deals with multinational oil companies and demanding greater political autonomy. On the ground too, violent incidents were increasing in multiethnic Kirkuk and at the border areas among local Arabs and Kurdish refugees from Turkey and Syria. On December 15, 2011, the United States formally terminated its military mission in Iraq, with mutual expressions of enduring common interests and pledges of cooperation. The White House was disturbed at reports, however, that the al-Maliki government was resuming arrests of prominent Sunnis and Kurds on grounds of attempts to subvert the regime. Throughout 2012, as incidents of renewed sectarian violence flared, Vice President Biden intensified his effort to persuade al-Maliki to seriously provide Sunnis opportunities to participate in a national unity government so as to avoid an implosion and disintegration of the country a some what ironic role for Biden who as senator and then early in the administration was the most prominent champion of a confederal system for Iraq with considerable autonomy for Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish regions. The main worry in Washington now was that in a full-blown inter-sectarian civil war, the country most likely to exploit the chaos and resulting power vacuum to its own advantage was Iran. What the intelligence reports of 2012 through early 2014 for the president neglected (or did not sufficiently flag) was that there was neither a vacuum nor a major resurgence of al-Qaeda militancy in the Sunnidominant areas, but rather a steadily advancing insurgency and consolidation of control by a Sunni extremist movement calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The shock of recognition that an entirely new phase of the post-Saddam struggle for control of Iraq was in store reverberated around the world in the first week of July 2014 with the news that only in a matter of days the major northern city of Mosul had been rampaged and taken over by the well-armed and disciplined ISIS militants. As Iraqi soldiers in panic fled the city, the ISIS group

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summarily executed local government officials and police and immediately issued edicts promulgating the fundamentalist version of Islam by which Mosul (and other communities ISIS was taking over) would henceforth be governed. Updated intelligence and journalistic reports on the “new” insurgency showed ISIS to be a political-religious movement with global ambitions—if not yet global reach—to be (as it was already proclaiming itself) the caliphate: the world’s center of Islamic righteousness, law, and power. Already dominant in the Sunni-majority sections of Iraq and Syria (where it had eclipsed al-Qaeda as the most militant, and ruthless, of the anti-Assad insurgents), the movement’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claiming it was a universal state without borders, announced that henceforth it would be called simply IS—the Islamic State. The most urgent imperative, from Washington’s perspective, was to keep this radical movement contained within the Sunni-majority areas, and away from Baghdad. The Obama administration would help by providing equipment and training assistance to the Iraqi military, conditioned on the government’s becoming a credible regime of national unity under a prime minister other than al-Maliki. A more direct role by the United States, using its airpower to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the IS, was provoked by a series of on-camera beheadings of IS-held British and U.S. hostages. But Obama was adamant that the Iraqis themselves would have to provide the military muscle and political control to keep the country from disintegrating into Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish states.

AFGHANISTAN: COUNTERINSURGENCY’S FINAL SURGE? Afghanistan—the war of necessity—presumably would be different. At the outset of his administration, President Obama had reaffirmed the Bush administration’s principal vital-interest rationale for defeating the intensifyingTaliban insurgency in Afghanistan: the Taliban, the ruling regime in Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC, had harbored the perpetrators of that carnage, al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden. Now, eight years after the initial U.S. military success in driving the Taliban from power in Kabul, that extremist Muslim movement, aided by allies in Pakistan, was struggling to regain control of Afghanistan.

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Early in 2009 there was still solid bipartisan support in Washington for doing whatever was necessary to decisively smash the Taliban insurgency. The assumption was that where the Taliban held sway they would continue to provide al-Qaeda with a hospitable venue for conducting their violent jihad against the West and especially against the United States. Moreover, Taliban and al-Qaeda success in Afghanistan would presumably energize and embolden violent jihadists around the world to persist in their efforts to terrorize and overthrow regimes friendly to the United States and its Western allies. A nightmare scenario was that this energizing effect would be felt in Pakistan, where Islamic extremists would be able to recruit more followers not only from the border areas where Afghan Taliban insurgents had established bases, but throughout Pakistan, enabling the jihadists to eventually take over the state, thus putting them in control of the country’s nuclear arsenal. Insofar as the incoming Obama administration was postured to effect a change in U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, it would be largely in the form of an increased deployment of troops to defeat the Taliban—whose resurgence was widely attributed by strategic experts to the premature diversion of military resources by the Bush administration to Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was consistent with Obama’s repeated charge, both as a U.S. senator and as a presidential candidate, that the Bush administration had its priorities wrong in giving primacy to the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq over the counterinsurgency/counterterrorism effort in Afghanistan. President Obama announced his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan on March 27, 2009. The product of a sixty-day effort led by former CIA official and Obama campaign adviser Bruce Riedel—an authority on Afghanistan and Pakistan—the new strategy was not all that new in its basic objective, which President Obama defined as “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” Nor was the president’s statement new in contending that in order to do so it was essential to escalate the war against the Taliban insurgency; for “if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban—or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged—that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as possible.”3 What was new was the premise that the means for accomplishing even the counterterrorism mission would have to include much broader and multifaceted military operations within Afghanistan, including substantially more U.S. boots on the ground (at least for the near term), than had characterized the Bush administration’s “light footprint” strategy.

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The conduct of the military dimensions of the enhanced counterinsurgency operations would supposedly reflect the ideas of General Petraeus and his coauthors in the new U.S. Army–Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual published in 2006, which (borrowing from British counterguerilla strategies in Malaya) gave greater emphasis to protecting the population from the insurgency and winning their hearts and minds than to killing the enemy.4 Already applied by General Petraeus in the Iraq surge in the last year and a half of the Bush administration, the focus on protecting people was made specific to the situation in Afghanistan and elaborated in rules of engagement by the Obama administration’s new commander of U.S. Forces–Afghanistan/International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), General Stanley McChrystal. The president portrayed the enhanced counterinsurgency approach as part of a comprehensive, multifaceted effort designed not only to reverse the Taliban’s gains but to deal with the problem, which he candidly pointed to, of a government “undermined by corruption” that “has difficulty delivering basic services to its people” and an economy “undercut by a booming narcotics trade that encourages criminality and funds the insurgency.” Accordingly, he said he was ordering a dramatic increase in the civilian dimensions of the counterinsurgency effort, refraining, however, from associating it with the politically unpopular concept of “nation-building.”5 Still, the enhanced priority given to Afghanistan and such claimed revisions in strategy could not themselves avoid profound dilemmas or produce high prospects of success. By the summer of 2009, embarrassing military difficulties on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, growing divisions among the U.S. policy elite, opinion polls showing increasing public opposition to the war (especially its financial costs), and persisting ineptitude and corruption in the government in Kabul were beginning to assault the president’s public posture of doing whatever was necessary in Afghanistan. Obama was already facing deep divisions within his administration over a range of issues: the numbers of troops that were required and could be sustained; the emphasis to be placed on counterterrorism as distinct from counterinsurgency missions and the rules of engagement for both; the prospects for substantial and effective Afghanization of the counterinsurgency, particularly in the wake of the fraud-saturated reelection of President Hamid Karzai; how to deal with the notorious corruption of the Karzai government without further diminishing its authority; the means of weaning Afghanistan from its opium poppy dependency (which was providing one-third to one-half of the country’s GDP) and putting it on

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the road to self-sustaining economic development; and finally, whether and under what terms to negotiate with the Taliban to wind down the war.

THE TROOP-LEVEL ISSUE In an early move to implement his pledge to rectify the underallocation of resources to the Afghanistan campaign, the president, even before the completion of the Riedel study, had ordered a troop increment of 17,000 plus 4,000 trainers for the campaign in Afghanistan. This would bring the U.S. military presence up to 68,000, in addition to the 40,000 troops deployed there by other NATO countries. But as early as midsummer 2009, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the commander of the U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan were expressing uncertainty about whether that number would be sufficient for conducting the three essential missions of the forces prescribed by the new strategy: protecting the population from the Taliban insurgents; physically destroying Taliban and al-Qaeda units operating in Afghanistan and western Pakistan; and training Afghanistan government forces to themselves effectively perform the population protection and offensive counterinsurgency missions. And there was growing skepticism in the Pentagon as to whether the U.S. military, already stretched thin, could also assume a major share of the burden of reconstruction and institution building in areas freed from Taliban control or harassment. At the end of August 2009, in the midst of growing popular and allied skepticism about the war and its prospects for success, Secretary of Defense Gates received a comprehensive assessment from the U.S. and ISAF commander McChrystal of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan—which the general admitted to be much more serious than he had anticipated before taking up his post—and what it would take to reverse it. “The mission can be accomplished, but this will require . . . fundamental changes,” he warned. These would entail “significant near-term cost and risk” and substantially augmented resources, including a larger deployment of U.S. troops than the president had ordered and was planning to authorize.6 General McChrystal’s follow-up report to JCS chairman Mike Mullen estimated that the best chance of prosecuting the necessary missions effectively was an additional 85,000 troops. The minimum necessary to avoid failure would be 40,000. His lower option of 11,000 implied giving up on the strategy the president had selected.7

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Accordingly, the White House let it be known that the March strategy was being reviewed again, taking subsequent assessments (including McChrystal’s) into account, and was being compared with various alternatives. When prodded in interviews during the ensuing months to reveal what those strategic alternatives and their troop numbers were, the president and administration officials refused to discuss the numbers, while insisting that the basic purpose of the strategy remained to defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to prevent its return to either country in the future. The question was how best to accomplish this purpose. On December 1, 2009, President Obama, addressing the nation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, announced his decision: he was sending an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The president then dropped the other shoe (or boot): “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.”8 The president’s case for the summer 2011 deadline to start removing U.S. troops, his aides explained in background briefings, was that it was important to make clear to the Afghans that they had to seriously get ready to assume the responsibility for their own security; but Secretaries Gates and Clinton, as well as the U.S. military, thought it was a mistake to go public with such a deadline, especially as it would allow the Taliban to adapt by lying low and then relaunching a full-blown effort when, following the withdrawal of U.S. troops, the balance of fighting power was in their favor. 9 Responsive to this concern, Obama allowed Gates and Clinton to qualify the June 2011 deadline, explaining in Sunday talk-show interviews that the magnitude and pace of the removal of the U.S. troops would of course depend on the conditions on the ground in Afghanistan at the time. The 30,000 “surge” was 25 percent lower than General McChrystal’s estimated minimum requirement of additional troops for moderate success in the counterinsurgency campaign. White House spokespersons maintained, however, that when new pledges being obtained from NATO allies were added in, the McChrystal target would be roughly approximated. But when linked with the promise to begin drawing down the troops in June 2011 and the confident statement of an increased Afghan military capacity, it reflected a more basic move on Obama’s part toward revising—apparently downward—the objectives of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan from those he had articulated in March. As now formulated, those objectives had to serve first and foremost the irreducible U.S.

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national interest—America’s own security and its own economic health, which was in a precarious condition due to the ongoing financial crisis. Our economic strength here at home needs to be rebuilt, the president told the global audience for his December 2009 West Point address. “That’s why our troop commitment to Afghanistan cannot be open-ended—because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”10

COUNTERTERRORISM VERSUS COUNTERINSURGENCY In back of President Obama’s West Point announcement on the number of troops and when they could start coming home there had been intensive, often acrimonious, debate in the administration over the priority to be given to counterterrorism missions as distinct from counterinsurgency missions. On the one side were those (led by Vice President Joe Biden) who argued that if the objective was to destroy al-Qaeda’s leadership and terrorist network, intelligence and offensive operations could and should be concentrated on knocking out the remaining al-Qaeda enclaves that were predominantly located in the eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan border areas. The strategies and capabilities needed for this effort, labelled “counterterrorism-plus” were quite different than those for the counterinsurgency mission, argued its proponents: the counterterrorism efforts would rely principally on drones and special ops forces for attacks on the al-Qaeda leadership and involve much lower numbers of troops than would be required to defeat the Taliban across the length and breadth of Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, however, contended that there was considerable linkage between Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and the Taliban; and they warned that the Taliban’s successes in Afghanistan were reverberating throughout the Islamic world, from Pakistan to Egypt to Yemen and Somalia and to Muslim communities in Western countries, energizing al-Qaeda and other violent jihadists and weakening progressive moderates. Moreover, Generals Petraeus and McChrystal and Admiral Mullen argued that, even if the basic mission were narrowed to destroying the terrorist enclaves in Afghanistan, special ops forays plus offshore and drone-delivered attacks would be woefully insufficient for preventing al-Qaeda’s return unless integrated with substantial U.S. ground-force operations to clear out, hold, and transfer such areas to sustainable control by government forces and anti-Taliban populations.11

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Yes, the president approved 30,000 additional troops for the PetraeusMcChrystal counterinsurgency mission. But his public announcement and internal insistence that the departure of troops from Afghanistan would start in the summer of 2011 meant that he had already, by the end of 2009, moved considerably toward the Biden position that countering terrorists who could attack the United States—not defeating the Taliban insurgency—was the primary justification for further expenditures of U.S. blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Moreover, the White House push for very rapidly devolving the counterinsurgency functions to the Afghan military were consistent with the plan to get the U.S. military substantially out of the active counterinsurgency business in Afghanistan as soon as possible. Obama still talked of the “fundamental connection” between the U.S. anti-Taliban effort in Afghanistan and going after al-Qaeda in Pakistan; and his aides pointed to the juxtaposition of the two objectives in the president’s West Point speech: “We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government.” 12 Yet reversing the Taliban’s momentum and preventing it from again overthrowing the government in Kabul were considerably scaled-down objectives from defeating it. The counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan was to be regarded as mainly, if not entirely, an instrument of the global counterterrorism campaign. Meanwhile, Obama had become more interested in strategies for decapitating the leadership of al-Qaeda and other violent jihadist movements around the world than in having the United States preside over the political and economic development of Afghanistan.13

Problems with Afghanization Similar to the Vietnam War, where Vietnamization had been a cover for U.S. disengagement, the devolution of the responsibility to the Afghans for countering the Taliban became the basic U.S. strategy prior to solid indications that the Afghan forces were up to the task, politically as well as militarily. General Petraeus and his military colleagues, however, were adamantly against a fundamental transference of responsibility to the Afghan security forces before the surge in U.S. troop and equipment levels authorized by the president in December 2009 had time to materialize on the battlefield, and the new population-centered strategy of clear/hold/ build was allowed to demonstrate its effectiveness. Henceforth much of

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the debate in the Obama administration, the deliberations in NATO, and the bilateral Washington-Kabul discussions had to do with the parameters of the Afghanization of the counterinsurgency—its speed; the stages in which various aspects of the mission were to be handed off; and the kinds of support, training, and limited combat participation the United States and other countries would continue to provide. The basic goal endorsed by the November 2010 NATO summit in Lisbon was for the Afghan forces to be fully “in the lead” by the end of 2014. As explained by NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, starting in early 2011 “Afghan forces will begin taking the lead for security operations . . . in certain provinces and, based on conditions, will gradually expand throughout the country.” He insisted, however, that “NATO is in this for the long-term. We will not transition until our Afghan partners are ready. We will stay, after transition, in a supporting role.”14 Meeting with President Karzai on May 20, 2012, in conjunction with the Chicago summit, President Obama proclaimed, “The war in Afghanistan as we know it is over, but our commitment to friendship and partnership continues.” 15 White House and Pentagon spokespersons, pressed to defend what seemed to be an earlier end-of-the-war announcement than was warranted by the transition process being endorsed at the NATO meeting, emphasized the “as we know it” phrase in Obama’s statement. The president, they claimed, was referring to the turn in U.S. and ISAF strategy toward handing over by the end of 2014 the prime responsibility to the Afghans for their own security and the changes in battlefield operations that were already underway.16 The media, they said, should read the Chicago summit’s declaration reaffirming the “irreversible transition to full security responsibility from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) . . . by the end of 2014.” It was then that “the NATO-led combat mission will end.”17 But did the end of combat mission mean the end of all combat operations by U.S. forces in support of the war against the Taliban now led by the Afghans? Could the U.S. “support” and “assistance” at times involve, at the request of the Afghans, attacks by U.S. special ops units or some airdelivered strikes or at least targeting information acquired by drones? And what of U.S. counterterrorism actions, particularly attacks against al-Qaeda or Haqqani enclaves on Afghan soil or from Afghanistan at their bases in Pakistan? The journalists kept asking such questions, and administration spokespersons kept responding with “it all depends”—which was in fact a

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truthful reflection of the work in progress situation on the battlefield and in negotiations between the Obama administration and President Karzai. Related complicated questions revolved around various initiatives to induce Taliban fighters to defect—promising amnesty, offering them better-paying and less dangerous alternative employment—simultaneously with Karzai holding out an olive branch to the Taliban, including offers of participation in the country’s governance to elements of the movement who were regarded as “moderate.” Could ostensible defectors play games of deception to infiltrate even the Afghan military (which did in fact emerge as a major problem in the so-called green-on-blue attacks by uniformed Afghan soldiers against ISAF soldiers) and also civilian agencies to subvert the ongoing reconstruction of governance? Would negotiating with the moderate Taliban confer political legitimacy on their movement and undermine the efforts in Afghanistan and on the part of the United States and its allies to continue to expend blood and treasure fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda extremists?

Negotiating a Truce As the reality sank in that the U.S. and ISAF forces could not expect to decisively degrade Taliban capabilities before the scheduled start of troop reductions in the summer of 2011, nor could the Afghans do so largely on their own after 2014, the objective of the Obama administration shifted from ensuring the Afghan government forces could defeat the Taliban to preventing the Taliban from again becoming the dominant power in the country. This appeared to require, however, some kind of a negotiated settlement, or at least a cease-fire, with the Taliban. And indeed a flurry of semi-official preliminary discussions were undertaken by President Karzai, Taliban and ISAF commanders, and U.S. diplomats to determine whether negotiations would be anything more than a propaganda contest among the involved parties or could lead to at least a sustainable truce. President Karzai’s on-again, off-again support for the idea of negotiations with the Taliban, plus his insistence on keeping control of the process in his hands, made for wariness in the Obama administration that negotiations once begun would produce an outcome consistent with U.S. geostrategic interests in the region. Moreover, the prelude to serious negotiations exposed serious rifts among the countries and political movements that would have a stake in the postwar arrangements.

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But even if these preliminaries came to naught, it was transparent that the Obama administration—with some objections from the military— was willing to countenance and eventually participate in negotiations that apparently would give the Taliban a legitimate role in the country’s governance as an alternative to continuing the war. These various complications in the good war—the war of necessity—in Afghanistan soured many people in the Obama administration as well as in the Congress on continuing to sustain the ten-year-old military effort beyond the summer of 2011 when U.S. troop convoys were slated to begin heading for the off-ramp. The official position of the Defense Department, publically backed by Obama, continued to be that conditions on the ground, not the calendar, would determine the timetable and quantity and quality of the troop drawdowns.

“Afghan Good Enough?” With the 2012 U.S. presidential election looming, the gap between the administration’s basic policy for Afghanistan and the public’s low tolerance for continuing the human and financial sacrifices was closing.18 The president had moved very substantially in the direction of the strategy Vice President Biden had been advocating all along. In this he was supported especially by his younger aides and a self-named “Afghan Good Enough Group” that U.S. deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough had been convening weekly during 2011 to brainstorm problems with the Petraeus-McChrystal strategy and to examine alternatives. The revised strategy in essence would provide that “the objective of having the Afghan government regain control throughout the country would be supplanted by the minimal objective of preventing the Taliban’s resumption of dominant power in Kabul.” It would be good enough if the government could secure its control in particular designated regions. The U.S. counterterrorism objective, however, would continue to be, as stated by Obama in 2009, “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat, al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” (Secretary of Defense Gates confesses in his memoir to being the author of the embarrassing “Afghan good enough” phrase, which he used in conversations with President Bush in support of “a combination of selective counterinsurgency and counterterrorism—to degrade the Taliban’s capabilities to the point where larger and better trained Afghan

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security forces could maintain control of the country and prevent the return of al Qaeda.”19) Obama did, in fact, adopt the essence of the Good Enough Group’s preferred strategy: The United States and its ISAF partners would by the end of 2014 have turned over to the Afghans full responsibility for conducting the counterinsurgency campaign and providing law and order. The U.S.-ISAF counterinsurgency operations would therefore totally terminate by then and their troops would be withdrawn by, except for some training and “enabler” contingents and possibly a few counterterrorism special ops units and bases (for attacking al-Qaeda and other violent jihadists in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan) to be approved by the Afghan government. In the meantime, the United States would work with the government of Afghanistan to persuade the Taliban to call off its insurgency. This could include negotiations between the government and the Taliban (with the U.S. a negotiating party if that would facilitate agreement) to allocate respective spheres of control across the country. The negotiations could also include agreements on Taliban participation in the central structures and processes of the country’s governance. (However, to the chagrin of human rights groups, any federal system that might result would not be able to guarantee the continuation, at least not in the Taliban-controlled areas, of the considerable progress in women’s rights that had been achieved under the U.S. occupation. Obama administration spokespersons insisted they would not countenance such an outcome; but it was becoming clear that war termination would have priority over democracy and human rights.) The United States would make substantial long-term commitments of funds and technical assistance to the reconstruction and economic development of Afghanistan, subject to credible efforts by the governing authorities to rout out the country’s notorious corruption. The Obama administration granted that security was the precondition for good governance; it also recognized that security could not be sustained if the governing authorities were riddled with corruption. Yet the pervasive culture of impunity (enjoyed by national officials and the military in addition to local officials and police and militias) for misuse of international aid and rewarding one’s family and tribal members with cushy jobs and contracts, whenever it was raised by U.S. officials, was reacted to with anger by president Karzai as an invasion of Afghanistan’s sovereignty. Obama could not be confident, however, that the revised strategy could indeed be “good enough” to prevent the Taliban from again becoming the dominant force in the country and—of highest importance to the

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Americans—to ensure the United States could continue to strike at alQaeda strongholds from Afghan territory. There was a substantial risk that the Afghans would see the revised strategy as an indication of abandonment by the Americans and would simply concede to living under a system of deals among power brokers and corrupt officials, with “security” provided by local militias or the Taliban, letting political reform and human rights, including the Western concerns for women’s rights, be damned. Despite these uncertainties as to its implementation and results, the “good enough” exit strategy (but not its name) was essentially adopted by Obama as a way of sloughing off the albatross that the erstwhile “war of necessity” in Afghanistan had become for him. The stabilization and reconstruction of the country, as with Iraq after the U.S. forces departed, although yet important, would no longer be regarded as a vital security interest of the United States.

The Assassination of Osama bin Laden Obama’s political advisers—concerned that the decisive move to counterterrorism and away from counterinsurgency could be exploited politically by the Republicans in the 2012 elections—were wary of an explicit public disclosure by the administration of the assumptions underlying the shift. Fortuitously, however, the counterterrorism rationale for getting involved in Afghanistan in the first place was again brought front and center in the form of a dramatic target of opportunity: Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11 and hero and head of al-Qaeda, now, in the spring of 2011, was apparently in the gun-sights of the CIA and the U.S. military. Obama could at least fulfill his 2008 campaign promise that “if we have Osama bin Laden [and other al-Qaeda leaders] in our sights . . . we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden; we will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.”20 The U.S. intelligence community, on the basis of leads obtained through its interrogations of al-Qaeda prisoners and clandestine operations in Pakistan, had been intensively watching the comings and goings into and out of a walled-off three-story compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The compound, surrounded by a concrete wall some fifteen feet high and topped with barbed wire, had evidently been built during the past few years and—curiously—was located a bare 0.8 miles from the Pakistan Military Academy; but soundings of the Pakistani military indicated they had

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no connection with the compound nor did anyone from the surrounding community admit to any knowledge of what was going on inside its walls. U.S. surveillance of the compound, however, did observe a particular individual periodically carrying what were assumed to be supplies and messages into the compound who fit the profile of a courier CIA informants had identified as serving bin Laden. The fact that there were no electronic messages of any kind sent from or received by persons within the compound was a giveaway that it must have been the site of some supersensitive command center. But if the commander inside was indeed bin Laden, the six-foot, four-inch wiry jihadist could not be observed moving around behind the high walls. On May 1, 2011, the raid on the Abbottabad compound was undertaken— without the knowledge of either the Afghan or the Pakistani government. President Obama and his national security team assembled in the White House situation room to witness its progress, as the helicopter-transported attack group, directed by the CIA and employing U.S. Navy SEALs and the U.S. Army’s airborne regiment of its Special Operations Command, breached the Abbottabad compound’s walls with explosives and charged into the main building, where the SEALs encountered bin Laden and shot him to death. Four other people were killed in the raid: bin Laden’s son Khalid; bin Laden’s courier; and the courier’s brother and the brother’s wife. In the president’s May 2 public statement about the event he recalled that “shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.” And he affirmed that “the death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.” He felt it also necessary to remind everyone that this was an act of war against that terrorist organization and that the United States was not—and never would be—at war with Islam: “I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.” The president knew, however, that the Pakistanis were outraged that the raid into their territory was undertaken without their prior knowledge; that the Americans felt they could not be trusted with that information;

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and that, indeed, the U.S. officials suspected that at least some higher-ups in the Pakistan military and intelligence service knew where bin Laden was hiding. The severe aggravation of U.S.-Pakistani mutual mistrust was an unfortunate cost of the operation, but, from the perspective of the White house, definitely worth incurring in order to preserve absolute secrecy of the operation. Relations between the United States and Pakistan had already deteriorated during the past decades, with Islamabad increasingly angry at the U.S. courtship of India as a counterweight to China, and Washington, obsessed with Pakistan’s continuing support for the Taliban. The U.S. Ambassador, Cameron Munter, in an effort to avoid a severe breakdown of the strategically crucial relationship tried to get the Obama administration to focus the interchanges more on Pakistan’s internal security and economic development needs, but to no avail. Now, however, to avoid further exacerbating the deeply frayed relationship, Obama included the following words in his public remarks: Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we’ve done. But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding. Indeed, bin Laden had declared war against Pakistan as well, and ordered attacks against the Pakistani people. Tonight, I called President Zardari, and my team has also spoken with their Pakistani counterparts. They agree that this is a good and historic day for both of our nations. And going forward, it is essential that Pakistan continue to join us in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates.21

The administration’s presentation to the public of the details of the raid, first conveyed in a press briefing by Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, were incomplete (deliberately so, to protect the supersensitive modes of operation of the special ops forces) and somewhat embarrassingly ragged with respect to exactly how the three individuals plus bin Laden met their deaths.22 Immediately, administration officials were peppered with questions concerning the “capture or kill” orders under which the SEALs were operating; and the answers that were given could be and were interpreted variously by commentators—ranging from the supposition that Obama wanted the terrorist leader dead rather than alive to the belief that the SEALs were instructed to kill bin Laden only in self-defense. Obama himself, in praising the SEALs for their heroism, did

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nothing to resolve the controversy. But the legal justification developed by Attorney General Eric Holder for this and other targeted killings of terrorists leaders (see chap. 38)—namely, that the targets were our enemies in war, the war on terrorism—gave credence to the suspicion that Obama just as soon wanted bin Laden executed on the spot rather than captured and brought to trial for crimes against humanity. Crushing al-Qaeda, as Obama put it, was his “biggest national security priority,” but did this require the decapitation of the terrorist movement and would eliminating its head essentially destroy the capacity of the movement to function? The intelligence on al-Qaeda gave no clear answers to these questions. Terrorism experts in the administration and think tanks were divided over the extent to which the attacks on al-Qaeda units in Afghanistan and Pakistan had broken the back of the movement or only caused it to disperse throughout the wider South Asia, Middle East, and North Africa regions. And there was no consensus on the role of Osama bin Laden himself in the context of the U.S. and international community’s concerted effort to decimate al-Qaeda in reaction to 9/11. Some analysts believed the movement had become largely decentralized and autonomously directed by leaders with localized priorities; others saw bin Laden and his immediate lieutenants as maintaining basic direction even over the dispersed cadres and continuing to design projects for them. But when the opportunity arose to do away with the world’s most notorious terrorist, Obama did not need to consider either of these evaluations; he knew what the American people overwhelmingly wanted him to do. Whether or not the assassination of bin Laden would be a large operational plus in the continuing war on terrorism was less important from the perspective of the White House than its symbolic value in that war and the catharsis its accomplishment provided the nation.

Lingering Troops and Lingering Doubts The killing of Osama bin Laden might have made it easier for the United States to extricate itself from Afghanistan without conceding ineffectiveness in the fight against al-Qaeda. Yet the Obama administration was not about to replicate the endgame of the Vietnam War, in which under the guise of successful Vietnamization, Nixon and Kissinger negotiated a peace treaty providing for a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country and requiring the government of South Vietnam to share power

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with the insurgents—the result being a total collapse of the ability of the government to stave off Saigon becoming Ho Chi Minh City in 1975. Thus, Obama began his second term with the issue of just how many U.S. counterinsurgency troops would remain in Afghanistan after 2014 and what precisely would be their mission still not fully resolved within the administration although the expectation was that their role would be primarily, if not exclusively, confined to training the Afghan military. Whether or not some of the residual U.S. forces would also be asked and be willing to provide air support and other “enablers” to the Afghan military operations was a matter of controversy, and the answers might yet be affected by assessments of what it would take to prevent the Taliban from making further gains. With respect to the counterterrorism campaign, however, Obama was eager to get agreement from Karzai or his successor that specialized U.S forces could continue to operate from Afghan territory for directing and conducting air strikes and commando-type raids against al Qaeda and other terrorist enclaves in Pakistan as well as in Afghanistan. But Obama was adamant that there would be no U.S. forces remaining— zero, it was emphasized—if Kabul and Washington failed to resolve their controversy over the terms in the Bilateral Security Agreement regarding the immunity of U.S military personnel from Afghan legal proceedings. Also still in the closet was the question of the terms of any disposition of territorial control and shared governance that might be negotiated by the Afghan government and the Taliban, for these—even in anticipation— could moot virtually all of the other questions or at least fundamentally change their parameters. Midway in what he had previously announced was to be the final year—2014—of the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan—President Obama, on May 27, provided his most candid and detailed public statement yet on what that meant: “We will no longer patrol Afghan cities or towns, mountains or valleys. That is a task for the Afghan people.” However, at the start of 2015 there would still be 9,800 U.S. service members in various parts of the country; they would have “two narrow missions: training Afghan forces and supporting counterterrorism operations against the remnants of al Qaeda.” By the end of 2015, these troops will have been reduced by roughly half, located in Kabul and on Bagram airfield. And by the end of 2016, the only U.S. military personnel left in the country would be the those assigned to guard the U.S. embassy, and, possibly, depending on arrangements to be worked out with the Afghan government (which Obama did not discuss in this public statement),

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some special counterterrorism contingents for conducting commandotype raids and implementing drone strikes. This graduated force-reduction scenario, the president now warned publicly, would materialize only if the Afghan government finally signed the already-negotiated Bilateral Security Agreement that preserved U.S. legal authority over all actions of U.S. military personnel. (At the end of September 2014, the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, did sign the BSA.) Obama was confident that the American people, weary of more than a decade of war, would support this complicated exit strategy. “I think Americans have learned that it is harder to end wars than to begin them. Yet this is how wars end in the 21st century.”23

LEGACIES OF THE IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS The president could not escape the realization, and need to adapt to the reality, that the United States would be burdened for decades with the consequences of its military response to 9/11—two wars which cumulatively lasted longer and cost more financially than any period of war in the country’s history. (The U.S. combat fatalities, over 6,800 by 2014, were substantially less than in the Korean or Vietnam wars; but there were more than 50,000 wounded, at least one-third of them severely.) The total bill exceeded a trillion dollars, and this at a time of great national concern over the soaring federal debt and irresponsible practices of private lending institutions that triggered the 2008–2011 recession. The country simply could not financially afford another war of the magnitude of the Iraq or Afghanistan counterinsurgencies; and as the withdrawing U.S. military left a rather precarious security environment in both—especially in Iraq, which Obama had considered the good war of necessity—the mood of most Americans was epitomized in the comment of the departing secretary of defense, Robert Gates, that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his mind examined’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”24 Moreover, to avoid falling over the deficit “cliff ” (the metaphoric cliché of the day), the Obama administration and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives had bound themselves with a “sequestration” agreement requiring budgetary cuts in the trillions of dollars over the forthcoming decade (if the Congress year by year did not deliver these

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mandated cuts, comparable, if not larger, gross cuts would be made automatically in the budgets of particular agencies). Whereas in the past, neither the executive nor the Congress was ready to severely reduce the Pentagon’s budget for fiscal reasons, now the Defense Department was no longer immune. It was required to achieve nearly $500 billion in reduced expenditures via annual cuts over a ten-year period; but failing that, the automatic sequestered cuts it would suffer would approximately double the decade’s cuts to over a trillion dollars. In anticipation of such a constriction of the Pentagon’s resources, Gates’s successor as secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, worked out with the White House a fresh statement of the country’s basic national security policy, titled Defense Strategic Guidance and Budget Issues. Putting the best face on it in his January 2012 briefings, Panetta forecast that the military will be smaller and leaner, but it will be agile, flexible, rapidly deployable and technologically advanced—a “cutting-edge force.”25 Ironically, the concept substantially replicated the military “transformation” ideas incorporating the “revolution in military affairs” championed a decade earlier by George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, which turned out to be a rather poor match with the requirements for the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the irony was consonant with the GatesPanetta-Biden determination—apparently fully shared by the president and featured in the January 2012 defense guidance—to drastically scale back the military’s counterinsurgency and “stability” (nation-building) functions. The Asia-Pacific “rebalancing” of U.S. military planning and deployments, although driven largely by the objective of being able to counter China’s increased strategic and power-projection capabilities, reinforced this shift away from forces trained primarily for intervening in underdeveloped or failing states. So did the prospect of once-again having to actively contain an imperialistically-expansive Russia—a preoccupation of the Pentagon strategists under Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in the wake of Putin’s imperial move against Ukraine. As prescribed in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, a “full spectrum” (but somehow less expensive) force posture would be retained as a planning imperative, with emphasis now, however, on certain segments of the spectrum—namely: operations and technologies for drone-type or “light-footprint” actions against terrorists; capabilities for “offshore” sea and air battle operations against major-power enemies; residually, a modernized nuclear arsenal to deter WMD aggression; and, most ambitiously, “command of the commons,” that is, superiority in the oceans, outerspace,

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and cyberspace.26 Capabilities for heavy-footprint ground-force interventions (conventional or counterinsurgency)—the most expensive components of the military budget—would be downgraded and defunded. It was not only the trillion-dollar costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, however, and congressionally-imposed limitations on future military spending that were the sources of the Obama administration’s determination to reallocate the defense budget away from the degree of emphasis on counterinsurgency it had featured since 9/11. It was time to “turn the page,” to “begin a new chapter” (Obama’s words) in the foreign policy that drew the United States into the hubristic military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq—countries that, like Vietnam a generation ago, turned out to have more complex societies than the best-educated commanders and diplomats knew how to manage. Boots on the ground, even though worn by soldiers trained in population-protection “hearts-and-minds” techniques of countering insurgencies, would not have the pride of place in the Pentagon’s full-spectrum of military instruments that General Petraeus and his colleagues had been championing. Indeed, no U.S. boots on the ground would be the oft-reiterated mantra of the commander-in-chief, even as he ordered U.S. forces into action in Libya and against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

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COUNTERTERRORISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals. —Barack Obama

URING THE 2008 ELECTION CAMPAIGN, Barack Obama was among those Democrats castigating the Bush administration’s suspension of due process constitutional rights of arrested terrorism suspects; its resort to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, including torture; and the increased surveillance (much of it without legal warrant) of the private communications and records of American citizens. Under an Obama administration, he and his supporters promised, national security and human rights would be mutually reinforcing, not at odds. They would also dispense with Bush’s “war on terror” rhetoric. Yes, acts of terror were immoral and unforgivable crimes; it was vital that they be prevented and their perpetrators be apprehended, convicted, and punished. But the notion that terror was the enemy and we were at war with it, claimed the critics, had been distorting U.S. policy in two ways: It diverted counterterrorism policies away from dealing with terrorism’s causes and not just with the acts of terror and those who were committing or ordering them. And calling it a war gave status and—in the eyes of the terrorists’ followers—a heroic dignity to despicably immoral criminals. But by the end of his first year as president, Obama’s rhetoric and policies for dealing with terrorist threats— not only abroad but also at home—revealed less dramatic change from than continuity with Bush’s policies during the last two years of his presidency.

