Some Free Advice for Liz Cheney

posted at 8:29 pm on October 14, 2009 by J.E. Dyer
[ National Defense ]   

I applaud Liz Cheney for starting her new organization Keep America Safe.   It should be a fun ride.  Two things are coming together here:  Liz Cheney’s intelligence and acerbic focus, and the fast-emerging – really fast-emerging – need for coherent policy alternatives to President Obama on national security.  Cheney has the pedigree to turn Keep America Safe into a 21st-century Committee on the Present Danger, and become a policy hub for the GOP candidate of 2012.

Following this analogy, I would recommend nothing so much as studying how Ronald Reagan – who famously heeded the analysis and advice of the Committee on the Present Danger – approached our national security policy.  He actually reversed the policy trend of 35 years’ worth of predecessors, and he did it on four key principles that remain centrally relevant today. We cannot do better than to look at those principles to establish a sound basis for national policy.

The first principle was reducing the import of nuclear arsenals in the relations of the superpowers, the US and USSR.  The clear indications of the last month, that the Russians still see nukes the same way they did in the 1980s (see here and here), make this a timely and salient principle.  Reagan’s vision transcended that of most of his contemporaries:  he was able to see that as long as “deterrence” and the nuclear arms balance occupied a central position in our national security calculations, the Soviets’ would always have an advantage, and we a disadvantage.

Nuclear arms constituted the only realm of defense in which the Soviets could really compete with us.  By letting that be what our relations were “about,” we handed them a gift.  Moreover, the Soviets were able to use their nuclear arsenal as a shield behind which to fight proxy wars for the Third World, from Asia and Africa to our Caribbean doorstep.  Reagan’s vision, from his first arms reduction proposal in 1981 to the signing of the INF Treaty in 1987, was to eliminate this dysfunctional dynamic by reducing arsenals and building missile defenses, so that a MAD-type deterrence – used against America and the West – could no longer be leveraged to enslave populations on the Soviet model.

The need to resurrect this principle is emerging very quickly, with Obama having scrapped the East European sites that were to be part of our global missile defenses.  He has effectively given up on the global defense concept, and the Russians are taking prompt advantage of this retreat to press their case for a power equation based on nuclear arsenals.  This concept was terrible for politics and cohesion in the West during the Cold War, and it should be discouraged and beaten back.  To reduce the significance of nuclear arms to our power relations with Russia, China, and any other nation, we need to press ahead with a comprehensive global missile defense system, and energetically seek mutual nuclear arms reductions, predicating our own reductions on concurrent and verifiable reductions by others.

The second principle discernible in Reagan’s policy was a purposeful “geographization” of our national security ideas.  He turned sharply from the disembodied abstractions of nuclear diplomacy and defensive deterrence, and looked instead to weighing our security in terms of power and influence exercised over territory.  He was the first president to win back territory seized by Marxist clients of the Soviet Union, when he invaded Grenada in 1983.  He implemented the “Maritime Strategy” originally proposed (but not implemented) under Carter:  not just building up the US Navy but deploying it into the Soviets’ fleet “bastions.” Reagan resisted Soviet demands to put cruise missiles like the then-new Tomahawk on the bargaining table – and instead, by deploying such missiles into the armed forces in Europe and the Far East, in conjunction with a comprehensive force build-up, he shifted the theater “correlation of forces” in our favor.  The Pershing-II ballistic missile deployment in 1983 was just such a concrete game-changing measure.

Reagan did not neglect security issues beyond the Soviet Union, mounting military responses to both Libyan terrorism and maritime terrorism in the Persian Gulf, during the Iran-Iraq War.  We can find fault today with the scope and character of some of his measures; but his predecessors had, with the exception of Carter’s failure to rescue the embassy hostages from Tehran, attempted little or nothing.  Reagan did not stamp out Islamic terrorism, by any means, but he did render it less of an avenue for Soviet exploitation against the West than his predecessors had managed to.

