# Posted 4:15 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

REAGAN'S VISION: Just recently, Henry Yang sent me a long and thoughtful response to a post I put up on May 11th as part of a wideranging discussion on the nature of liberal foreign policy. (NB: The discussion was set off by Michael Totten's provocative essay "Builders and Defenders", which was later published by WSJ Online. For further comments from myself and others, click here.)

Henry writes that:

...Through OxBlog, I have learned that you have been working on your dissertation. As I said, I was reading the archives of your blog when I encountered a post you made on May 11th of this year when you characterized President Reagan as someone who battled isolationists and realists within the Republican Party as a finding in the course of your research. I write in to inform you of my disagreement with that perspective.

I would certainly agree that Reagan chose to take what one might call a “proactive” stance toward the Soviet threat that effectively silenced the isolationists in the party for a long time. (though not decisively crushed, as evident from the likes of Pat Buchanan before he left the GOP) What I disagree with is your assertion that Reagan represented idealism in combating the realist elements in his party. In my opinion, nothing can be further from the truth.

From your blog, I can tell that you are already aware of many exceptions to the “democratic idealism” that you ascribe to Reagan, though I’m puzzled by your failure to note the fact that there are so many “exceptions” to your theory that the "exceptions" are the rule, and that the examples supporting your theory are the real exceptions. In other words, Reagan was a realist who achieved realist ends occasionally (though infrequently) through idealist means (and often employing idealist rhetoric).

For a realist statesman, his primary interest is the interest of his country. As a realist myself, I am more interested in the actions of statesmen than their
words. (So, please, do not quote me his words as rebuttal since I’m quite familiar with them and will be dealing with that aspect later on.)

Reagan’s actions contributed to the collapse of the Communist system throughout the Soviet bloc and encouraged their replacement with democratic states.
Though that is obviously consistent with Wilsonian idealism, it also served US interests. Therefore those examples cannot decisively prove one argument or
another.

You might say that Reagan’s view that Communism was an evil that must and could be defeated was an idealist view, since the realist view, as represented by the detente of Nixon and Kissinger, was that Soviet Communism was a force that could only be contained and that perhaps the 2 forces could reach a peaceful accommodation.

This view ignores a few facts:

1. The above view could only be an idealist view if detente was the complete realist solution to the Soviet threat. It was not. Quite the contrary, Kissinger viewed detente as nothing but a phase in his strategy to defeat Soviet Communism.

Kissinger’s memoirs, “Years of Renewal”, made that quite clear. We must remember how seriously the Vietnam War weakened the United States. Economically, the US was a train wreck. Socially, it promoted civil disobedience that destroyed internal cohesion. Politically, it caused the Democratic Party to adopt the idea of unilateral disarmament and destroyed whatever little bipartisan consensus the 2 parties had. (Consider, for example, the lopsided
Congressional vote on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. In contrast, Reagan’s decision to deploy “Euromissiles” and his SDI were denounced thoroughly by the
Democrats) Diplomatically, it seriously weakened the United States’ prestige overseas. Most important of all, the American people lost confidence in their own country.

Nixon and Kissinger knew that the US was in no position to begin a campaign of confrontation against the Soviet Union. Therefore, detente was devised,
which was no more than a tactic of buying time for the US to recover so that it can resume on its grand strategy of bringing Communism to an end. As
Kissinger puts it: “I shared their [neoconservatives] distrust of Communism and their apparent determinationto thwart its aims. I thought once they realized that our goal was not to placate but to outmaneuver the Soviet Union, we would be able to join forces in a common cause.”

You might question the wisdom of putting one’s faith in the architect of detente whose policy was eventually revoked. You might make the argument that
this is nothing less than Kissinger’s attempt to rewrite history so that he might appear as a wise sage than a bumbler. [I would! --ed.]

I don’t believe that’s the case. First, surely Kissinger’s narrative was sound strategy, considering the context. Second, let’s remember Kissinger’s background. He was a Jew, and the memory of the Holocaust must have oppressed him. It is hard to believe such a person would so readily compromise with the likes of the Soviet Union.