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OBAMA’S EARLY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVES On his second full day as president, Barack Obama issued orders closing the prison camp at Guantánamo within one year; mandating all U.S. agencies, civilian and military, to strictly adhere to the laws against torture and to cease the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques; and preventing the CIA from operating detention facilities. But efforts to elaborate and implement these early directives ignited fierce debates, often along partisan lines, but also within the administration. Equally controversial were the efforts of the administration to deal with the national security versus civil liberties tensions over constitutional due process of law guarantees and protections against unwarranted surveillance and invasions of privacy. Although even President Bush, by the end of his administration, had come around to the belief that the Guantánamo prison was more of a liability than an asset, once in the Oval Office, President Obama found that to summarily deliver on his campaign promise to immediately shut down the facility was politically and legally impossible and perhaps also dangerous. His executive order of January 22, 2009, mandated that the prison camp was to be closed within one year.1 But in May 2009, the House and the Senate acted to deny the administration the funds required to close Guantánamo until it came up with an acceptable plan for dealing with the detainees. And a year after Obama’s January 2009 directive, the detention facility was still operating, although more than half of the detainees had been transferred elsewhere or released. The administration was still struggling to overcome objections from members of Congress and governors with prison facilities in their states to which the prisoners were likely to be transferred. This “NIMBY” (not in my back yard) response was ridiculed in the White House, but nevertheless had to be taken seriously. The Departments of Defense and Justice were also having difficulty working out a legally defensible plan for assuring that prisoners who were in fact terrorists would not be released because of due process failures or because they had been tortured during their incarceration. Obama’s parallel executive order to the CIA to shut down its own detention facilities “as expeditiously as possible” fared better.2 There was consensus in the administration and in the pertinent congressional committees that beyond having access to prisoners for purposes of acquiring important intelligence, the Agency had been wrongly exceeding its proper

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role insofar as it was itself acting as jail-keeper, notoriously at its facilities on foreign soil. The executive order did not, however, prohibit the CIA from turning over terrorism suspects to foreign intelligence agencies— through the process of “extraordinary rendition”—in whose detainment facilities tough interrogation techniques were the norm.

The Treatment of Detainees The most absolute of the president’s January 22, 2009, directives mandated that individuals in the custody of any U.S. agency “shall in all circumstances be treated humanely and shall not be subjected to violence to life and person (including murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture), nor to outrages upon personal dignity (including humiliating and degrading treatment).” Effective immediately, the president ordered, any individual captured in armed conflict “shall not be subjected to any interrogation technique or approach, or any treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed in the Army Field Manual.”3 In signing this order, the president rescinded the Bush administration’s insistence that it could use special harsh interrogation techniques on terrorists because they were “unlawful enemy combatants” and therefore not legally covered by the Geneva convention protections for prisoners of war that are incorporated and elaborated in detail in the Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations. There was disagreement from the start within the Obama administration, however, over how to ensure that torture and other gross abuses (such as those committed at Abu Ghraib) would never again be engaged in by U.S. officials. Should legal actions be brought against those responsible? Although the president was on the “look forward, don’t look back” side of the controversy, Attorney General Eric Holder ordered the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to investigate the role of the department’s attorneys in the Bush years who gave the go-ahead for the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. The OPR reported back in July 2009 that Office of Legal Counsel Attorneys during Bush’s first term, particularly in memoranda authored by attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee, had engaged in “professional misconduct” by failing to provide objective legal analysis to the CIA concerning the agency’s interrogation procedures. And the OPR indicated its intent to

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refer its finding of misconduct to the state bar disciplinary authorities in the jurisdictions where Yoo and Bybee were members.4 The two accused attorneys were invited to submit their responses to the department, after which the associate deputy attorney general, David Margolis, submitted his own memorandum to Attorney General Holder, finding only “poor judgment” by the Bush-era attorneys and challenging the OPR’s finding of professional misconduct and recommendation of possible disbarment.5

Due Process Issues While mandating during its first week in power the use of only nonabusive and humane interrogation procedures in U.S. detention facilities for terrorists and suspected terrorists, the Obama administration did not move with similar alacrity to guarantee due process of law protections to those apprehended and incarcerated. At the end of its first year, the administration had to fend off criticism from civil liberties advocates that hundreds of U.S. citizens or residents were still being denied their constitutional rights—specifically: the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination and the Sixth Amendment habeas corpus rights right to a speedy and public trial in which the accused are fully informed of the allegations against them and are confronted by their accusers. And like Bush, Obama endorsed the continued resort to military commissions (albeit with a few new due process safeguards) for trying difficult cases, instead of having them tried in the federal courts where strict adherence to all due process rights of the accused could presumably lead to compromising national security and counterintelligence secrets and setting free dedicated and dangerous terrorists.

Persisting Intrusive Surveillance The administration also had to fend off criticisms from civil liberties advocates that it was continuing the Bush administration’s flouting of the Fourth Amendment’s provision: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause” and specificity as to what and whom is to be searched.

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Centrally at issue was the application (or undermining, in order to apprehend terrorists) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 and its amendments—their original purpose being to constrain intelligence activities against persons within the United States. The Obama administration inherited the Bush administration executive orders and congressional legislative reactions to 9/11 that had shifted the burden of proof onto those who would restrict the government’s waron-terror surveillance (via wiretaps and accessing cell phone and internet communications) of suspected terrorists and their supporters. Reportedly, some of the most intensive early debates within the Obama administration were over whether the burden of proof should be returned onto the government to demonstrate case by case to the FISA Court or appropriate magistrate that national security does in fact require derogation of the Fourth Amendment protections.

OBAMA’S EARLY EFFORT TO STRIKE A BALANCE Charged by national security hawks that his executive orders during his first weeks in office had weakened the country’s ability to protect the United States against future 9/11s or even more catastrophic terrorist attacks, but charged by human rights organizations with sustaining the Bush administration’s cavalier willingness to sacrifice basic civil liberties, the president decided to deliver a wide-ranging address on the challenge of simultaneously serving national security and America’s essential freedoms. His administration was taking steps critical to keeping the country secure, he intoned to an audience of national leaders assembled on May 21, 2009, at the National Archives. “But I believe with every fiber of my being that we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.” With respect to the closing of Guantánamo: Yes it was difficult and complex to determine what to do with the 240 people still incarcerated there who had spent years in legal limbo. But Guantánamo averred that the president had “weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. . . . By any measure the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications in closing it.” Yet working out the alternatives to the mess of Guantánamo required dealing with a flood of legal challenges and human rights and security problems. He wanted to be clear, however, that

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we are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees within the United States who endanger the American people. Where demanded by justice and national security, we will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders— namely, highly secure prisons that ensure public safety.

All of this required reviewing each of the detainee cases at Guantánamo to determine the appropriate policy for dealing with them. Some would indeed require trial by military commissions rather than by federal courts. And Obama granted that could appear to be a reversal of his earlier opposition to military commissions. But the reasons for keeping them as an option were compelling: [The military commissions] are an appropriate venue for trying detainees for violating the laws of war. They allow for the protection of sensitive sources and methods of intelligence-gathering; they allow for the safety and security of participants; and for the presentation of evidence gathered from the battlefield that cannot always be presented in federal courts.

Given their usefulness, Obama promised to make sure that the procedures of the military commissions would be reformed to bring them into line as much as possible with due process in the federal courts. Then there was “the toughest single issue that we will have to face”: what to do with “the detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a threat to the American people,” the detainees who “in effect, remain at war with the United States.” Recognizing that his answer to the question—a system of “prolonged detention” without trial—would be very difficult for his liberal supporters to accept, Obama insisted that “our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight.” Another formulation in this historic speech, reflecting the president’s move away from positions dear to his civil-libertarian constituency, included a defense of his opposition to the release of all the humiliating photos taken of detainees at Abu Ghraib by U.S. personnel: It was “my judgment,” he explained, “that releasing these photos would inflame anti-American

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opinion and allow our enemies to paint U.S. troops with a broad, damning, and inaccurate brush, thereby endangering them in theaters of war.” “National security requires a delicate balance,” opined the president. “On the one hand, our democracy depends on transparency. On the other hand, some information must be protected from public disclosure for the sake of our security.” This was reflected in the controversy over keeping important evidentiary material from being introduced in judicial trials by invoking the “state secrets” privilege. On this issue, Obama indicated, he sided with those who wanted stricter legal criteria for determining when material could legitimately be withheld by the government. In attempting to achieve the needed balance, the president claimed, he was depending ultimately on the fact that “the American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems. They know that we need not sacrifice our security for our values, nor sacrifice our values for our security, as long as we approach difficult questions with honesty and care and a dose of common sense.”6

THE DUELING VICE PRESIDENTS On the same day that President Obama delivered his historic address on the problem of reconciling the war on terror with human rights, former vice president Dick Cheney was ready with a rebuttal. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, he ridiculed Obama’s effort to strike a balance between national security imperatives and the country’s constitutionally enshrined civil liberties. The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism. They may take comfort in hearing disagreement from opposite sides of the spectrum. . . . But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-hearted measures keep you exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear armed terrorist out of the United States. Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy. . . . There is never a good time to compromise when the lives and safety of the American people are in the balance.7

Cheney, a known advocate of harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, also challenged Obama’s moves to outlaw them. “The

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enhanced interrogations of high-value detainees and the terrorist surveillance program have without question made our country safer. Every senior official who has been briefed on these classified matters knows of specific attacks that were in the planning stages and were stopped by the programs we put in place.” And he castigated the Obama administration’s release of the interrogation memos produced in the Bush administration as “flatly contrary to the national security interest of the United States. The harm done only begins with top secret information now in the hands of the terrorists, who have just received a lengthy insert for their training manual.”8 The president’s political advisers took note of the fact that former president Bush himself—known to have increasingly overruled his vice president on some of these matters, such as waterboarding—had not entered into the current public debate. So they convinced Obama to let Vice President Biden answer Cheney. The occasion presented itself on the Sunday morning talk shows of February 14, 2010, with segments scheduled to be devoted to the national anxiety and controversies surrounding the luckily foiled effort of the “underwear bomber’s” attempt to destroy an airliner on Christmas day and Attorney General Holder’s decision to bring 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to trial in a federal court in New York City. When the ABC network revealed that Cheney was scheduled to appear on its This Week show, the White House arranged to have Vice President Joe Biden appear that same morning on CBS’s Face the Nation. Letting the vice presidents duke it out would preserve the president’s role in leading a thoughtful national dialogue—not a partisan debate—on the profound dilemmas. And the verbally dueling vice presidents did indeed have at it. Cheney complained that the way the Obama administration handled Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas underwear bomber, and Attorney General Holder’s plan to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a criminal proceeding in New York, rather than by a military commission in Guantánamo, proved that the president is still “trying to avoid treating this as a war.” There were repeated examples, contended Cheney. “Eric Holder . . . still insists on thinking of terror attacks against the United States as criminal acts. . . . and that’s a huge distinction.” 9 Biden shot back: “I don’t think . . . Dick Cheney listens. The President of the United States said in the State of the Union, ‘We’re at war with alQaeda.’ . . . And, by the way, we’re pursuing that war with a vigor like it’s never been seen before. We’ve eliminated 12 of their top 20 people. We have taken out 100 of their associates. . . . They are on the run. I don’t

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know where Dick Cheney has been. Look, it’s one thing . . . to criticize; it’s another thing to sort of rewrite history. What is he talking about?” Cheney was not about to let up. He characterized the promise to close Guantánamo, the intent to rely on criminal rather than military prosecutions of terrorists, and taking “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding off the table as fundamental mistakes. And he accused Vice President Biden of dangerously discounting the likelihood of catastrophic terrorist attacks. “If you’re really serious and you believe this is a war and if you believe the greatest threat is a 9/11 with nukes or a 9/11 with a biological agent of some kind, then you have to consider it a war, you have to consider it as something we may have to deal with tomorrow. You don’t want the vice president of the United States running around saying, ‘Oh, it’s not likely to happen.’ ” Biden returned to the attack, accusing the former vice president of misrepresenting the facts, of trying to rewrite history. “It’s just simply not true that the President of the United States is not prosecuting the war against al-Qaeda with a vigor that’s never been seen before. It’s real, it’s deep, it’s successful.” Cheney’s response was a skeptical smile. Biden’s, to that, was to laugh. Quite different faces of power.

HIGH POLITICS OR POLITICS AS USUAL? The Obama administration found itself increasingly on the defensive with respect to how it was balancing the imperatives of national security and civil liberties—mainly against charges that Obama was letting politics determine policy rather than his professed grand strategy of serving both liberty and national security. These charges pointed not only to his targeted killing of terrorist leaders but also to his failure to close Guantánamo and other military bases outside the United States where alleged terrorists captured anywhere in the world were imprisoned and interrogated without charge or trial; the embrace of military commissions for those prisoners brought to trial; the continued extradition of prisoners to other countries whose guarantees against torture are suspect; the continuation, with some additional FISA court oversight, of the previous administration’s expansive program of surveillance of the phone and internet use of U.S. citizens; and frequent invocation of the state secrets doctrine to fend off court challenges to the government’s counterterrorist activities.

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Plausibly, Obama’s toughening stance could be attributed in part to his perceived need to fend off Republican charges in the 2012 election of softness on matters of national security; but it was probably more heavily determined by the shift in Obama’s perceptions of the terrorist threats and how to counter them. The view from the Oval Office, given acuity each day by intelligence briefings on seething as well as foiled plots, was scarier than the briefings he got as senator. Moreover, as president and bearing the ultimate responsibility for the safety of the people of the country, like his predecessor, he gave the highest priority to countering terrorism, and the notion that this was indeed a very difficult war, which at times could require uncomfortable compromises of traditional civil liberties, became part of his operational code.

TARGETED KILLINGS The issue of how to balance national security and human rights took the spotlight again as Obama began his second term. His nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan, had been the top White House adviser on counterterrorism and the mastermind of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and he had been running the administration’s drone air strike operation against terrorists abroad. Brennan had also been deputy executive director of the CIA during the Bush administration when the CIA was applying its enhanced interrogation techniques—including waterboarding (widely regarded as torture)—to accused terrorist detainees. In his confirmation hearings on February 7, 2013, Brennan denied having any responsibility for the extreme interrogation techniques that became as issue during the Bush years. He promised that he would not allow waterboarding if he were to head the CIA (although he avoided answering the question of whether he considered it to be torture). But he stoutly defended the targeted killings program he had been directing using weapons fired from remotely-piloted drones against suspected terrorists, even if they were U.S. citizens. The issue surfaced when the White House announced it had been successful in a drone strike designed to kill the prominent Yemeni American al-Qaeda official, Anwar al-Awlaki (who was a U.S. citizen). Background stories from the White House revealed that such drone attacks against specially targeted individuals had become a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policy. The reactions by civil liberties and

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human rights organizations and litigations initiated since the al-Awlaki episode were now, in February 2013, given special prominence in Brennan’s confirmation hearings. The Obama administration jumped to Brennan’s defense with a Department of Justice white paper that concluded: It would be lawful for the United States to conduct a lethal operation against a U.S. citizen who is a senior, operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force of al-Qa’ida without violating the Constitution or federal statutes. . . . under the following conditions: (1) an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an immediate threat of violent attack against the United States; (2) capture is infeasible, and the United Sates continues to monitor whether capture becomes infeasible; and (3) the operation is conducted in a manner consistent with the . . . fundamental principles of the laws of war governing the use of force.10

NSA EXPOSED From the perspective of Obama’s political advisers, the inability of either civil libertarians or war-on-terror hawks to mobilize strong opposition to Brennan’s confirmation as head of the CIA was symptomatic of an emergent national acceptance of the president’s approach to balancing the national security/human rights dilemma. But then, barely six months into Obama’s second term, a core aspect of the government’s war on terrorism, much of it highly classified, was suddenly exposed and thrust into the arena of public debate: The Washington Post and the Guardian, followed immediately by other media around the world, published the first installment of thousands of top secret National Security Agency documents Edward Snowden had copied on his computer flash drives. His purpose, he claimed, was to inform the American people how blatantly their presumably sacrosanct rights of privacy and constitutionally guaranteed protections against unreasonable search and seizure were being violated. Snowden, a 29-year-old information-technology whiz, who had worked for the CIA, NSA, and various of their corporate contractors, willingly (indeed proudly) admitted that what he understood were his technicallyillegal acts would likely subject him to prosecution for espionage and to life

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imprisonment, possibly even capital punishment as a traitor. But he was motivated, he maintained, by a higher legality plus a moral and patriotic obligation to expose the evidence that the government was spying, not only on alleged terrorists, but on millions of ordinary citizens. The documents Snowden turned over to the media also confirmed earlier revelations (notoriously stated by WikiLeaks) of widespread eavesdropping by the government on the confidential communications of foreign leaders.11 Not surprisingly, Snowden’s actions provoked a chorus of official denunciations and promises to prosecute him for espionage. But the administration was unable to deny the existence of the government’s surveillance programs he had exposed or to control the public debates that had been unleashed. Some of the controversy would revolve around Snowden himself; apart from having obviously violated the law, was he traitor or patriot? More important, however, was the controversy over the actions of the government; had the NSA and the other intelligence agencies themselves been violating the supreme law of the land? Subscribers to Verizon and other communications companies almost immediately brought suit in the federal court against President Obama, General Keith Alexander (the director of the NSA), Attorney General Eric Holder, and other government officials for conducting a secret government scheme to intercept vast quantities of domestic communications in violation of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The Justice of the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. But the Justice of a District Court in New York City found the NSA phone data collection a legal and important counterterrorism weapon. These cases would next be tried in the federal appellate court system, on their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, President Obama’s effort to balance national security and civil liberties having been profoundly shaken by the revelations, he decided not to wait for the judiciary to rectify the obvious imbalance. His announcement of January 17, 2014, at the Department of Justice of a package of reforms of the government’s surveillance system was couched in some fresh ruminations on the problem. Given the unique power of the state,” he said, “it is not enough for leaders to say ‘trust us; we won’t abuse the data we collect, for history has too many examples when that trust has been breached. Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends on the law to constrain those in power.”

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Accordingly, he outlined in considerable detail a set of reforms and procedures he was instituting “to provide greater transparency to our surveillance activities, and fortify the safeguards that protect the privacy of U.S. persons.” These included: t
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“privacy perspectives” in its deliberations on permits to the NSA and other agencies to conduct intrusive surveillance t
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DPNNVOJcations of millions of Americans that was exposed by Snowden, its removal from control by the NSA, and the establishment of a strictlyaccountable “third party” (yet to be designated) to retain the bulk records and authorize (presumably subject to judicial procedures) any opening up of particular communications to examine their content The president also made a special point of assuring foreign leaders like German Chancellor Merkel and their constituents—angry at being revealed as targets of the wiretaps and new forms of electronic bugging— that the United States was not spying on anyone who doesn’t threaten U.S. national security. Finally, at the close of this remarkably specific and candid statement regarding the government’s surveillance programs, the president, probably inadvertently, partly validated Edward Snowden’s illegal outing of those programs. “One thing I’m certain of,” said Obama, “this debate will make us stronger.”12

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AMBIVALENCE IN DEALING WITH UPHEAVALS IN THE ARAB WORLD Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian targets. This would not be an open-ended intervention. We would not put boots on the ground. . . . But I’m confident we can hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior, and degrade their capacity to carry it out. . . . But . . . our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And that is why I’ve made a second decision: I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress. . . . I know well that we are weary of war. . . . In that part of the world . . . the hopes of the Arab Spring have unleashed forces of change that are going to take many years to resolve. And that’s why we are not contemplating putting out troops in the middle of some else’s war. —Barack Obama

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came not so much in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he was winding down, as in the popular upheavals in the Arab Middle East and Maghreb against tyrannical regimes. Starting largely as peaceful demonstrations and modeled initially on the civil disobedience campaigns of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., the uprisings provoked repressive crackdowns by the targeted governments, which gave further credence to the cries that they were illegitimate regimes. But the crackdowns in turn

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frequently provoked some of the militant protesters to engage in violent counteraction, which fed into the claims of the beleaguered autocrats of being bulwarks against anarchy. As the so-called Arab Spring burst forth and spread throughout the region, Obama could not avoid facing the dilemma of on the one hand endorsing the demands of the demonstrators, thereby alienating governments with whom the United States had geostrategic partnerships; or on the other hand continuing to treat those governments as valued allies or partners, thereby appearing to validate the claims of the most anti-American and anti-Western elements among the reformers that the targeted governments were puppets of U.S. imperialism. Was there a basic response to these upheavals that would put the United States on the (right) side of history? And what short-term and long-term strategies could be derived from such a grand strategy? Or was there no grand strategy from which particular policies could be deduced and would the connections between the unfolding events and U.S. interests and values have to be induced uniquely from each situation on a case-by-case basis? Obama’s deep ambivalence in dealing with these issues was one of the distinguishing characteristics of his presidency.

TUNISIA: THE APPLECART OF STABILITY TURNED OVER A catalyst of the storm of protests that would sweep across the region starting in late 2010—though it was at first regarded as country-specific turbulence—was the eruption of demonstrations in Tunisia against regime of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Although notoriously autocratic and corrupt, the government of Tunisia was one of Washington’s favorites in the region due to its cooperation in the campaign against terrorism. But under the relatively calm surface, grievances had been seething—on the part of Islamic fundamentalists against Ben Ali’s secularism and on the part of liberal reformers against the regime’s concentration of wealth and power. Activated by the self-immolation on December 17, 2010, of a fruit and vegetable vendor whose cart had been confiscated by police, the initial street protests, mobilized through Twitter and Facebook transmissions, were soon joined by labor unions, middle-class professionals, and even elements of the country’s elite. The resort to deadly force by Ben Ali’s security forces, also transmitted by the social media, only exacerbated the resentments and enlarged the demonstrating crowds, to the point where

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the Tunisian army chief of staff refused orders from President Ben Ali to fire on the protesters. In less than a month, Ben Ali was compelled to leave the country, while other members of his government, the courts, and opposition leaders attempted to institute a process of transition to a more democratic regime. The Obama administration, caught by surprise, maintained an aloof stance during the first few weeks of the uprising, not knowing which side would prevail. It restricted itself to statements urging the Tunisian government to respect freedom of assembly and not use force against the demonstrators. In mid-January, however, as the tide turned decisively in favor of the reformers and as dissident groups in Algeria, Morocco, and Jordan— inspired by social media reports of the successes of the demonstrations in Tunisia—took to the streets in their own countries, Secretary of State Clinton, speaking at a forum in Doha, Qatar, signaled the growing appreciation in Washington that neutrality was not in the U.S. interest. In too many places, in too many ways, she told the assemblage, “the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand. The new and dynamic Middle East that I have seen needs firmer ground if it is to take root and grow everywhere.” And in remarks unmistakably directed at the high officials present, she warned, “Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever. If leaders don’t offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum.”1 With respect to Tunisia itself, the United States would give material and moral support and advice if it was requested for the transition toward a constitutional democracy, however bumpy the road. Caretaker governments some dominated by Islamic parties, some by secular technocrats, kept the peace for the next three years as the national assembly struggled to draft a democratic constitution, to be ratified and a new government selected in the 2014 elections. Meanwhile, the hope in Washington was that Secretary Clinton’s prophecy of further revolutionary upheavals against regimes who failed to reform themselves would prod governments in the region to at least open up a dialogue with their opponents as to how to institute peaceful change. But in country after country the official responses to what was now being called the Arab Spring proved too little and too late to avoid explosions of protest that to the regimes’ embarrassments, the social media beamed around the world.

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EGYPT: THE (FAR FROM) PERFECT STORM The Obama administration’s response to the uprising in Egypt that forced President Hosni Mubarak from power followed a pattern similar to its response to the situation in Tunisia: initial reluctance to take sides, giving way to strong suggestions from President Obama himself urging the dictator step down to facilitate a transition to democracy. That there should have been any ambivalence at all in the White House, and not forthright expressions of support for the most dependable and important U.S. partner in the Arab World, was itself a symptom of the growing recognition in the U.S. policy community, cutting across party lines, that the turbulence and upheavals underway in the Maghreb and the Middle East might well be part of a profound but as yet unpredictable sea change in power relationships in the region. Moreover, the initial reluctance to take sides was based on skepticism that the Mubarak regime, though very unpopular, was all that vulnerable. There was uncertainty in Washington about how the government in Cairo was going to react to the evident capacity of the opposition to mobilize huge crowds of angry citizens from all walks of life, including young information technology specialists and other professionals, who were demanding that the dictator step down. One stratagem for Mubarak was the demagogic one of fractionating the opposition by catering to its radical Islamic elements and dramatically realigning Egypt with the most emotional pan-Arabic/pan-Islamic cause: the Palestinian conflict with Israel. From Washington’s perspective, this would be a disastrous development, for it was the Israel-Egypt peace accord of 1979 brokered by President Carter that brought on the geopolitical partnership between Egypt and the United States. For the past three decades Washington had relied on Cairo to be a moderating influence on militant Islam, an opponent of aggression by both Iraq and Iran, a guarantor of U.S. commercial and naval use of the Suez Canal, and an important ally in the campaign against al-Qaeda and other terrorists. The United States having invested over $60 billion in economic and military assistance to Egypt since 1979, the Obama administration was in no mood to alienate either the Mubarak regime or its possible successor; but this counseled a wait and see posture. As huge crowds chanting anti-Mubarak slogans gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and public spaces in other cities during the last week of January 2011 and the first week of February, and as protestors clashed with

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riot police, Ministry of Interior security forces, and pro-Mubarak squads of thugs, high U.S. military officials urgently but quietly entreated their Egyptian counterparts not to allow themselves to become instruments of violent repression. Mubarak loyalists countered this American counsel with the argument that the real alternatives were either persisting chaos exploited by the radical Islamists or survival of the modernizing secular regime, which might require tough emergency measures. In a partial response to the protests, Mubarak announced on February 1 that he would not run for reelection in the fall of 2011 and was prepared to oversee a peaceful transfer of authority at the end of his term; meanwhile his reshuffled cabinet would engage in a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood and other representatives of the protest movement on constitutional reforms, including provisions for the presidential election. But the dominant voices from Tahrir Square shouted that they would not leave until Mubarak left. Observing the turmoil, President Obama was in a quandary. He realized that unless and until Mubarak resigned, the conflict would continue to escalate and become increasingly violent. Although he did not publicly call for Mubarak to step down right away (White House aides later confided to journalists that the president was concerned that such open insistence could backfire, allowing Mubarak to whip up nationalist sentiment against U.S. interference), Obama insisted in a tense president-to-president phone conversation that Mubarak’s resignation was in the interest of both countries.2 And in his public remarks just after the phone call, Obama was unequivocal in stating that the United States was now on the side of the Egyptians demanding fundamental reforms and a wholesale change of leadership in Cairo. “Now, it is not the role of any other country to determine Egypt’s leaders,” he said. “Only the Egyptian people can do that. What is clear—and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak—is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.”3 Over the next ten days, on-again, off-again negotiations between representatives of Mubarak’s regime and representatives of the various opposition groups focused mainly on the timing and rules of the next national elections. There were sporadic outbreaks of violence that the military, without taking sides, tried to contain. Then on February 10, the situation appeared to be coming to a head. Things could go either way: toward resolution or violent rebellion. Government officials warned protestors to disband or the military would

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forcibly exercise control. President Mubarak announced he was delegating some of his powers to the vice president Omar Suleiman but was otherwise emotionally defiant, reiterating he would stay on until the election of a new president in September. Obama went public again, now speaking as advocate and ally of the opposition: “Too many Egyptians remain unconvinced that the government is serious about a genuine transition to democracy,” he said. “The Egyptian government must put forward a credible, concrete and unequivocal path toward genuine democracy, and they have not yet seized that opportunity.”4 On the next day, February 11, 2011—less than three weeks since the start of the protests in Tahrir Square—Vice President Suleiman announced that President Mubarak had resigned and had departed with his family to the town of Sharm el Sheikh and that the Supreme Higher Council of the Egyptian armed forces had taken control of the country. President Obama promptly took to the podium to identify the United States with the defining historical moment represented by Mubarak’s stepping down, but being careful not take credit for it. It was a victory not only for the Egyptian people, he intoned, but also “a victory for universal rights and human dignity.” The Egyptians did this “by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence—not terrorism, not mindless killing . . . that bent the arc of human history toward justice once more. . . . Today belongs to the people of Egypt, and the American people are moved by these scenes in Cairo and across Egypt because of who we are as a people and the kind of world we want our children to grow up in.”5 As the smoke from the celebratory firecrackers in Cairo cleared, however, the Obama administration—like the variety of Egyptian dissident groups who now had to coalesce around the complex agenda for constructing a new political order—found itself in the proverbial situation of not being all that happy with getting what it wished for. The dictator was out, but the military commanders (all of whom he had appointed) retained their privileges and power; and without the restraining hand of their former commander in chief, they fell into the habit of violently crushing street demonstrations of citizen groups attempting to influence the content and pace of the constitutional system the military had promised to bring about. Moreover, what was functional for forcing Mubarak out—a very broad coalition of religionists (Muslims of various degrees of orthodoxy and Christians) and secularists, angry unemployed, globally active

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entrepreneurs, and young technocratic intellectuals—was turning out to be dysfunctional for negotiating with the interim military regime over the sequencing and rules for the democratic transition. The quite disciplined Muslim Brotherhood, however, taking advantage of the lack of unity among the secularists, got the military regime to preside over nationwide elections in November 2011, which the Brotherhood correctly calculated would allow it to win a plurality of seats in the parliament and, in coalition with the even more militant Salafis, to dominate the constitution-writing process and the selection of the top leadership of a postmilitary government. The military also cooperated six months later, in May and June 2012, in presiding over the election of a president. But as it looked virtually certain that the Muslin Brotherhood’s candidate would win the runoff election, the junta (still acting as the interim executive) and the Supreme Court (acting on behalf of the military) summarily shut down the parliament and awarded themselves sweeping powers to promulgate laws, control the national budget, and issue a new constitution themselves—in effect, preemptively emasculating the new president and the Islamic-oriented government he was expected to install. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ostensibly attending the reopening of the U.S. consulate in Alexandria, flew to Egypt in an effort to persuade the military to confine itself to “a purely national security role,” as she put it, and to “reaffirm the strong support of the United States for the Egyptian people and for their democratic future.” But she wanted to be clear, she insisted, “that the United States is not in the business, in Egypt, of choosing winners and losers, even if we could, which, of course we cannot.”6 Protesters at the consulate in Alexandria, charging that the United States was again meddling in Egyptian politics, threw tomatoes and shoes at her motorcade and shouted “Monica! Monica! Monica!” (the name of the White House staffer with whom her husband had an affair) as Secretary Clinton left the building.7 As former Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi was sworn in on June 30, 2012, as the country’s first elected—but seemingly powerless— head of state, the Obama administration and other governments were essentially paralyzed when it came to pressuring the military to accept legitimate civilian rule. But President Morsi was not bereft of power plays of his own for reversing what the military had done: Invoking the inherent authority of his office, banking on widespread popular endorsement— secular and sectarian—of the results of the electoral process the country

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had enthusiastically adopted, he fired top generals responsible for giving themselves illegitimate power and appointed one of the most respected military leaders, General Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, formerly head of military intelligence, as minister of defense. But ironically, in amassing the powers of the presidency vis-à-vis those who might try to usurp it—particularly during the period of transition in which the drafting and ratification of the new constitution had yet to be completed and new elections held under its auspices—Morsi claimed for himself autocratic law-making, judicial, and law enforcement prerogatives that renewed fears of the Muslim Brotherhood establishing a theocratic dictatorship. When in late November 2012 President Morsi issued a series of decrees claiming virtually absolute power for himself, not subject to judicial review, Cairo’s Tahrir Square and other city squares throughout Egypt again erupted in massive protests against the government. Now it was the Muslim Brotherhood who called upon the military to provide the state with minimum civic order. But General el-Sisi was not about to have his troops take sides for or against the pro-Morsi or anti-Morsi agitators. During the rest of 2012 and the spring of 2013, the situation deteriorated further, with pro- and anti-Morsi demonstrations frequently escalating into violent encounters. Coptic Christians also became targets of attack by extremist Muslims. On June 30, the anniversary of Morsi’s inauguration, millions of anti-Morsi protestors took to the streets all around the country. As incidents of violence multiplied, on July 3, 2013, General el-Sisi and his military colleagues—having determined it was necessary to prevent total anarchy—removed President Morsi from power and placed him and several other Muslim Brotherhood leaders under house arrest. The general appointed the chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court as interim president (subordinate to the military) with the responsibility for forming a transitional government mandated to oversee the completion of a new constitution and electoral process while the military enforced order. In response to the nationwide explosion of protests this takeover triggered, el-Sisi declared martial law and his forces engaged in preventive detention of senior Muslim leaders and closed down the Brotherhood’s media and newspapers. The Obama administration was back in its damned-if-you-do/damnedif-you-don’t quandary. For once again, as during the anti-Mubarak phase of the uprising in Egypt, not to weigh in against the military’s preemptory role would be to allow the junta to make a mockery of the democratic

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transition. Turning this dilemma into a trilemma for the United States, minority religious groups, most notably the Coptic Christians, plus many of the secular liberals who were in the vanguard of the Arab Spring uprising, were now considering a tacit alliance with the military regime despite its anti-democratic moves. They appeared to fear the older and known evil of an Egypt dominated by the military less than they feared the unknown evil of a theocratic state run by the Muslim Brotherhood that might suppress the other religions and secularists. Human rights groups in the United States and around the world were similarly torn, for they had been growing increasingly alarmed at Morsi’s own tyrannical attempts to centralize power and suppress dissent prior to the military’s coup. But was it a coup? The Obama administration refrained from using the term because that would activate provisions in U.S. foreign assistance legislation prohibiting military transfers to governments established by “coups”—which would apply to the $1.5 billion of annual military aid being provided to Egypt. The ambivalence in the Oval Office was reflected in the president’s pubic statement that we appreciate the complexity of the situation. While Mohamed Morsi was elected President in a democratic election, his government was not inclusive and did not respect the views of all Egyptians. We know that . . . millions of Egyptians, perhaps even a majority of Egyptians were calling for a change in course. . . . Instead, we’ve seen a more dangerous path taken [by the military] through arbitrary arrests, a broad crackdown on Mr. Morsi’s associations and supporters, and now tragically the violence that’s taken the lives of hundreds and wounded thousands more. . . . The United States strongly condemns the steps that have been taken by Egypt’s interim government and security forces. We deplore violence against civilians. We support universal rights essential to human dignity. We oppose the pursuit of martial law, which denies those rights to citizens under the principle that security trumps individual freedom or might makes right. . . . And given the depths of our partnership with Egypt, our national security interests in the pivotal part of the world and our belief that engagement can support a transition back to a democratically elected civilian government, we’ve sustained our commitment to Egypt and its people. But . . . our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back.

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As a result, . . . we are canceling our biannual joint military exercise which was scheduled for next month.8

Anticipating that critics would brand the military exercise cancellation as a mere slap on the wrist, the president revealed that he had asked his national security team to assess “further steps that we may take as necessary with respect to the U.S.-Egyptian relationship.”9 With debates raging in the U.S. Congress over whether and how to force the president’s hand, and reports showing the el-Sisi regime itself brutally persisting in human rights violations, the Obama administration was moved further to announce in early October 2013 a temporary and “modest” freeze on the delivery of military items. The equipment being withheld included Apache attack helicopters, Harpoon missiles, M1-A1 tank parts, and F-16 warplanes. The $260 million earmarked for the general Egyptian budget was also frozen.10 But the administration was still unwilling to define General el-Sisi’s ouster of Morsi as a coup, for that could require a full cutoff of military aid. Obama did not want, as he said, the geopolitical relationship with Egypt to “trump” human rights. Nor did he want the larger agenda of U.S. interests in the region for which Washington depended on Egyptian cooperation—resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, restricting the Iranian nuclear program, mitigating the Syrian civil war, assuring free flow of the region’s petroleum, combating terrorism—to be held hostage to the way the Egyptians handled, or mishandled, their internal political crises. As he put it in his September 2013 address to the United Nations, “The United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure our core interests in the region.” Yet emphasizing once more the softer aspects of U.S. power, he reminded the world body that for him to say these are America’s core interests “is not to say that they are our only interest. We deeply believe it is in our interests to see a Middle East and North Africa that is [sic] peaceful and prosperous. And we’ll continue to promote democracy and human rights and free markets because we believe these practices achieve peace and prosperity.”11 Field Marshall Sisi’s next step in consolidating and trying to legitimate his autocratic rule was to doff his military uniform and run for president as a civilian in the 2014 elections. His victory was a foregone conclusion, having suppressed the anti-government and pro-Muslim Brotherhood media and marshalled the government’s ample public-relations resources

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to glorify his campaign. The best the United States could now look forward to, without the power to assure it, would be an el-Sisi regime modelled on Anwar Sadat’s or, second best, Mubarak’s dictatorship, that would maintain peace with Israel and would be amenable to coordinating its counterterrorist actions with the United States. It soon became clear that in roughly three years since the popular uprising forced Mubarak’s ouster, the cowed Egyptian electorate in effect reinstituted his clone—albeit officially retired from the military, but in fact still one of them and their leader. And reluctantly, despite Egypt’s full-circle return to a human-rights-repressing regime, official Washington, with a sigh of relief from the Netanyahu government, quietly welcomed Cairo’s resumption of an honest-broker’s role, at least for the Israel-Palestine conflict. Critics called Obama’s Egypt policy “dithering,” but to the president the administration’s ambivalence—his ambivalence, throughout the Arab Spring and the return of bad weather— was the essence of realism.

