Right About Reagan

Andrew Alexander writes:

History is a moving target. Hit it at the right moment and you will get a good picture of the past, otherwise it is a succession of inners and outers and plain misses. The 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth has seen a mixture of marksmanship, ranging from accurate to deranged, the latter as befits a dangerously deluded man who brought the world so near to a nuclear holocaust.

Yes, of course he was charming and engagingly modest. Yes, he understood a great simplicity of economics: that lower taxes could increase government revenues. Simplicities were, indeed, his speciality. The Cold War was, to him, an extension of Hollywood B-movies where there were good guys and bad guys, with the white hats eventually defeating the black hats in the final shoot-out. Those journalists who followed his campaign trails wondered if they heard him correctly. Did he really say Russia had ‘hardened’ all its factories against nuclear blast? Did he actually say that the Kremlin was preparing an attack and that war was likely?

Yes, he did. The man he appointed Under Secretary of Defence claimed the U.S. could recover from nuclear war in two to four years. And, Reagan absurdly claimed, there was no word in the Russian language for freedom (there is, it’s svoboda). No wonder the Kremlin was alarmed. Matters were made worse by U.S. Air Force planes and warships being ordered to test Soviet defences by advancing up to and sometimes into its airspace and territorial waters. It led to the shooting down of a Korean airliner by an over-zealous fighter pilot.

But this was by no means the key incident. The planned ‘Able Archer’ exercise by the Pentagon had the Soviets fearing these war games would suddenly convert into an all-out attack. Fortunately, the head of the KGB in London, Oleg Gordievsky, was a double agent and warned how this was being interpreted in Moscow. Able Archer was changed. We were lucky, too, that a Soviet colonel disregarded standing orders and declined to fire his missiles when the radar registered a launch from the U.S. It was actually a trick of the sunlight.

Then there was the Star Wars project for a missile shield in outer space. It has been seen by admirers of Reagan as a brilliant manoeuvre — the system so expensive that the Soviet Union could never meet the cost of a response and would have to sue for peace. In fact, CIA analysts saw the project — if it came into being — as capable of being matched by Soviet counter-measures without undue cost. But the plan looked to the Kremlin like another disguise for that final attack on what Reagan dubbed ‘the evil empire’ in his warlike rhetoric.

If we have to single out a U.S. President who brought about the end of the Cold War, it would be Jimmy Carter. In 1979, he inveigled the Soviet Union into its war in Afghanistan, thus creating the Taliban. It proved an unwinnable ten-year war — how history repeats itself! The intense unpopularity and outright failures in that conflict were a serious factor in bringing to power Mikhail Gorbachev, long sceptical of the sustainability of the Communist system.

To Reagan’s admirers, the end of the Cold War blotted out everything else. And there was a lot else. He came as near to formal indictment as President Nixon. The ‘Iran-Contra’ scandal involved defying a specific Congress ruling by sending aid to Nicaraguan exiles seeking to overthrow the Left-wing government. He was warned that these very roundabout deals were, in fact, illegal. At least his deals to support Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran were legal, if heavily disguised.

Among the historical messages of the Reagan presidency must be a warning to beware of charm. This, we might recall, was Tony Blair’s strong point — and he ended up embroiling us in two Middle East wars. Historians can muse on the role of charm in the wrong hands. They may also like to muse on the fact that Reagan was so much in the hands of his wife Nancy. She had her own views on the President’s appointments and on dates which were ‘unlucky’. And she, it turned out, was being advised by an astrologer in San Francisco. Scholars of the Roman empire and other ancient civilisations must find this intriguing.