For his lonely stand
against the forces of barbarism, I rate Winston
Churchill the greatest statesman of the 20th century.
Ronald Reagan, though, arguably was the greater
commander in chief. Decisiveness (translating
Clausewitz’s term Entschlossenheit) depends in
turn upon strategic vision. But a commander requires not
only vision, but also the intestinal fortitude to endure
uncertainty, and the will
to force the burden of uncertainty onto his opponent.
Borrowing from the language of economics, one might call
this a predilection for creative destruction.
Whatever his other faults, Reagan possessed the
great attributes of command. Bush's war cabinet is of a
lesser ilk. Consider their CIA chiefs: the oily George
Tenet and the gruff William Casey, who personally
planted a listening device in office of a Middle Eastern
leader during a courtesy call. Tenet is a flatterer and
politician; Casey was a warrior and adventurer.
To a generation that has come of age after the
fall of the Soviet Empire, it is hard to imagine that
the smart money in Europe wagered on Russian dominance
when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. I can attest
that the closest advisors of French President Francois
Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt thought
NATO would lose the Cold War. So humiliating was the
later collapse of the communist regimes that the pundits
could argue credibly that it had fallen of its own
weight. No such thing happened. Reagan took office at a
dark hour for the West, and did things that the elite of
Europe had deemed impossible.
Russia had invaded Afghanistan a year
earlier and its ultimate failure was by no means
assured. Iran had shamed the United States by
sequestering its embassy staff for months, and an
abortive rescue attempt showed up the shabby condition
of the American military. America had entered the third
year of an economic decline with unemployment and
inflation both at unprecedented levels, and Europeans
took for granted that Washington could not afford to
rebuild its armed forces. In October 1979, Federal
Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker returned from the annual
meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Belgrade,
and forced American interest rates to the highest levels
in history. A month before Reagan took office, the
lending rate American banks charged their most
credit-worthy customers stood above 20%. An economic
chasm gaped in front of the United States, the dollar's
status as a global reserve currency stood in jeopardy,
and enlightened opinion believed that America's world
role would shrivel in keeping with her reduced
circumstances.
At no time in the postwar period
was the Soviet Union more confident of success, or more
credible among its erstwhile enemies. France and Germany
looked eastwards for trade, and the
"Ostpolitiker" clique around Helmut Schmidt
prepared for life under Soviet suzerainty. For a
generation, "containment" of communism had been
America's watchword, under the "realistic" assumption
that a thriving Soviet Union and her satellites would
remain a force to be reckoned with indefinitely.
When Reagan made clear his intention to bury the
"evil empire" (as he characterized it before the Commons
in 1982), a wave of shock and indignation spread among
the Atlantic elite unimaginable to those who where not
there at the time. Europe's disgust at George W Bush is
a gentle June shower compared to the tempests of 1982.
Whereas Europe thinks that the younger Bush is crude and
ideological, it thought Reagan barking mad. Only seven
years later the Berlin Wall came down, and not of its
own weight. As it turned out, America's economy could
pay for both guns and butter while wringing out
inflation and strengthening the dollar. Responsible
opinion in the academic and financial community demanded
urgent attention to America's budget deficit, that is, a
cut in spending and an increase in taxes. Only on the
fringes of the economics profession could one find
support for what Reagan in fact did, namely to reduce
tax rates while launching a military buildup. Without
exception, the sages of the City and Wall Street
foretold disaster.
Reagan possessed the
strategic vision to brush aside the objections and
plunge ahead. His economic policies embodied "creative
destruction", the chaotic emergence of new firms and
methods to challenge the old. Conventional economics
thinking restricted its attention to large
corporations that depend on the debt markets. Under
Reagan, employment at the 500 largest US corporations
shrank, but the explosion of small businesses more than
made up for it. After the first round of Reagan tax
cuts, which nearly halved the top tax rate, the value of
the American stock market doubled in 1984. Creative
destruction transformed the landscape of the American
economy. The microchip transformed domestic life as well
as warfare, and America regained a dominant position in
the global economy. Reagan's strategic policy stemmed
from a similar kind of creative destruction. Under the
old containment doctrine, the United States sought to
maintain stability while the Soviets stirred the pot. As
I wrote some years ago, "The elder Bush and advisers
such as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, schooled in the
Cold War, flinched at the thought of instability. Any
regime, no matter how corrupt and oppressive, merited
American backing, as long it was 'our bastard', as
Franklin Roosevelt qualified Nicaragua's strongman of
the 1930s. It is a stretch to accuse such men of having
a philosophy. Their strategic reflex came from the
simple fact that the Soviet Union stood to gain from any
instability outside its immediate sphere of influence.
The more chaos, the more options open to the Kremlin. A
coup in Western Asia, a civil war somewhere in the
Pacific Rim, a war between India and Pakistan, an
insurgency in Latin America gave Russia a chance to get
involved. Russia had unlimited upside and little
downside (Geopolitics in the light of Option
Theory, Jan 26, 2002)."
Reagan and his band of wild-eyed radicals put
the burden of uncertainty onto the Russians. The
sclerotic Soviet Union, they believed, could not match
America's pace of technological innovation in armaments.
Not only the "Star Wars" anti-missile project, but
avionics, smart weapons, and a host of other
improvements convinced the Russian military that it
could not win a war against the United States.
Reagan's predecessors in the Ford and Carter
presidencies, as well as his successor, George H W Bush,
fretted over the collapse of the security arrangements
of the Cold War: the arms control agreements, the fine
lines in the sand demarcating spheres of influence, the
instabilities of the Middle East and Asia. In other
words, they were fearful and timid commanders, unsuited
for decisive action. Reagan's team marched into
Washington in January 1981 with as much contrarian
spirit as Fidel Castro's 1958 entry into Havana.
"Plans are all right sometimes ... And sometimes
just stirring things up is all right - if you're tough
enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you'll see
what you want when it comes to the top," said Dashiell
Hammett's Continental Op. Reagan's people knew that
their policies implied a chaotic breakdown of the
existing world order, and they set out to do just this
with malice aforethought. Russia's death rate rose by
30% between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 1994 largely
due to alcoholism, tuberculosis and venereal disease.
After the Iran-Contra scandal, the composition
of the second Reagan administration shifted away from
radicals and towards traditional managers, but by then
it was too late. The process of creative destruction had
broken down the marrow of the Soviet system and its
collapse could not be postponed, to the chagrin of the
"realists" who advised Reagan's successor, the father of
the sitting president.
President George W Bush
takes Reagan as an exemplar rather than his father. He
is "not yet the man to catch hold of the Devil", as
Mephisto said to Faust. He kept a CIA director whose
concern was to determine whether the available
intelligence justified a war. The late Bill Casey
understood that if you want intelligence, first you
start a war - but that is a long story. For now it is
enough to say that Ronald Reagan goes to his rest with
the gratitude of free people everywhere.
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uncertainty, and the will
to force the burden of uncertainty onto his opponent.
Borrowing from the language of economics, one might call
this a predilection for creative destruction.