Bahrain The basic dilemmas the contagious Arab Spring fever posed for the Obama administration were also thrown into stark relief when Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa invited Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to help him put down the democracyespousing uprising against his regime. The resulting intervention visibly pitted key allies of the United States against the basic transformatory trend in the region that the United States under George W. Bush and now under Barak Obama claimed to be supporting. Inspired by the events in Tunisia and Egypt, leaders of the majority Shiite community—the majority of Bahrain’s population—who had been agitating for decades against the discriminatory policies of the Sunni-run regime, were energized to stage their own “Day of Rage” on February 14, 2011. The heavy-handed response of the army and police, in which some demonstrators were killed, generated international reactions and intense but quiet efforts by U.S. diplomats to get both sides to compromise. King Hamad promised to investigate and take legal action against unjustified uses of force by its security forces and to initiate a series of constitutional reforms to allow the Shiite population more equitable representation. President Obama voiced approval. “As a long-standing partner of Bahrain,” the president affirmed, “the United States continues to believe that Bahrain’s

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stability will be enhanced by respecting the universal human rights of the people of Bahrain and reforms that meet the aspirations of all Bahrainis.”12 In the following weeks, however, as the regime’s opposition escalated their demands, claiming the king’s promises were basically a hoax, the U.S. government showed no inclination to weigh in against its strategic ally. Not just any small ally, Bahrain is headquarters for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which includes a carrier battle group based in Manama. Under the regime’s cooperative defense agreement with the United States, nearly 2,500 U.S. military personnel are stationed there, and a $580 million project is underway to expand U.S. naval facilities. So when the king in mid-March 2011, fearing the protests were getting out of hand, invited the Saudis and other GCC members to send in troops to help him stabilize the situation, the U.S. reaction continued to be equivocal—and muted. The GCC states justified their combined deployment of over 2,000 troops on the basis of suspicions that the uprising was aided and abetted by the Iranians and that Tehran was attempting to generate a full-scale popular revolt by the Shiite majority against the Sunni-run regime. Nonetheless, there was concern in the White House that the Saudi/GCC troop presence, branded an “occupation” by Tehran, would further radicalize the opposition movement in Bahrain and allow the Iranians to claim legitimacy for counterintervening, whether overtly or covertly. Throughout the rest of 2011, therefore, U.S. diplomacy proceeded on two tracks: strongly urging both the regime in Manama and its opponents to agree on a graduated process for expanding the political rights and civil liberties of all of the country’s people and persuading the Saudis and other members of the GCC to withdraw their forces and turn the stabilization and pacification roles fully back to the Bahraini government. Most of the U.S. entreaties were conveyed privately. Yet in a major speech on his Middle Eastern policies the president did include a public rebuke to the Hamad regime for not doing enough to moderate the crisis. Although recognizing that “the Bahraini government has a legitimate interest in the rule of law,” he pointed to “mass arrests and brute force . . . at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain’s citizens.” The only way forward, he said, was for the government and opposition to engage in dialogue, “and you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail. The government must create the conditions for dialogue, and the opposition must participate to create a just future for all Bahrainis.”13 At the end of June 2011, King Hamad and the leading opposition group, Al Wifaq, said they were launching a “national dialogue in Bahrain” and

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the Saudis announced they were withdrawing their troops. Obama hailed these developments as consistent with his premise that the path to stability for the countries in the region was via dialogue, democratization, and the expansion of human rights; and that brutally enforced public order was inherently unstable. But further turmoil in Bahrain and its neighbors over the months and years ahead, pitting the champions of reform against recalcitrant governments, while seeming to confirm what was being called the “Obama Doctrine,” did little to resolve the here-and-now predicaments resulting from the fact that the recalcitrant governments were often strategic partners of the United States and the reformers were not all that reliable as future partners.

Libya A day after the February “Day of Rage” uprising in Bahrain and five days after Mubarak stepped down, it only took a few peaceful anti-regime protests in eastern Libya for Muammar Gaddafi to unleash a heavy military crackdown on demonstrations. But his swift and brutal response only brought angry crowds into the streets demanding his ouster, some of them retaliating with small arms. The rapid expansion of the conflict across the country, even into Tripoli and other cities thought to be Gaddafi strongholds, plus a number of defections of high officials from his regime, signaled an impending civil war with previously intimidated tribes and their militias joining the rebels. The Obama administration was at first highly ambivalent toward the situation in Libya—Gaddafi having cooperated in covert actions against al-Qaeda, and having relinquished his effort to develop his own nuclear weapons. Also U.S. intelligence on the fractious rebel groups did not inspire confidence in either their ability to mobilize a sufficiently coherent force to bring down the Gaddafi regime or in the unlikely event that they did succeed, to establish and sustain a viable government. But in this case, unlike in the two previous U.S. interventions in the region (the 1991 Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom), it was now a core group of West European countries plus Saudi Arabia and other friends in the GCC that were prodding the initially reluctant United States to join in military actions to prevent Gaddafi’s forces from massacring Libyan civilians. Following the lead of French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British prime minister David Cameron, President Obama—despite opposition

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by Secretary of Defense Gates and some other key advisers, but urged on by Secretary of State Clinton—instructed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice to cosponsor a Security Council resolution approving a “no-fly zone” to protect the Libyan civilians Gaddafi was preparing to slaughter. Security Council Resolution 1973, adopted on March 17, 2011, by a vote of 10 in favor with 5 abstentions (Brazil, China, Germany, India, Russian Federation), called the situation in Libya a threat to international peace and security, demanded an immediate cease-fire, and authorized member states “to take all necessary measures . . . to protect civilians and civilian populated areas” under threat of attack. The authorization specified “a ban on all flights in the airspace of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” (the area including Benghazi and other rebel strongholds Gaddafi’s forces were about to attack). But consonant with White House concerns about being drawn into another military occupation of a Muslim country, Resolution 1973 excluded “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” 14 In his statement the next day, President Obama explained that in enforcing the UN resolution the U.S. military would be providing “unique capabilities” as part of an international coalition in which the British and French and members of the Arab League would be taking a leading role in implementing the no-fly zone. “I also want to be clear about what we will not be doing,” he said. “The United States is not going to deploy ground troops into Libya. And we are not going to use force to go beyond a welldefined goal—specifically, the protection of civilians in Libya.”15 Yet the actual use of force over the next ten days proved to be more multipronged than the president’s cautious formulation of the limited purpose of the intervention appeared to imply. As reports from the theater of operations revealed that the United States had committed some of its more advanced military assets to the mission, Secretary of Defense Gates, who had been a reluctant convert to the no-fly zone operation, let alone a more direct military intervention, was asked on Meet the Press: “Is Libya in our vital interest as a country?” Gates carefully replied, “No, I don’t think it is a vital interest for the United States, but we clearly have interests there, and it’s a part of the region which is a vital interest for the United States.” Sounding puzzled, Meet the Press host David Gregory responded: “I think a lot of people would hear that and say, well, that’s quite striking. Not in our vital interest, and yet we’re committing military resources to it.”16 Gates’s somewhat ambiguous remarks did reflect the thinking in the White House, which the president the very next night sought to clarify in

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a comprehensive report to the nation of what the United States was doing in Libya and why: Gaddafi, in reaction to the world’s condemnation of his brutal suppression of dissent, had escalated his attacks against the Libyan people; innocents were targeted for killing, hospitals and ambulances were attacked; journalists were arrested and sexually assaulted; supplies of water and food were cut to communities Gaddafi threatened to wipe out as rats, military jets and helicopters had been unleashed to destroy apartment buildings and mosques and to strafe people in the streets, and Gaddafi’s troops were massing for a drive into the rebel stronghold in the eastern city of Benghazi. “We knew that if we waited,” said Obama, “Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. It was not in our national interest to let that happen [emphasis added]. I refused to let that happen.” Accordingly, we struck regime forces approaching Benghazi to save that city and the people within it. We hit Qaddafi’s troops in neighboring Ajdabiya, allowing the opposition to drive them out. We hit Qaddafi’s air defenses, which paved the way for a no-fly zone. We targeted tanks and military assets that had been choking off towns and cities, and we cut off much of their source of supply. And tonight [nine days into the military operation], I can report we have stopped Qaddafi’s deadly advance.17

By doing so, the president claimed, he remained faithful to the pledge he made at the outset of the crisis, that “America’s role would be limited; that we would not put ground troops into Libya; that we would focus our unique capabilities on the front end of the operation and that we would transfer responsibility to our allies and partners. . . . In that effort, the United States will play a supporting role.” This supporting role would include the provision of intelligence, logistical support, search and rescue assistance, jamming the regime’s communications. But with the NATO-led coalition taking over the operations, the U.S. direct participation would be “reduced significantly.” 18 The objective of the military operation would also stay limited to protecting Libyan citizens from being slaughtered. Obama would not, as some were suggesting, broaden it to bring down Gaddafi and usher in a new government. Of course, Libya and the world would be better off with Gaddafi out of power, the president affirmed, and he had embraced that goal and would actively pursue it through nonmilitary means. But

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broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake. . . . If we tried to overthrow Qaddafi by force, our coalition would splinter. We would likely have to put U.S. troops on the ground to accomplish that mission, or risk killing many civilians from the air. The dangers faced by our men and women in uniform would be far greater. So would the costs of our share of the responsibility for what comes next. To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq . . . But regime change there took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is something we cannot afford in Libya. 19

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense Gates stuck to this script. The intervention was shifting into its second phase, the NATO-led effort called Operation Unified Protector in which the U.S. military will provide the capabilities that others cannot provide, either in kind or in scale, such as electronic warfare, aerial refueling, lift, search and rescue, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance support. Accordingly, we will . . . significantly ramp down our commitment of other military capabilities and resources. The NATO-led military mission . . . is a limited one. . . . There will be no American boots on the ground in Libya. Deposing the Qaddafi regime, as welcome as that eventuality would be, is not part of the military mission.20

Pressed by the senators on the regime-change issue, Gates had a difficult time distinguishing the political goals from the military objectives. “In my view,” said Gates, “the removal of Colonel Qaddafi will likely be achieved over time through political and economic measures by his own people. However, this NATO-led operation can degrade Qaddafi’s military capability to the point where he and those around him will be forced into a very different set of choices and behaviors in the future.”21 Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under intense questioning, clouded the distinction even more: “Clearly, the policy of the President is one of—to see Qaddafi out, to see regime change in that regard. And I think that can be accomplished through the limited military mission that we have and—in execution—and then the additional—the other tools, if you will, that we have to pressure him over time.”22 But as the NATO

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attacks escalated to include strikes on Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli and air support operations for the rebel forces battling loyalist forces across the country, U.S. military assets committed to the conflict (target information provided by Predator drones, for example) escalated—blurring in fact the already-murky lines in rhetoric between population protection and regime-change missions. The extent and objectives of the U.S. military operation in Libya embroiled the Obama administration in a debate with critics over whether its actions were consistent with the War Powers Resolution Congress passed in 1973. The resolution’s purported purpose was to ensure that the executive branch would never again, as it allegedly did in the Vietnam War, override the legislative branch’s constitutionally provided authority to decide when the country will go to war. Although, like its predecessors, the Obama administration did not consider itself constitutionally bound to adhere to the terms of the resolution, it did claim to be acting in the spirit of the resolution by providing Congress with updated statements and testimony on the Libyan intervention. However, in refusing to implement the resolution’s requirement that in order to engage in hostilities for more than sixty days, there had to be congressional authorization to do so, the administration did not challenge the legality of that requirement per se; it only challenged the resolution’s applicability to the Libyan case, arguing the United States was not engaged in “hostilities.” As put by the White House press secretary Jay Carney, the “U.S. operations do not involve a number of elements traditionally associated with hostilities, including sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces.” There was “not a single U.S. ground troop” in Libya and “no U.S. casualties . . . or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by such factors.” Our conclusion, reiterated Carney, reading from a statement prepared by the administration’s lawyers, “[is that] these constrained and limited operations do not amount to hostilities under the War Powers Resolution” and that this “[is] consistent with . . . interpretations put forward by administrations of both political parties dating back to the statute’s 1973 enactment.”23 Notably, the president himself, while vigorously defending the proposition that the Libyan intervention was a just and prudent resort to military force, not a high-risk military operation, refrained from giving voice to these strained legalisms. Another issue for the administration was whether NATO and/or the countries participating in the operation against Gaddafi’s forces should provide arms to the rebels to permit them to better defend themselves

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than they could by depending entirely on the weapons of the anti-Gaddafi militias and what they could obtain by breaking into the regime’s arsenals. The White House, still wary of having NATO become party to a fullblown Libyan civil war and insisting on fidelity to the UN-mandated arms embargo, was opposed to supplying weapons, but as various members of the coalition nevertheless began to provide the rebels with military equipment, the United States became an enabler of these efforts too. It took another six months (April through September 2011) for the disorganized rebel forces, aided by NATO air strikes, to essentially overcome the weakened and demoralized forces still loyal to Gaddafi. The ragged denouement came on October 20 with the rebels’ capture and killing of Gaddafi. Having fled Tripoli, Gaddafi had been hiding out in Sirtre near his birthplace. A car carrying Gaddafi in a convoy of vehicles targeted from a Predator drone base in Las Vegas, Nevada, was disabled by NATO air strikes; and Gaddafi, having holed up in a roadside drainage pipe, was dragged out and beaten by the rebels (in a bloody scene broadcast around the world) before they killed him. “Today, we can definitely say that the Qaddafi regime has come to an end,” proclaimed President Obama, hailing it as proof that “the rule of an iron first inevitably comes to an end.” Obama claimed to be under no illusion, however, that the transition to democracy in Libya would be anything but long and difficult.24 Obama’s worry about difficulties ahead in Libya was validated when on September 11, 2012 (the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States), heavily armed jihadists stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, setting it afire and murdering Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other State Department officials. Whether that particular shocking event could have been prevented or not (a question generating intense debate in the United States), it was a cruel reminder of the reality that toppling a tyrant may lead, at least initially, to a period not of democracy but of anarchy, which in Libya was being exploited by groups who hate the United States even more than Gaddafi did. Some of these provided safe haven for al-Qaeda fighters and contributed recruits and arms for al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist rebels battling the French-backed forces propping up the central government in neighboring Mali. The scene in Libya increasingly featured conflicts among rival militias— hundreds of them—often battling each other to secure control their own claimed swath of territory and refusing to be integrated into the country’s regular armed forces. Some of the militias were even trying to take over

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Tripoli and were engaged not only in skirmishes against the government’s forces but also against enemy ethnic groups with similar aspirations. But various of the militant groups were also infused with globalist jihadist aims; and the Obama administration, since the attack on the U.S consulate in Benghazi, had shifted into a damage-control, no longer really a nationbuilding, mode. Thus in response to the escalation of violence in Libya in July 2014, the State Department, instead of demanding a military reinforcement of the embassy in Tripoli, suspended the embassy’s operation and relocated about 150 of its personnel in Tunisia—symptomatic of the larger shift in grand strategy as the region’s political spring turned dangerously stormy.

Syria The Obama administration, no less than the regime of Bashar al-Assad, doubted that the democratization fever migrating via the media and cybernetworks would also destabilize the Syrian polity. Memories of how Assad’s father brutally suppressed protests in the 1990s, the fear of Bashar’s own vicious security apparatus, plus the regime’s stratagem of co-opting members of the country’s elite class who might otherwise oppose it, appeared to have marginalized the disaffected citizens, rendering them impotent for anything like the uprising that drove Mubarak from power in Egypt. Syria was “immune” from such infections, Assad declared. Moreover, in recent years the U.S. administrations had gone relatively easy on Syria when it came to applying sanctions on the regime as provided for in congressional human rights and antiterrorism legislation. U.S. diplomats regarded Assad as a possible moderating force in the next phase of the Arab-Israeli peace process—this despite Syria’s partnership with Iran in supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. When Assad, fearful that a contagious virus of popular protest was now also beginning to penetrate the Syrian body politic, ordered the merciless suppression of demonstrations for reform, the Obama administration, having just endorsed the uprising in Egypt as an expression of universal rights, could no longer remain aloof. And by August 2011, with entreaties from Washington and graduated applications of economic sanctions not having dissuaded al-Assad to change course, President Obama once again, as with Mubarak and Gaddafi, made the dictator himself the issue:

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The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.25

In Egypt, when it became evident that the president of the United States was demanding it, Mubarak did step aside. And in Libya, when Gaddafi refused to accede to Obama’s insistence that he leave, the United States joined its NATO allies in militarily supporting the insurrection that captured and killed him. The ability of the United States to push Assad out of power, however, would be severely constrained. The regime’s 330,000 troop army, equipped with Russian weapons, was reputed to be disciplined and loyal to Assad. The country’s surface-to-air missiles were highly colocated with concentrations of population, so knocking them out in order to establish no-fly zones would produce even more civilian casualties. While granting that direct U.S. military intervention was not an option, Secretary of Defense Panetta, Secretary of State Clinton, and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey argued within the administration for providing the rebels with material support and training, perhaps with the assistance of the Turks, who were already doing so. But President Obama listened to other advisers who pointed out the Syrian opposition was split along sectarian lines, even more than in Libya. Moreover, administration strategists worried that the provision of major arms to opposition groups could get into the wrong hands—possibly al-Qaeda—and/or could generate a civil war that could well turn into a proxy war pitting those backed by the United States against allies of Iran backed by Russia.26 Even so, President Obama did not rule out any U.S. military operation whatsoever against Syria—“a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” he warned in August 2012. “That would change my equation.”27 For the Israelis, though—seeing their own national security threatened by advanced weapons of any sort getting into the hands of their enemies—the red line for Syria was not as self-limiting. Thus on January 29 and 30, 2013, the Israeli air force struck and destroyed a research center near Damascus and a convoy of weapons in Syria the Israelis claimed were being shipped to Hezbollah.28 The perspective from the White House was one of satisfaction that the Israelis would give the Assad regime a bloody nose as they

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saw fit, but also one of concern that Assad would point to the attacks from Israel in an attempt to weaken the rebellion against his rule by branding it a U.S.-Zionist scheme. Obama began his second term troubled by the deteriorating situation in Syria more than by any other foreign policy issue. No doctrine, no grand strategy provided him (or his critics) with guidance on whether and how to commit U.S. material and human resources in an attempt to stop the carnage. Yet action—or inaction in response to the Syrian crisis—would have profound implications for the future of U.S. power, in the sense of the United States being able to influence others in the pursuit of a less violent and more just world order. Sooner than expected, however, that need to decide whether or not the United States should use force against the Assad regime was pushed to the top of Obama’s agenda by a series of credible allegations in the spring and summer of 2013 that Syrian forces had been using chemical weapons—quite likely the nerve agent sarin—against rebel fighting units and enclaves, killing and injuring civilians in the process. The Syrian government responded to these charges by claiming the opposition forces were the ones using chemical weapons. These initial allegations, although about relatively small incidents, prompted the United Nations in conjunction with the World Health Organization and the official Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to investigate whether chemical weapons had been used; but the UN mandate did not permit it to investigate deeply enough to determine what chemical agents had been used or who had used them. The cacophony of official and journalistic reports that ensued from the field did not yet constitute the “strong evidence” President Obama required in order to conclude that the red line he had laid down had been crossed. The strong evidence required by the president did surface on August 21, 2013, in the form of reports of attacks with chemical weapons in the Damascus suburbs in which more than 1,000 people were victims. After a week of verifying investigations by international and national agencies, Obama concluded—and said so publicly in a PBS interview—that the Assad regime had indeed used chemical weapons on unarmed civilians. When asked if there was to be a military response, he said he had not yet made a decision to take military action against Syria, but his answer sparked widespread speculation, which the White House made no effort to quash, that he was about to do so. The administration was taken aback, however, by the vote in the British Parliament on August 29, acceded to by

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Prime Minister David Cameron, against giving support to military action in Syria. Nevertheless, and in the face of intense pro and con statements by members of Congress, Secretary of State John Kerry announced on August 30 that discussions on military action were underway. Scheduled to address the nation (and world) on August 31, Obama in a moment-of-truth prior consultation with his immediate advisers (but without the presence of either Secretary of State Kerry and Secretary of Defense Hagel) decided on a highly controversial course for dealing with the situation. As stated in this unique address, he had determined it was in the U.S. national interest to take military action against military targets in Syria—which he did not specify, but would come from U.S. military assets positioned in the region. “The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has informed me that we are prepared to strike whenever we choose.” And then, foreshadowing what he was to say next, he revealed that Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Dempsey had informed him that “our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive, it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now.” The president evidently needed that flexibility, for he had also decided to seek “authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress”—which might take some time to obtain.29 Was this sudden deference to Congress a clever political maneuver, critics asked, to escape the ultimate burden and responsibility of actually ordering the use of force against the Assad regime? What if Congress fails to pass the resolution the president is requesting? What if Congress votes against any employment of U.S. forces in this situation? Brushing these contingencies aside, Obama asserted unequivocally, “I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization.” But then something happened on the way to the congressional forum. President Putin, picking up on an offhand speculative comment by Secretary of State Kerry, offered to explore the possibility of getting Assad to agree to dismantle his chemical weapons in return for the Americans dropping their threat to use force against his regime. “It’s too early to tell whether this offer will succeed,” Obama granted in reporting to the nation on September 10 what was happening, but “I have, therefore, asked the leaders of Congress to postpone a vote to authorize the use of force while we pursue this diplomatic path. . . . Meanwhile, I’ve ordered our military to maintain their current posture to keep the pressure on Assad, and to be in a position to respond if diplomacy fails.”30

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Within three days, the Russians announced that the Syrian Arab Republic had agreed to accede to the Chemical Weapons Convention and to start immediately to destroy the Syrian chemical weapons. And on September 14, the U.S. Department of State issued a statement describing the “framework” U.S. and Russian negotiators had hammered out for the elimination of the Syrian chemical weapons, which they were jointly asking the United Nations Security Council to convert into a binding resolution. 31 Security Council Resolution 2118, passed unanimously on September 27, 2013, required the “expeditious destruction of the Syrian Arab Republic’s chemical weapons program and stringent verification thereof ” and stipulated that the Syrian government or any party in Syria “shall not use, develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain, or transfer chemical weapons.” It further mandated that Syria should provide the inspecting personnel of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)—the enforcement agency of the Chemical Weapons Convention—“immediate and unfettered access to and the right to inspect . . . any and all sites . . . that the OPCW has grounds to believe to be of importance for the purpose of its mandate.”32 The United States, the United Kingdom, and France pushed for a clause in Resolution 2118 that would authorize member states to take military action against the Syrian government’s armed forces in the event of Syria’s noncompliance. Russia opposed this, but did accept the statement that the Security Council, “in the event of non-compliance with this resolution, including the unauthorized transfer of chemical weapons, or any use of chemical weapons by anyone in the Syrian Arab Republic” would “impose measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.”33 The Security Council was mandated to convene in such a case, but the use of force would require a subsequent resolution at the time. In their press conferences Russian officials reassured the Syrians that the world body had fully endorsed the quid pro quo of no chemical weapons in Syria in exchange for no U.S. use of military force against the Assad government. The Americans, however, including President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry, insisted that they had not taken the option of military action off the table; that it was the credibility and readiness of the U.S. threat to take such action that brought about Syria’s contrite agreement to junk its chemical weapons; and that Assad should stay forewarned that any failure on his part to comply with his obligations under Resolution 2118 would activate the U.S. capability and will to smash Syria’s military forces.

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As President Obama lit the Christmas tree on December 6, 2013, the reports coming in from the international inspectorate attested to Assad’s apparent compliance in doing away with his chemical weapons. But had things moved any closer to the recurrent hope for peace on earth, goodwill toward men and women? Unfortunately, not yet in Syria, where Assad loyalists—and the rebels (increasingly infiltrated by al-Qaeda)—were continuing to kill and maim innocent civilians and the government’s forces were reportedly gaining ground and reconsolidating control. Obama could experience a measure of satisfaction, however, that agile engagement diplomacy, albeit in this case relying on sticks more than carrots, had restrained America from again stumbling into another war in which U.S. interests, other than preventing massive atrocities, were not at all clearly defined. Six months later, UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon reported to the Security Council that Syria would not be completing its eradication of its chemical arms by June 30, 2014 as mandated by Resolution 2118, and to which Assad had agreed. Roughly 8 percent of Syria’s stockpile of lethal chemical weapons still remained in the country, only five of 18 production facilities had been closed, and 11 of its 12 storage facilities were still in existence. Secretary General Ban also revealed that a fact-finding mission was underway to verify allegations that Assad’s military had used poisonous chlorine gas against civilians.34 Most disturbing were reports that indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants—by all sides in the civil war—had not abated. The persisting problem of differentiating the good guys among the rebels from the bad guys (many of whom were affiliated with al-Qaeda), however, had not discouraged critics of Obama’s noninterventionist policy from demanding military aid to some of the rebels sufficient to turn the tide, possibly via their Jordanian and Saudi allies. Yet despite rumored agitation from within his administration (particularly on the part of National Security Adviser Susan Rice and UN Ambassador Samantha Power) for tangible moves to match his responsibility-to-protect rhetoric, the president was keeping his options close to his vest. In his address to the graduating class of 2014 at West Point, however, he did announce stepped-up “efforts to support Syria’s neighbors—Jordan and Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq—as they host refugees, and confront terrorists working across Syrian borders” and that he would “work with Congress to ramp up support for those in the Syrian opposition who offer the best alternative to terrorists and a brutal dictator.” Meanwhile, without specifying what he had in mind, he vowed to “push for a political resolution to this crisis.”35 But for the time being, he gave no

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indication of being ready to revive the threat of a military strike against Assad’s military assets, let alone to put American troops in the middle of the civil war. In the White House there was a growing awareness that however noble America’s intentions to protect people around the world from tyrannical psychopaths, U.S. intervention—like al-Qaeda or the Islamic State—could well mean freeing up others with no less brutal tendencies to contest for power. “No more Libyas,” “no more Egypts,” now joined “no more Iraqs” as watchwords in the Oval Office. This deepening skepticism about having enough foreknowledge, let alone power, to justify U.S. efforts to shape the politics of other people profoundly affected how Obama dealt with demands to employ military force, even to save the lives of the thousands who had become a prime candidates for “responsibility to protect” intervention.

EPILOGUE The danger for the world is not an America that is too eager to immerse itself in the affairs of other countries. . . . The danger for the world is that the United States after a decade of war, rightly concerned about issues back home, aware of the hostility that our engagement . . . has engendered . . . may disengage creating a vacuum of leadership that no other nation is ready to fill. I believe such disengagement would be a mistake. I believe America must remain engaged for our own security, but I also believe the world is better for it. Some may disagree. But I believe America is exceptional. In part because we have shown a willingness through sacrifice of blood and treasure to stand up not only for our own narrow self interest, but for the interest of all. —Barack Obama

return once more to the question I posed and attempted to answer in previous editions of Faces of Power: In what respects has U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II remained essentially the same, and in what respects and at what junctures, has it significantly changed? My analysis—now updated to include Bill Clinton’s second term and the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama (plus new information on the presidencies from Harry Truman to George H. W. Bush)—confirms that each of the occupants of the Oval Office believed that to the maximum extent possible he was working to protect and advance the country’s irreducible national interest: in the words of the Constitution, to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

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All of the presidents have been accused of putting special interests, party interests, or personal and egoistic interests ahead of the national interest; and objective critiques have shown such considerations to have at times affected presidential actions in the realm of foreign policy as well as domestic policy (which is always highly politicized). But the evidence from the memoirs and private papers of the presidents, their closest associates and families, and even their sometimes unfriendly interlocutors indicates that the Oval Office has an overwhelming psychological effect on its principal occupant—convincing at least him that what he is doing as the nation’s premier executive, commander in chief, and top diplomat is motivated, and constrained, by his overriding obligation to put the interests of the country ahead of everything else. Accordingly, protection of the country against its foreign and domestic enemies has received the highest priority, with the nation’s economic well-being and traditional liberties at times temporarily subordinated to the national security imperatives. However, questions about the necessity and extent of such prioritization (and subordination) characteristically generate intense debate in the government and the nation at large; and the outcome, as expressed in specific policies, has been a distinguishing mark of each administration. Also there has been considerable variation in the willingness to commit some of this country’s human and material resources to the security, economic well-being, and liberties of other peoples. However, the pattern of constancy and change in U.S foreign policy from Truman to Obama cannot be understood apart from the variations in presidential assessments of the kind of power and strategies for using it that would best serve U.S. purposes. Crucially, the analysis reveals each president making such assessments and emphasizing some aspects of power more than others—exhibiting, as it were, a changing “face of power” to the world. It has been this variable—perceptions about the capacity of the United States to counter threats to and positively exploit opportunities to advance its basic interests and values (more than changes in the interests and values)—that most explains the evident changes in policy. Complicating the story of how and why certain policies have been chosen is the fact that all such power assessments always depend also on perceptions of the intentions and capabilities of the other actors in the international system, which in turn are affected by their own assessments of the intentions and capabilities of the United States. Distilled from the accounts in the previous chapters, what follows are some of the telling examples of this dialectic of both considerable constancy and change.

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The Truman administration’s determination to contain Soviet expansion following World War II was not the fundamentally new objective it is widely characterized as being. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in their 1945 Yalta conference with Joseph Stalin were already telling their wartime ally that in order to sustain a tolerable balance of power, the postwar Soviet empire could extend no farther west than the Eastern European lands the Red Army had liberated from German control and parts of Germany east of the Elbe River—although they did not use the word “containment.” Under Truman the means for containing Soviet expansion become more openly confrontational and more militarized, but the basic objective was the same. Nor was Truman’s focus on the global power rivalry with the Soviet Union all that new in 1947 when it was publicly revealed in the Truman Doctrine. The postwar balance of military power and how it would affect his political bargaining with Stalin was uppermost in Truman’s mind as early as the Big Three Potsdam conference at the end of July 1945; and that preoccupation was in part responsible for the use of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, before the expected date of the Soviet entry into the war against Japan. The emergent U.S. grand strategy for the post–World War II world had two core imperatives that persisted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991: Prevent the Soviets from expanding their imperial domain without in the process bringing on World War III (Truman’s rationale for fighting a limited war in Korea and for dismissing MacArthur for trying to break out of that constraint). Avoid getting into another world war, but make sure the Soviets know that the United States is prepared to do whatever is necessary to prevent them from enlarging their sphere of control. (U.S. actions in the Berlin crises of 1948, 1958, and 1961). In other words, containment— by whatever name it may have been called by different administrations. Dwight Eisenhower, having been elected with the slogan “Time for a Change,” and rejecting the term “containment” because the Truman administration was its author, entered the presidency determined to pursue a policy of “fiscal responsibility” (balanced federal budgets) by reducing the level of defense spending established by Truman during the Korean War. He tried to do so by revising the country’s defense strategy so as to get “more bang for a buck” through relying on America’s military strong suit: nuclear weapons. A centerpiece of the new strategy was a set of stern warnings to the Soviets and the Chinese that in response even to any local military aggression they might undertake or sponsor, the United States was ready to retaliate massively. These warnings, Eisenhower believed, were

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necessary to deter Moscow from major aggressive moves in Berlin, and Beijing from reopening the Korean War or attacking Taiwan. Eisenhower found, however, that the United States still needed to sustain hefty and expensive conventional forces to counter those of the Soviets as the nuclear balance of terror matured. A similar fate met the Republican 1952 campaign rhetoric promising a “rollback” of communism around the world, claiming that Truman’s containment policy was a spineless accommodation to Soviet imperial expansion. Finding that it was expensive enough to keep the communists from enlarging their sphere of control, President Eisenhower had no inclination to mobilize the enormous resources it would take to pose a credible threat to challenge the Kremlin’s domination of Eastern Europe. Always insistent that U.S. commitments not outrun its capabilities, when the Hungarian nationalist uprising in 1956 was brutally suppressed by the Soviets, the former general in the White House, cognizant of the Soviets’ own strategic nuclear forces, ruled out any tangible U.S. intervention. President John F. Kennedy too exhibited more continuity with his predecessor’s policies than he cared to admit. An early case in point was his support of the Cuban-exile invasion of Cuba in the Bay of Pigs—the basic plan having been hatched by the CIA and the Pentagon in the Eisenhower administration. The Eisenhower holdovers in the agency and the Department of Defense were shocked, however, at Kennedy’s prohibition of any direct military involvement by the United States, even air support, as Castro’s forces began to decimate the invading exiles on the beach. Kennedy, although not squeamish about the use of force, was determined to open a new era in hemispheric relations that would once and for all put to rest Latin American resentments of interventions by the “colossus to the north.” Economic and political pressure on the Latin Americans to reform their oligarchical regimes, yes; but military intervention, no— unless required to counter a direct threat to the United States. Eisenhower too, near the end of his presidency, however, had become increasingly sympathetic toward a hemispheric policy less dominated by “hard power” thinking and began to initiate policies that in many respects prefigured Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. But Kennedy did go much farther than Eisenhower in pushing for a U.S. Third World policy that could effectively compete with the Kremlin’s sponsorship of “wars of national liberation.” He strove to place the United States on the side of political and economic reforms, using this “soft power” approach to drive a wedge between genuine reformers and their Russian

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and Chinese would-be big brothers. Even with this reform-oriented policy démarche, however (and paradoxically, in part because of it), the United States under Kennedy and Johnson got drawn into the conflict to win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, which morphed into a brutal war of attrition that a majority of Americans ultimately found too costly. Another change advocated by the Kennedy brain trust, which JFK himself had championed as senator, was to reject the Eisenhower administration’s nuclear-reliant military strategy and force posture. Particularly for dealing with aggressive moves in situations like Berlin, where the Soviets had a preponderance of conventional force, the Eisenhower policy, Kennedy charged, was one of “suicide or surrender.” But when it came to correcting the conventional force gap—much of it which would have to be filled by NATO allies—Kennedy was no more successful than Eisenhower in persuading the allies to rectify the imbalance. And when having to deal with Khrushchev over Berlin, Kennedy, like Eisenhower, despite an augmented U.S. conventional force posture, fell back on the specter of uncontrollable escalation to strategic nuclear war in order to deter the Soviets from provocative moves. Shocked by the Cuban missile crisis into a dedicated effort to denuclearize U.S. national security policy, Secretary of Defense McNamara moved U.S. strategists and arms controllers, and then their Soviet counterparts, into accepting the reality that a nuclear war would be mutual suicide and therefore to enter into negotiations to prohibit each side from maintaining war-fighting nuclear arsenals—the only purpose of nuclear weapons being mutual deterrence. Nixon and Kissinger campaigned on a Republican platform castigating the Kennedy-Johnson negotiations with the Soviets on strategic nuclear weapons, charging that Secretary of Defense McNamara’s acceptance of a mutual deterrence relationship was a sellout to the Kremlin and that the United States should strive to regain strategic superiority. But once in power, facing a Congress determined to constrain military expenditures, Nixon and Kissinger locked the mutual assured destruction (MAD) balance into place through a set of strategic arms control agreements that included doing away with antiballistic missiles and other efforts to protect the population in the event of nuclear war. The biggest break with Cold War assumptions and policies was the Nixon-Kissinger grand strategy of realpolitik, as manifested in détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China. The character of the communist governments and how they

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treated their people would no longer be an issue as long as they played by agreed-upon rules internationally. With respect to exiting Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger presided over the final demise of the U.S. war effort there, which had already started to drastically unravel by the end of the Johnson administration. Jimmy Carter inherited, codified, and broadened only somewhat the new relationships with both the Soviet Union and China that Nixon and Kissinger had already negotiated. Also, Carter’s major breakthrough in international affairs, the Camp David accords that ended the state of belligerence between Egypt and Israel, was built on groundwork laid by Kissinger’s mediational shuttle diplomacy following the Yom Kippur War. The Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement was undoubtedly a major breakthrough; but the Camp David accords passed on to future U.S. administrations a slew of seemingly intractable and violence-prone issues, including Jewish settlements on the West Bank, the territory and population to be included in a emergent Palestinian state, and the status of Jerusalem. President Carter’s other most notable claim to moving U.S. foreign policy in a new direction was his much vaunted effort to make the human rights of people around the world a high-value national interest. No longer, he argued, should governments who abuse people within their jurisdictions be able to use the cloak of national sovereignty to shield themselves from international condemnation and pressure. Yet when it came to implementing the human rights policy, Carter was quite selective—on geopolitical grounds—as to which governments should be pressured with words and/or tangible sanctions to reform their brutal practices. Rights-abusing regimes of little commercial or strategic significance to the United States were subject to cutoffs in economic or military aid, while the big guys (the USSR, the People’s Republic of China) and geostrategically significant regional powers (Brazil, Nigeria, Iran) were let off the hook. Iran’s impunity turned out to be Carter’s worst foreign policy embarrassment, as the Islamic revolutionaries who kicked out the Shah in 1979 not only charged the United States with complicity in the notorious brutalities the Shah’s SAVAK secret police inflicted on dissidents but also took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding its officials hostage for over a year while Carter negotiated their release. Ronald Reagan on the way to the White House famously promised never to negotiate with terrorists and claimed that Tehran’s release of the embassy hostages at the time of his inauguration was the result of his implied threat

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to use military force against the Iranian regime. But in office, Reagan on a number of occasions allowed members of his administration to use intermediaries (including Iranians), at times selling them arms, to secure the release of Americans captured by Islamic militants. Reagan’s grand strategy was a deliberate throwback to the earlier Cold War policies of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations, which he believed were essentially correct in their assumption of a bipolar worldwide struggle for ascendancy between the United States and the Soviet Union. Even more than Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, however, Reagan (during his first three years in the White House) conceived of that struggle in zero-sum terms—that is, one side’s gain is the other side’s loss, and vice versa. This meant that the burgeoning East-West commerce being engaged in by America’s allies and the communist countries, and which the United States had joined in under the Nixon-Kissinger and Carter détente policies, had to be drastically cut back; for anything that helped the enemy economically would eventually add to its power in its hoped-for ultimate showdown with the United States. The United States and its allies, Reagan contended, had gone soft and flabby and needed to stiffen their spines for the protracted economic, ideological, geopolitical, and possibly military confrontations ahead. In his early press conferences he inveighed against the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” with whom arms control negotiations were futile (the Kremlin’s Leninist leaders would lie and cheat, so agreements with them were worthless). Truman was right, Reagan reasserted, the only thing the Soviets understand is force. Accordingly, Reagan ordered major increases in the defense budget even before the Pentagon was able to come up with a new bill of particulars that needed funding. (Actually, the military were already in pretty good shape as a result of budgetary increases ordered by Carter in reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.) But the world of the 1980s was not about to be returned to the bipolar mold of the 1950s and 1960s. Nor was the sluggish U.S. economy taking well to Washington’s deficit spending required by the defense buildup— contradicting Reagan’s “supply-side” economic promises to generate a new era of growth by reducing federal taxes. Then in Reagan’s second term, maturing international and domestic developments on both sides of the ideological divide prompted Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to the realization that both superpowers were suffering from imperial overstretch. And it was the tough-talking, take-no-prisoners Reagan who, in conjunction with his Soviet counterpart, called a halt to the Cold War.

