Here's the man who killed detente.
I showed this picture to my class this week, and offered symbolic bonus points (the only kind there are here in Norwegian universities) to anyone who could identify him. To my mild surprise, one student, a rather young woman, correctly identified him: Helmut Schmidt.
Q: How do you know who he is?
A: I'm German.
I like the two-finger thing. I'm guessing this is Schmidt being sworn in as chancellor of the old West Germany, i.e., the Federal Republic (FRG). Bear in mind Schmidt was a Social Democrat. In the US, that would be enough to make plenty of folks think he was a Communist.
Not quite.
So, why start with Schmidt? Well, we had a big task in class this week. We had to try to understand both the escalation of the Cold War starting about 1978 or 1979, the start of a nail-biting period that lasted about five years, and then the dramatic and incredibly fast wind-down of the whole 40-years' conflict, ending, basically, with the phased surrender of the Soviet Union. A new leader in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in 1985 and proceeded to opt out of the arms race with the US and to withdraw Soviet forces from its Eastern European empire. And all this while, eventually, working with a US president, Ronald Reagan, who got elected in 1980 by pledging to build up the US military and be more aggressive with the Soviets than Jimmy Carter had been as president since 1977. Many Americans think Reagan ended the Cold War by getting tough with the Soviets; most people outside the US see Gorbachev as the leader in ending the conflict.
But that's getting ahead of the story.
In 1980, probably no one anywhere in the world expected the Cold War to end 10 years in the future. Most people saw the conflict between the superpowers getting a lot worse - escalating, not deescalating. And whose fault was this? Reagan's? Well, he didn't become president until 1981, so you can blame him for making tensions worse if you like, but not for starting what appeared a downward slide. He was completely against detente, but detente was already on its death-bed when he became president.
What about Jimmy Carter? A lot of people look to the second half of Carter's 4 years as president as the time when a rightward shift in the US international stance (and domestically, too, but that's another story) became clear. Particularly after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter launched a very aggressive response: reinstating universal male registration for a potential military draft (I recounted to my students my experience going to the post office to register when I turned 16, very soon after this change in the law), boycotting the 1980 Summer Olympics, set for Moscow, banning US grain sales to the USSR, and beginning covert aid to the Afghan insurgents (the mujahideen) fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Whew. Carter said he had had it with the Soviets.
But back up just one step more. The SALT II treaty, agreed to by Gerald Ford and Leonid Brezhnev, was already a dead letter in the US Senate by this time. So maybe Scoop Jackson killed detente. Boy, that guy really hated arms control. "The Senator from Boeing," they called him.
Well, what about Brezhnev himself? Doesn't he, and the whole Soviet leadership, deserve their share of the blame? Sure. Of course. But let's be honest: they weren't trying to restart the Cold War by invading Afghanistan. Not that they had any right to invade the country, murder its leader, and install their own guy in Kabul, which is what they did. But their purposes were pretty strictly regional - they were agitated over the prospect of (what we now would call) an Islamist state on their southern border, with the potential to export its politics to the populations inside the (largely Muslim) Soviet Socialist Republics of Central Asia. Carter's national security adviser, Zbig Brzezinski, insisted the Soviets wanted to use Afghanistan as a path toward the Persian Gulf, their eyes on oil. There was someone who said something wry once about the damage done by small maps. From Kabul to the sea is a hell of a long way, and a rough one.
But detente had its most fervent base of support in Europe - the same place the Cold War began, before it went global. In Robert McMahon's wonderful book, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (when has another book done so much so well, so concisely?), there is a key section that explains that the policy of detente had multiple sources in the 1960s and 1970s, and that one of these was an indigenous welling up of sentiment for peace and reconciliation within Europe, and especially within the FRG, led by the Social Democratic chancellor Willy Brandt.
Same party as Helmut Schmidt.
Detente was staggered by blows landed within Europe. Speed ahead a few years. In the early 1980s, there were huge protest demonstrations in Western Europe - Germany, Italy, Britain, elsewhere - against President Reagan's plans to install a new generation of nuclear warhead-tipped missiles (both Pershing II intermediate-range missiles and smaller cruise missiles) in several NATO countries, especially the FRG. Warmonger!
OK. Well, there was something in that. But hold on. Reagan can be blamed for a lot of things. But it wasn't his idea to install the "Euromissiles." Jimmy Carter had promised to do so, and Reagan was following through on that Carter promise.
And why had Carter promised to give new missiles to Western Europe? Why would he force these awful things on them?
He didn't. Helmut Schmidt demanded them. He practically browbeat Carter into promising these new missiles, supposedly to match a new generation of missiles the Soviets had installed in Eastern Europe. Carter, who did try to puzzle things out for himself in general, seems to have found this hard to understand. The old missiles did the trick (deterrence) pretty well. What difference would new missiles make? But Schmidt, who apparently really detested Carter, wanted them.
The Social Democrats, by the way, lost power in 1982. Then they decided they didn't like the Euromissiles so much.