Reagan also, of course, supported local freedom movements against Soviet-proxy governments, in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, and Central America.  He provided them supplies, cash, and means of communication.  He further implemented a “Latin American Marshall Plan,” intended to foster democracy rather than authoritarian caudillo-ism throughout the region, along with – indispensably – encouraging economic market reforms, and strengthened ties with the US.  At every step, his approach was to hold territory, retake it, build up an intimidating presence next to it, or threaten the Soviets’ hold on it.  The implications of his success for current issues like Afghanistan and Iraq are not to be missed.

This territory-oriented approach was pursued in natural concert with the third Reagan principle:  emphasizing the outcome of liberty and self-determination for the peoples of disputed or menaced territories.  To a significant degree, Reagan “re-moralized” American foreign policy, changing the emphasis from expedience in our own defense, narrowly conceived, to the concept of achieving our security through actively promoting the greatest freedom for others.  Besides not fearing to challenge the USSR as an evil empire, Reagan unabashedly brought a moral commitment to fostering liberty and self-determination, in the then-peripheral nations that were perennial prey for Moscow.

Many peoples, from Poland to China to Vietnam to Cuba, were much less impressed than American policymakers with the success of nuclear deterrence and “containment” in the Cold War, because they and their children and livelihoods were the sacrifices for the West’s defensive posture.  Reagan’s unique vision was to see it as important to our security that these people be free.  Their freedom of self-determination may not mean precisely our form of constitutional government, but their option for self-determination is in every case better for them than living under brutal dictators with ties to the former Soviet Union.  It is also better for us.

Maneuvering cynically to shore up a defensive national position, regardless of the fate of other peoples, is often seen as necessary in traditional security policy.  It is usually referred to as “realism.”  America has been guilty of it along with other nations.  But it is not the American way of security, and the blunt truth is, its promise is always false.  It never achieves what we think it will.

The Reagan approach of pursuing security through promoting the freedom and self-determination of others is often disparaged as “Wilsonian idealism,” but it is actually a very different thing, looking not to international collectivization – Wilson’s signature concept – but to national self-determination for subjugated peoples.  To put in perspective which promotes security and stability better – a nation enslaved to a dictator or one whose people are free to determine their own fate – we need only compare North and South Korea.

The last principle of Reagan’s security policy applied to all his actions:  bargain hard.  The reason Reagan was able to obtain nuclear arms reductions, where his predecessors had only managed poorly verified limitations, was that he was willing to make tough demands, make good on threats, relentlessly improve his bargaining position, and walk away if the deal wasn’t good enough.  He usually did this at great cost in bad press, and even in the approval of his fellow conservatives and closest advisers.

Reagan’s November 1981 nuclear arms reduction proposal met with near-universal scorn from the media and the arms control profession, and alarmed a whole wing of American conservatives.  Gorbachev proposed the same deal back to him in 1985, and by then Reagan was able to leverage the Pershing-II deployments and SDI as bargaining chips, to ultimately get an ever better deal.  To get that better deal – the INF Treaty and the START process – he had to walk away from it in Reykjavik in 1986, when the price Gorbachev demanded was relinquishing SDI.  The Reykjavik walk-out was approved by very few of even Reagan’s most trusted advisers.  He had to walk that path virtually alone.  But it was the key to getting a remarkable deal that critics had called everything from foolish to insane when he outlined the vision back in 1981.

In issues from Iran’s nuclear program to Russia and missile defense, from Russia and the Caucasus to North Korea and China, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, hard bargaining on the Reagan model is an indispensable adjunct to policy.  It will not always look to everyone – even one’s staunchest political supporters – like the right thing to do.  There will almost always be tremendous political opposition, both at home and abroad, to building an effective bargaining position.  But hard bargaining works to achieve game-changing agreements – and Reagan showed it can work without, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, firing a shot.

Many specific security issues will face us in the next few years, and all their unique features will swirl around them begging to be viewed in narrow and oblique contexts.  But in approaching these issues, a group like Keep America Safe could look long and hard and not find a better set of basic principles than the ones Reagan used to defeat the Soviet Union and make America more secure.  The benefit to us of avoiding the disadvantageous abstractions of nuclear diplomacy, and the profitability of defending and extending the freedom and self-determination of peoples over territory, have no prospect of fading in this epoch of human history.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Optimistic Conservative and “contentions”.

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