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Both George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton, adapting to the post–Cold War diffusion of power and weakening of alliances, had to deal primarily with a different kind of opponent than the rival superpower— namely the likes of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević, regional tyrants who were taking advantage of the emergent volatility and fickleness of alignments and antagonisms to bully their opponents. In response, both Bush and Clinton reverted to a more classical form of diplomacy— defending U.S. geostrategic and material interests that were in jeopardy on a basically nonideological ad hoc basis with temporary “coalitions of the willing” for limited-purpose interventions. And both, but especially Clinton, also presided over an economics-focused foreign policy, regarding the growing globalization of U.S. commerce as a vital U.S. interest. Clinton was castigated by the George W. Bush’s election campaign in 2000 for presumably engaging in a “nation-building” intervention in the Balkans. Actually, the U.S. intervention to counter the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” campaign was undertaken entirely with air strikes. And following the failed humanitarian intervention in Somalia (which had been initiated by the elder Bush), Clinton abjured interventions that would require U.S. ground troops—witness the Rwanda crisis. Condoleezza Rice and other campaign spokespersons for George W. Bush promised that his administration would pursue a “realist” foreign policy that while encouraging democratic development and human rights, would never deploy the U.S. military abroad to engage in “nation-building” projects that other people should be doing for themselves. Following the terrorist shock of 9/11, however, President Bush embraced the neoconservative doctrine of international peace through regime-change interventions around the world—interventions to further democracy and human rights. Tyranny, the neoconservatives had been arguing, was the prime source of alienation that produces recruits for terrorist movements; and the tyrants themselves were prone to recruit terrorists to intimidate their domestic and foreign enemies. But in giving highest priority, if not almost singular attention, to the war on terrorists with global reach (meaning capable of attacking the United States), the Bush administration, like its predecessors during the Cold War, often found that many of the capable and willing allies of the United States in the good fight were hardly paragons of democracy and human rights. Accordingly, by the end of his second term, reeling from the international and domestic backlash against his Pax Americana posture and policies—especially in light of the political chaos the Afghanistan and Iraq interventions left in both countries—Bush #43 overrode the

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neoconservative holdouts in his administration and reverted substantially back to the prudential realism of Bush #41. Domestically, however, Bush did not retreat from the aggressive counterterrorism surveillance procedures initiated during his first term. He did compromise a bit though—despite objections from Vice President Cheney—on the treatment of arrested terrorists or terrorist suspects, issuing strong orders against torture and disavowing problematical “enhanced interrogation” techniques such as waterboarding. On mainline strategy and arms control issues, the Bush administration entered office with a bias against bilateral negotiations with the Russians. But not wanting to alienate Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom Bush established an early cordial rapport, and finding that the bilaterals, whether or not new agreements emerged, provided a useful opportunity for keeping tabs on what the Russians were doing and thinking, the administration decided to keep the negotiations alive. And even with respect to the main U.S.-Russian controversy, the U.S. missile defense program, which was at a stage where the projected tests and deployments would violate the antiballistic missile treaty, Bush adhered to the treaty’s obligation of providing advance notice of the U.S. plan to withdraw from it. Although many in the arms control community condemned the Bush administration for undermining the mutual deterrence philosophy that had been sustaining the U.S.-Russian strategic arms control negotiations since the 1970s, and also for doing so unilaterally, the Clinton administration during its last two years had itself been proceeding with the missile defense program that the Bush administration was now going forward with. Like Bush, Clinton had defined and justified the need to have missile defenses against “rogue” states, such as North Korea, and insisted that the systems being developed and deployed would not and could not be used against the Russian strategic missiles. All in all, therefore, by the end of his presidential tenure George W. Bush located himself close to the foreign policy mainstream navigated by the other presidents—Republican and Democratic alike. Predictably, however, the Democratic aspirants for president in 2008 would charge that #43’s new realism was too little and too late; that he had left the next administration a legacy of damaged societies in Iraq and Afghanistan and a tarnished image of the United States as world leader that no longer knows what it is doing—in short, a legacy of diminished power. Although elected under a “Change We Can Believe In” banner, President Obama found that the problems he inherited were more the product

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of systemic international and domestic conditions than they were the results of the previous administration’s avoidable mistakes. His foreign policy and national security team (some of whom, notably the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were holdovers from the Bush administration) were divided over and ambivalent—as he was—about the extent to which transformative world order and justice and human rights objectives should animate his foreign policy and the extent to which he should devote himself “pragmatically” to damage control of the legacy from the Bush years: two wars, a deep economic recession, and widespread anti-Americanism. Then, compounding the recurrent realism versus idealism prolematique of U.S. foreign policy, came the so-called Arab Spring—pitting democracy and human rights advocates in uneasy alliance with radical Islamists against autocratic regimes (as in Egypt and Bahrain), who were in many respects America’s strategic partners, or against dictators (as in Libya and Syria), who since 9/11 had been reasonably supportive of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. But as the revolutionaries themselves turned out to be unreliable for instituting democracy and human rights—also for fighting terrorism—the Obama administration’s quandary only deepened. Much criticized for inconsistency in dealing with this new challenge— from direct military action in Libya, to wrist-slapping declarations of discontent with the kingdoms in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, to profound ambivalence regarding how to support the fragmented and anti-Assad rebellion in Syria to how to combat the barbaric Islamic state jihadists—the Obama administration stuck to a differentiated case-by-case response. While characterized as dithering by opponents and prudent by supporters, the emerging Obama approach (pundits, but not the president used the term “Obama Doctrine”) for dealing with the turbulent world of the second decade of the twenty-first century was turning out to be an updated version of the uneasy synthesis of idealism and realism that has been the essence of U.S. foreign policy since World War II. As always, priority would be given to core “security” interests—meaning whatever is necessary, including the employment of military power, to secure the irreducible national interest: the physical safety, economic well-being, and basic liberties of the American people. The use of force would be a last resort (only if other instruments of statecraft were proving ineffective); and UN or other multilateral institutional endorsement would normally be sought for U.S. military action against or in other countries,

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but not if that would inhibit the kinds of military operations deemed to be required. Ironically, although he recognized in his Nobel Prize speech that this might be required of him, the putative disciple of Gandhi and Martin Luther King was compelled to exhibit the commander-in-chief ’s face of power at least as much as his predecessors. As this book went to press, President Obama was fending off a barrage of criticisms—even from former high officials in his administration—that his cool, professorial, exploreall-options decision-making style had allowed threatening situations to mature to the point where the tough actions he finally was willing to take were too little, too late. The charges of costly waffling included his reluctance to confront Putin with a full range of crippling economic sanctions and symbolic military deployments early in the Russian autocrat’s bullying of Ukraine and the president’s failure to deliver on his threat to take military action against Bashar Assad’s forces after they crossed Obama’s red-line regarding the use of chemical weapons. Critics alleged that such equivocations—despite his gutsy ordering of the Abbottabad assault on Osama bin Laden, and his authorization of drone attacks against terrorists—were symptomatic of the president’s inner squeamishness when it came to employing U.S. forces in major operations, especially if they could require U.S. “boots on the ground.” Obama was blamed, for example, for the so-called Islamic State’s (IS) rampages in Iraq and Syria—the IS taking advantage of the absence of a stabilizing U.S. military presence in Iraq resulting from Obama’s inability to negotiate an acceptable Status of Forces agreement with the Iraqi government on legal immunities for U.S. military personnel remaining after 2011. The resulting power vacuum allowed the most radical Sunni jihadists to take over the anti-regime rebellions in both Iraq and Syria. When widespread outrage at IS videos of their beheadings of U.S. and British captives induced public pledges by Obama, and orders to the U.S. military, to “degrade and ultimately destroy” IS , he insisted that this would be accomplished by U.S. airpower and support of direct military action by U.S. coalition partners, yet still no U.S. boots on the ground. But as weeks of intensive pounding from the air failed to substantially contain, let alone reverse, expanding areas of IS control in Iraq and Syria, the president’s absolutist limitation of the U.S. military role was subject to increasing pressure—even from within his administration. The president was convinced that his actions (including decisions to postpone action) were in the national interest, and that the critics were

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unable to propose alternatives that had a reasonable prospect of success, Accordingly, he was willing to take his lumps in the arena of public opinion—even as his approval ratings dropped so drastically on the eve of the 2014 elections that members of his own party running for congress or governor discouraged him from campaigning in their states. He retained the audacity to hope that history would absolve him for not involving the United Sates in new or revived wars of unclear purpose and open-ended duration which could drain the country’s substance and morale to such depth as to eventually generate overwhelming demands for peace at virtually any price. A strategy of self-restraint at the outset of escalating conflicts was especially difficult to maintain, yet for that reason all the more prudent. Moreover, in the volatile post-Cold War polyarchy, quintessentially in the Middle East, and dramatically evident in Syria and Iraq, today’s ally might be tomorrow’s adversary; and vice versa, depending on the issue at hand. But let the buyer beware: for the enemy of your enemy might pose as your friend, but in fact be your enemy too. Obama, fully aware of these dynamics, was not about to be stampeded into another quagmire. The evolved Obama foreign policy, though more overtly nationalistic than in its early articulation, was based on the premise that the irreducible national interestrequires a foreign policy that pursues basic world interests to which the national interest is inexorably connected: the prevention of large-scale, war and genocidal conflict; a well-functioning world economy; a healthy and nonthreatening global climate and environment; and a system of multilateral institutions to facilitate accountability and cooperation among countries and communities in the pursuit of these world interests. Yet even this melding of national security interests and world interests does not sufficiently define the purposes of U.S. commitments and actions abroad. Each of the presidents, from Truman to Obama, has understood, and attempted to act on the premise that the nation, while doing good for itself, also aspires to do good for others—not simply out of self-interest but because as a leading and wealthy member of an increasingly interconnected global society the United States has an obligation to help alleviate extreme poverty and suffering around the world and a responsibility to help protect people everywhere from violation of their most basic human right not to be brutally treated by governments or other powerful groups. Since World War II, the presidency has transformed the occupants of the Oval Office more than its occupants have transformed the presidency, moving them to perceive their most important role in the world to be

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the pursuit of the nation’s irreducible national interest and basic values in ways that further the development of a genuine international community of mutual security, accountability, and concern. Frequently, administration officials who have been overruled by the president will accuse him of having pandered to special interests or domestic political constituencies; but let the buyer of these kiss-and-tell accounts be wary of such self-serving efforts. Readers who want to know what was really in the minds of those charged with the ultimate responsibility for the most crucial decisions affecting the nation should start with, and then return to, the testimony of the presidents themselves (as I have tried to do in this narrative) before giving credence to the allegations of the disgruntled. The serious foreign policy differences between administrations and their critics and within each administration have been mostly about the means—the most appropriate instruments of power—rather than the ends of U.S. foreign policy, with the latter showing a remarkable consistency. Yet there have been voices raised, at times by candidates for high political office, urging on the one side a blatantly imperialist foreign policy, and on the other side isolation from the troubles of the world and tending exclusively the country’s domestic needs under a homeland-defense-only national security strategy and protectionist economic policy. But up to now neither of these extremes have been able to garner enough support in the electorate or at the highest levels of the government to significantly affect the U.S. role in the world. My narrative cuts off, however, during a period of more complex challenges to U.S. leadership abroad than at any time since World War II. It has also been a period of dysfunctional partisanship in Washington, making it almost impossible for the executive to generate legislative majorities for internationally consequential domestic policies, such as immigration reform, let alone pending world-interest initiatives, such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and a new climate management treaty. Whether these troubles and pressures will persist and in the years ahead produce a fundamental change in the ends as well as the means of U.S. foreign policy is now an open—and troubling—question.

NOTES

1. THE SHATTERING OF EXPECTATIONS 1. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Address to Congress Reporting on the Yalta Conference,” March 1, 1945, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1944–45 (New York: Harper, 1950) Book I:586. 2. See Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 332–412. 3. For the disagreements among Truman’s advisers early in his administration about how to deal with the Soviets, see Melvin P. Leffler, “The Emergence of an American Grand Strategy, 1945–1952,” in Melvin P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 1, Origins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 67–88. See also Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2006 (New York: McGraw Hill, 2008), 18–32. 4. Truman, Memoirs: Year of Decisions, 70. 5. Ibid., 1:71. 6. William D. Leahy, I Was There (New York: McGraw Hill, 1950), 351–52; Truman, Memoirs: Year of Decisions, 82. 7. Truman: Year of Decisions, 85–87. 8. That the use of the atomic bomb against Japan to achieve a quick surrender was strongly motivated by the hope of thereby reducing the opportunity for the Soviets to be in on the final kill and to have a heavy claim on the victors’ spoils is a central argument of Gar Alperovitz’s thoroughly researched book, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Knopf, 1995), but Alperovitz admits that the evidence for this allegation is only circumstantial, especially with respect to the president’s motivations.

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9. Truman, Memoirs: Year of Decisions, 419. 10. Combined Chiefs of Staff, “Estimate of the Enemy Situation (as of 6 July 1945),” report by the Combined Intelligence Committee, CCS 643/3, July 8, 1945 (declassified February 12, 1976); see also “Minutes of Meeting Held at the White House on Monday, 18 June 1945 at 1530”; both documents are available from The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II: A Collection of Primary Sources, ed. William Burr, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 162, August 5, 2005 (updated April 27, 2007), www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv /NSAEBB/NSAEBB162 (hereafter referred to as NSAEBB162). 11. The debates in the administration over allowing Japan to keep its emperor are recorded in numerous now-declassified documents available in NSAEBB 162. See esp. Memorandum from Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew to the President, “Analysis of Memorandum Presented by Mr. Hoover,” June 13, 1945; “Minutes of Meeting Held at the White House on Monday, 18 June 1945 at 1530”; “Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy to Colonel Stimson, June 19, 1945.” 12. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers: The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference) 1945, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960). 13. Truman diary entry of June 25, 1945, in “Notes by Harry S. Truman on the Potsdam Conference,” President’s File, Truman Papers, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. And see David McCulloch, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 443–44. 14. Interim Committee Meeting, May 31, 1945, quoted by Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Bomb (New York: Knopf, 1995), 164. 15. Alperowitz, The Decision to Use the Bomb, 416–17. 16. Final surrender terms, quoted in Alperowitz, The Decision to Use the Bomb, 418. 17. The quotations are from Truman’s letter to Byrnes of January 5, 1946. Truman, Memoirs: Year of Decisions, 551–52. 18. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 11. 19. Walter Millis, The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1952), 102. 20. Ibid., 129. 21. Ibid., 135–40. 22. The full text of the September 1946 report by Clark Clifford was first published by journalist Arthur Krock in his Memoirs: Sixty Years on the Firing Line (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), 419–82. For details on the origins of the report, its role in crystallizing the president’s thinking prior to the Truman Doctrine, and its publication twenty years later by Krock, see Clark Clifford (with Richard Holbrooke), Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 124–29. 23. David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 47. 24. Truman, Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope, 95. 25. Ibid., 96–97. 26. Truman, Memoirs: Year of Decisions, 551–52. 27. John C. Campbell, Defense of the Middle East: Problems of American Policy (New York: Praeger, 1960), 33. 28. Truman, Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope, 100. Actually, the Greek communists and their local allies were prosecuting their insurrection against the Greek monarchy contrary

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to the wishes of Stalin. The Greek communists were aided by Tito, with whom Stalin was having an altercation; and in any event, Stalin preferred to keep his spheres of influence agreement with Churchill, consigning Greece to British control. 29. Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York: Viking, 1955), 138–41. Dean Acheson’s account of the February 27, 1947, meeting in the White House is in his Present at the Creation (New York: Norton, 1969), 219. 30. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks, 157, 162. 31. Harry S. Truman, “Special Message on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine, March 12, 1947,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Harry S. Truman, 1947 (Washington: GPO, 1963), 176–78. 32. W. W. Rostow, The United States and the World Arena (New York: Harper, 1960), 209. 33. Department of State Bulletin 16, no. 410 (May 11, 1947): 920–24. 34. Quoted by Harry Bayard Price, The Marshall Plan and Its Meaning (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955), 22. 35. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks, 251–52. See also George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston: Atlantic, Little, Brown, 1967), 335–45; and McCullough, Truman, 562–63. 36. Department of State Bulletin, XVI, No.415 (June 15, 1947), 1159–60. 37. Clifford, Counsel to the President, 144. 38. Price, The Marshall Plan and Its Meaning, 24–29; Rostow, The United States and the World Arena, 209–13. 39. X [George Kennan], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs (July 1947): 566–82. 40. John Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 309–10, 463–64.

2. IMPLEMENTING CONTAINMENT 1. Walter Millis, The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), 341. 2. This interpretation of Marshall’s views relies heavily on Warner R. Schilling’s thorough study, “The Politics of National Defense: Fiscal 1950,” in Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets, ed. Warner R. Schilling, Paul Y. Hammond, and Glen H. Snyder (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). 3. Millis, The Forrestal Diaries, 240, 350. 4. Ibid., 350–51. 5. There was yet another consideration that may have weighed heavily with Forrestal. In contrast to the services over which he presided (as the first secretary of defense), Forrestal appeared to be more interested in a general increase in the military budget and capabilities than in the implementation of any particular strategic doctrine. He seemed to regard some of the esoteric strategic debates of the military as responses to low budget ceilings and the consequent need to convince their political benefactors that security could be had only through their particular functions and capabilities. These specious debates were a severe source of embarrassment to Forrestal. In his attempts to achieve harmony within the defense establishment, higher budgets would put him in a position to mitigate the intensity of interservice rivalry.

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6. This review is the subject of a detailed monograph by Paul Hammond entitled “NSC68: Prologue to Rearmament,” in Schilling, Hammond, and Snyder, Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets, 271–378. My account of the substance of arguments and activities surrounding NSC-68 relies heavily on the Hammond monograph. 7. Hammond’s analysis of Kennan’s differences with Nitze and NSC-68 is confirmed by John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 390–92. 8. “A Report to the National Security Council—NSC 68,” April 12, 1950 (declassified in 1975), President’s Secretary’s Files, Truman Papers, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, accessible at www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/cold war documents. 9. See Edward S. Flash Jr., Economic Advice and Presidential Leadership: The Council of Economic Advisers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 39–52. 10. According to Truman’s biographer, David McCulloch, the President was not ready to accept the premises and recommendations of NSC-68 prior to the Korean War. “His response was the same as it had been with the Clifford-Elsey Report. He put it away under lock and key.” See McCulloch, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 72. 11. Coral Bell, Negotiation from Strength (New York: Knopf, 1963), 6–10. 12. An excellent analysis of the strategic assumptions prevailing at the highest levels of the Truman administration during the Korean War is provided by Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 130–234. Subsequent declassification of Truman’s deliberations with his advisers validates the George-Smoke account. 13. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 325. 14. Remarks by Dean Acheson before the National Press Club, January 12, 1950, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, accessible at www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study _collections/korean war/documents. Less attention was paid at the time and retrospectively to Acheson’s statement in the same forum referring specifically to the ongoing instability in Korea: If an attack on South Korea occurred, he said, the United States would invoke “the Charter of the United Nations Charter, which so far has not proved a weak reed to lean on by any people who are determined to protect their independence against outside aggression.” 15. United Nations Security Council Resolution 82, June 25, 1950, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 83, June 27, 1950,[both titled “Complaint of aggression upon Republic of Korea”] www.un.org/documents/sc/res/1950. These could not be vetoed by the Soviet Union since the USSR was not present due to its walkout in protest against the unwillingness of the United States to allow Mao’s government to occupy the seat of China. 16. McCullough, Truman, 799. 17. Directive to the Commander of the United Nations Forces in Korea (attachment to 27 September 1950 letter of from Secretary of Defense Marshall to the President), Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections /korean war/documents. 18. “Substance of Statements Made at Wake Island Conference on 15 October 1950 Compiled by General of the Army Omar N. Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, From Notes Kept by the Conference From Washington,” Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/koreanwar.

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19. Address by President Truman about policy in the Far East, April 11, 1954, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 223–27. 20. Truman, Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope, 341. 21. Ibid., 380. 22. Ibid., 403. 23. Ibid., 408. 24. Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, Military Situation in the Far East, Hearings, June 2, 5, 6, 15, 1950 (Washington: GPO, 1951). 25. Department of State, United States Relations with China (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1949), 383. 26. Quoted by Tang Tsou, America’s Failure in China, 1941–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 363. Dr. Tsou thoroughly documents the prevailing U.S. consensus of the late 1940s that the stakes on the Chinese mainland were not worth a U.S. military combat intervention. 27. Quoted by John C. Sparrow, History of Personnel Demobilization (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1951), 380. See also Tang Tsou, America’s Failure in China, 366. 28. Harry S. Truman, press conference of November 30, 1950; see Truman, Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope, 395–96. 29. For detailed blow-by-blow accounts of the intra-administration battle over recognizing Israel, see Clark Clifford (with Richard Holbrooke), Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 3–25; and David McCullough, Truman, 595–620. 30. Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917, text accessible at www.mideastweb.org. 31. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, November 29, 1947, “Future Government of Palestine.” http://dacess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN /NRO/038. 32. Clifford, Counsel to the President, 8 For an interpretation contending that Truman’s support for partition and then recognition was highly determined by domestic political considerations, see John B, Judis, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israel Conflict (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 214)

3. A NEW LOOK FOR LESS EXPENSIVE POWER 1. My narrative of Eisenhower’s early deliberations with his advisers, which led to the “New Look” defense policy, draws heavily on Warner R. Schilling, Paul Y. Hammond, and Glenn H. Snyder, Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 356–86. It is also informed by David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 65–72, who presents details provided by an interview with Eisenhower’s presidential staff secretary, General Andrew Goodpaster. 2. John Foster Dulles, “The Evolution of Foreign Policy,” address to the Council on Foreign Relations, January 12, 1954, in Department of State Bulletin 30:107–10. 3. Edward S. Flash Jr., Economic Advice and Presidential Leadership: The Council of Economic Advisers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 100–2.

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4. Eisenhower, radio address, March 19, 1953, in New York Times, May 20, 1953. 5. NSC 162/2. A Report to the National Security Council, October 30, 1953. Highly classified at the time, the document is now accessible at www.fas.org/irp/offdocs /nsc-hist. 6. Schilling, Hammond, and Snyder, Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets, 356–86. See also Evan Thomas, Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World (New York: Little Brown, 2012), 98–114. 7. Dulles, January 12, 1954 address. 8. John Foster Dulles, “Policy for Security and Peace,” Foreign Affairs (April 1954): 353–64. 9. On Dulles’s Weltanschauung, see Michael A. Guhin, John Foster Dulles: A Statesman and His Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). 10. From Eisenhower’s letter to Churchill, April 4, 1954. Quoted by Eisenhower in Mandate for Change: The White House Years 1953–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 346. 11. Eisenhower, press conference, April 7, 1954, in New York Times, April 8, 1954. 12. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 354. 13. See Chalmers Roberts, “The Day We Didn’t Go to War,” The Reporter, September 14, 1954. 14. Thomas, Ike’s Bluff, 119–25. 15. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 352. 16. Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012), 612; and Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (Newtown: American Political Biography Press, 1990), 359. See also Rothkopf, Running the World, 76–77; and Thomas, Ike’s Bluff, 124–25. 17. Thomas, Ike’s Bluff, 354 18. Joint resolution authorizing the President to employ the Armed Forces of the United States for protecting the security of Formosa, the Pescadores and related positions and territories of that area, Pub. L. No. 84–4, 69 Stat. 7 (1955). 19. Robert Cutler’s minutes of NSC meeting, March 11, 1958, quoted by McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House,1998), 258. 20. Bundy, Danger and Survival, 277–78. 21. Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 659. 22. President Eisenhower, press conference, March 23, 1955, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Research Service, 1955), 358. 23. Emmet John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 208. 24. Ibid. 25. This account of the Eisenhower administration’s conduct of the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis is informed by Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 363–86;

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Morton Halperin, “The 1958 Quemoy Crisis,” in Sino-Soviet Relations and Arms Control, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 265–303; and Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 740–43. See also Jim Newton, Eisenhower: The White House Years (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 272–75. William Taubman shows the Soviets to be quite displeased with Mao’s acting on his own to putting the Taiwan issue ahead of their common interest in avoiding war with the United States. See Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), 338–95. 26. Quotes are from February 1955 Eisenhower letters to Churchill, appearing in Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 470–75. 27. James Shepley, “How Dulles Averted War,” Life (January 16, 1956): 70ff.

4. WAGING PEACE: THE EISENHOWER FACE 1. Emmet John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 343–44. 2. Quoted by Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report: The Story of the Eisenhower Administration (New York: Harper, 1961), 89. 3. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956–1961: The White House Years (Garden City: Doubleday, 1965), 365. 4. Adams, Firsthand Report, 89. 5. Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York: Basic, 1982). 6. Hughes, The Ordeal of Power, 109. 7. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Chang, 1953–1956: The White House Years (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963), 149. 8. “The Chance for Peace” address by the president to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953, in Department of State Bulletin (April 27, 1953) 28:599–603. 9. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 251. 10. Ibid., 251–55. 11. See Coral Bell, Negotiation from Strength: A Study in the Politics of Power (New York: Knopf, 1963), 127. 12. Ibid., 111–23, passim. 13. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 506. 14. Address by the President, July 15, 1955, in Department of State, American Foreign Policy, 1950–1955: Basic Documents (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1955), 2:2005–8. 15. Proposal by the President at the Geneva Conference of Heads of Government, July 21, 1955, in American Foreign Policy, 1950–1955: Basic Documents, 2:2842–43. 16. Statement by the President at the Geneva Conference of Heads of Government, July 23, 1955, in American Foreign Policy, 1950–1955: Basic Documents, 2:2014. 17. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 530.

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5. CRISES AND COMPLICATIONS 1. See W. W. Rostow, The United States in the World Arena (New York: Harper, 1960), 364–65. 2. Robert J. Donovan, Eisenhower: The Inside Story (New York: Harper, 1956), 388. 3. Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report: The Story of the Eisenhower Administration (New York: Harper, 1961), 245. 4. Anthony Eden, Full Circle (London: Cassell, 1960), 374–75. 5. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace,1956–1961: The White House Years (Garden City: Doubleday, 1965), 33, 34n; and Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston: Atlantic, Little, Brown, 1973), 330–44. 6. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 50. 7. Ibid., 38. 8. Ibid., 53. 9. Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012), 697. 10. Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 698–99. See also David A. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis; Suez and the Brink of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 242–66 11. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (Newtown: American Political Biography Press, 1990), 424–25. 12. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 91. 13. Ibid., 91. 14. Ibid., 90. Actually, the proposal for a joint U.S.-Soviet peacekeeping force was a calculated Soviet move to embarrass the United States; Eisenhower’s rejection of the proposal produced an exultant reaction by Khrushchev that it exposed as myth the U.S. position of standing for peace and justice. Khrushchev also attributed the French and British withdrawal of their forces from Egypt to Soviet nuclear blackmail hints (of attacks on France and Britain) rather than to U.S. pressure on its allies. The Soviet reactions to the Suez crisis are described and analyzed by William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003) 358–60. 15. Dulles, speech to Council on Foreign Relations, October 6, 1952, quoted in John Robinson Beal, John Foster Dulles: 1888–1959 (New York: Harper, 1959), 312. 16. Quoted by Beal, John Foster Dulles 311–12. 17. Dulles, radio-television address, in Department of State Bulletin 28, no. 711 (February 9, 1953): 207–16. 18. Message from the Allied Commandants in Berlin to the Representative of the Soviet Control Commission, June 18, 1953, and letter from the Allied Commandants in Berlin to the Soviet Military Commander in Berlin, June 24, 1953; texts in Department of State, American Foreign Policy 1950–1955: Basic Documents (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), 2:1744–45. 19. Dulles, press conference, June 30, 1953, in American Foreign Policy 1950–1955: Basic Documents, 2:1745–46. 20. American Foreign Policy 1950–1955: Basic Documents, 2:1750. 21. Warren R. Schilling, Paul Y. Hammond, and Glenn H. Snyder, Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 407–9.

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22. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 87–8. 23. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President, 430. 24. Department of State, American Foreign Policy: Current Documents (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), 784–85. 25. Ibid., 790. 26. Ibid., 787–90, passim. 27. Statement by the Secretary of State before the Committees on Foreign Relations and Armed Services of the Senate, January 14, 1957, in ibid., 796–97. 28. American Foreign Policy: Current Documents (1957), 800. 29. Public Law 85–87, Congress, 1st sess., H. J. Res. 117, American Foreign Policy: Current Documents (1957), 816–17. 30. Documents Nos. 298–303, in American Foreign Policy: Current Documents (1957), 1023–28. See also John C. Campbell, Defense of the Middle East: Problems of American Policy (New York: Praeger, 1960), 127–31. 31. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 196. 32. White House news conference, August 21, 1957, in American Foreign Policy: Current Documents (1957),199. 33. Current Digest of the Soviet Press 9, no. 2, 23. 34. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1958, (Washington: GPO, 1959), “Statement by the President Following Landing of United States Marines at Beirut July 15, 1958,” 553–56; “Special Message to the Congress on the Sending of United States Forces to Lebanon, July 15, 1958,” 550–52, 35. Campbell, Defense of the Middle East, 142–44. 36. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 290. 37. Ibid., 290–91. 38. Address by the president to the Third Emergency Session of the UN General Assembly, August 13, 1958, in American Foreign Policy: Current Documents (1958), 1032–39. 39. See Arnold L. Horelick and Myron Rush, Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 40. Radio-television address by the president, November 7, 1957; see Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 223–25. 41. Morton H. Halperin, “The Gaither Committee and the Policy Process,” World Politics (April 1961): 13:360–84. 42. Ibid., passim. 43. Samuel P. Huntington, The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 94. 44. From Eisenhower’s account of November 1957 NSC deliberations, Waging Peace, 221–22. 45. Quoted by Huntington, The Common Defense, 101. 46. Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 734. 47. Resolution XCIII, Tenth Inter-American Conference, Caracas, Venezuela, March 1–28, 1954, in Department of State, American Foreign Policy, 1950–1955: Basic Documents (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), 1:1300–2. 48. Edwin Lieuwen, U.S. Policy in Latin America: A Short History (New York: Praeger, 1965), 88–92.

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49. Eisenhower’s candid discussion of the intervention in his Mandate for Change, 1953–1956: The White House Years (Garden City, 1963), 504–11, details most of the essentials. 50. Lieuwen, U.S. Policy in Latin America, 113. 51. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 525. 52. Statement by the president, July 11, 1960, in Department of State Bulletin (August 1, 1960), 42:318–19. 53. Statement by Under Secretary of State Dillon, September 6, 1960, in Department of State Bulletin (October 3, 1960), 43:533–37. 54. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 539. 55. Ibid., 533. For details on the administration’s deliberations prior to Eisenhower’s March 17, 1950, authorization of what later with some modifications became the Bay of Pigs operation, see Jim Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs (New York: Scribner, 2011), 47–56. (I discuss the Bay of Pigs in chap. 8). 56. For a description of the U.S. responses to procedural harassments on the access routes to Berlin during the spring and summer of 1958, see Jean Edward Smith, The Defense of Berlin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), 157–60. 57. The interpretation of Soviet calculations, prevalent in U.S. policy circles in 1958— that the Kremlin felt the emergent balance of power put it in a position to negotiate from strength—might well have been wrong. William Taubman in his Khrushchev: The Man and His Era ((New York: Norton, 2003), pp. 396–441) shows the Soviet leadership at the time to have been worried and insecure about the revived economic, and political, and potential military strength of West Germany, especially in comparison with East Germany. If this was indeed the Soviet perception of the context, then Khrushchev’s 1958 Berlin/Germany démarche might have been based on the assumption that this was the last chance to gain Western acceptance of East Germany as a legitimate state. 58. John Foster Dulles, News Conference, November 26, 1958, Department of State Bulletin, Vol. 39: 947–50. New York Times, November 27, 1958. 59. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 334–49, passim. 60. Ibid., 342. 61. Evan Thomas, Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World (New York: Little, Brown, 2012). Similarly, scholars who speculate, on the basis of essentially the same archival evidence, that Eisenhower, if driven to it by Khrushchev’s intransigence, would have escalated the conflict to strategic nuclear war—notably Marc Trachtenberg in his excellent A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement 1945–1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 256–63—take note of the president’s ambivalence and determination to keep that decision in his own hands. Both sides in this debate among historians recognize that Ike prided himself on being a superb bluffer. 62. As scholars of the Soviet Union show, it was at least as likely that Khrushchev was bluffing about his willingness to fight a nuclear war if it came to that. See, for example, Taubman, Khrushchev, 408–12. 63. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 341. 64. Western Proposal on Berlin (Draft Agreement), June 16, 1959, Department of State account of the Geneva Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, May–August, 1959 , discussed in

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“Berlin Crisis 1958–1959,” Foreign Relations of the United States 1958-1960, (Washington: GPO, 1960), 8:312–13 65. Eisenhower’s own paraphrase of his confidential letter to Macmillan (sent sometime between July 15 and 20, 1959), in Waging Peace, 402. 66. Ibid., 405–12. 67. Text in New York Times, September 29, 1959.

6. ENHANCING THE ARSENAL OF POWER 1. N. S. Khrushchev, “For New Victories for the World Communist Movement,” World Marxist Review: Problems of Peace and Socialism (January 1961): 3–28. 2. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 302. 3. Kennedy’s note to the NSC, quoted by Richard Reeves in President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 41. 4. See Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper, 1965), 629–33; and Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 340–42. 5. See Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 585–91. 6. Address by the president, on the First Anniversary of the Alliance for Progress.," March 13, 1962. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9100. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Quoted by Sorensen, Kennedy, 408. 10. Address by President Kennedy to the Congress, January 25, 1962, in House Document 314, 87th Cong., 2d sess. 11. John F. Kennedy, Annual Message on the State of the Union, January 30, 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, John F. Kennedy 1961 (Washington: GPO, 1962), 19–20. 12. John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Harper, 1960), 4. 13. Ibid. 14. Quoted by Sorensen, Kennedy, 528. 15. General Maxwell Taylor recounts these doctrinal battles and advances the doctrine of “flexible response” in his The Uncertain Trumpet (New York: Harper, 1960). 16. See William W. Kaufmann, ed., Military Policy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956); Robert E. Osgood, Limited War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); and Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1957). 17. See chap. 7 for recommendations of the Gaither report. The Rockefeller panel report, “International Security: The Military Aspect,” was first published in January 1958, and then republished as a part of Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports (New York: Doubleday, 1961).

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18. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961 (Washington: GPO, 1962), 231, emphasis added. 19. See Henry A. Kissinger, The Troubled Partnership: A Reappraisal of the Atlantic Alliance (New York: Anchor, 1966), especially 106–28. See also Raymond Aaron, The Great Debate (New York: Doubleday, 1965). 20. Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1961, 385, emphasis added. 21. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), 490–96. 22. See Seyom Brown. “An Alternative to the Grand Design,” World Politics (January 1965): 231–42. 23. See Sorensen, Kennedy, 567; and Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 872–73. 24. Remarks of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara at Commencement Exercises, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, June 16, 1962, in Department of Defense News Release No. 980–62. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Press conference of the president of France, November 10, 1962, in New York Times, November 11, 1962. 28. I am indebted to Herbert Dinerstein for the domestic analogy. 29. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, 174–75. 30. Sorensen, Kennedy, 564; Kissinger, The Troubled Partnership, 82–83. 31. Testimony of the Secretary of Defense before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, February 20, 1963. 32. Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Appropriations, 1963; quoted by William W. Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy (New York: Harper, 1964), 95. 33. Testimony before the House Committee on Armed Services, February 1, 1963. 34. Speech to American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 20, 1963. 35. Testimony before the subcommittee of Senate Committee on Appropriations, April 24, 1963. 36. Ibid. 37. Testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, February 21, 1963. 38. Testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, January 30, 1963. 39. Testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, February 1, 1963. 40. “McNamara Thinks About the Unthinkable,” Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962, 13–19. 41. Testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, February 21, 1963. 42. Testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, February 20, 1963. 43. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival, 543–48. 44. Ibid., for McNamara’s wrestling with the problem of “assured destruction” vs. “damaging limiting” (a.k.a. “counterforce”) nuclear capabilities and strategies. For additional details, and quotations from his now declassified Defense Program memoranda from McNamara to the president, see Keith B. Payne, The Great American Gamble: Deterrence Theory and Practice from the Cold War to the Twenty-First Century (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, 2008). 45. Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963, 890–94.