Well, in 1983, in the missiles went - and out the Soviet delegation marched from the ongoing (if moribund) strategic arms control talks. It took a little while for things to get going again.
Reagan came into office insisting that Carter (and, by implication, Nixon and Ford) had let the Soviets become #1. America was #2. America was weaker militarily than the Soviet Union.
Does this seem comical now? Well, to plenty of Americans it didn't in 1980. The US defeat in Vietnam was not so long ago. More relevant, the Iran hostage crisis was still ongoing. This added powerfully to the sense among Americans than the US had become - in Nixon's undying phrase - a "pitiful, helpless giant." Smaller countries were picking on us! And we couldn't seem to do anything to stop them. That was definitely the feeling among many, many Americans in 1980. This had nothing to do with "throw weight" and other technical terms relating to weaponry. It was something visceral.
Reagan would make America #1 again. That was his promise on defense. Big, big military buildup. Which he delivered, the budget be damned. Reagan also distinguished his own brand of American patriotism from that of others (like, supposedly, Carter) in this way: Reagan would not tolerate any criticism of the United States. Period. Criticism of the US (worst of all if it came from Americans themselves) could only weaken the US image and US resolve to battle the Communists everywhere around the world.
Guy loved to salute. Had no official reason to, but did it all the time anyway. Any chance he got.
Once Reagan became president he basically ended diplomacy with the Soviets. Detente was a sucker's game, a "one-way street" - going the Soviets' way - that's what Reagan said at his first news conference as president in 1981. And diplomacy could only mean a continuation of detente. That's the way it looked to him. He liked to joke later on, after Yuri Andropov lasted 2 years as the Soviet leader and then Chernenko only 1 year, that he really wanted to make peace with the Soviets, but their leaders kept dying on him. That was bunk. Reagan had no interest in diplomacy with the Soviets in his first term as president. The Soviets kept saying they wanted to go back to detente, which was a dirty word to Reagan. Why shouldn't they have wanted to go back to detente? It was their policy. What I mean is, since they didn't have a democratic political system, the guys who'd negotiated the ABM Treaty, SALT I, and SALT II for the Soviets were still there. Same guys, basically.
In 1983 things got a bit hairy. Popular fears of a nuclear war between the superpowers were becoming severe. The high point, perhaps, was the airing of The Day After, a TV movie on ABC that depicted a thermonuclear war as it would look from Lawrence, Kansas. Not a great movie, but still an ugly picture.
This is a still shot from the movie. I remember finding it rather chilling to see the images of the missiles taking off. ABC was persuaded to have a roundtable discussion late at night, after their aired the film, where Reagan administration officials tried to allay public fears that the government actually contemplated fighting and winning a nuclear war. Truly a nutty idea, but one that various administration officials actually floated, for the record. I don't think the efforts to placate the public's fears worked so easily. What the public didn't even know, but what most historians seem to believe happened behind the scenes right around the same time, was a very serious "war scare," in which a NATO war-games exercise led the USSR's leaders to fear that NATO was really planning a nuclear first strike against them, using war games as a ruse. Oy.
Whether because of what was unknown to the public, or because Reagan was heading into a reelection year and his campaign saw fears of a nuclear war as perhaps his biggest political problem, Reagan changed his rhetoric starting in 1983, tentatively, then far more strongly in 1984 (election year). He started to say that a nuclear war could not be won and must not be fought. Imagine - this was a new departure for him. But gradually this worked to mollify public anxieties. I'm trying to make a long story short here. Reagan announced he was now ready to resume diplomacy with the Soviets. He may have believed that he now could do so safely because of his massive arms buildup. This is what we used to call "negotiating from a position of strength." But he certainly didn't persuade the Soviets to return to the bargaining table, because they were already pleading with him to go there.
Oh, and also: the Soviets shot down a plane, KAL007, killing 269 people. And 241 US Marines got blown up in Lebanon. Hell of a year, 1983. And Star Wars, too (the missile-defense fantasy, not the movie).
Of course, superpower relations weren't the only geopolitical game going on at the time. Reagan was determined not just to end detente when he became president. He also looked for places to roll back socialism (socialism, communism...whatever).
Like Afghanistan.
Reagan also resolved to wage indirect war in Central America. That long-feared event, a "second Cuba," finally had come to pass, it seemed, in Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas overthrew a really nasty US client regime in 1979 and took over. So Reagan started funding an insurgency, the Contras. (I'm a Contra, too, Reagan said. Contrarevolucionario, that is.) At the same time he started sending as much money and weaponry as he could find to the regime in El Salvador, so that the leftist insurgency there didn't create a third Cuba in the Caribbean Basin. Insurgency in Nicaragua, counterinsurgency in El Salvador.