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7. THE THIRD WORLD AS A PRIMARY ARENA OF COMPETITION 1. From an address at La Grande, Oregon, November 9, 1959, in John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Harper, 1960), 107–8. 2. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 gave legislative sanction to the injection by the president of this criterion when negotiating development loans. The president, in the language of the act, was to take into account “the extent to which the recipient country is showing a responsiveness to the vital economic, political, and social concerns of its people, and demonstrating a clear determination to take self-help measures.” Title I, Sec. 201, Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, 22 U.S.C. § 2151 (1961). 3. The most comprehensive policy-oriented statement to come out of this group was the book by Max Millikan and Walt Rostow, A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1957). A more theoretical treatise is Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Some refinements are added by John Kenneth Galbraith, “A Positive Approach to Foreign Aid,” Foreign Affairs (April 1961): 444–57. 4. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 592. 5. The interregnum task force on Latin America, in addition to Berle, included Richard Goodwin, Lincoln Gordon, Teodoro Moscoso, Arturo Morales-Carrion, Robert Alexander, and Arthur Whitaker. 6. Task force quotations are taken from Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 195–96. 7. Address by President Kennedy at a White House reception, March 13, 1961, in Department of State Bulletin (April 3, 1961): 471–74. 8. Ibid. 9. Address by Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon to the Inter-American Economic and Social Conference, Punta del Este, Uruguay, August 7, 1961, in Department of State Bulletin (August 28, 1961): 356–60. 10. Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper, 1965), 535. 11. Tad Szulc, The Winds of Revolution: Latin America Today—and Tomorrow (New York: Praeger, 1963), 243–44. 12. Quoted by Sorensen, Kennedy, 535. 13. Address by President Kennedy at the White House, March 13, 1962, in Department of State Bulletin (April 2, 1962): 539–42. 14. Evaluation of the First Year of the Alliance for Progress by the Ministerial Representatives of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council, meeting in Mexico City, October 22–27, 1962, in Department of State Bulletin (December 10, 1962): 897–901. 15. Ibid. 16. Address by President Kennedy to the Inter-American Press Association, Miami Beach, Florida, November 18, 1963, in Department of State Bulletin (December 9, 1963): 900–4. 17. Address by President Kennedy to the Congress, March 13, 1962, House Document 362, 87th Cong., 2d sess. 18. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 597.

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19. Department of State, Report to the President of the United States from the Committee to Strengthen the Security of the Free World: The Scope and Distribution of United States Military and Economic Assistance Programs, March 20, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963). For Kennedy’s reaction, see Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 484. 20. Address in Salt Lake City at the Mormon Tabernacle, September 26, 1963, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, 733–38, emphasis added.

8. KENNEDY’S CUBAN CRISES 1. Central Intelligence Agency, Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, vol. 3 (released, sanitized in1998), available at National Archives, College Park, MD, http://www2 .gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB355/ 2. M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 210–213. 3. John F. Kennedy, press conference, April 12, 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), 258–59. 4. Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 252–295. 5. Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles, in a strongly worded memorandum to Secretary of State Rusk, gave the Bay of Pigs operation a very low chance of succeeding without the use of U.S. forces; and even if Kennedy’s ground rule against that were followed, Bowles argued, the obvious need for at least U.S. logistic support would be seen as evidence of a direct U.S. role in the attack. Historian Robert Dallek, in his Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 139, reports that Rusk simply filed away the Bowles memorandum. Neither Bowles nor others who regarded the plan as misconceived, such as UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson and Senator William Fulbright, were part of President Kennedy’s inner circle of advisers. And Richard Reeves in his authoritative President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 76–106, shows Kennedy believing he was deliberately deceived by advisers who wanted him to use U.S. forces. 6. Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 144–45. See also David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 89. 7. Reeves, President Kennedy, 104. 8. McGeorge Bundy, interviewed by Gordon M. Goldstein, January 17, 1996. See Goldstein’s book, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Holt, 2008), 40. Historians of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, however, have not been able to document such a high-level plot. See, for example, Trumbull Higgins, A Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs (New York: Norton, 1987). Mining their works and thoroughly searching the declassified archival material himself, Jim Rasenberger,

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in his brilliantly told story of The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, (New York: Scribner, 2011), concludes that the entrapment charge “needs to be taken with a grain of salt” (101–102). Still, not all the relevant records have been declassified, and conspiracy-suspecting chroniclers (I admit to being one in this case), speculate that what is being held back covers a smoking gun. 9. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 276. Reeves, President Kennedy, 69–73, 79–85, 90–5; Dallek, Camelot’s Court, 133–38. 10. Senator William J. Fulbright, quoted in Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 251. 11. President Kennedy, address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 20, 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1961, 204–6 12. Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1962, 897– 8. 13. Ibid, 898. 14. Ibid., 808–9. The assumption that the Soviets in their missile deployments to Cuba were trying to change the balance of power bearing on Berlin was denied by former Soviet officials who later participated in a major multilateral oral history project on the crisis. See James G. Blight and David A. Welch, On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis, (New York; Noonday, 1990); and James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis and the Soviet Collapse, (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). Clearly, however, Khrushchev regarded the deployments as rectifying the imbalance, globally, in nuclear strategic power and the conflict over Berlin as affected by the condition of the strategic balance. See William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), 529–77. 15. Photocopy of Ball’s October 18, 1962 memorandum, in Chang and Peter Kornbluh, The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, 121–22. 16. Minutes of the October 19, 1962, Executive Committee meeting, taken by Leonard Meeker, in Chang and Peter Kornbluh, The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, 125. The president revealed in the EXCOM deliberations that the Pearl Harbor parallel was one of the concerns that led him to reject the surprise air strike option. See Sheldon M. Stern, Averting “The Final Failure”: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 151. 17. Transcript of the second Executive Committee meeting, October 16, 1962, in Stern, Averting “The Final Failure,” 107. See also Aleksander Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy (New York: Norton, 1997), 202. 18. Transcripts and minutes of EXCOM meetings of October 16–20, 1962, in Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962. A National Security Archives Documents Reader (New York: New Press, 1992), 86–143. 19. David A. Welch, The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34. 20. John F. Kennedy, 1962 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), 808. 21. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Munton and Welch, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 79–80. 22. Munton and Welch, 70–71. 23. President Kennedy overruled most of his advisers in conceding privately to Khrushchev’s demand that the U.S. missiles in Turkey be removed. Moreover, if Khrushchev objected to keeping the deal secret, Kennedy was prepared to publicly accept a proposal to

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that effect that could be suggested by UN Secretary General U Thant—despite the doubts that might arise in NATO concerning U.S. commitments. 24. Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper, 1965), 717.

9. BERLIN AGAIN 1. Jean Edward Smith, The Defense of Berlin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), 230. 2. Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper, 1965), 584–86. 3. Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961 (New York: Berkley, 2011), 239–255. 4. Quotations are from the text of the aide-mémoire, handed by Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy at Vienna on June 4, 1961, in Department of State, American Foreign Policy: Current Documents (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), 584–86. 5. The president’s television address of July 25, 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961, 533–40. 6. Quoted by Smith, The Defense of Berlin, 254–55. 7. Ibid., 620–21 (emphasis added). 8. Sorensen, Kennedy, 594. 9. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), 368. See also Kempe, Berlin 1961, 464–75. 10. Kennedy quoted by Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 12. 11. National Security Archive, “The Creation of SIOP-62: More Evidence on the Origins of Overkill (ed. William Burr), Electronic Briefing Book No. 130, posted July 13, 2004, www. gwu.edu~nsarchiv/NSAEBB130/index. 12. Kempe, Berlin 1961, 430–39. 13. Quoted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 399.

10. THE VIETNAM QUAGMIRE 1. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 709–11. 2. Bundy quoted by Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the War in Vietnam (New York: Holt, 2008), 67. Goldstein’s book is an outgrowth of his collaboration with Bundy to draft a memoir of Bundy’s time as national security adviser. Before Bundy’s death in 1996, he and Goldstein had accumulated extensive verbatim notes of Bundy’s recollections of his views while in office and his retrospective reflections. 3. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 44–47. 4. President Kennedy’s interview with Walter Cronkite, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, (Washington: GPO) 652. 5. President Kennedy’s participation in discussions planning the coup against Diem was concealed from journalists and historians until the key memoranda and audiotapes were

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declassified in 2009 and 2013. Ambassador Lodge and other U.S. officials who were directly involved were convinced they had the president’s go-ahead, although the record shows Kennedy to have been shocked and distressed that Diem and his brother were murdered in the operation. See National Security Archive, The Diem Coup After 50 Years (posted November 1, 2013), www/2.gwu.edu/(nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB444. Many of the details of the U.S. government’s cooperation in the coup—but not Kennedy’s involvement—were also revealed in Mike Gravell, ed., The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department’s History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam (Boston: Beacon, 1971), 2:212–20, 239, 253–54, 257–62, 734, 738, 789–92. 6. Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1996), 86–87. Considerable controversy still surrounds the question of the timetable for the U.S. withdrawal of its military advisers, if that indeed was what President Kennedy was deliberating about. See, for example, the essay by Walt Rostow, “The Case for War” published as an appendix to the 1996 Vintage edition. There is no question, however, that at the time of his death Kennedy was steadfast against a substantial augmentation— especially to full belligerent status—of the U.S. military role. 7. Kenneth O’Donnell conversation with JFK, quoted by Robert Dallek, Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 351. 8. Recorded telephone conversations of May 27, 1964. Available at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library. Quoted in Mark K. Updegrove, Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency (New York: Crown, 2012), 185–87. 9. Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 97–106. 10. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Signet, 1977), 251–52. 11. Gravell, The Pentagon Papers, 3:3. 12. Ibid., 3:141–52. See also Leslie H. Gelb and Richard Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1979), 102. 13. The Gulf of Tonkin: The 1964 Incidents, Hearings Before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 90th Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968). 14. Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Pub. L. No. 88–408, 78 Stat. 384 (1964). 15. Address to the American Bar Association, August 12, 1964, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–1964, (Washington: GPO) 2:953. 16. Remarks in Manchester, New Hampshire, September 28, 1964, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–1964, 2:1164. 17. Remarks in Memorial Hall Akron University, October 21, 1964, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–1964, 2:1391. 18. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (New York: Knopf, 2012), 535. 19. Press conference by Secretary of Defense McNamara and Under Secretary of State Ball, February 7, 1965, in New York Times, February 8, 1965. 20. Department of State, Aggression from the North: The Record of North Viet-Nam's Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam (State Department Publication 7839, February 1965). 21. Address by President Johnson at Johns Hopkins University, April 7, 1965, in Department of State Bulletin (April 26, 1965): 606–10.

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22. See the president’s message to Congress, May 4, 1965, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, 1:494–98. 23. In Department of State Bulletin (July 12, 1965). 24. New York Times, November 18 and 19, 1965. 25. In Department of State Bulletin (August 16, 1965): 262–65. 26. Ibid. 27. In New York Times, January 29, 1966. 28. James Gavin, testimony before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings: Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966—Vietnam, 89th Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), 230–31. 29. George Kennan, in ibid., 331–36. 30. The Declaration of Honolulu and accompanying statements, published in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, February 14, 1966. 31. Draft memorandum for the president from the secretary of defense (“The McNaughton Draft Presidential Memorandum”), May 19, 1967, in Gravell, The Pentagon Papers, 4:477–89. 32. McNamara, In Retrospect, 319–35. 33. My narrative here of Clark Clifford’s efforts to turn around U.S Vietnam policy is based largely on his own account written with the assistance of Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991). 34. Clifford, Counsel to the President, 495. 35. Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention (New York: McKay, 1969), 181. 36. Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, 357. 37. Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, 205. 38. Johnson’s speech of March 17, 1968, quoted by Clifford, Counsel to the President, 507 39. Clifford, Counsel to the President, 507. 40. Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, 217. 41. Clifford, Counsel to the President, 515–16. 42. Clifford, Counsel to the President, 516–18. 43. President Johnson’s March 31, 1968, television address in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968, 1:469–476. 44. Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream 351–68 passim.

11. AVOIDING HUMILIATION IN INDOCHINA 1. Henry Kissinger, “The Vietnam Negotiations,” Foreign Affairs 47, no. 2 (January 1969): 218–19; and The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 227–29, 298. 2. Kissinger, The White House Years, 298. See also Richard Whalen, Catch the Falling Flag (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972); and Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (New York: Dell, 1975), 142–50. 3. Nixon’s autobiography, published by Doubleday in 1962, was called Six Crises. 4. For Kissinger’s defense of the legality and morality of the secret bombing of Cambodia see The White House Years, 239–54.

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5. President Nixon, radio-television address to the nation, April 30, 1970, in Department of State Bulletin 62, no. 1612 (May 18, 1970): 620. 6. Ibid., 619. 7. Richard M. Nixon, “A Report on the Conclusion of the Cambodian Operation,” Department of State Bulletin 63, no. 1621 (July 20, 1970): 65–74. 8. Kissinger, The White House Years, 433–521. 9. H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978), 82. 10. Kissinger, The White House Years, 974. 11. Details on the secret Paris negotiations between Henry Kissinger and his North Vietnam counterparts gleaned from subsequently declassified verbatim records of the meetings are provided by Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 2001). For an even more detailed account of the final negotiations of 1972–1973 that produced the Paris Peace Accords, see Marvin Kalb, The Road to War: Presidential Commitments Honored and Betrayed (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2013), 137–98. 12. Richard M. Nixon, “A Report on the Military Situation in Vietnam and the Role of the United States,” Department of State Bulletin 66, no. 1716 (May 15, 1972): 684. 13. Richard Nixon, address of May 8, 1972, in Department of State Bulletin 66, no. 1718 (May 29, 1972): 747–50. 14. Ibid. 15. See Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 184–86. 16. Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement and Extradition from the Vietnam War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 280–81. 17. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 352–54. 18. Morris, Uncertain Greatness, 186. 19. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 384. 20. Berman, No Peace, No Honor, 180–206 21. In The White House Years Kissinger unequivocally endorses the Christmas 1972 bombing: “Nixon chose the only weapon he had available. His decision speeded the end of the war; even in retrospect, I can think of no other measure that would have” (1461). See also Berman, No Peace, No Honor, 206–20. 22. Address by President Nixon, January 23, 1973, in Department of State Bulletin 68, no. 1755 (February 12, 1973): 153. 23. “Texts of Agreements and Protocols on Ending the War and Restoring the Peace in Vietnam,” Department of State Bulletin 68, no. 1755 (February 12, 1973): 169–88. 24. Ibid. 25. Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 331–32. 26. “Texts of Agreements and Protocols on Ending the War.” 27. Kissinger, The White House Years, 1470. 28. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 369–70. 29. Ibid., 301–35. 30. Ibid., 306–08. 31. Ibid., 318–19.

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32. Ibid., 324. 33. Ibid., 332–37. 34. Ibid., 327. See also Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War, 456–69. 35. Kalb, The Road to War, 175–98.

12. THE INSUFFICIENCY OF MILITARY CONTAINMENT 1. Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 62, 66–67. 2. Ibid., 217. 3. President Nixon’s news conference on January 27, 1969, Department of State Bulletin no. 1547 (February 17, 1969), 143. 4. Richard M. Nixon, U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970s: Building for Peace (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), 170–71. 5. Richard M. Nixon, U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970s: The Emerging Structure of Peace (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), 158. 6. The skirmishing over strategic arms policy inside the U.S. government is described in rich detail by Kissinger in The White House Years, 215–18, 539–51; and by John Newhouse, Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973), esp. 133–65. 7. Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems, signed in Moscow May 26, 1972, ratified and entered into force on October 3, 1972. http://www.state.gov/www/global/arms /treaties/abm/abm2.html 8. Ibid. 9. Interim Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Certain Measures with Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (signed in Moscow May 26, 1972), U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Arms Control and Disarmament Agreements: Texts and History of Negotiations (Washington: ACDA, 1979), 131–52. 10. Newhouse, Cold Dawn, 234–36. 11. Secretary of Defense James L. Schlesinger’s news conferences on August 17, 1973; January 10, 1974; and January 24, 1974, Department of Defense texts (processed). 12. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, Annual Defense Department Report, FY 1976 and Transition Budgets (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1975), 1–14. 13. Ibid. 14. Kissinger’s news conference in Moscow on July 3, 1974, Department of State Bulletin 71, no. 1831 (July 29, 1974): 210. 15. See Thomas W. Wolfe, The SALT Experience: Its Impact on U.S. and Soviet Strategic Policy and Decisionmaking (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, R-1686-PR, September 1975), 164–71, for the specifics of the Vladivostok agreement, many of which were left out of the cryptic summit communiqué and dribbled out in subsequent press conferences and background news stories. 16. Kissinger’s version of the early moves toward China is in The White House Years, 163–94. The Kalb brothers, reflecting Kissinger’s pre-Watergate deference to Nixon, give the nod to the president and cite his 1967 article in Foreign Affairs as evidence. Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (New York: Dell, 1975), 250.

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17. Kissinger, The White House Years, 163–65. 18. A. Doak Barnett, China Policy: Old Problems and New Challenges (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1977), 4–5. 19. Department of State Bulletin 61, no. 1573 (August 18, 1969): 126. 20. Richard M. Nixon, U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970s: A New Strategy for Peace, Report to Congress, February 18, 1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), 140–41. 21. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 263–64. 22. Ibid., 266–70. 23. Nixon, U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970s: Building for Peace (1971), Report to Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), 105–10. 24. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 272. See also John G. Stoessinger, Henry Kissinger: The Anguish of Power (New York: Norton, 1976), 120; and William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975), 372. 25. President Nixon’s news conference on August 4, 1971, in Department of State Bulletin 65, no. 1678, (August 23, 1971): 191. 26. Nixon, U.S. Foreign Policy The Emerging Structure of Peace (1972), Report to Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972) 35. 27. Tillman Durdin, “Peking Explains Warmer U.S. Ties,” New York Times, August 22, 1971. 28. Text of joint communiqué issues at Shanghai, February 27, 1972, in Department of State Bulletin 66, no. 1708 (March 20, 1972): 435–38. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Winston Lord, statement before the Subcommittee on Future Foreign Policy Research and Development, House Committee on International Relations, March 23, 1976. Full text in Department of State Bulletin 74, no. 1921 (April 19, 1976): 514–18. 32. Excerpts from “Interview with Kissinger: Eight Years in Washington Evaluated,” New York Times, January 20, 1977. 33. “Basic Principles of Relations Between the United States of American and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” in Department of State Bulletin 66, no. 1722 (June 26, 1972): 898–99. 34. Richard M. Nixon, U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970s: Shaping a Durable Peace, Report to Congress, May 3, 1973 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 31–35. 35. Peter G. Peterson, U.S.-Soviet Commercial Relations in a New Era (Washington: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1972), 3–4. 36. See Seyom Brown, New Forces in World Politics (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1974), 67–78. 37. Department of State Bulletin 66, no. 1718 (May 29, 1972): 755. Kissinger also arranged a special meeting between the Soviet Trade Minister and President Nixon and key U.S. trade officials at the White House three days after the Haiphong mining was announced. The Kremlin denounced the U.S. threats to Soviet shipping as a gross violation of freedom of navigation and demanded the blockade be lifted immediately but continued its preparations for the Moscow summit. See Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 352–53. 38. Kissinger, September 19, 1974. Department of State Bulletin 71, no. 1842 (October 14, 1974): 505–19. 39. Helmut Sonnenfeldt, “U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Nuclear Age,” Department of State Bulletin 84, no. 1923 (May 3, 1976): 581.

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13. THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE REASSERTION OF AMERICAN COMPETENCE ABROAD 1. UN Security Council Resolution 242, November 22, 1967, S/RES/242 (1967). [No formal title, but known as “land for peace” resolution]. (United Nations Organization: 1967), http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/7D35E1F729DF491C85256EE700686136 2. Secretary of State William R. Rogers, “A Lasting Peace in the Middle East: An American View,” address delivered December 9, 1969, in Department of State Bulletin 62, no. 1593 (January 5, 1970):8. 3. William B. Quandt, Decade of Decisions: American Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967–1976 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 89–90. 4. Israeli Cabinet statement, December 22, 1978, quoted by Quandt, Decade of Decisions. 91. 5. Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 478–79. Nixon’s claim of advance skepticism about the prospects for the Rogers Plan is borne out by the fact that the president failed to identify himself with the plan at the time either publicly or within the counsels of government. See Tad Szulc, The Illusion of Peace: Foreign Policy in the Nixon Years (New York: Viking, 1978), 97–98. 6. Nixon, RN, 479. 7. Ibid. See also Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 560–61. 8. See Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (New York: Dell, 1975), 215; Quandt, Decade of Decisions, 97–99. 9. Quandt, Decade of Decisions, 100–101. 10. Kissinger, as quoted by Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 222. 11. Szulc, Illusion of Peace, 317–20; Quandt, Decade of Decisions, 106–8; Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 225–26. 12. Kissinger, The White House Years, 567–91. 13. See Quandt, Decade of Decision, 113. 14. Szulc, Illusion of Peace, 324–25. 15. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 228–29. 16. Quandt, Decade of Decisions, 114. 17. Nixon, RN, 483. 18. Kissinger, The White House Years, 594–631, provides the most complete account of White House actions and considerations in the Jordanian crisis. Nixon devotes only a few cryptic paragraphs of his memoirs to the crisis. 19. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 236–38; Quandt, Decade of Decisions, 116–19; Szulc, Illusion of Peace, 329–31. 20. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), chapter 12; and Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 510–19, provided most of the material on the indications of impending war. See also Szulc, Illusion of Peace, 726–27; and Nadav Safran, Israel: The Embattled Ally (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap-Harvard, 1978), 467–75. 21. John Stoessinger, Henry Kissinger: The Anguish of Power (New York: Norton, 1976), 179. 22. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 477.

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23. Kissinger’s news conference on October 25, 1973, Department of State Bulletin 69, no. 1794 (November 12, 1973): 583–94. 24. See Edward R. F. Sheehan, The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger: A Secret History of American Diplomacy in the Middle East (New York: Readers Digest Press, 1976). Kissinger “recognized instinctively,” says Sheehan, “that . . . if he allowed neither side to win decisively, then he might manipulate the result to launch negotiations, and—ultimately—to compose the Arab-Israeli quarrel. All of Kissinger’s ensuing moves must be understood in this perspective” (32). 25. On the details of the arms supply delay see Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 512–24. 26. UN Security Council Resolution 338, October 22, 1973, in Department of State Bulletin 69, no. 1974 (November 12, 1978): 604. 27. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 570–71, 601–11. 28. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 550–51. 29. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, 553; Quandt, Decade of Decisions, 196; Szulc, Illusion of Peace, 745; Nixon, RN, 938. 30. James Schlesinger’s news conference on October 26, 1973, in Department of State Bulletin 69, no. 1796 (November 19, 1973):617–26. See also Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 584. 31. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 585. 32. Ibid., 585–86. 33. Nixon, RN, 939–40. 34. Kissinger’s news conference on October 25, 1973, Department of State Bulletin 69, no. 1794 (November 12, 1973): 588. 35. Ibid., 589. 36. Ibid., 604–5.

14. THE ANACHRONISM OF CONSERVATIVE REALPOLITIK 1. Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 842–918. 2. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 374–413; but see Seymour M. Hersh, “The Price of Power,” Atlantic Monthly (December 1982) 250(6): 31ff. 3. Kissinger, The White House Years, 950. 4. John B. Connally, remarks at the International Conference of the American Bankers Association, Munich, May 28, 1971, Department of the Treasury news release. 5. Richard M. Nixon, radio-television address, August 15, 1971, in Department of State Bulletin 65, no. 1680 (September 6, 1971): 253–56. 6. Kissinger, The White House Years, 955–62. 7. See Seyom Brown, New Forces in World Politics (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974), 29–44. 8. Kissinger, address delivered to the annual meeting of the Associated Press editors, April 23, 1973, in Department of State Bulletin 68, no. 1768 (May 14, 1973):593–98. See also Alvin Shuster, “Europe Cool to U.S. Design for New Ties,” New York Times, May 22, 1973. 9. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 128–94.

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10. For details on the consultations prior to and during the Washington energy conference of 1974, see ibid., 896–934. 11. Kissinger, address delivered February 11, 1974, to the opening session of the International Oil Conference, Washington, excerpts in New York Times, February 12, 1974. 12. See address by Kissinger at the World Food Conference in Rome, November 16, 1974, in Department of State Bulletin 71, no. 1851 (December 16, 1974): 821–29. 13. Interview with Secretary of State Kissinger, Business Week, January 13, 1975; full text reprinted in Washington Post, January 3, 1975. 14. Bernard Gwertzman. “Threat of Force Serves as U.S. Weapon,” New York Times, January 20, 1975. 15. Kissinger, address delivered in Milwaukee, July 14, 1975, in Department of State Bulletin 73, no. 1884 (August 4, 1975): 149. 16. Daniel P. Moynihan, “The United States in Opposition,” Commentary (March 1975): 31–44. 17. See Seyom Brown, “The New Legitimacy,” International Journal 31, no. l (Winter 1975–76): 14–25. 18. Kissinger, address read by Daniel P. Moynihan to the General Assembly of the United Nations, September 1, 1975, in Department of State Bulletin 73, no. 1891 (September 22, 1975): 425–41. 19. Anthony Lake, The “Tar Baby” Option: American Policy Toward Southern Rhodesia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). 20. National Security Council Interdepartmental Group for Africa, Study in Response to National Security Study Memorandum 39: Southern Africa, Document AF/NSC-IG 69—August 15, 1969, reprinted in full in Mohamed A. El-Khawas and Barry Cohen, eds., National Security Study Memorandum 39: The Kissinger Study of Southern Africa (Westport, Conn. Lawrence Hill, 1976). 21. The report of the NSC Task Force on Angola is summarized by Nathaniel Davis, “The Angola Decision of 1975: A Personal Memoir,” Foreign Affairs 57, no. 1 (Fall 1978): 109–24. 22. Kissinger, statement made January 29, 1976, before the Subcommittee on African Affairs of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings on U.S. Involvement in Civil War in Angola, 94th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 14–23. 23. Statement by Senator Dick Clark, January 29, 1976, before the Subcommittee on African Affairs of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings on U.S. Involvement in Civil War in Angola, 94th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976). 1-4. 24. Kissinger, address delivered in Lusaka, Zambia, April 27, 1976, in Department of State Bulletin 74, no. 1927 (May 31, 1976):672–79.

15. THE MANY FACES OF JIMMY CARTER 1. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1977 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977), 1: 3–4.

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2. Ibid., 444–50. 3. Ibid., 955–56. 4. Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. News & World Report, May 30, 1977, 35–36. 5. Carter’s promise never to lie catered to a people who, following the systematic lying at the highest levels of the U.S. government in connection with Vietnam and Watergate, wanted to trust their leaders again. His effort to demonstrate such credibility was taken to lengths unusual for a political in his admission near the end of the election campaign to an interviewer for Playboy magazine that he had “looked on a lot of women [other than his wife] with lust.” Interview with Jimmy Carter by Robert Scheer in Playboy, November 1976. 6. Jimmy Carter, address at the U.S. Naval Academy, June 7, 1978, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 14, no. 23 (1978): 1052–57. 7. Hodding Carter III, “Life Inside the Carter State Department,” Playboy, February 1981, 215. 8. James Fallows, “The Passionless Presidency,” Atlantic, May, 1979, 33–46ff. 9. Cyrus Vance, commencement address at Harvard University, June 4, 1981, New York Times, June 5, 1981. 10. Richard Burt, “Brzezinski Calls Democrats Soft Toward Moscow,” New York Times, November 30, 1980. 11. Bernard Gwertzman, “Vance, Looking Back, Lauds Pact on Arms and Retorts to Brzezinski,” New York Times, December 3, 1980.

16. THE FUSION OF REALISM AND IDEALISM 1. Cyrus Vance, “Human Rights and Foreign Policy,” address at Law Day ceremonies at the University of Georgia Law School at Athens, April 30, 1977, in Department of State Bulletin 76, no. 1978 (May 23, 1977): 505–8. 2. Information on the role and decisions of the Interagency Group on Human Rights and Foreign Assistance is from Neil J. Kritz, “The Carter Human Rights Policy: An Analysis,” manuscript, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass., 1981. 3. Ibid. 4. Mark L. Schneider, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, statement to the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, February 28, 1979 (Washington, D.C.: Department of State, internal paper). 5. The Panama Canal Treaty established a staged devolution of control of the canal and the zone to Panama, to be completed by the year 2000. Until then, the United States would retain its military base rights in the zone as well as full responsibility for the defense of the canal. The treaty also established schedules of fees to be paid Panama during this period and stipulated canal administrative procedures in detail. The Neutrality Treaty, which takes effect in the year 2000, was a guarantee by Panama to assure all nations the right to use the canal in peace and war, stipulating that only Panama was to operate the canal and to maintain any required military forces on its territory for the purpose, but implying a residual right of the United States to take matters into its own hands if Panama failed to live up to

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its treaty obligations. The United States also was given the status of first among equals by the provision that warships of the United States and Panama were entitled to transit the canal “expeditiously.” 6. Cecil V. Crabb Jr. and Pat M. Holt, Invitation to Struggle: Congress, the President, and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1980), p. 71. 7. See William M. LeoGrande, “The Revolution in Nicaragua: Another Cuba?” Foreign Affairs 58, no. l (Fall 1979): 28–50. 8. Ibid., 32–33. 9. Richard R. Fagen, “Dateline Nicaragua: The End of the Affair,” Foreign Policy, no. 36, (Fall 1979): 184. 10. Fagen, “Dateline Nicaragua,” 185–86; Leo Grande, “The Revolution in Nicaragua,” 35. 11. Cyrus R. Vance, address to the Organization of American States in Washington, June 21, 1979, excerpts in New York Times, June 22, 1979, emphasis added. 12. David Ottaway, “Africa: U.S. Policy Eclipse,” in “America and the World 1979,” special issue, Foreign Affairs (1980): 640–41. 13. White House briefing by the president for civic community leaders, April 30, 1980, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1980–1981 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981), 1: 801.

17. THE CAMP DAVID ACCORDS: CARTER’S FINEST HOUR 1. Brookings Middle East Study Group, Toward Peace in the Middle East (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1975). 2. The complete membership of the Brookings Middle East study group was Morroe Berger (co-director), Robert R. Bowie, Zbigniew Brzezinski, John C. Campbell, Nijeeb Halaby, Rita Hauser, Roger Heyns (chairman), Alan Horton, Malcolm Kerr, Fred Khouri, Philip Klutznick, William Quandt, Nadav Safran, Stephen Spiegel, A. L. Udovich, and Charles W. Yost (co-director). 3. Brookings Middle East Study Group, Toward Peace in the Middle East, 13. 4. Department of State Bulletin 77, 2002 (November 7, 1977), 639–40. 5. Sidney Drell and Uri Dan, “Untold Story of the Mideast Talks,” New York Times Magazine, January 21, 1979, 20ff. 6. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, statement of February 14, 1978, Department of State Bulletin 78, 2012 (March 1978), 37. 7. Begin’s minister of agriculture, the flamboyant hawk General Ariel Sharon, was the principal architect of the settlements policy, pushing Begin to more substantial and even irreversible colonization of the occupied areas than apparently was the prime minister’s preference. 8. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam, 1982), 327–403. 9. Drell and Dan claim that the bifurcation of the Sinai issues into a treaty and the other aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict into a set of guidelines for future negotiations was at first opposed by Brzezinski and the State Department as too much a separate peace between Israel and Egypt that would alienate the rest of the Arab world; and that Carter had to overrule his advisers to save the Camp David process from failure. Part 2 of “Untold Story of Mideast Talks,” New York Times Magazine, January 28, 1979, 38.

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10. Ibid. 11. Camp David accords, September 17, 1978, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1978): 1523–28. 12. Drell and Dan, Part Two of “Untold Story,” 38. 13. Treaty signing ceremony, March 26, 1979, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1979), 518–22, emphasis added.

18. IRAN AND AFGHANISTAN: CARTER’S STRUGGLES TO SALVAGE CONTAINMENT 1. Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 1262. 2. For U.S. policies toward Iran during World War II, see Bruce R. Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 130–208. 3. See Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience in Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), esp. 29–90. 4. Ibid., 116–23. 5. Kissinger, The White House Years, 1264. 6. Michael Ledeen and William Lewis, Debacle: The American Failure in Iran (New York: Knopf, 1981), 51. 7. Kissinger, The White House Years, 1264. 8. New York Times, January 2, 1978. 9. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1977–81 (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1983), 358–78. 10. William H. Sullivan, “Dateline Iran: The Road Not Taken,” Foreign Policy no. 40 (Fall 1980): 175–86. Compare with Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 376–82. 11. Jimmy Carter, news conference, December 7, 1978, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1978): 2171–83. 12. Sullivan, “Dateline Iran,” 184. Compare with Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam, 1982),443–49. 13. Terrence Smith, “Why Carter Admitted the Shah,” in “America in Captivity: Points of Decision in the Hostage Crisis,” special issue, New York Times Magazine, May 17, 1981, 42. 14. Pierre Salinger, America Held Hostage: The Secret Negotiations (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 15–17. See also Carter, Keeping Faith, 452. 15. Henry Kissinger, speech of April 9, 1979, at Harvard Business School dinner, quoted in Smith, “Why Carter Admitted the Shah,” 42. 16. Salinger, America Held Hostage, 18. 17. Smith, “Why Carter Admitted the Shah,” 47. See also Carter, Keeping Faith, 454–55. 18. See Salinger, America Held Hostage, 26–27. 19. The details of the takeover, unknown by Washington at the time, were reconstructed by journalists on the basis of interviews with the released hostages in early 1981. I have relied principally on the account by Charles Mohr, “Events That Led Up to Takeover of U.S. Embassy on November 4, 1979,” New York Times, January 21, 1981. 20. Carter, Keeping Faith, 459.

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21. See Carter statement on the American hostage, December 7, 1979, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1979): 2205. 22. Terrence Smith, “Putting the Hostages’ Lives First,” in “America in Captivity,” special issue, New York Times Magazine, May 17, 1981, 78. 23. The secret proximity talks of mid-November 1979 are described in Smith, “Putting the Hostages’ Lives First,” 81–82. 24. Salinger, America Held Hostage, 169–81. 25. Robert Shalpen, “Eye of the Storm,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1980, 48–49. 26. See Drew Middleton, “Going the Military Route,” in “America in Captivity,” special issue, New York Times Magazine, May 17, 1981, 103–12; also the accounts in Time and Newsweek of May 5 and 12, 1980. 27. “Poll: Use of Force in Iran Favored.” Washington Post, April 20, 1980. 28. The story of the rescue mission has been reconstructed from the material in Carter’s Keeping Faith, 506–21; Brzezinski’s Power and Principle; and from a number of journalistic accounts based on Pentagon briefings in the days following the raid. Particularly useful accounts appeared in the New York Times, April 27, 1980; Time and Newsweek April 5, 1980; and the Middleton article “Going the Military Route.” 29. Jimmy Carter, interviewed by Frank Reynolds of ABC News, December 31, 1979; text in New York Times, January 1, 1980. 30. The strongest hint of a “linkage” between U.S. support for SALT and Soviet good behavior in the Horn of Africa were Brzezinski’s in February 1978. See Strobe Talbott, Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 146–47. 31. Carter, address at Wake Forest University, March 17, 1978, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, (1978): 529–35. 32. Carter, commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, June 7, 1978, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, ( 1978): 1052–57. 33. The flexible targeting doctrine for U.S. strategic forces was formulated in the summer of 1979 in Presidential Directive 59, but the go-ahead for the associated improvements in U.S. strategic forces to make them at least equivalent to the Soviets in “war-fighting” capability was obtained by Brown in late 1977 and was featured in his unclassified budget presentations to Congress in January and February of 1978. 34. The United States had already indicated its willingness to tolerate the Soviet Union’s conversion of Afghanistan from a nonaligned country to a client state by acquiescing, without much visible diplomatic protest, to the Soviet-engineered coup in 1978 that installed a pro-Soviet Marxist regime in Kabul. 35. Carter, television address, January 4, 1980, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, (1980): 25–27. 36. Carter, State of the Union Address, January 23, 1980, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, (1980): 194–203. Quote at 197.

19. HIGH PURPOSE AND GRAND STRATEGY 1. Ronald Reagan, inaugural address, January 20, 1981, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1981): 1–5.

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2. Richard Halloran, “Reagan Aide Tells of New Strategy on Soviet Threat,” New York Times, May 22, 1982; Saul Friedman, “Reagan Calls for Pressure on USSR,” Boston Globe, May 22, 1982. 3. Richard Halloran, “Pentagon Draws up First Strategy for Fighting a Long Nuclear War,” New York Times, May 30, 1982. 4. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 267. 5. Ibid., 268. 6. Ronald Reagan, statement on sanctions being applied to the Soviet Union, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 17, (1981): 1429–30. 7. Margaret Thatcher, remarks to the British House of Commons, July 1, 1982, quoted by James Feron, “Mrs. Thatcher Faults U.S. on Siberia Pipeline,” New York Times, July 2, 1982. 8. Judith Miller, “Curb Sought on Equipment for Soviet,” New York Times, October 2. 1982. 9. Ronald Reagan, press conference, January 29, 1981, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1981): 64–72. 10. Ronald Reagan, address to Members of the British Parliament, Palace of Westminster, June 8, 1982, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1982): 764–770. 11. Ronald Reagan, address before the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando Florida, March 8, 1983, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1983): 364–70. Lou Canon reports that Reagan’s speechwriter for both the London and Orlando speeches, Anthony Dolan, was considered by the President’s more pragmatic advisers to be “a wild man . . . far to the right of Reagan.” But Canon correctly observes that the speeches faithfully reflected Reagan’s long-standing views and points out that the president took an active role in editing the drafts. See Lou Canon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 317. 12. Ronald Reagan, address to the nation, March 23, 1983, U.S. Department of State, Current Policy, no. 472. Full text also in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1983): 442–48. 13. Reagan, An American Life, 550. 14. Canon, President Reagan, 287–91. 15. On the origins of the Strategic Defense Initiative, see Janne E. Nolan, Guardians of the Arsenal: The Politics of Nuclear Strategy (New York: Basic, 1989). 16. Canon, President Reagan, 323–33. 17. Nolan, Guardians of the Arsenal, 175–82. 18. Ronald Reagan, speech to the National Space Club, March 29, 1985, excerpts in U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, Ballistic Missile Defense Technologies, OTA-ISC-254 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1985), 298. 19. Paul Nitze, speech to Philadelphia World Affairs Council, February 20, 1985, excerpts in U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, Ballistic Missile Defense Technologies, OTA-ISC-254 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1985), 301. 20. Joseph E. Persico, Casey: From the OSS to the CIA (New York: Viking, 1990), 264. 21. Ronald Reagan, State of the Union address, February 6, 1985, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1985 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), 135.

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22. Ronald Reagan, remarks at Bitburg Air Base, May 5, 1985, quoted by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Allan Gerson, “The Reagan Doctrine, Human Rights, and International Law,” in Louis Henkin, Stanley Hoffmann, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Allan Gerson, William D. Rogers, and David J. Scheffer, Right v. Might: International Law and the Use of Force (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1989), 22. 23. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorship and Double Standards,” originally in the November 1979 issue of Commentary, reprinted in her Dictatorship and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster for the American Enterprise Institute, 1982), 23–52, extended quote from 29–30. 24. Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” 41–42. 25. Ibid., 49–51. 26. Ibid., 52. 27. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “The Reagan Doctrine II,” address before the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., May 30, 1985. Reprinted in Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Legitimacy and Force: Political and Moral Dimensions (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1988), 1: 432–39. 28. On disputes within the administration over publicizing the Reagan Doctrine, see Constantine Menges, Inside the National Security Council (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 243–49. 29. Ronald Reagan, news conference, February 11, 1986, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1986): 211–18. 30. Canon, President Reagan, 364. 31. On Reagan’s abandonment of Marcos, see Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989),

20. THE TENSION BETWEEN FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC IMPERATIVES 1. Ronald Reagan, address to the Board of Governors of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, September 29, 1981, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1981): 1052–55. 2. David A. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (New York: Harper & Row, 1986). 3. A dispassionate analysis of the differences and similarities in economic philosophy among Reagan’s economic advisers is provided by William A. Niskanen, Reaganomics: An Insider’s Account of the Policies and the People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Niskanen was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from April 1981 through March 1985. 4. Ibid., 286. 5. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics, p. 76. 6. Ibid., 376–94, quotes from 377. 7. Laurence I. Barrett, Gambling with History: Reagan in the White House (New York: Penguin, 1984), 175–76. 8. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics, 290–91. 9. Ibid., 296. 10. Ibid., 299. 11. Benjamin Friedman, Day of Reckoning, (New York: Random House, 1988), 274.

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12. Niskanen, Reaganomics, 33–34. 13. Donald T. Regan, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 153–59, 293–99. 14. Niskanen, Reaganomics, 176–77. 15. See I. M. Destler, American Trade Politics: System Under Stress (Washington: Institute for International Economics, 1986), 100–109. 16. Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., Trading Places: How We Allowed Japan to Take the Lead (New York: Basic, 1988), 253. 17. Ronald Reagan, remarks to business leaders and members of the President’s Export Council and the advisory committee for trade negotiations, September 23, 1985, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1985): 1128–31. 18. Robert B. Reich, “The Economics of Illusion and the Illusion of Economics,” Foreign Affairs January 1987, Special issue on America and the World, 520–21. 19. Ibid., 522–23.

21. MIDDLE EAST COMPLEXITIES, 1981–1989 1. Alexander M. Haig Jr., Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 169–70. 2. Ronald Reagan, news conference of June 16, 1981, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1981): 632–41. 3. Congressional Quarterly, The Middle East (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1990), 58. 4. Ibid., 76–78. 5. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 411. 6. Ibid., 415. Steven L. Spiegel, The Other Arab–Israeli Conflict: Making America’s Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 410, credits reports that Reagan was misinformed about the intensity of Begin’s lobbying efforts in Congress during his September 1981 visit. 7. Reagan, An American Life, 416. 8. Congressional Quarterly, The Middle East, 59; Spiegel, The Other Arab–Israeli Conflict, 410. 9. Haig, Caveat, 328. 10. Ibid., 326–27. 11. Ibid., 335. 12. Ibid., 342. 13. Michael Deaver, Behind the Scenes (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 166. 14. Caspar W. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon (New York: Warner, 1990), 143–44. 15. Ronald Reagan, address on U.S. policy for peace in the Middle East, September 1, 1982, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1982): 1081–85. 16. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, 151–52. 17. General James Vesey quoted by David C. Martin and John Walcott, Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War Against Terrorism (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 97.

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18. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, 160. 19. Congressional Quarterly, The Middle East, 61. 20. Report of the DOD Commission on Beirut International Airport Terrorist Act, October 23, 1983 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1983), 32. 21. Reagan, An American Life, 437, 458. 22. Ibid., 458. 23. Ronald Reagan, address to the nation, October 27, 1983, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1983): 1500–02. 24. Report of the DOD Commission on Beirut International Airport Terrorist Act, October 23, 1983, 134. 25. Canon, President Reagan, 456–57. 26. Ronald Reagan, remarks at White House ceremony, January 27, 1981, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1981): 49–52. 27. Alexander Haig, press conference, January 28, 1981, New York Times, January 29, 1981. 28. Ibid. 29. Haig, Caveat, passim. 30. President Regan, various statements, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 1981, 50–66. 31. Secretary Haig, press interviews, Department of State Bulletin (1981): 1–17. 32. President Reagan’s remarks quoted by Mary McGrory, “The Price of Retaliation,” Boston Globe, June 21, 1985. 33. Secretary of State George Shultz, “Terrorism and the Modern World,” address before the Park Avenue Synagogue, New York, October 25, 1984, Department of State, Current Policy no. 629. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Bernard Gwertzman, “Bush Challenges Shultz’s Position on Terror Policy,” New York Times, October 27, 1984. 37. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, address to the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., November 28, 1984, text in his Fighting for Peace, 443–45. 38. George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), 650. 39. Martin and Walcott, Best Laid Plans, 161–202. 40. Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President 1984– 1988 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 94–96. 41. Ronald Reagan announcement of hostage release, June 30, 1985, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1985): 866–67. 42. Reagan, speech before the American Bar Association, July 8, 1985, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1985): 876–82. 43. Bob Schieffer and Gary Paul Gates, The Acting President (New York: Dutton, 1989), 233. 44. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair: Abridged Edition (New York: Times Books, 1988), 150. See also Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 785.

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45. The Tower Commission Report: The Full Text of the President’s Special Review Board (New York: Bantam/Times Books, 1987), 217–18. 46. Larry Speakes, Speaking Out: The Reagan Presidency from Inside the White House (New York: Avon, 1989), 342–54. 47. Reagan address to the nation, November 13, 1986, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1986): 1559–61. 48. President Reagan, news conference, November 19, 1986, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1986): 1583–90. 49. Speakes, Speaking Out, 365. 50. Gary Wills, Reagan’s America (New York: Penguin, 1988), quote from the epilogue in this edition, 476. 51. My rendering of the Achille Lauro incident relies heavily on the detailed account by Martin and Walcott, Best Laid Plans, 235–57. 52. President Reagan, remarks on the Achille Lauro hijacking, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 1234–37. 53. Mayer and McManus, Landslide, 140. 54. Reagan news conference, January 7, 1986, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1986): 22–29. 55. On the lack of conclusive evidence that the Libyans were directly involved in the La Belle disco bombing, see Seymour M. Hersh, “Target Qaddafi,” New York Times Magazine, February 22, 1987, 17ff. 56. Ibid. 57. Martin and Walcott, Best Laid Plans, 309–11. 58. Ronald Reagan address to the nation, April 14, 1986, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 22, no. 16 (1986): 491–92. 59. Ibid. 60. Admiral Crowe quoted by Martin and Walcott, Best Laid Plans, 313.

22. CONTRADICTIONS IN LATIN AMERICA 1. Department of State, Special Report on Communist Involvement in the Insurrection in El Salvador, February, 1981, 1–11. 2. Quoted in the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, “The Case of Four U.S. Churchwomen Murdered in December 1980,” New York (1984, processed). Much of my documentation on the Reagan administration’s policies toward El Salvador relies on Eran Rafael, “The Reagan Administration’s Attitude Toward Human Rights Violations in El Salvador 1981–1983” (senior honors thesis, Brandeis University, 1991), which was written under my guidance. 3. Ibid. 4. Ronald Reagan, news conference, March 6, 1981, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1981): 246–50. 5. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders, “U.S. Policy Options in El Salvador,” Hearings and Markup Before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, September 24, 1981, 97th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 15.

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6. Report on Haig’s testimony in the New York Times, March 29, 1981. 7. Jeane Kirkpatrick, quoted in Marvin Gettlemen, Patrick Lacefield, Louis Menashe, David Mermelstein, and Ronald Radosh, eds., El Salvador: Central America in the New Cold War (New York: Grove, 1981), 344–45. 8. Presidential Certification of El Salvador, U.S. Congress, Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs, February 2, 23, 25 and March 2, 1982 (Washington: GPO, 1982), 2. 9. Cited by Cynthia J. Arnson, Crossroad: Congress, the Reagan Administration, and Central America (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 84. 10. New York Times, February 4, 1982. 11. Tom Buckley, Violent Neighbors: El Salvador, Central America, and the United States (New York: Times Books, 1984), 28. 12. Eran Rafael, The Reagan Administration’s Attitude Toward Human Rights Violations in El Salvador, 35–36. 13. George Bush, toast at dinner in San Salvador, December 1983, text of remarks in Robert S. Leiken and Barry Rubin, eds., The Central American Crisis Reader (New York: Summit, 1987), 546–47. 14. Ronald Reagan, address before the British Parliament, June 8, 1982, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1982): 764–770. 15. Letter from the president to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the president pro tempore of the Senate, October 25, 1983, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 19, no. 17 (1983): 1493–94. 16. Ronald Reagan, address to the nation, October 27, 1983, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1983): 1501. 17. Reagan, Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 456–57. 18. My information on the Grenada invasion relies heavily on Robert Pastor, “The Invasion of Grenada: A Pre- and Post-Mortem,” in The Caribbean After Grenada: Revolution, Conflict, and Democracy, ed. Scott B. MacDonald, Harold M. Sandstrom, and Paul B. Goodwin (New York: Praeger, 1988), 87–105. The Pastor essay is an update of his testimony before House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Hearings: U.S. Military Actions in Grenada: Implications for U.S. Policy in the Eastern Caribbean, November 2, 3, 16, 1983, 72–102. 19. British report quoted by Pastor, “The Invasion of Grenada,” 88. 20. Ibid., 92–95. 21. Reagan, An American Life, 457–58. 22. Ronald Reagan, address to the nation, October 27, 1983, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1983): 1502–03. 23. On the bureaucratic infighting by and against Thomas Enders, see Roy Gutman, Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American Policy in Nicaragua 1981–1987 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988). See also Constantine Menges, Inside the National Security Council (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988). 24. For Reagan April 1983 quotes on adhering to the law, see U.S. Congress, House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transfers with Iran; Senate Select Committee to on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition, Iran-Contra Investigation Report, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1987) 33.

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25. Ronald Reagan, address to the Congress, April 27, 1983, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1983): 608–14. 26. U.S. Congress, Iran-Contra Investigation Report, 36. 27. Senator Goldwater’s letter to Casey was later published in the Congressional Record, March 3, 1988, S 1865. Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line, 20–21, quotes it in full. 28. U.S. Congress, Iran-Contra Report, 41. 29. McFarlane, quoted by Draper, A Very Thin Line, 30. 30. The information on the “third country” and private financial contributions is from U.S. Congress, Iran-Contra Investigation Report, 37–103. 31. Ibid, 327. 32. George Shultz, October 7, 1986, quoted in U.S. Congress, Iran-Contra Report, 145. 33. Ronald Reagan, news conference, October 8, 1986, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1986): 1348–49. 34. Congressman Foley’s exchange with Fawn Hall that elicited her “above the law” statement is quoted by Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History (New York: Norton, 1991), 359. 35. Ronald Reagan, news conference statement, November 25, 1986, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1986): 1604–05. 36. Attorney General Edwin Meese, news conference remarks, November 25, 1986, quoted by Draper, A Very Thin Line, 543.

23. THE REAGAN-GORBACHEV SYMBIOSIS 1. Ronald Reagan, radio-television address on Soviet-American relations, January 16, 1984, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1984): 40–45. 2. Ibid. 3. The Pentagon’s basic assessment as of early 1984 of the Soviet threat and U.S. policies needed to counter it are found in Caspar W. Weinberger, “Annual Report to the Congress, Fiscal Year 1985, February 1, 1984” (Department of Defense publication). 4. Ronald Reagan, State of the Union address, January 24, 1984, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 20 (1984): 92–93. 5. John Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age (New York: Knopf, 1989), 373–74. 6. Michael K. Deaver, Behind the Scenes (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 39. 7. Ronald Reagan, address before the 39th session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 24, 1984, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents(1984): 1352–58. 8. Deaver, Behind the Scenes, 120. 9. Nancy Reagan, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan (New York: Random House, 1989), 336–37. 10. Donald T. Regan, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 296–99. 11. Larry Speakes, Speaking Out: The Presidency from Inside the White House (New York: Avon, 1988), 159–60. 12. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 12. 13. Ibid., 634.

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14. Joint statement of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at the United States–USSR summit in Geneva, November 21, 1985, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 21, no. 47 (1985): 1422–24. 15. Speakes, Speaking Out, 173. 16. Regan, For the Record, 112–13. 17. Nancy Reagan, My Turn, 342–43. 18. Reagan, An American Life, 707, 712. 19. Speakes, Speaking Out, 173. 20. Regan, For the Record, 344. 21. Ibid., 338–41. 22. Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, 394–95. 23. My summary of Gorbachev’s opening proposal at Reykjavik relies heavily on Strobe Talbott’s account in The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace (New York: Knopf, 1988), 315–16. 24. Regan, For the Record, 350. See also Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, 395–96; Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus, Landslide: The Unmasking of the President 1984– 1988 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 283. 25. Reagan, An American Life, 677. 26. Regan, For the Record, 351–52. 27. Speakes, Speaking Out, 183. 28. Reagan, An American Life, 675. 29. Regan, For the Record, 336. 30. James Schlesinger, “Reykjavik and Revelations: A Turn of the Tide?” Foreign Affairs January 1986, Special issue on America and the World, 434. 31. Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, 398. 32. Ronald Reagan, remarks at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, June 12, 1987, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1987): 657–61. 33. Reagan, An American Life, 683. 34. Michael E. Gordon, “Negotiating the Arms Treaty: Verification Issue Proved Thorny,” New York Times, January 28, 1988. See also Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, 400–401. 35. Remarks on signing the treaty eliminating intermediate-range and shorter-range nuclear missiles, December 8, 1987, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1987): 1458. 36. Ibid. 37. Reagan, An American Life, 707–708. 38. Ibid., 708.

24. PRESIDING OVER THE END OF THE COLD WAR 1. Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 3–4. 2. Mikhail Gorbachev, address at the plenary meeting of the 43rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly, December 7, 1988 (Washington, D.C.: Embassy of the USSR, 1988).

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3. Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 13. 4. Brent Scowcroft on This Week, American Broadcasting Company, January 22, 1989. 5. George Bush, news conference, January 27, 1989, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1989): 121. 6. Scowcroft on This Week, January 22, 1989. 7. Bush, commencement address at Texas A&M University, May 12, 1989, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1989): 699–702. 8. Fitzwater quoted by Beschloss and Talbott, At The Highest Levels, 73. 9. Ibid., 74. 10. Bush, remarks at Mainz, West Germany, May 31, 1989, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1989): 812–16. 11. Roger E. Kanet and Brian V. Souders, “Poland and the Soviet Union,” in East-Central Europe and the USSR, ed. Richard F. Staar (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 125–45. 12. Beschloss and Talbott, At The Highest Levels, 85–88. 13. For the intricate international diplomacy that produced the unification of Germany and its inclusion in NATO, see Mary Elise Sarotte’s excellent study, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 14. Karl Kaiser, “Germany’s Reunification,” Foreign Affairs January 1990, Special issue on America and the World, 179–205; and Robert Gerald Livingston, “Relinquishment of East Germany,” in Staar, East-Central Europe and the USSR, 82–84. 15. Livingston, “Relinquishment of East Germany,” 86. 16. Kaiser, “Germany’s Reunification,” 179–205. 17. See Seyom Brown, “Explaining the Transformation of World Politics,” International Journal Spring 1991, 207–19. 18. Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill, “America’s Stake in the Soviet Future,” Foreign Affairs Summer 1991, 77–97. 19. Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 411–15. 20. Bush, address to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, August 1, 1991, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1991): 1093–96. 21. Bush, exchange with reporters in Kennebunkport, Maine, August 19, 1991, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1991): 1154–58. 22. Ibid. 23. Bush, statement on the attempted coup in the Soviet Union, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 1991: 1159–60. 24. Bush, news conference of August 20, 1991, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1991): 1160–66. 25. Bush, address to the nation, December 25, 1991, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1991): 1883–85.

25. THE RESORT TO MILITARY POWER 1. Kevin Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 146–57; Dole quote at 147. 2. Ibid., 155–56.

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3. Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 86–87. 4. George Bush, news conference, May 11, 1989, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1989):689–91. 5. George Bush, interview with White House press corps aboard Air Force One, May 13, 1989, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1989): 706–710. 6. Buckley, Panama, 197–208; Woodward, The Commanders, 119–25. 7. Fitzwater statement, quoted by Woodward, The Commanders, 125. 8. George Bush, exchange with reporters, October 6, 1989, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1989): 1514–15. 9. George Bush, news conference, October 13, 1989, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1989): 1541–43. 10. Woodward, The Commanders, 156–74. 11. George Bush, address to the nation, December 20, 1989, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1989): 1974–75. 12. Ibid. 13. Tom Wicker, “What Price Panama?” New York Times, June 18, 1990. 14. Woodward, The Commanders, 190–95; see also Buckley, Panama, 253. 15. United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/44/240, “Effects of the Military Intervention by the United States of America in Panama on the Situation in Central America, December 29, 1989. 16. Bush statement on post-invasion aid to Panama quoted in New York Times, January 26, 1990. 17. John Weeks, “Panama: Still Teetering on the Verge of Anarchy,” Boston Globe, March 26, 1990; Howard W. French, “Noriega’s Troops Now Form Police with U.S. Aid, Panamanians Say,” New York Times, July 24, 1990. 18. Jean Edward Smith, George Bush’s War (New York: Holt, 1992), 44–45. 19. Ibid., 52–57. 20. Leslie Gelb, “Mr. Bush’s Fateful Blunder,” New York Times, July 17, 1991. 21. Michael R. Gordon, “Pentagon Objected to a Message Bush Sent Iraq Before Its Invasion,” New York Times, October 25, 1992. 22. Quoted by Smith, George Bush’s War, 59–60. 23. United Nations Security Council Resolution 660, August 2, 1990, “The Situation Between Iraq and Kuwait” United Nations Security Council Resolutions Related to the Crisis in the Gulf (United Nations: Department of Public Information DP/1104–41090, November 1990), 3. 24. Bob Woodward, The Commanders, 229; see also U.S. News and World Report, Triumph Without Victory (New York: Times Books, 1992), 49–51. 25. Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict 1990–1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 74. 26. George Bush, remarks and exchange with reporters, August 6, 1990, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 26, no. 32 (1990): 1214–15. 27. George Bush, address to the nation announcing the deployment of United States armed forces to Saudi Arabia and follow-up news conference, August 8, 1990, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1990): 1216–23.

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28. Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 244–248. 29. Resolution 661, August 6, 1990, “The Situation Between Iraq and Kuwait” in United Nations Security Council Resolutions Relating to the Crisis in the Gulf, 3–4. 30. A selection of remarks on the Persian Gulf situation by President George Bush from August 5 through August 10, 1990, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 26, no. 32 (1990): 1207–26. 31. Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 250–51. 32. Resolution 665, August 25, 1990, in United Nations Security Council Resolutions Relating to the Crisis in the Gulf, 5–6. 33. Elaine Sciolino, “How U.S. Got U.N. Backing for Use of Force in the Gulf,” New York Times, August 30, 1990. 34. Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 97–98. 35. Statement by President Bush on Syria’s cooperation, quoted by Smith, George Bush’s War, 153. 36. Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 101. 37. Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 259. 38. Ibid., 260–65. 39. George Bush, news conference on the Persian Gulf crisis, November 8, 1990, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1990): 1789–95; quote from 1790. 40. Ibid., 1791. 41. Smith, George Bush’s War, 215. 42. Resolution 678, November 29, 1990, in United Nations Security Council Resolutions Relating to the Crisis in the Gulf (supplement to report cited in note 23). 43. Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 233. 44. Presidential news conference, November 30, 1990, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1990): 1948–56. 45. Ibid. 46. Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 241. 47. Woodward, The Commanders, 345. 48. Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 254–60. 49. Joint Congressional Resolution of January 12, 1991. Text published as Appendix B in U.S. News and World Report, Triumph Without Victory, 449–50. 50. Woodward, The Commanders, 366–67. 51. George Bush, address to the nation announcing allied military action in the Persian Gulf, January 16, 1991, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1991): 50–52. 52. Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 150–51. 53. United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, April 3, 1991, in United Nations Resolutions Relating to the Crisis in the Gulf. 54. United Nations Security Council Resolution 668, April 5, 1991, S/RES/668/ 1990http//:www.refworld.org/docid/3b00f16b30 55. George Bush, speech at Maxwell Air Force Base, April 13, 1991, and news conference of April 16, 1991, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1991): 431–35, 444–50.

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56. See the Frontline video documentary on the Gulf War, vol.2.www.pbs.org/wgbh/ fropntline/gulf 57. George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), 488–489. 58. Ibid., 447–48. 59. Reports and excerpts from Bush’s remarks on January 14, 1993, New York Times, January 14, 1993. 60. Michael R. Gordon, “Somali Aid Plan Is Called Most Ambitious Option,” New York Times, November 28, 1992. 61. United Nations Security Council Resolution, December 3, 1992, in New York Times, December 4, 1992. 62. President George Bush, address of December 4, 1992 on decision to deploy U.S. troops to Somalia, in New York Times, December 5, 1992. 63. President George Bush, speech at West Point Military Academy, January 5, 1993, Cable News Network transcript #107–1, emphasis added.

26. THE NEW WORLD ORDER 1. George Bush, address before joint session of the Congress, September 11, 1990, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1990): 1358–62, quote at 1359. 2. George Bush, address before joint session of the Congress on cessation of the Persian Gulf conflict, March 6, 1991, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1991): 257–60, quote at 259. 3. George Bush, statement on the Chinese government suppression of student demonstrations, June 3, 1989, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1989): 838–39. 4. Bush statement quoted by Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 182. 5. George Bush, news conference, June 5, 1989, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1992): 839–43. 6. Duffy and Goodgame, Marching in Place, 183. 7. Robert S. Ross, “U.S. Policy Toward China,” in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Search for a New Role, ed. Robert J. Art and Seyom Brown (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 338–57. 8. Presidential debate in St. Louis, October 11, 1992, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1992): 1914–15. 9. United States’ statement on the situation in Yugoslavia, May 24, 1991, quoted in Morton H. Halperin, David J. Scheffer, and Patricia L. Small, Self-Determination in the New World Order (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1992), 33. 10. United Nations Security Council Resolution 757, May 30, 1992, text in U.S. Department of State Dispatch 1992 vol. 3, no. 23, 448–50. 11. Lawrence Eagleburger, interview on MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour August 28, 1992, text in U.S. Department of State Dispatch 1992 vol. 3, no. 7, 13. 12. Ibid. 13. I. M. Destler, American Trade Politics (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1992), 208–09.

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14. Duffy and Goodgame, Marching in Place, 243–44. 15. Destler, American Trade Politics, 209. 16. George Bush, remarks on trade agreement, August 12, 1992, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1992): 1421–24. 17. Richard Elliot Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet (Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1991), 30–31. 18. Keith Schneider, “White House Snubs U.S. Envoy’s Plea to Sign Rio Treaty,” New York Times, June 5, 1991. 19. Edward A. Parson, Peter M. Haas, and Marc A. Levy, “A Summary of Major Documents Signed at the Earth Summit and the Global Forum,” Environment, 1992, vol. 34, no. 8, 12ff. 20. Steven Greenhouse, “Ecology, the Economy and Bush,” New York Times, June 14, 1992. 21. George Bush, address at the earth summit in Rio, June 12, 1992, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 28, no. 25 (1992): 1043–44. 22. William Reilly, mid-July 1992 memo to EPA employees, quoted in Richard N. Gardner, Negotiating Survival: Four Priorities After Rio (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1992), 13. 23. START II: Treaty Between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, 1993, analysis in http://www.acq.osd.mil/tc/treaties/start2/text.htm. 24. Remarks at the START II signing ceremony on January 3, 1993 in Moscow, New York Times, January 4, 1993.

27. FROM DOMESTIC POLITICIAN TO GEOPOLITICIAN 1. Bill Clinton, address to the diplomatic corps, Washington, D.C., January 18, 1993 in Department of State Dispatch 4, no. 5 (February 1, 1993): 57–58. 2. Warren Christopher, speech before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, March 22, 1993, in the New York Times, March 23, 1993. 3. Ibid. 4. New York Times/CBS news poll, New York Times, April 2, 1993. 5. President Clinton, address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Annapolis, April 1, 1993, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1993): 508–10. 6. Gwen Ifill, “President Urges America to Back Help for Moscow,” New York Times, April 2, 1993. 7. David E. Sanger, “Seven Nations Pledge $28 Billion Fund to Assist Russia,” New York Times, April 16, 1993; Gwen Ifill, “Seven Nations Hasten to Aid Russia: Will Push for Growth and Trade,” New York Times, April 9, 1993. 8. Elaine Sciolino, “Clinton Reaffirms Policy on Yeltsin,” New York Times, December 16, 1963. 9. Michael R. Gordon, “U.S. Opposes Move to Rapidly Expand NATO Membership,” New York Times, January 2, 1994. 10. Elaine Sciolino, “U.S. Narrows Terms for its Peacekeepers,” New York Times, September 23, 1993.

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11. President Clinton, address to United Nations General Assembly, September 27, 1993, Department of State Dispatch 4, no. 39 (1993). 12. Bill Clinton, press conference of September 27, 1993, quoted by Thomas L. Friedman, “Clinton at UN Lists Stiff Terms for Sending U.S. Force to Bosnia,” New York Times, September 28, 1993. 13. Department of State, “Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright Before the Senate Finance Committee,” press release, June 10, 1997. 14. Clinton’s warning to North Korea, quoted by Gwen Ifill, “In Korea, Chilling Reminders of Cold War,” New York Times, July 18, 1993. 15. Joel S. Wit, Daniel B. Poneman, and Robert L. Gallucci, Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004). My description of how the Clinton administration handled the North Korean nuclear weapons crisis is reconstructed primarily from this account by three former Clinton administration officials who were directly involved in dealing with it. 16. Ibid., xvi. 17. Agreed Framework Between the United States of America and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, signed in Geneva on October 21, 1994, by Robert L. Gallucci for the United States and Kang Sok Ju for North Korea. International Atomic Energy Agency, INFCIRC/457, 2 November 1994. 18. On the trade issues facing Clinton at the outset of his administration, see Keith Bradsher, “Clinton Gets Tough on Trade, but Policies Are Still Blurred,” New York Times, March 30, 1993. 19. Mary Curtis, “U.S. Tells Allies It Won’t Always Take the Lead on Regional Crises,” Boston Globe, May 26, 1993; and “Shift in Role Abroad Quickly Disavowed,” Boston Globe, May 27, 1993. 20. Stephen A. Holmes, “Christopher Reaffirms Leading U.S. Role in World,” New York Times, May 28, 1993. 21. “A Brand X Foreign Policy,” New York Times (editorial), May 28, 1993. 22. Anthony Lake, address at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, D.C., September 21, 1993, Department of State Dispatch 4, no. 39 (1993). 23. Ibid. 24. Colin L. Powell, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), 576. 25. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, interview on NBC’s Today Show, February 19, 1998.

28. OPPORTUNITIES AND FRUSTRATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST 1. New York Times, January 14, 1993. Extended excerpts from Clinton’s January 13 interview were published by the New York Times on January 15, 1993. 2. Thomas L. Friedman, “Clinton Affirms U.S. Policy on Iraq,” New York Times, January 15, 1993. 3. Thomas L. Friedman, “U.S. Asserts Iraq Changed Behavior,” New York Times, February 3, 1993.

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4. Warren Christopher, March 24, 1993 testimony before Appropriations Subcommittee of the House Operations Committee, Department of State, Dispatch, vol. 3, no. 13, March 29, 1993, 18f. 5. Thomas L. Friedman, “Jewish Criticism on Clinton Picks,” New York Times, January 5, 1993. 6. Clinton’s mediation process at Camp David is described by Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 613–27. 7. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 936–37. 8. Ibid., 943–45.

29. LEAVING SOMALIA AND LEAVING RWANDA ALONE 1. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1999). 2. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 552–54. 3. Ibid., 551. 4. Most of the information here on the Clinton administration’s actions (and inaction) during the Rwanda crisis of 1994 is gleaned from Madeleine Albright’s memoir, Madame Secretary (New York: Hyperion, 2003), and from Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic, 2002). 5. Prudence Bushnell, quoted by Powers, A Problem From Hell, 350. 6. Albright, Madame Secretary, 187. 7. Albright, 154–55. 8. Bill Clinton, My Life, 593.

30. GETTING TOUGH WITH SADDAM AND OSAMA 1. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 525. 2. Ibid., 526. 3. Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, 22 U.S.C. § 2151 (1998). 4. CNN, “Transcript: President Clinton Explains Iraq Strike,” December 16, 1998. 5. Ibid. 6. Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary: A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 364–365. 7. Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, authorized ed. (New York: Norton, 2003), 115–16. Hereafter referred to as 9/11 Commission Report. 8. Ibid., 116–17. 9. President Clinton, news conference of August 20, 1998, broadcast on PBS Online NewsHour, www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec 98/clintoN. 10. 9/11 Commission Report, 117.

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31. INTO HAITI AND THE BALKANS 1. Anthony Lake, address at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, D.C., September 25, 1993, Department of State Dispatch 4, no. 39 (1993) 2. Pamela Constable, “Clinton in Reversal Backs Bush on Haiti,” Boston Globe, March 3, 1993. 3. United Nations Security Council, Resolution 940, July 31, 1994. 4. President Clinton, address to the nation, September 1, 1994. Text in New York Times, September 2, 1994. 5. Robert A. Pastor, “The Clinton Administration and the Americas: The Postwar Rhythm and Blues,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 36, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 99–128, quote from 106–17. 6. Mary Curtis, “Some See in Clinton Policy a Casualty of Balkan War,” Boston Globe, March 25, 1993. 7. Ivo H. Daalder, Getting to Dayton: The Making of America’s Bosnia Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000), 42–43. 8. Madeleine Albright, Madame Secretary: A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 236–39. 9. Ibid., 240–41. 10. Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998), 101–2. 11. Holbrooke, To End a War, 142–99. 12. Albright, Madame Secretary, 484–85. Most of the quotes in this section on the Kosovo crisis are taken from her memoir, and much of my account here is based on her candid and authoritative recollection of the events. 13. Ibid., 488. 14. Ibid., 490. 15. White House, “President Clinton’s Address to the Nation,” press release, March 24, 1999. 16. For the debate on the ground force option, see Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000), 130–36. 17. Albright, Madame Secretary, 520. 18. Ibid., 523. 19. Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 144–45. 20. Ibid., 526 21. Albright, Madame Secretary, 534. 22. Ibid., 534–35. 23. Ibid., 536.

32. NEOCONSERVATIVES SEIZE THE DAY 1. The emblematic statement of the kind of foreign policy “realism” the incoming Bush team promised to install (very much in the tradition of the administration of George H. W. Bush) was the article by Condoleezza Rice entitled “Promoting the

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National Interest,” which appeared in the January–February 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs, 45–62. 2. Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 117–21. 3. Project for the New American Century, “Statement of Principles” (Washington, D.C.: 1997). 4. President George W. Bush, second inaugural address, White House, January 20, 2005. 5. George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), 397 6. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, address to the World Forum on the Future of Democracy, Williamsburg, Va., September 17, 2007, www.defenselink.mil/speeches. 7. Bush, Decision Points, 335–36.

33. 9/11, THE WAR ON TERROR, AND A NEW STRATEGIC DOCTRINE 1. Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, authorized ed. (New York: Norton, 2003), 35. Hereafter referred to as 9/11 Commission Report. 2. George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), 127. 3. President George W. Bush, address to the nation, September 11, 2011, 9:30 a.m. EST, Text available from CNN: edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/bush.speech. Also published in Selected Speeches of President George W. Bush (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2004), 57–58. whitehouse.gov. 4. Bush, Decision Points, 129. 5. 9/11 Commission Report, 38–42. 6. The alleged problematic mismatch between the logs when the president’s authorizations of Cheney’s shoot-down authorizations were supposed to have been given and the timing of the actual orders is detailed in Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2008), 120–25. The 9/11 Commission Report documents some of the confusion on pp. 40–46. Cheney, in his memoir, does not get into such details, affirming only that the President “approved my recommendation that they [U.S. fighter aircraft] be authorized to fire on a civilian airliner if it had been hijacked and would not divert.” Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 3. 7. George W. Bush, address on the night of September 11, 2001, (sources in Note 3, above) Security Act of 2002, 6 U.S.C. § 101 (2002). 9. Authorization for the Use of Military Force, S. J. Res. 23, and Pub. L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 2004 (2001). 10. 9//11 Commission Report, 333–34. 11. Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 192 12. 9/11 Commission Report, 334. Early on the intelligence agencies could not come up with anything more than an unverified Czech report alleging Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers, had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001.

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13. 9/11 Commission Report, 334–36. 14. White House, Remarks by the president at the 2002 graduation exercise of the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., press release, June 1, 2002. Text at Presidential Rhetoric.com http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/06.01.02.html 15. National Security Strategy of the United States, issued by the White House, September 20, 2002 (White House document). http://www.state.gov/documents /organization/63562.pdf 16. White House, President George W. Bush, State of the Union address, press release, January 29, 2002. Text at http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/06.01.02.html 17. Rumsfeld’s reflections on this appear in his memoir Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011), 423–24.