Who are these guys? Bonus points here, too. Picture the guy in the back in a US Marine uniform, lots of medals on his chest. Yup, Ollie North of Iran-Contra infamy. Long story. Let me just say this is a classic picture, because it shows North as he usually dressed when he worked at the White House - in a business suit - and, of course, it shows him with Dutch (Reagan's nickname). The other guy, in the foreground with Reagan, is Adolfo Calero, one of the political front men for the Contras. Yes, Reagan knew who North was and had a pretty good idea of what he was doing, legally and illegal (illegally starting in late 1984 when the Congress banned funding for the Contras but North et al., on Reagan's orders and with Reagan's involvement in some details, did whatever they had to to keep the money and arms flowing to them, never mind what the law said).
Any of you 80s trivia nuts out there - again, who's this guy? Why, it's Eugene Hasenfus, of course, in October 1986. This is when the secret Contra supply operation got its cover blow. Hasenfus was the lone survivor of a supply plane the Nicaraguans shot down.
And what about the "Iran" in Iran-Contra? That was the politically dangerous part for Reagan. Selling US weapons to IRAN??!! Oops. Why?
Here's one big reason. William Buckley - not the National Review guy - the CIA's Beirut station chief, the most important of the several Americans taken hostage in Lebanon by militias in the early 1980s. Reagan really wanted to get these guys out. The idea that there was a "strategic opening" to Iranian "moderates" was always just so much smoke being blown. It was always about trading arms for hostages. And no, it didn't even work. About 2,000 antitank weapons delivered to Iran, 3 hostages freed - but at least 4 more taken. If you're inclined actually to keep score. And Buckley died in his captors' hands.
This was all blowing up (in a bad way, not a good way, like the kids say today) in October and November of 1986. By coincidence, in October Reagan met for the second time with Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader, in power for about 1.5 years at this point. They met, of all places, in Reykjavik. This is how they looked when they were done:
Which one looks angrier? Maybe Reagan. But they're both unhappy campers, no doubt about it. They seemed to have accomplished nothing in Iceland. We now know that their parleys ended acrimoniously, with each accusing the other of not really wanted to reach an arms-reduction agreement.
But we also know, and people learned very soon after the meetings ended, that Gorbachev and Reagan had at least talked about the idea of completely eliminating nuclear weapons.
!!??!!
Could this be possible? Conservatives in the US, the people who'd always hated detente, were beside themselves. Gorbachev, in fact, well before Reykjavik, had made public the outlines of a proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. And Reagan had started to embrace the same idea, at least as an ultimate goal, in 1983. (And no, in case you're wondering, Reagan had not been a secret nuclear "abolitionist" for years. This was a new idea for him.)
Reagan had gradually been persuaded to give up, rhetorically, the idea that the US had to achieve (or maintain) strategic superiority over the USSR. The two superpowers had achieved strategic parity by the late 1960s. Neither could really get an advantage over the other in a potential nuclear war. Reagan had always resisted the idea of parity, just hated it. Somebody had to be top dog, and he wanted it to be the US. But at their first meeting, in Geneva in 1985, Reagan and Gorbachev had agreed to a joint statement in which both countries renounced the quest for superiority. They didn't say "parity," but that was the implication.
And strategic parity was an essential concept of detente.
Here's the thing: Reagan was edging back toward detente, perhaps without understanding this is what he was doing. Once you give up the idea that the two countries are locked in a perpetual competition for supremacy, the door is suddenly open to negotiating a continuation of parity, simply at lower levels of armaments and danger. Lots of factors went into Reagan moving in this direction. The two leaders couldn't make their breakthrough in Reykjavik because Reagan was still clinging to the idea of missile defense - shoot 'em down in space, after they're launched - and Gorbachev couldn't sell disarmament to his own defense hawks without a US pledge to give up this idea, which was quite destabilizing, even if it was science fiction (long story).
Down the road, however, Gorbachev just gave up his objections to the missile defense fantasy. He agreed to take the nukes out of Europe - the Euromissiles gone from Western Europe and the Soviet missiles gone from Eastern Europe. This had been Reagan's proposition in 1981, when everyone saw it as something so unreasonable, from the Soviet view, that they would never agree to it, and it was probably a US effort to ditch arms-control talks by taking a position that was a total nonstarter. Well, now (in 1987) it was happening.
Concession after concession came from Gorbachev. He really, really wanted to get out of the arms race. He wanted to sink his resources into saving his domestic economy, which he ended up failing to do anyway.
There is, of course, a lot more to the story. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989 - and all the Warsaw Pact satellite regimes of the Soviet Union collapsed unbelievably fast, within months. In Prague, the Communists just handed the house keys over to Vaclav Havel and the dissidents. In Poland, the Communists invited Solidarity to form a government. There was violence in Romania - and, later, some in Lithuania, as the Baltic nations actually broke away from the USSR itself - but most of the Soviet empire's breakup was startlingly nonviolent as well as swift.
The US largely lost interest in Central America as the 1980s ended. The Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, often with the backing of the US Congress (and sometimes without it), fueled civil wars there in which US-backed governments killed 300,000 of their own people in the 1980s. It's a horrible record.
The Cold War had organized global politics, US foreign policy, and many elements of domestic US life for 40 years. It ended suddenly. I'm not sure we've really adjusted. But I guess that's another story. This one was plenty dramatic enough for one week.
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