34. FROM CONTAINMENT TO FORCIBLE REGIME CHANGE: AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ 1. George W. Bush, address on the night of September 11, 2001, Text available from CNN: edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/bush.speech. Also published in Selected Speeches of President George W. Bush (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2004), 57–58. 2. White House, George W. Bush, speech of September 20, 2001, to a Joint Session of Congress, press release. 3. Ibid. 4. “Transformation” was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s concept for incorporating the so-called revolution in military affairs (RMA) U.S. military strategy and force structure. Central to such transformation was the integration of advanced information technologies into military weapons design, strategies, and operations. In the words of a study Rumsfeld ordered upon taking office, priority was to be given to the creation of “joint forces (putting the forces of the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines under unified commands) capable of conducting operations across the full spectrum of conflict. The joint forces would be capable of “projecting force both rapidly and potently” and “combining precision with speed.” The jointness would be both horizontal and vertical, within the force and to the highest national command authorities. Department of Defense, Transformation Study Report: Transforming Military Operational Capabilities (April 27, 2001). 5. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, remarks at National Defense University, January 31, 2002. 6. For General Frank’s reasons for not calling in more forces at Tora Bora, see Bradley Graham, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld (New York: Public Affairs, 2009) 307–08 7. Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011), 403. 8. Michael E. O’Hanlon, “Did Military Misstep Let Bin Laden Escape?” Baltimore Sun, April 28, 2002. O’Hanlon’s more detailed critique, “A Flawed Masterpiece,” was published in Foreign Affairs (May–June 2002, 47–63). See also the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report: Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get Bin

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Laden and Why It Matters Today (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2009). 9. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, news conference, October 18, 2001, www.defenselink .mil/transcripts. 10. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, news conference, September 12, 2005, www .defenselink.mil/transcripts. 11. Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2010). 12. A compilation of the data on the situation in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2008 is provided by John H. Campbell and Jeremy Shapiro, Afghanistan Index: Tracking Variables of Reconstruction & Security in Post-9/11 Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: March 30, 2009). See also International Security Assistance Force, Metrics Brief 2007–2008, cited by Catherine Dale, War in Afghanistan: Strategy, Military Operations, and Issues for Congress (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, January 23, 2009), 21. 13. Ronald E. Neumann, The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2009): 203. 14. Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, authorized ed. (New York: Norton, 2003), 35. Hereafter referred to as 9/11 Commission Report. 15. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir, 425. 16. George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2011), 234. 17. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice, 216. 18. Brent Scowcroft, “Don’t Attack Saddam,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2002. 19. Vice President Dick Cheney, remarks at the opening session of the National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, August 26, 2002, www.americanrhetoric.com /speeches/cheney. 20. George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 315–17, 21. Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, 322–24. 22. “Iraq’s Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction: Key Judgments,” from October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (subsequently declassified and released by the White House on July 18, 2003), www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraq-wmd .html 23. Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. Pub. L. No. 107–243, 116 Stat. 1498 (2002.). 24. Bush, Decision Points, 242. 25. Ibid., 243. 26. Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, 369–74. 27. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice, 242. 28. Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, 375. 29. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice, 242. 30. Tenet, At The Center of the Storm, 322–39. 31. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 449.

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32. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “President Bush Addresses the Nation,” press release, March 19, 2003, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/ releases/2003/03/20030319-17.html 33. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended,” press release, May 1, 2003, http://georgewbush -whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030501-15.html 34. See especially testimony of Paul Wolfowitz before the Committee on the Budget of the House of Representatives on February 27, 2003, Department of Defense Budget Priorities for Fiscal Year 2004 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2003), 8–10, where he said that “some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark.” 35. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 454–56, 464. 36. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 515. 37. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 516–18. 38. The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward—A New Approach (Minneapolis: Filiquarain Publishing, 2006). 39. Bush, Decision Points, 373–78. 40. U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), sect. I-149, 48. 41. Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011) 540. 42. President Bush’s speech on Iraq, January 10, 2007, http://georgewbush-whitehouse .archives.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-7.html 43. Iraq War Policy Resolution, H.Con.R. 63, 110th Cong. (2007). 44. General David H. Petraeus, “Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq,” testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, April 8–9, 2008. 45. Associated Press report, “Iraq Surge Exceeded Expectations, Obama Says,” September 4, 2008, msnbs.com.

35. NATIONAL SECURITY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES 1. Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 363, 2. Title II, USA PATRIOT Act, Public Law 107–56. 3. Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011), 115. 4. Dick Cheney, In My Time, 353. 5. George W. Bush, Memorandum for the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, The Chief of Staff to the President, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on “Humane Treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda Detainees” (White House, February 7, 2002).

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6. The Bush administration efforts to legally shield U.S. officials from criminal prosecution under the torture statute are recounted in former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith’s memoir, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (New York: Norton, 2007). 7. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, Memorandum for Albert R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President “Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation Under 18 U.S.C. Sections 2340–2340A (Office of the Assistant Attorney General, August 1, 2002). 8. Ibid. 9. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Legal Counsel, Memorandum for John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency, “Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative” (Office of the Attorney General, August 1, 2002). 10. Quoted with approval by Cheney, In My Time, 361–62. 11. Bush, Decision Points, 169.

36. ENGAGING THE WORLD 1. In embracing the goal of full nuclear disarmament Obama explicitly invoked the call for a nuclear weapons–free planet made by former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former secretary of defense William Perry, and former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn—all hard-headed national security realists. See their op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2007. 2. White House blog, “President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address,” January 20, 2009, www.whitehouse.gov/blog/inaugural-address. 3. James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York: Viking, 2012). 4. David Axelrod, quoted by Peter Baker, New York Times, March 15, 2009. 5. David Brooks, “Obama, Gospel and Verse,” New York Times, April 26, 2007. The works of Reinhold Niebuhr that Obama could have gotten these ideas from would be especially Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and The Irony of American History (1952). 6. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, Oslo, Norway,” press release, December 10, 2009, www.whitehouse.gov /the-press-office/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize 7. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “ Remarks by the President on a New Beginning, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt,” press release, June 4, 2009, www.whitehouse .gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Cairo-University-6-04-09. 8. Ibid. 9. “President Obama Holds a News Conference with President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia,” CQ transcript, Moscow, Russia, July 6, 2009, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn /content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070601537.html. 10. Remarks by President Obama at the New Economic School Graduation, Moscow, Russia, July 7, 2009, text on the Council on Foreign relations website: www.cfr.org /publication/19750.

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11. Hillary Clinton, quoted by Stephen Stromberg, “What’s Up With the Reset?” Washington Post, October 15, 2009. 12. Peter Baker, “Obama Resets Ties to Russia; Work Remains,” New York Times, July 8, 2009. 13. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on Strengthening Missile Defense in Europe,” press release, September 17, 2009, www.whitehouse.gov /the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-on-Strengthening-Missile-Defense-in-Europe. 14. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright, Department of Defense news briefing, September 17, 2009, Department of Defense news transcript, defenselink.mili/transcripts, transcriptiad=4479 15. Robert M. Gates, “A Better Missile Defense for a Safer Europe,” New York Times, September 20, 2009, Sunday Opinion section. 16. President Obama, Face the Nation interview by Bob Schieffer, conducted at the White House, September 18, 2009, broadcast on CBS September 20, 2009, cbsnews.com/ftn 17. Secretary of State John Kerry, “Remarks With Ukranian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin”, July 29, 2014. www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2014/07/229905.htm 18. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the Presidenr on Ukraine, July 29, 2014, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/07/29/statement-president 19. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Barack Obama at Hradcany Square, Prague, Czech Republic,” press release, April 5, 2009, www.whitehouse. gov/the_press_office/Remarks-By-President-Barack-Obama-In-Prague-As-Delivered 20. Treaty Between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, signed by President Barack Obama and President Dimitri Medvedev in Prague on April 8, 2010. Also called New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). Text at Department of State http://wwwsate.gov/t/avc/newstart/c44126.htm 21. Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review Report (Washington, D.C.: April 2010), 2. Hereafter cited as NPR. 22. NPR, 20. 23. NPR, 16. 24. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Report on Nuclear Employment Strategy of the United States Specified in Section 491 of 10 USC, 19 June 2013. www.defense.gov/pubs/ ReporttoCongressonUSNUclearEmplpoymentSTrategy-Section491pdf. See also Seyom Brown, “Beyond MAD: Obama’s Realistic—but Risky—Effort to Reduce the Role of Nuclear Weapons,” Survival, December 2013–January 2014, 135–146. 25. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Working Toward Change in Perceptions of U.S. Engagement Around the World.” roundtable with traveling press, February 20, 2009, http://m.state.gov/md119430.htm 26. Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg, keynote address at the Center for a New American Security, Washington, D.C., September 24, 2009, www.state.gov. At the National Security Council, there was some unhappiness that the deputy secretary of state had apparently taken it upon himself to articulate his “strategic reassurance” concept without first consulting with NSC China specialists and clearing the speech with the White House. Andrew Higgins and Anne E. Kornblut, “Ties That Bind, and Labels to Keep in Mind,” Washington Post, November 12, 2009.

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27. Xu Caihu, vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, quoted in People’s Daily Online, October 29, 2009. 28. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Barack Obama at Town Hall Meeting with Future Chinese Leaders,” press release, November 16, 2009, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-town -hall-meeting-with-future-chinese-leaders. 29. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President in a BiLateral Meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao of China,” press release, November 18, 2009, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-a-bilateral-meeting -with-premier-wen-jiabao-china. 30. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “U.S.-China Joint Statement,” press release, November 17, 2009, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/us-china-joint-statement 31. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Remarks on Internet Freedom,” January 21, 2010, www .state.gov. For Google’s complaints against the Chinese government and its announcement of an intention to fundamentally review its business operations in China, see Google official blog, “A New Approach to China,” January 12, 2010, googleblog.blogspot .com/2010/01. 32. Department of Defense, “Statement by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone,” news release, November 23, 2013, www.defense. gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=16392. 33. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1874, “Non-proliferation/Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” June 12, 2009 (United Nations, S/RES/1874 [2009]). 34. Mark Lander, “Clinton Trades Jibes with North Korea,” New York Times, July 23, 2009. 35. John Podesta (former White House chief of staff who accompanied Clinton on his August 4, 2009, trip to Pyongyang), interview on CNN, August 10, 2009. 36. Senator Jim Webb’s remarks in Bangkok, August 16, quoted by Seth Mydans, “American Held in Myanmar Is Released After Senator Meets with Junta Leader, “ New York Times, August 17, 2009. 37. Jim Webb, “We Can’t Afford to Ignore Myanmar,” New York Times, August 26, 2009. 38. Kurt M. Campbell, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, “Statement on U.S. Policy Towards Burma,” September 28, 2009, www.cfr.org /publication/20327. 39. Ibid. 40. Thomas Fuller, “U.S. Diplomat Meets Myanmar’s Top Dissident and Urges Junta to Work with Her,” New York Times, November 5, 2009. 41. Obama statement on Iranian Qum nuclear plant, quoted by David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “U.S. and Allies Press Iran Over Nuclear Plant ‘Deception’,” New York Times, September 26, 2009. 42. The British and French reactions to the news of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility, also quoted in ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Alan Cowell and Nazila Fathi, “Iran Test-Fires Missiles That Put Israel in Range,” New York Times, September 29, 2009.

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45. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on the Meeting of the P5+1 Regarding Iran,” press release, October 1, 2009, www.whitehouse.gov /the-press-office/remarks-president-meeting-p5-plus-1-regarding-iran 46. Rahm Emmanuel, quoted by Helene Cooper and William J. Broad, “U.N. Agency Says Iran Must Freeze Nuclear Project, New York Times, November 28, 2009. 47. Ahmadinejad speech, February 11, 2010, quoted by Michael Slackman, “Iran Boasts of Capacity to Make Bomb,” New York Times, February 12, 2010. 48. Clinton remarks on Persian Gulf “security umbrella,” quoted by Marc Lander, “U.S. Fears That Iran Is Headed Toward a Military Dictatorship,” New York Times, February 15, 2010. 49. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President at AIPAC Policy Conference,” press release, March 4, 2012, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office /2012/03/04/remarks-president-aipac-policy-conference-0 50. Ibid. 51. For details on the “Olympic Games” program see David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Crown, 2012), 188–209. 52. P5+1 Joint Plan of Action (Geneva: November24, 2013) http://eeas.europa.eu /statements/docs/2013/131124_03_en.pdf 53. Ibid. 54. Department of State, Remarks to the Press in Geneva, by John Kerry, Secretary of State, November 24, 2013,http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2013/11/218023.htm 55. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the President on First Step Agreement on Iran’s Nuclear Program,” press release, November 23, 2013 [evening of 11/23 in Washington, D.C. was morning of 11/24 in Geneva], www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/2013/11/23/statement-president-first-step-agreement-irans-nuclear-program

37. ENDING TWO WARS 1. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks of President Barack Obama—As Prepared for Delivery: Responsibly Ending the War in Iraq, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina,” press release, February 27, 2009, www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks -of-President-Barack-Obama-Responsibly-Ending-the-War-in-Iraq 2. Ibid. 3. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” press release, March 27, 2009, www.whitehouse .gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-on-a-New-Strategy-for-Afghanistanand-Pakistan 4. The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 5. “Remarks by the President on a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” 6. Stanley A. McChrystal, Commander’s Initial Assessment, 30 August 2009 (Kabul, Afghanistan: NATO/ISAF [Unclassified], 2009). 7. The numbers of troops requested by General McChrystal are from Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (New York: Knopf, 2012)

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76–77. Enterprising think tank researchers and journalists were able to extract similar numbers from Pentagon informants, even while they were still supposed to be classified. At the time, a number of newspaper stories indicated that they were 80,000 (high), 10,000 (low), and 40,000 (presumably what McChrystal would settle for). See Peter Baker, “How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan,” New York Times, December 5, 2009. 8. President Barack Obama, “Remarks to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” delivered at West Point, N.Y., December 1, 2009 http://www.whitehouse .gov/issues/defense/afghanistan 9. David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Crown, 2012), 34. 10. President Obama, Remarks at West Point, December 1, 2009. 11. An authoritative report on the deliberations on the strategy and troops levels presided over by the president from August 2009 to the end of November based on a number of interviews with participants is provided by Peter Baker, “Inside the Situation Room: How a War Plan Evolved,” New York Times, December 6, 2009. Baker’s report on divisions within the administration is supported by Sanger, Confront and Conceal, 28–34; and James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York: Viking, 2012), 134–40, as well as Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). See also Marvin Kalb, Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2013), 241–305. 12. President Obama, Remarks at West Point, December 1, 2009. 13. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, 301–09. 14. NATO news release, November 20, 2010, www.nato.int/cps/en/SID-7DB590FF. 15. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Obama and President Karzai of Afghanistan After Bilateral Meeting,” press release, May 20, 2012, www. whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/05/20/remarks-president-obama-and-president -karzai-afghanistan-after-bilateral 16. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Briefing by General John Allen, General Douglas Lute, and Deputy Security Advisor Ben Rhodea,” press release, May 20, 2012 www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/05/20/briefing-general-john-allen -general-doug-lute-and-deputy-national-securi 17. Chicago Summit Declaration, Issued by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Chicago on May 20, 2012 http:// www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_87593.htm?mode=pressrelease 18. A New York Times/CBS poll of U.S. citizens conducted March 21–25, 2012, showed 68 percent opposed to the United States continuing to fight in Afghanistan and only 23% saying it was the right thing to be fighting there. Elisabeth Bumiller and Allison Kopicki, “New Poll Finds Drop in Support for Afghan War, “New York Times, March 2012. Similarly, a Washington Post /ABC poll during the third week of March 2012 registered declining support for continued U.S. participation in the war with 60 percent saying the war was no longer worth fighting. “Behind the Numbers,” Washington Post, March 22, 2012. 19. The existence of the “Afghan Good Enough” group was revealed in David Sanger’s Confront and Conceal, 49–51. 20. CNN, transcript of second McCain, Obama debate, October 7, 2008, www.cnn .com/2008/POLITICS/10/07/presidential.debate.transcript.

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21. Remarks by President Obama on Osama bin Laden, May 1, 2012. White House Press Office, May 1, 2012, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/05/01 /remarks-president-address-nation-afghanistan 22. Ibid. 23. Eric Schmitt, “Book on Bin Laden Killing Contradicts U.S. Account,” New York Times, August 29, 2012. 24. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, address at West Point, March 2, 2011, www .defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1539 25. Secretary of Defense Panetta, Statement on Defense Strategic Guidance, January 5, 2012, http://www.defense.gov/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1643 26. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review 2014 (Department of Defense, March 2014) http://www.defense.gov/pubs/2014_Quadrennial_Defense_Review.pdf

38. COUNTERTERRORISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS 1. Exec. Order No. 13492, 74 C.F.R. 4893 (2009). 2. Ibid. 3. Exec. Order No. 13491, 74 C.F.R. 4893 (2009). 4. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility, Investigation into the Office of Legal Counsel’s Memoranda Concerning Issues Related to the Central Intelligence Agency’s Use of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” on Suspected Terrorists (Department of Justice, July 29, 2009). 5. Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, Memorandum for the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General U.S. Department of Justice on Objections to the Findings of Professional Misconduct in the Office of Professional Responsibility’s Report of Investigation into the Office of Legal Counsel’s Memoranda Concerning Issues Relating to the Central Intelligence Agency’s Use of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” on Suspected Terrorists (Department of Justice, January 5, 2010). 6. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on National Security, at the National Archives, Washington, D.C.,” press release, May 21, 2009, www .whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-national-security-5-21-09. 7. Fox News, Text of Dick Cheney’s National Security Speech at AEI, May 21, 2009, www .foxnews.com/politics/2009/05/21/raw-data-text-dick-cheneys-national-security-speech-aei 8. Ibid. 9. My rendering of this exchange between Joe Biden and Dick Cheney is based on the transcripts of their Sunday talk-show appearances of February 14, 2010: Obama’s vice president on Meet the Press, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/35367033/ns/meet_the_press/t /meet-press-transcript-february/#.U5HILJrD8qQ; and Bush’s vice president on This Week, http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week-transcript-vice-president-dick-cheney /story?id=9818034&page=3 10. Department of Justice, Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or an Associated Force, Department of Justice white paper obtained and released by NBC News, February 4, 2013. 11. Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, “U.S., British Intelligence Mining Data from U.S. Internet Companies in Broad Secret Program,” Washington Post, June 6, 2013.

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12. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on Review of Signals Intelligence,” press release, January 17, 2014, www.whitehouse.gov /the-press-office/2014/01/17remarks-president.

39. AMBIVALENCE IN DEALING WITH UPHEAVALS IN THE ARAB WORLD 1. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, remarks at Forum for the Future, Doha, Qatar, January 13, 2021, bbc.co. ak/news/world-us-canada-12200851 2. Peter Nicholas, “Obama’s strategy was to pressure Mubarak without intruding,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2011. 3. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on the Situation in Egypt,” press release, February 1, 2011, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/02/01 /remarks-president-situation-egypt 4. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement of President Barack Obama on Egypt,” press release, February 10, 2011, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/02/10 /statement-president-barack-obama-egypt 5. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on the Situation in Egypt,” press release, February 11, 2011, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/02/11 /remarks-president-egypt 6. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Remarks at Flag Raising Ceremony, U.S. Consulate, Alexandria, Egypt, July 15, 2012, http://translations.state.gov/st/english/texttrans /2012/07/201207169083.html#axzz33rttpXh2www.state.gov/scretary/rm 2012/07 7. “Protests as Clinton Holds Meetings in Egypt,” CNN report, July 15, 2012. 8. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on the Situation in Egypt,” press release, August 15, 2013, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/15 /remarks-president-situation-egypt 9. Ibid. 10. Michael R. Gordon and Mark Landler, “In Crackdown Response, U.S. Temporarily Freezes Some Military Aid to Egypt,” New York Times, October 9, 2013. 11. President Obama, address at the United Nations General Assembly, September 24, 2013, text in Washington Post, September 24, 2013. 12. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the President on Bahrain,” press release, February 27, 2011, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/02/27 /statement-president-bahrain 13. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks of President Barack Obama—‘A Moment of Opportunity’,” press release, May 19, 2011, www.whitehouse.gov /the-press-office/2011/05/19/remarks-president-barack-obama-prepared-delivery-moment -opportunity 14. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, “Libya,” March 17, 2011, www .un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/1973(2011). 15. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on the Situation in Libya,” press release, March 18, 2011, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/18 /remarks-president-situation-libya 16. Meet the Press transcript for March 27, 2011, www.msnbc.msn.com/id42275424/ns /meet_the_press-reanscripts

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17. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Libya, National Defense University Washington, D.C.,” press release, May 28, 2011, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/28/remarks-president-address-nation-libya 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Operation Odyssey Dawn and the situation in Libya, March 31, 2011, www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112shrg71378/pdf/CHRG-112shrg71378.pdf, emphasis added. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael G. Mullen, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, March 31, 2011. 23. White House press secretary Jay Carney, press briefing, June 16, 2011, www .whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/06/16/press-briefing-press-secretary-jay-carney -6162011. For an analysis of the legal basis of the administration’s position, see Robert M. Chesney, “A Primer on the Libya/War Powers Resolution Compliance Debate” (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, August 18, 2011), www.brookings.edy/oopinions /2011/0617_war-powers-chesney 24. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on the Death of Muammar Qaddafi,” press release, October 20, 2011, www.whitehouse.gov /the-press-office/2011/10/20/remarks-president-death-muammar-qaddafi 25. President Barack Obama, Statement on Syria, August 18, 2011. Available at www .whitehouse/gov/ blog/2011/08/18. 26. Michael R. Gordon and Mark Landler, “Deeper Divide on Syria Policy Comes to Light,” New York Times, February 8, 2013. 27. Obama quoted by James Ball, “Obama Issues Syria a ‘Red Line’ Warning on Chemical Weapons, Washington Post, August 20, 2012. 28. Isabel Kershner and Michael R. Gordon, “Israeli Airstrike in Syria Targets Arms Convoy, New York Times, January 30, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/world/middleeast /syria-says-it-was-hit-by-strikes-from-israeli-planes.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0.29. 29. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the President on Syria,” press release, August 31, 2013., www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/31/statementpresident-syria (White House: Office of the Press Secretary). Available at www.whitehouse .gov/the press-office/2013/08/31. 30. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Syria,” press release, September 10, 2013, www.whitehouse.gov /the-press-office/2013/09/10/remarks-president-address-nation-syria. 31. Department of State, “Media Note: Framework for Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons,” September 14, 2013, www.state/gov/r/pa/prs/2013/09/214247. 32. United Nations Security Council Resolution 2118, “Reports of the Secretary-General on the Sudan,” September 27, 2013, www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S /RES/2113(2013). 33. Ibid. 34. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Three Rivers, 2006), 93. 35. Ibid., 97–98.

INDEX

Subentries are in the sequence they appear in the text Abbas, Abu, 453, 454 Abdulmutallab, Umar Faroukm, 725 ABM (anti-ballistic missile), 371–75, 463– 64 667–69. See also Strategic Defense Initiative ABM treaty (1972), 231–32 Abbottabad, Pakistan, 710–13 Abrams, Elliot, 445, 610 Abu Ghraib prison, 655, 720, 723–24 Acheson, Dean: and Truman Doctrine, 29–31; omission of Korea from defense perimeter, 41; 47–48; advisor to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, 118, 200 Acheson-Lilienthal Report, 25 Achille Lauro hijacking, 424–26 Adams, Sherman, 75 “Afghan Good Enough,” 708–10 Afghan National Security Forces, 705–7 Afghanistan: Soviet invasion of, 354–355; and Carter policies, 355–62; U.S.

and ISAF war and policies in under Bush, 622–24, 626, 629–33; Obama’s policies for 699–715; troop-level issue, 702–4, 206; and Counterterorism vs. Counterinsurgency issue, 704–5; strategies for withdrawing from, 705– 15; negotiating with Taliban to end war in, 707–8 Africa: role of Soviet Union in, 233; policies of the Nixon and Ford administrations, 289–94; Carter policies in, 321–22, 378. See also HIV/ AIDS; Rwanda; Somalia Agreed Framework Between the United States and the Democratic Republic of Korea of October 21, 1994, 564–65 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 689 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), 400–403 Aidid, Mohammed, 581 Albanians in Kosovo, 599

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Albright, Madeline, 569, 571, 577; and Rwanda, 582–84; and policies toward Iraq, 586, 588; and Haiti, 592–93, and Balkans, 597–605 Algeria, 118, 353 Allen, Richard, 399, 403 Allende, Salvador, 285, 460 Allen, Richard, 374 Allende, Salvador, 273 Alliance for Progress: precursor policies of Eisenhower administration, 107–9; of Kennedy administration, 122–123, 148–55, 164 Allison, Graham, 488–89 al-Qaeda, 588–89, 622–23, 629–31, 700–15 altruism, 7–10, 155 American Enterprise Institute, 610 Andersen, Martin, 374 Anderson, Robert B., 156 Andropov, Yuri, 485 Angola, 290, 487 Annenberg, Walter, 362–63 Apple, R. W., Jr., 644n Aqaba, Gulf of, 347 Aquino, Benigno, 385 Aquino, Corazon, 385 Arab regional development plan, 104 “Arab Spring,,” 665, 731–55. See also Bahrain; Egypt; Libya; Syria; Tunsia Arab-Israeli conflict, 51–53, 249–71; and 1967 war, 258–59; and Yom Kippur War, 259–68; Kissinger as mediator of, 268– 71; and Camp David Accords, 320–33 Arafat, Yasir, 346, 407, 576–79 Argentina, 405, 465–67 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 591,593 armed force, congressional resolutions authorizing: in Taiwan Strait crisis, 69; in response to Gulf of Tonkin clash, 179–80; against Afghanistan, 622–23; against Iraq, 638. See also war powers arms for hostages deal (with Iran), 447–52 Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations, 655, 656, 720

INDEX

Asia-Pacific Economic Conference, 604 Asia-Pacific “Pivot,” 680–81 Assad, Bashar al-, uprising against, 749–55. See also Syria Assad, Hafez al-, 8, 510–11 Aswan Dam, 75, 84, 85, 86 atomic bomb. See nuclear weapons Atoms for Peace, 77–78 Attlee, Clement, 28, 48–49 Australia, 65 Austrian peace treaty, 78 Awlaki, Anwar al-, 727–28 Axelrod, David, 662 “axis of evil,” 626 Aziz, Tariq, 516, 517 Ba’ath Party, 643–45 Baghdad Pact, 66, 85 Bahrain, 8, 741–43 Baker, James A., 5, 390, 392–93; as secretary of state, 474, 477, 482, 485, 504, 505, 507, 511, 512, 515–17, 534 Baker-Hamilton Report, 645–46 Bakhtiar, Shapour, 341–42 Baldridge, Malcolm, 392 Balfour Declaration of 1917, 51–52 Balkans. See Bosnia; Kosovo; Yugoslavia Ball, George, 160, 201 Biamby, Philippe, 593–944 Ban Ki-moon, 754 Bangladesh, 272–73 Bani-Sadr, Abolhassan, 348–49 Barak, Ehud, 577–79, 690 Bartholomew, Reginald, 596 Baruch, Bernard, 25 Bay of Pigs, 154–58; CIA role in, 154–55 Bazargan, Mehdi, 342, 345 Bedjaoui, Mohammed, 370 Beecher, William, 210 Begin, Menachem, 324–33, 399, 402–3, 404–5 Belarus, and nuclear weapons, 545, 562 Bell, David, 119 Ben Ali, Zine al-Abidine, 732

829 Benghazi: protected, 745; U.S. Consulate stormed and ambassador murdered, 748 Berger, Monroe, 321 Berger, Sandy, 588, 600 Berle, Adolph, 149 Berlin: blockade of 1948–49, 37; crisis of 1953, 89; crises of 1958–1959, 108–13; crisis of 1961, 166–75 Berlin wall, 172–73, 465; dismantled, 484 Berri, Nabih, 420 Betancourt, Romulo, 149, 155 Biden, Joseph, 704–5, 708, 724–26 bin Laden, Osama, 588–89, 622, 629–31; assassination of, 710–13 Biodiversity, Convention on, 543 bipolarity, 11–12 Bishop, Maurice, 438 Bismarck, Otto von, 307 Bissell, Richard, 156 “Black Hawk down” in Somalia, 581–82 Black, Eugene, 187 Blair, Tony, 604, 639 Blackwill, Robert, 476, 488–89 Bogota, Act of, 106–7, 432 Boland Amendment I, 443–45 Boland Amendment II, 445–52 Bolton, John, 610 Bosnia-Herzegovina: Bush policies toward, 535–37; Clinton policies toward, 595–99 Boutros Ghali, Boutros, 524, 580 Boumedience v. Bush, 655 Bowdier, William G., 433 Bowles, Chester, 119 Bradley, Omar, 43, 201 Brandt, Willy, 173 Brazil, 395 Bremer, Paul “Jerry,” and de-Ba’athification, 643–44 Brennan, John, 727–28 Bretton Woods system, 393 Brezhnev, Leonid, 215, 234, 268–69, 455 Brock, William, 392

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INDEX

Brodie, Bernard, 124 Brookings Institution 1977 report on peace in Middle East, 321–24 Brooks, David, 663 Brown, Gordon, 687 Brown, Harold, 350 Brown, Jerry, 566 Brundtland Commission on Environment and Development, 542; concept of sustainable development, 542 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 298–307, 321; and Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, 340–52; and Afghanistan, 354–62; and Horn of Africa, 355 Buddhists in Vietnam, 183, 189, 194 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 309 Bulganin, Nikolai, 80 Bundy, McGeorge, 157, 176, 178–79, 201 Bunker, Elsworth, 83 Burke, Arleigh, 157 Burma. See Myanmar Burns, Arthur, 58 Burns, William J., 687 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 4, 8, 9, 240, 406, 415–16, 420, 436, 473, 495; presidency of, and use of force, 494–528; and Noriega, 495–503; and Gulf War (1990–91), 504–24; and Somalia intervention, 524–26; views on use of force, 526–28; New World Order concept, 529–30; reactions to Tiananmen Square, 532–35; Balkans policies of, 535–37.; economic issues and, 537–41; environmental issues and, 541–46; target of Iraqi assassination plot, 586. See also Bosnia-Herzegovina Bush, George W., 8; presidency of, 607–56; and neoconservatives, 609–16; and International Criminal Court, 610; and Kyoto Protocol, 610; and antiballistic missiles, 610; and HIV/AIDS crisis, 616; and War on Terror, 617–27; new strategic doctrine of, 624–27; and civil liberties, 649; and treatment of terrorist detainees, 653, 655

830

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Bybee, Jay, 720, 721 Byrnes, James, 21–25 Cambodia: bombed in 1969, 210; invaded by U.S. forces (1970), 210–13; bombed in Mayaguez incident, 275; and Reagan Doctrine, 409 Cameron, David, 743–44, 752 Camp David Accords on Middle East (1978), 320–33 Campbell, Kurt M., 684–85 Card, Andrew, 617 “Captive peoples” resolution, 91 Caracas Declaration (1954), 104 Carney, Jay, 747 Carter, Hodding III, 302 Carter, Jimmy: campaign for president, 297, 300–301; presidency of, 8, 297–362; human rights policies of, 309–12; and Zimbabwe, 318–19; Middle East policies of 320–33; and negotiations with North Korea, 564–65; mission to Haiti, 593–94 Carter Doctrine, 360–61 Casey, George, 646 Casey, William, 378–79, 406, 420, 421–22, 437, 458; and Iran-Contra, 442–52 Castro, Fidel, 105–6, 107, 154–69 Catholic bishops, on nuclear war, 374 Cedras, Raoul, 592–94 Central Intelligence Agency. See CIA Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, 287–88 Chechnya, 9 Chemical weapons, 459; use in Syria, 750– 51; Obama’s “red-line” against, 750–54; Convention on, 753; agreement by Syria to relinquish, 753–54 Cheney, Dick: as secretary of defense, 477, 498, 504, 519; as vice president, 610–52; and 9/11, 618–19; and homeland defense, 620–22; role in War on Terror, 622–655; and Iraq’s WMD, 636–37; and civil liberties, 650, 724–26 Chernenko, Konstantin, 455 Chiang Kai-shek, 69–73, 240

INDEX

Chile, overthrow of Allende in, 275 China, People’s Republic of: and Korean War, 43–51; and Formosa Strait crisis, 69–73; rapprochement with, 235–43; recognized by UN, 240; as Pakistan’s ally, 273; role in Africa, 303; reactions to for Tiananmen Square, 532–35, 559–61; embassy of in Belgrade attacked, 604; Obama policies toward, 675–81; economic issues with, 676. See also Taiwan Chirac, Jacques, 639 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, 221 Christopher, Warren, 312, 350, 353; as Clinton’s secretary of state, 550, 552–53, 557, 568, 574–76, 600 Churchill, Winston, 18; “Iron Curtain” speech, 28 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency): and overthrow of Mossadegh, 66; and invasion of Guatemala, 104–5; and Bay of Pigs, 107, 156–58; and coup in Chile, 275; operations in Africa, 290–91; in Reagan’s grand strategy, 378–79; and Iran-Contra, 442–452; and Panama, 496, 498; and Iraq’s WMD, 636–38; October 2002 NIE, 637–38; and treatment of detainees, 652–55; and assassination of Osama bin Laden, 710–11, 719–21, 722–26; and targeted killings, 727–28 Civil Liberties, 649–56, 718–30 Clark, Dick, 292 Clark, Wesley, 602 Clark, William, 367–78, 374, 400, 406, 408 Clay, Lucius D.: report on foreign aid, 149–53; and 1961 Berlin, crisis, 173 Clifford, Clark: 1946 grand strategy memo to Truman, 27; and Truman’s Israel policy, 51–53; as secretary of defense, 199–204 Climate Change, Convention on, 543 Clinton, Bill; 8; presidency of, 549; and Russia, 552–58; and international

831

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peacekeeping, 557; and China, 559–61; trade policies of, 565–67; and Saddam Hussein, 572–74; amd Israel-Palestine Peace process, 572, 574–79; and Somalia, 580–82; and Rwanda, 582–84 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 638, 660; as secretary of state, 661, 667, 676, 681–82, 684, 686, 704, 733, 737, 743–44, 750 “coalition of the willing,” 640 Coalition Provisional Authority, 643 Cold War: basic pattern, 2–4; end of, 479–92 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of EC, 567 Common Market. See European Community Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), 493 Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, 675, 678 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), 248 confidence building measures (military), 454–55 Connally, John, 218; 276–80 containment: basic strategy of, 3–4; George Kennan on, 34–36; Truman policies of, 36–51; Carter reassertion of, 358–62; post-9/11 critique of, 625–27; issue in U.S.-China relations under Obama, 680–81 “Contras.” See Iran-Contra; Nicaragua conventional forces in Europe (CFE) negotiations, 455 Cooper-Church amendment (1970), 214 Coptic Christians, 738, 739 Corruption in Afghanistan, 701, 709 counterforce (strategic), 230–35 counterinsurgency, 119; in Afghanistan, 630–33; strategies of Petraeus and McChrystal, 701 counterinsurgency field manual of Army and Marine Corps, 701 Counterterrorism vs. Counterinsurgency issue, 633 Crimea crisis of 2014, 669–70 Croatia, 535, 597, 598

INDEX

Crowe, William, 514 Cuba: Bay of Pigs attack on, 154–58; forces in Angola, 247, 291, 487; forces in Horn of Africa, 355 Cuban missile crisis, 154–55, 158–65, 166 Cunhal, Alvaro, 274 currency exchange rates, Nixon and, 279; Plaza Accord on, 393 Cutler, Robert, 61, 70 cyberattacks, 691; See “Olympic Games”; “Stuxnet” Cyprus, 195, 275 Czech Republic: admission to NATO, 556; and missile defense, 668 Dali Lama, 677, 678 Dallaire, Romeo, 582–83 Darman, Richard, 390 D’Aubuisson, Roberto, 435–36 “Day of Rage” in Bahrain, 741 Dayton accords, 599 Dean, Arthur, 201 death squads of El Salvador military, 433–36 Deaver, Michael, 407, 457–58 De Cuellar, Perez, 602 Defense Policy Board, 610 De Gaulle, Charles, 121, 185, 186 democracy, as objective of U.S. foreign policy, 8, 312, 554 Dempsey, Martin, 750 Derian, Patricia, 309, 312 “Desert Shield” military deployment, 508 “Desert Storm” military operation, 550–53 detainees, treatment of, 652–56, 719–21, 722–26 détente with Soviet Union, 227–35, 473; commercial aspect of, 243–48, 455 developing countries. See Third World development decade, 8–9 Diaoyu Islands, 680–81 Diem, Ngo Dinh, 183, 184 Dien Bien Phu, 67–68 “Dignity Batallions” of Noriega, 521 Dillon, Douglas, 106–7, 201 Dobrynin, Anatoly, 218, 265

832

■

Dodge, Joseph, 60, 62 Dole, Bob, 474, 494, 504, 505. 597 domino metaphor, 66 drones, 704 drug cartels, 495 Druze Muslims, 436 Duarte, Jose, 432–36 due process issues, 718–30, Dukakis, Michael, 494 Dulles, Allen, 89, 156 Dulles, John Foster, 7, 8; and “massive retaliation,” 57–58; and French in Indochina, 66–68; and Formosa Strait crisis, 69–72; and Suez Crisis, 84–89 East China Sea, 675, 679–80 Eagleburger, Lawrence, 476–77, 533–34, 536–37 Eban, Abba, 259 economic conditions (international), 104–7, 121, 140–53, 276–89; 391–96, 457, 537–41, 565–67 economic conditions (in United States): “New Look” defense policy, 57–66; affected by Arab oil embargo, 276–86; and Reagan policies, 386–96, 457; and Clinton policies, 565–67; and Obama policies, 659 economic sanctions, and Ukraine crisis, 669–72 Edelman, Eric, 610 Eden, Anthony, 67; and Suez Crisis, 84–89 Egypt, 66, and Suez Crisis, 84–89; and Yom Kippur War, 257–68; and Sinai disengagement, 268; and 1977–78 peace process, 322–33; “Arab Spring” in, 734–41 Eisenhower Doctrine (for Middle East), 95–99 Eisenhower, Dwight D.: presidency of, 8, 57–112; and defense policy, 57–66; and French defeat in Indochina, 66–69; and Formosa Strait crises, 69–72; relationship with Dulles, 74–79; and Suez crisis, 84–89; Latin American policies of, 104–7

INDEX

El Salvador, Reagan policies toward, 432–36 Emanuel, Rahm, 689 Endera, Guillermo, 501 Enders, Thomas, 434, 442 “engagement” policy 8 “enlargement” policy, 5, 569–70 “Enterprise,” operation in Iran-Contra, 447–50 Ethiopia, 355 ethnic cleansing, 5, 536, 595–99 Eurocommunism, 273–75 European Community (EC) [also appears as European Economic Community (EEC) and European Union (EU)], 276–88 European Recovery Program, 7. See also Marshall Plan Export Import Bank credits for Soviet Union, 247–48 “extended deterrence,” 673–74 “extraordinary rendition,” 652, 720 “fair trade,” 382–96, 536–41 Faisal, bin Abdulaziz (King of Saudi Arabia), 258 Falkland (Malvinas) Islands war, 428, 437–38 Fedayeen-i-Khalq, 343 Feith, Douglas, 610, 635 Fifth Amendment protections, 721 Fifth Fleet, 742 FISA Court, 722, 726 Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, 675, 678 Fitzwater, Marlin, 477, 480 “flexible response” military strategy, 124–39 Ford, Gerald: summit with Brezhnev, 234–35; and Mayaguez crisis, 287 Ford, Guillermo, 496 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), 650, 651, 722 Formosa. See Taiwan Forrestal, James, 26–27, 37–38 Fortas, Abe, 201

833 Fourth Amendment protections, 721, 722 France: and Indochina, 66–69; and Suez Canal crisis, 84–89 Franks, Tommy, 630. 631 Freeman, Orville, 193 free trade, 382–96, 536–41, 565–67 Freedom Agenda (of George W. Bush), 6–7, 615 Friedman, Milton, 386 Fulbright, J. William, 157–58; chair of 1966 Hearings on Vietnam, 192–93 “Full Court Press” against Soviets, 367–71, 389 Gaither Committee report, 94–95, 124 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 119 Gallucci, Robert, and negotiations with North Korea, 564 Galtieri, Leopolda, 437–38 Gaddafi, Muammar, 8, 297, 349, 455–58; and terrorism, 427–30 Gamayel Bachir, 408 Gandhi, Mahatma, 457, 663–64, 731 Gates, Robert, 476; as secretary of defense, 615, 661, 668, 673, 704, 708, 743–45 Gavin, James, 119, 192 Gaza Strip, 326, 328–29, 332, 691; in Oslo Accord, 576 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 539, 567 Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war, 652, 720 genocide, 598 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 108–13, 483–85; reunification with West Germany, 484 Germany, Federal Republic of (FRG): and Berlin crisis of 1958–1959, 108–13; and Berlin crisis of 1961, 166–75; reunification with East Germany, 484; NATO membership after reunification, 485 Ghotbsadeh, Sadegh, 349 Glaspie, April, 504 global warming, 542, 543

■

INDEX

Golan Heights, 261, 327, 404 Goldberg, Arthur, 201, Goldwater, Barry, 181, 445–46 Gomulka, Wladysaw, 91 Goodwin, Richard, 144–45 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 12; accession to power, 457; relationship with Reagan, 459–71; at 1985 Geneva summit, 459–60; at 1986 Reykjavik, 461–65; negotiations on intermediate nuclear forces, 465–68; Reagan’s view of, 466– 69; and end of Cold War, 473–92; and military pullback from Germany and East Europe, 474; perestroika concept of, 474–75, 477; resignation of, 493; and Gulf War (1990–91), 507, 512 Gordon, Lincoln; 119 Gore, Albert, 597, 598 Governor’s Island Agreement on Haiti, 592 Graham, Daniel, 374 “grand bargain” for aiding post-Soviet Russia, 519–20 Greece: and Truman Doctrine, 28–32; and Cyprus conflict, 275 “greenhouse effect.” See global warming Greenstein, Fred, 76 Greneda, Marine invasion of (1983), 438–41 Gromyko, Andrei, 20, 174, 456, 457 G-7 (Group of Seven), 465, 554 G-20 (Group of Twenty), 686 Guatemala, invasion of (1954), 104–5 Guantánamo, 653, 655, 719, 722–23, 726 Guinea, 312 Gulf Cooperation Council, 741 Gulf of Sidra firefight, 427–28 Gulf of Tonkin, clashes in, 178, 178–180; congressional resolution on, 179, 180 Gulf War (1990–91) 4, 9, 503–24; U.S.-led coalition in, 510–12; Joint Congressional Resolution on, 518–19; cease-fire agreement, 521–22; legacy of, 634–35. See also Operation Desert Shield; Operation Desert Storm Guzman, Jacobo Arbenz, 104

834

■

Haass, Richard, 623, 635, 639–40 habeus corpus, 655, 656, 721 Habib, Philip, 385, 406–7 Habyarimana, Juvenal, 582–83 Hadley, Stephen, 615 Hagel, Chuck, 686–87 Hagerty, James, 70 Hague, Gabriel, 58 Haig, Alexander: as aide to Nixon, 219, 266; as secretary of state, 389, 397–98, 404, 406, 433, 434, 437; as presidential candidate, 473–74 Haiphong harbor, mining of (1971), 214–19, 247 Haiti: refugees from, turned back, 9, 591; human rights violations in, 592–93; Clinton’s regime-change operation in, 592–94 Hakim, Albert, 448 Halleck, Charles, 157 Hall, Fawn, 450 Hamad, bin Isa Al Khalifa, 741–42 Hamas, 691 Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 655 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 655 Hamilton, Lee, 645–46 Hannah, John, 610 Haqqani, 706 “hard power,” 10–11 Hasenfus, Eugene, 448 Hassan, King of Morocco, 363 H-bomb, 39, 77 Heller, Walter, 169 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 248 Heritage Foundation, 374, 610 Hilsman, Roger, 119 Hinton, Deane, 436 Hiroshima, bombed with nuclear weapon, 21–24 “high frontier” ABM concept, 374 HIV/AIDS, 616 Ho Chi Minh, 184 Ho Chi Minh City, 210 Ho Chi Minh Trail, 214

INDEX

Holbrooke, Richard, 598–99 Holder, Eric, 720–21 Homeland Security, Department of, 620–22 Honduras, 106, 465 Hoopes, Townsend, 199, 201 Hoover, Herbert, Jr., 84 Horn of Africa, 321–22, 378 hostages: in U.S. embassy in Iran (1979–80), 345–54; Reagan’s policies on, 417–28; in TWA flight 847, 417–19; presidential finding on Iran and, 420–21; on Achille Lauro, 424–26; other attempts to take, 427 “hot line,” 456 Howe, John T., 266 Hughes, Emmet J., 74 Hu Jintao, 679 human rights, 7–10, 247–48, 308–318, 667, 676, 678, 718–30 Humphrey, George, 58, 62 Humphrey, Hubert H., 194 Hungary: crisis of 1956, 89–92, admission to NATO, 556 Huntington, Samuel P., 381, 618n Hussein, bin Talal (King of Jordan), 258, 261; and Gulf War (1990–91), 511 Hussein, Saddam, 9; and Gulf War (1990–91), 503–24 idealism, 7 immigration issues, 9 India, 64; and Bangladesh conflict, 272–73 Indochina, French war in, 66–69; See also Cambodia; Laos; Vietnam “industrial policy,” 395, 396, 567 intermediate nuclear forces (INF), 485; treaty to eliminate, 496–98, 510 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 73–74, 562–53, 586–87, 682, 686, 687, 692–93 International Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 653, 654 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 482, 554, 555

835 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), 631–633 Interrogation of terrorist detainees, 650, 720–21, 725–26 Iran, 25, 66; Truman vs. Stalin over, 335; Eisenhower’s CIA and, 336; Kennedy’s reform pressures on, 337; NixonKissinger military buildup of, 338; Carter’s policies toward, 339–54; U.S. embassy personnel held hostage in, 343–54; nuclear program of, 686–93 “Iran-Contra” scheme, 422–24; 441–52 Iraq, 65–66; nuclear reactor attacked by Israel, 399; and balance vis-à-vis Iran, 503; and Gulf War (1990–91), 503–24. See also Saddam Hussein Iraq Liberation Act (1998), 587 Iraq Study Group, 645–46 irreducible national interest, 1, 3, 7, 203, 649 Islamic State (IS, also ISIS, or ISIL), 698–99, 755 Israel: Truman and, 51–53; and Suez Crisis, 88–89; bombing Iraq’s nuclear reactor, 399; and dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, 686–93. See also Camp David Accords; Gulf War (1990–91); Middle East; Oslo Accord; Yom Kippur War; specific Israeli officials Jacobson, David, 422 Jacobson, Eddie, 51 Jackson, Henry, 611 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, 247–48, 611 Japan: surrender of, 21–24; economic issues with, 279, 393–95, 539, 566 Jarring, Gunnar, 252 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 482–83 Jerusalem, 321, 322, 691 Johnson, Lyndon B.: as vice president, 176, 181; presidency of, 183–210; and Vietnam, 176–204 Jonaissant, Emile, 594 Jones, David, 350, 514 Jones, James, 661

■

INDEX

Jordan, 95, 97, 253; crisis of 1970, 254–56 Jordan, Hamilton, 350 Kahn, Yahya, 272–73 Kalb, Bernard Kalb, Marvin, 267 Kamg Nam (North Korean ship), 681 Karadzic, Radovan, 599 Karzai, Hamid, 701, 706, 707 Kashmir, 195, 273 Kaunda, Kenneth, 289–90 Kaysen, Carl, 119 Kearns, Doris, 200 Kel1y, John, 505 Kennan, George F.: “long telegram” of 1946, 26–27; on Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, 32–33; 570; “X” article, 34–36; vs. Paul Nitze, 39–41; on Vietnam, 192–93 Kennedy, Edward M., 236–37, 349 Kennedy, John F., presidency of, 117–78; special emphasis on Third World, 117–21, 140–53; revision of military posture and strategies, 123–139; and Bay of Pigs, 154– 58; and Cuban missile crisis, 158–65; and 1961 Berlin crisis, 166–75; and Vietnam, 176–78; and Laos, 177 Kennedy, Robert F.: and Cuban Missile Crisis, 160–62; presidential candidacy of, 199–200 Kent State, students killed at, 213 Kenya, 383; U.S. embassy bombed, 588 Kerrey, Bob, 566 Kerry, John, 638; and Ukraine crisis, 671–72; and Iran’s nuclear program, 692–93; and Syria, 752–53 Keyworth, George A., 374 Khmer Rouge, 209–10 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 340–54 Khrushchev, Nikita, 80; and Berlin crisis of 1958–1959, 108–13; defines “wars of national liberation,” 118; and Cuban Missile Crisis, 159–65; and 1961 Berlin crisis, 167–75 Kim Il-Sung, 562, 682

836

■

Kim Jong Il, 681–82 Kim Jong Un, 682–83 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 298, 302, 663, 664, 731 Kirkpatrick, Jeane: Commentary article (1979) 379–80; justifications for interventions, 381–82; as UN ambassador, 399, 433, 434, 437 Kissinger, Henry A., 124, 169; and Vietnam War, 207–26; policies toward the Soviet Union and China, 227–48; Middle East diplomacy of, 249–71; modified realpolitik of, 272–94; and asylum for Shah of Iran, 344; reactions of to Gorbachev, 475 Kohl, Helmut, 484 Korea (North), nuclear program of, 562–65 Korean War, 8, 41–51 Kosovo, 599–605 Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), 600–601 Kosygin, Aleksei, 252 Krasnoyarsk radar facility, 455 Krenz, Egon, 484 Kurds, 503; attacked by Saddam, 521, 587; no-fly zones over safe-havens for, 522–23 Kurile Islands, 18 Kuwait, and Gulf War of 1990–1991, 503–24 Ky, Nguyen Cao, 189, 193, 194 La Belle disco, bombed, 427–28 Laingen, L. Bruce, 366 Laird, Melvin, 229, 231 Lake, Anthony, 318, 557, 570–71, 591, 597 Laos, 177, 214, 238 Latin America: and Eisenhower administration, 107–9; and Kennedy administration, 148–55, 164. See also specific countries Law of the Sea Treaty, 679 Laxalt, Paul, 385 League of Nations, 17 Leahy, William, 20 Lebanon: crisis of 1958, 96–98; Israel and, 400; crisis of 1982, 404–12; attack on

INDEX

U.S. Marine compound in (October 1983), 410–411 Le Due Tho, 216, 219, 221 Lemnitzer, Lyman, 156 Lend-Lease debt of USSR, 244 Libby, Lewis “Scooter,” 610 “liberation” of East European countries, 91 Libya: plot to execute Sadat, 324; and terrorism, 427–30; bombed by U.S. planes, 426–30; upheaval against Gaddafi, 743–48; U.S. and allied military support for rebels in, 744–48; post-Gaddafi turmoil in, 748 Lippert, Mark, 661 Lloyd, Selwyn, 87 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 177, 201, 209 Lon Nol, 211 Lord, Winston, 242–43 Luti, William, 610 MacArthur, Douglas A.: and Korean War, 41–45; fired by Truman, 44 Macmillan, Harold, 112 MAGIC code intercepts, 22 Maliki, Nouri al-, 645, 697–99 Malmtios (archbishop), 287 Malta summit (1989), 485–86 Mann, Thomas C., 150 Mao Zedong, 118, 236, 238, 241 Marcos, Ferdinand, 385 Margolis, David, 721 Marshall, George C., 29–35, 37–38 Marshall Plan (European Recovery Plan), 32–34 Mason, Edward S., 119 massive retaliation, 57–58, 62–64 Matlock, Jack, 477 Mayaguez crisis, 287 Mazar-i-Sharif, battle of, 630 McCain, John, 582, 656, 660 McCarthy, Eugene, 199–200 McChrystal, Stanley, 704–5, 708 McCloy, John J., 171, 201 McCullough, David, 23

837

■

McDonough, Denis, 661, 708 McFarlane, Robert, 408, 420, 421, 445, 458 McGovern, George, 229 McNamara, Robert S.: and nuclear strategies, 130–38, 162, 174, 230, 231; and VietnamWar 177–198; appointed head of World Bank, 198 McNaughton, John, 623–24 McPherson, Harry, 201–2 McGovern, George, 220 Medvedev, Dimitri A., 665–68; and “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations, 666; and Iran’s nuclear program, 687, 688 Meese, Edwin, 390, 450 Meir, Golda, 252, 261–62 Mexico, 152; and NAFTA, 540–41, 566–67 Middle East: policies of Truman administration, 27–28, 51–53; policies of Eisenhower administration, 65–66, 84–89, 93–99; policies of Kennedy/Johnson and Nixon/Ford administrations, 249–271; policies of Carter administration, 320–33, 334–53; policies of Reagan administration, 397–430; Gulf War and, 503–24; policies of Clinton administration, 572–79 Middleton, Drew, 631 militias: in Afghanistan, 710; in Libya, 748–49 military commissions, 653, 655, 656, 721, 723, 726 Military Commissions Act, 655 Millikan, Max, 119 Milosevic, Slobodan, 599, 600 MIRVs (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles), 241, 242, 243; banned, 545 missile defense. See ABM; Strategic Defense Initiative Mitterrand, François, 428, 480 Mladics, Ratko, 597 Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh, 725 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 20

INDEX

Mondale, Walter, 326, 350, 456, 457 “monetarist” economists, 412 Mongolia, 18 Monroe Doctrine, 459 Montreal Protocol (on ozone layer), 542; and DuPont corporation, 542; and chloroflourocarbons, 542 moon landing, 122–23 Moorer, Thomas, 277 Moose, Richard, 318 moral considerations, 7–10, Morsi, Mohamed, 737–39 Mossadegh, Mohammed, 66 most-favored-nation (MFN) trade status, for China, 534 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 287–88 Mozambique, 384 Mubarak, Hosni, 8; and Gulf War (1990–91), 510; and “Arab Spring,” 734–36 Mugabe, Robert, 303, 319 mujahedeen, 383 Mullen, Michael (adm.), 689, 746, 704 multilateral force (MLF), 131–37 multilateralism, 558 multinational corporations, 289 Multinational Force (for Lebanon) (MNF), 407–9 multipolarity, 235 Munter, Cameron, 712 Murphy, Robert, 201 Muslim Brotherhood, 735–37 Muslims, in Bosnia, 535–37, 595–99 Muskie, Edmund, 353, 451 mutual assured destruction (MAD), anticipated in Eisenhower administration, 95–97; in 1960s and 1970s, 228–35; Reagan critique of, 371–75; persistence of, 673–74 Muzorewa, Abel, 319 Myanmar, 683–86 Nabulsi, Suleiman, 95 NAFTA, 540–41; 565–67; “fast track” approval of, 541

838

■

Nagasaki, bombed with nuclear weapon, 21–24 Namibia, 293, 384, 487 Nasser, Garnal Abdel, 65; and Suez Canal crisis, 84–86; and Lebanon (1958), 97–98 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), on Iraq WMD, 637–38 National Liberation Front (South Vietnamese), 208 National Security Agency (NSA), 446, 651 nation-building, 631–33 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 55, 127–39, 277, 455; post–Cold War role, 480–81; membership in for reunited Germany, 486; enlargement, 556, 557; air strikes against Serbs, 597–98; activated by Ukraine crisis, 670 neoconservatism, 609–16 Nepal, 328 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 691–93, 741 Neumann, Ronald, 633 Newhouse, John, 461, 464 “New Look” defense policy (Eisenhower), 57–73; criticized by Gaither Committee, 101–2 New START, 667–69, 672–75 Nhu, Ngo Dinh, 177 Nicaragua: Carter policies toward, 315–18; Reagan policies toward, 441–52; election in, 487. See also Iran-Contra Nidal, Abu, 455 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 663, 664 9/11 (September 11, 2001), 5–6, 617–19 9/11 Commission, 623, 635 Niskanen, William, 387–88, 390 Nitze, Paul, 39–41, 118, 124; and NSC-68, 38–41; vs. George Kennan, 39–41, and Gulf War (1990–91), 514 Nixon Doctrine, 338 Nixon, Richard M.: as vice president, 84; presidency of, 206–94; and détente, 227–35, 243–48, 455, 473; and China, 235–43; and Vietnam, 207–26

INDEX

Nobel Peace Prize, Obama’s acceptance speech, 663–64 “No-fly”zones: in Bosnia, 596; in Libya, 744, 745 nonaligned movement, 84, 98–99, 286–89 Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Treaty on, 195, 459, 674; and North Korea, 562–65 Noriega, Manuel Antonio, 495–503; target of Operation Just Cause, 500–3 Norstad, Lauris, 130 North, Oliver, 421; and Iran-Contra, 445–52 North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. See NAFTA Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, 630 North Korea, nuclear weapons program of, 561–65, 681–83 Nourse, Edward, 38 NSC-68, 38–41, 50 NSC-162/2, 61–62 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, 195, 459, 674 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) 2010, 673–75 nuclear weapons: use against Japan, 21–24; in Truman administration’s strategies, 38–41; use urged by MacArthur in Korean War, 44; in Eisenhower administration’s strategy, 57–64; brandished in Formosa Strait crisis, 70–71; threats in 1958–1959 Berlin crisis, 109–11; in Kennedy administration strategies, 125–39; in Nixon-Kissinger strategies, 228–35; Carter policies toward, 356–57; Reagan and, 271–75, 455; negotiations with Gorbachev on, 459, 461–72; and Obama administration strategies, 672–75; North Korean program of; 681–83; Iran’s potential to develop, 686–93 Nunn, Sam, 514, 593 Obama, Barack Hussein, 12; presidency of, 658–755; “engagement” approach, 660; problems inherited from Bush, 661;

839

■

early pragmatism; 662–63; Nobel Prize address, 663–64; and Islamic world, 664–65; and Russia policy “reset,” 665–69; and Ukraine crisis, 669–72; and nuclear weapons, 672–75; policies toward China, 675–81; dealing with North Korea, 681–83; and Burma, 683; and Iran’s nuclear program, 686–93; relations with Israel, 690–91; responses to “Arab Spring,” 731–55; actions toward Libya, 744–48; and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, 749–55 O’Donnell, Kenneth, 177–78 oil. See Petroleum Okinawa, 279 Olympics, 456 “Olympic games” cyberattack, 691 “Open Skies” arms proposal: by Eisenhower, 80–82; by Bush, 479 Operation Allied Force, 604 Operation Deliberate Force, 598 Operation Desert Fox, 587, 635 Operation Desert Shield, 508, 513; becomes Desert Storm, 519 Operation Desert Storm, 514, 519–21 Operation Enduring Freedom, 629–33 Operation Iraqi Freedom, 633–48 Operation Just Cause, 500–503 Operation Restore Hope, 525–26, 580–82 Operations Plan 34-A, 179 Operation Urgent Fury, 438–41 opium-based economy in Afghanistan, 632, 701 Organization of African Unity (OAU), 292 Organization of American States (OAS), 107, 333–34 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 276–77, 281–85 Ortega, Daniel, 442 Osgood, Robert, 124 Olso Accord (Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements for the Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank), 576–77 Owen, David, 590, 595

INDEX

ozone layer, 542. See also Montreal Protocol Pakistan, 64, 195, 272–73; and war in Afghanistan, 630, 701 Palestine Liberation Front, 452 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 323, 326, 400, 404–8, and Oslo Accord, 576–79 Palestinians, 323–33 Panama: 1989 turmoil in, 496–501; invasion of, 500–503. See also Operation Just Cause Panama Canal, treaties of 1977, 314–15 Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF), 499, 500–503 Panetta, Leon, 711 Paris Accords (1973) ending Vietnam War, 221–26 “Partnership for Peace” policy for NATO, 556 Pastor, Robert, 593–94 Pathet Lao, 176 Patriot Act, 651 Peace Corps, 122, 195 peacekeeping forces: command and control of, 557–58; in Somalia, 581–82; and Presidential Decision Directive-25, 582; in Bosnia, 596–97 Pentagon, attacked on 9/11, 618 Peres, Shimon, 420 perestroika, 474–75, 477, 478, 486 Perle, Richard, 462, 466, 610, 635 Pescadores Islands, 69–70 Peterson, Peter G., 245–46, 279 Petraeus, David (gen.), 648, 689, 704–5, 708 petroleum: as political weapon by Arabs, 263, 264, 276–86; and Kissinger’s diplomacy, 282–88 Pettiti, Louis-Edmond, 370 Phalange (Christian paramilitary group in Lebanon), 435 Philippines, 385, 679 Phleger, Herman, 156

840 Pickering, Thomas, 438 Pinay, Antoine, 87 “Ping-Pong diplomacy,” 239 “pivot” toward Asia/Pacific, 680 Podgorny, Nikolai, 218 Poindexter, John, 421; and Iran-Contra, 445–52, Poland: crisis of 1956, 89–92; post–Cold War transition, 555; admitted to NATO, 556; and missile defense, 668 polyarchy, 6–7, 11–12 poppy economy of Afghanistan, 632, 701 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), 254–55, 264–65 Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), 290–91 Portugal, 273–74; African colonies of, 290, 384 Potsdam Conference, 22–23 Powell, Colin: and force in Panama, 498– 503; and Gulf War (1990–91), 506, 519, 520; argument with Madeline Albright, 570–71; military advice to Clinton, 586; and Haiti, 593–94; as secretary of state, 610; UN speech on Iraq’s WMD, 639–40 Powell, Jody, 350 power, concepts of, 10–13 Power, Samantha, 661 preemptive attack, 626–27 preventive war, 626–27, 641 Proliferation Security Initiative, 681 provincial reconstruction teams (PRT) in Afghanistan, 632 Putin, Vladimir V., 13, 665–72; and Ukraine, 669–672; and reassertion of Russian sphere of influence, 669; and natural gas deal with China, 671 Qaddafi, Muammar. See Gaddafi, Muammar Quandt, William B., 261 Quayle, Dan, 543–44 Quemoy and Matsu islands, 69–73

■

INDEX

Rabin, Yitzhak, 256, 576–77 Radford, Arthur, 59–60 Rambouillet negotiations on Kosovo, 602 Rasmussen, Anders Fogh, 706 Rasul v. Bush, 655 Reagan, Nancy, 456, 458, 459, 461 Reagan, Ronald, 9, 12; presidency of, 363– 469, and “Full Court Press” on Soviets, 367–71; and restricting commerce with communist countries, 368–70; “evil empire” speeches, 371; and Strategic Defense Initiative, 371–77; economic philosophy of, 386–96; and defense budget, 389–91; and Gorbachev, 453– 69; as hero of neoconservatives, 611–12 Reagan Doctrine, 377–85 realism, 7–10 realpolitik,7; Kissinger and, 272–94 Red Cross, and Rwanda, 583 Regan, Donald, 390, 392, 393, 460, 463–64 “regime change” operations: and Guatemala, 104–5; and Cuba, 154–58; and Chile, 275; and Iran, 336; and Nicaragua, 441–53; and Haiti, 592–94; and Iraq 586–88, 633–48; and Afghanistan, 629–33; and Egypt, 734–41; and Libya, 743–48; and Syria, 749–55 Reischauer, Edwin, 237 Reilly, William, 542–44 Responsibility to Protect (R2P), 7–10 “reset” of Russia Policy, 665–69 revolution in military affairs (RMA), 642–43 “revolution of rising expectations,” 120 Reykjavik summit (1986), 461–65 Rhodes, Benjamin, 691 Rhodesia, 292–93, 303 Rice, Condoleezza, 610, 617, 623; as secretary of state, 615–55 Rice, Susan, 661, 744 Ridgway, Matthew, 45, 124, 201 Riedel, Bruce, Afghanistan policy recommendations of, 700, 702 Roberto, Holden, 291

841

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Roberts, Chalmers; 616n Robinson, Randall, 592–93 Rockefeller, David, 344 Rockefeller, Nelson, 84 Rockne, Knute, and “Gipper” story, 366 Rogers, William D., report on El Salvador, 433 Rogers, William P., plan for Middle East peace, 250–51 “rollback of communism,” 367. See also “liberation” Roosevelt, Franklin D., 17–18 Rosenstein-Rodan, Paul N., 119 Ross, Dennis, 476–77 Rostow, Walt W., 118, 119, 197, 202 Rove, Karl, 617 Rumsfeld, Donald, 610; and Afghanistan, 630; and Iraq, 635, 640–44; and military “transformation,” 642–45 Rusk, Dean, 174, 191, 202 Russia: George H. W. Bush policy toward, 489–93; Clinton policy toward, 583, 584–589; Obama policy toward, 753. See also Soviet Union Russell, Richard, 178–79 Rwanda: genocide in, 582–84; U.S. and UN failures in, 583–84; Clinton regrets about, 584 Sadat, Anwar, 257–71; and 1977–78 peace process, 320–33; assassinated, 402 Sakharov, Andrei, 309 SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty), 231–35 Sandinistas, in Nicaragua, 315–18; 441–42. See also Nicaragua; Iran-Contra Sanger, David E., 691 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 687, 743–44 Saudi Arabia, 400–403, and Gulf War (1990–91), 508–10; troops deployed to Bahrain, 741–42; actions toward Libya, 743 SAVAK, 339, 342 Savimbi, Jonas; 291 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 118, 156, 176

INDEX

Schlesinger, James R., 10, 266, 341, 464, 514 Schroeder, Gerhardt, 639 Schwartzkopf, Norman, 519, 520 Scowcroft, Brent, 266, 451, 474–75, 513, 518, 521, 522–23, 532–33, 636 Scud missile attacks on Israel, 587 SDI. See Strategic Defense Initiative SEALs (U.S. Navy), 711 SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), 60, 63–66 Secord, Richard, 448 Senkaku Islands, 680–81 Serbs, and Bosnia, 535–37 Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, of Iran, 334–49; dies, 352 Shanghai Communique (1972), 241–42 Sharaf, Abdul Hamis, 256 Sharon, Ariel, 400, 405, 579 Shepley, James, 71–72 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 461, 485, 505 Shia: attacked by Saddam, 521; no-fly zones over safe-havens for, 522–23; conflict with Sunnis, 643–48; militias, 644 Shinseki, Eric, 642 “shock and awe” military strategy, 641 “shock therapy” for transition to capitalism, 556 Shultz, George, 370, 406, 407, 458, 462; debate with Weinberger on terrorism, 414–16; on arms for hostages, 421, 423; and 1985 attack on Libya, 429; and Iran-Contra, 448 Sidra, Gulf of, 455 Sihanouk, Norodom (prince), 211 Simon, William, 288 SIOP-62, 174 Sisco, Joseph, 255–56 Sisi, Abdul Fattah el, 736, 740–41 Sixth Amendment protections, 721 Sixth Fleet, 254–55, 256 Slovenia, 568 “smart power,” 10–11 Smith, Ian, 292, 319 Smith, Margaret Chase, 138 Snow, Edgar, 238

842

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Snowden, Edward, 728–30 “soft power,” 10–11 Solana, Javier, 687 Somalia, 355; and Bush, 524–26; and Clinton, 580–82 Somoza, Anatasio Debayle, 315–17 “Sons of Iraq,” 648 Sorensen, Theodore, 152, 164, 167, 169, 181 South Africa, Republic of, 290, 293, 384 South China Sea, 675–76 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 64 sovereignty, issues of, 593 Soviet Union. See Russia; USSR Speakes, Larry, 422–424 special operations forces, 630, 704 spheres of influence, 18–19 Sputnik, 99–103 Stalin, Joseph, 18, 20 START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) I, 486, 490 START II, 544–45 “Star Wars.” See Strategic Defense Initiative Stassen, Harold, 83–84 “state secrets doctrine,” 724–26 status of forces: disagreement in Iraq, 697; agreement in Afghanistan, 715 Steinberg, James, 677 step-by-step diplomacy, of Kissinger, 279–83 Stevenson, Adlai, 117 Stevenson Amendment, 247 Stimpson, Henry L., 21–24 Stockman, David, 368, 388–90 Strait of Tiran, 260 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 371–75; and Reagan-Gorbachev negotiations, 463–64 strategic forces, 40, 57–64, 125–143; and Cuban missile crisis, 158–65; and détente, 227–35 “structure of peace,” 228 “Stuxnet,” 691 Sudan, and al-Qaeda struck by cruise missiles, 588–89 Suez Canal, 251; crisis of 1956, 84–89

INDEX

“sufficiency” as strategic force concept, 229–35 Suleiman, Omar, 736 Sullivan, William, 340, 342 “Sunni Awakening,” 648 Sunni insurgency, 644 Sununu, John, 543, 544 “surge” in Iraq, 647–48 surveillance issue, 726–27, 728–30 Suu Kyi, Aung San, 683–85 Svahn, Jack, 390 Syria, 100, 101, 265,266, 267, 268, 272, 280–81, 432–36, 599; and Gulf War (1990–1991), 510–11; upheaval in against Assad, 749–55 Taft, Robert, 58 Tahrir Square, demonstrations in, 735, 738 Taiwan, 48, 237; and Taiwan (Formosa) Strait crises, 69–73; arms sales to, 675 Taiwan Relations Act, 675 Talbott, Strobe, 556, 557, 605 Taliban, 630–33 Tanzania, U.S. embassy bombed, 588 “Tar Baby” option, 290 Tarnoff, Peter, 567–69 Taylor, Maxwell, 118, 124, 201 Teller, Edward, 377 Tenet, George, 589, 631; on Iraq’s WMD, 636–39, 640 terrorism: at Beirut International Airport (1983), 410–12; priority for Haig, 413–14; Reagan frustration over, 414; ShultzWeinbereger debate on, 414–17; Bush strategies for combatting, 617–27. See also War on Terror Tet offensive of 1968, 199 Than, Shwe, 684 Thatcher, Margaret, 319, 370, 428, 437–38, 464, 506, 515, 634 Thein Sein, 685 Thieu, Nguyen Van, 193, 220–21 Third World policies: of Eisenhower administration, 105–7; of Kennedy

843 administration, 140–53; of Nixon and Ford administrations, 288–94 Thomas, Evan, 110 Thompson, Llewellyn, 167 Thurman, Maxwell, 498–99, 502 Tiananmen Square, 532–35 Tibet, 9 Tonkin, Gulf of, clash in, 179–80 Tora Bora, battle of, 630 Torture, 653, 654, 719 Tower, John, 451 “transformation,” Rumsfeld concept of, 630, 642–43 Trilateral Commission, 300–301 Trinh, Ngiuyen Duy, 221 Truman, Harry S.: presidency of, 15–53; and early 1945 relations with Soviets, 18–21; and nuclear bombing of Japan, 21–24; and beginning of Cold War, 24–35; and containment strategy, 36–40; and Korean War, 41–51; and Arab-Israeli conflict, 51–53 Truman Doctrine, 7, 19, 28–33 Tunisia, and “Arab Spring,” 732–33 Turner, Stansfield, 350 Tutsi, 582–84. See also Rwanda TWA Flight 847, hijacking of, 445–47 Twin Towers. See World Trade Center Tyson, Laura D’Andrea, 566 Uighurs, 9 Ukraine: Bush visit to, 1991, 490–91; and nuclear weapons, 545, 562; relations with EU, 669; bullied by Putin, 669–72; conflict between nationalists and Russian ethnic communities in, 669–72; Malaysian airliner shot down over, 671 Ulbricht, Walter, 112, 168 “underwear bomber,” 725 United Airlines Flight 93, 618 United Arab Emirates, 535 United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, 25

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INDEX

United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (1972), 541–44 United Nations General Assembly resolution on Panama, 502 United Nations Security Council resolution on Bosnia, 536, 597 United Nations General Assembly resolution on stabilizing North Korea, 43 United Nations Security Council resolution on Haiti, 592–93 United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program, 687 United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq, 505, 506, 508, 509, 515–16, 638 United Nations Security Council resolution on Libya, 744 United Nations Security Council resolutions on Middle East, 263–64, 267, 326 United Nations Security Council resolutions on North Korea: on invasion of South Korea, 42; on North Korean nuclear program, 564 United Nations Security Council resolutions on Rwanda, 582, 584 United Nations Security Council resolution on Somalia, 525, 580–81 United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq, 586 “unlawful enemy combatants,” 720 unmanned armed vehicles (UAVs). See drones Uruguay Round of GATT, 539 USS Abraham Lincoln, 641 USS C. Turner Joy, 180 USS Constellation, 180, 358 USS Coral Sea, 275 USS Enterprise, 273 USS Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 266 USS Harlan County, 592 USS John F. Kennedy, 255, 266

844 USS Maddox, 179–80 USS Mayaguez, 275 USS Saratoga, 256 USS Stark, 503 USS Theodore Roosevelt, 598 U Thant, 187 U-2, over Soviet Union (1960), 113 Vance, Cyrus, 202; as Carter’s secretary of state, 209–307, 326, 595–96 Vance-Owen plan for Bosnia, 590, 591, 595–96 Verizon, 729 Vesey, John, 407, 408 Vienna Summit of Khrushchev and Kennedy, 167–68 Vietnam: French defeat in, 66–69; U.S. involvement in under Kennedy, 176–78, 188; U.S. military involvement in under Johnson, 179–204; war and war-termination policies of Nixon administration, 207–26; agreements ending the war, 221–26; maritime conflicts with China, 679–80 “Vietnamization,” 208–26 “Vietnam syndrome,” 417 Vladivostok summit, 234–35 Waldheim, Kurt, 349 Walesa, Lech, 482, 555 Wallace, Henry, 23 Walsh, Lawrence E., 451–52 war powers: congressional resolution on, 409–10, 617–27; Obama exercise of, 752 wars of national liberation, 118, 189 Washington Special Action Group (WSAG), 261, 268 waterboarding, 653, 655, 724, 725 Watergate scandal, effects on Nixon presidency, 224–25, 266 weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Iraq and, 519; 634. See also nuclear weapons

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INDEX

Webb, James, 683–84 Weeks, Sinclair, 58 Weinberger, Caspar, 368, 389–90, 403, 408; debate with Shultz on terrorism, 414– 16; doctrine for using force, 416–17; on arms for hostages, 421 Weizmann, Chaim, 51–52 West Bank (of Jordan River), issues, 326–33, 575–78, 691 Westmoreland, William, 196 WikiLeaks, 729 Will, George, 499 Wills, Gary 424 Wilson, Charles, 58 Wilson, Woodrow, 17 wiretaps, 722 Wohlstetter, Albert, 124 Wolfowitz, Paul, 610, 623–24, 642, 635 women’s rights, 709 World Bank, 301 World Trade Center attacks, 617; Bush Administration reactions to, 618–27 Yalta Conference (J945), 18 Yanukovych, Vicktor, 669 Yeltsin, Boris, 489, 492–93, 545, 556–57, 604 Yemen (North), 358 Yemen (South), 358 Yergin, Daniel, 614n Yom Kippur War, 257–68 Yoo, John, 720–21 Young, Andrew, 301–4, 318 Yugoslavia, Federation of, 535–37; 595–605. See also Bosnia-Herzegovina; Kosovo Zakheim, Dov, 610 “zero option” of Reagan for intermediate nuclear forces, 465 zero-sum concept, 677 Zhironovsky, Vladimir, 556–57 Zhou Enlai, 235–43 Zimbabwe, 318–19 Zubaydah, Abu, 654