Third, there’s also Kissinger’s acts, which showed that he was trying to hold as much ground as possible considering the miserable hand dealt to him by
Johnson...

Reagan’s realism in his handling of Latin America is a matter of record. (In other words, he followed the prescription of Dr. Jeanne Kirkpatrick in her
“Dictatorships and Double Standards”: Support any right-wing government, no matter how despicable their death squads may be, in the interests of attacking Communism.)

What is also instructive is the way the US dealt with the dictatorship of Mobutu in Zaire (or, shall we say, how Reagan continued the policy of supporting one of the most corrupt dictatorships in Africa) and supported the military government of South Korea.

My favorite example remains the Kwanju Massacre of 1980, when the South Korean military government massacred hundreds of protestors and students. During the conflict, the protestors and students managed to seize some weapons from the military and discovered that they were all made courtesy of the United States. Reagan continued the policy of supporting the military government of South Korea.

Also, the idealist quotient of President Reagan’s support of the proxy war in Angola, with the Soviets supporting the government and the US supporting UNITA (hardly a lily white lamb when it came to human rights) is questionable.

You might say that this criticism is unfair. That without US support, Angola would go over to the Soviets. However, surely the most humane (i.e.
fastest) way to bring that conflict to an end was a full scale American invasion? Or perhaps the US could have threatened UNITA with withholding aid if they
don’t become more humane? Of course, no such threat was issued. As long as UNITA was effective in checking the Angolan government, Reagan did not lose much sleep over their brutality.

What about all those beautiful speeches urging no compromise with the “Evil Empire”?

For better or for worse, the American people cannot be roused with a pure realist appeal to their best interests. It must also be combined with a call to
their ideals. (As someone once quipped: Just as realist can never convince the American people to follow the example of Metternich, liberals can never
convince the American people to always defer to Kofi Annan.)

Those speeches were rallying cries to motivate a nation that was spiritually drained after Vietnam War, Watergate, and the uninspired leaderships of Ford and Carter. (“malaise”, anyone?) The purpose of rallying the people was to serve the country’s interests, which was not an accommodation with the Soviet Union. The fall of the Communist order was seen to be in the best interests of the country.

Isolationism did not serve the interest of realism. Therefore it never became mainstream Republican thought. (Trent Lott’s statement on Operation Allied
Force notwithstanding, I should note that Sen. John McCain supported the operation once it got underway. So did Kissinger, Norman Podhoretz, Joshua
Muravchik,...etc.)...

I hope you don’t misunderstand me and think that I’m an embittered Leftist e-mailing you a rant on Reagan and Bush. Quite the contrary, I’m a conservative
realist who applauds the realist policies of both administrations as I believe they have served American interests well. (I dare say the current president has
done more for the US in terms of foreign policy in his first 9 months than Bill Clinton had done for the country in all his 8 years.)

There’s a principle in logic known as “Occam’s razor” which states that the simplest hypothesis is always the best in explaining inexplicable facts. A theory
of idealism would have trouble accounting for any lack of restraint of UNITA or the South Korean military government or the likes of Mobutu, and would have to fall back upon complicated (and not necessarily accurate) factors such as bureaucratic infighting to account for Reagan’s foreign policy.

In contrast, the realist explanation is simple, straightforward, and requires no Kremlinology.

The best theories are not only descriptive but also predictive. Not only does realism account for a lack of attention to Afghanistan now, not only is the
realist paradigm being validated everyday as the US continues to refuse to expend the necessary energy and resources to reconstruct Afghanistan, I believe it will be validated by Election Day 2004 when the reconstruction of Iraq continues apace whereas Afghanistan, aside from garnering a few posts on
OxBlog and a few editorials in a few newspapers, would be entirely forgotten. I would not be surprised if most US troops would be withdrawn by then. (I heard a report suggesting that the Pentagon is trying to sub-contract security to some security firms.)

I apologize for this exceedingly long e-mail and look forward to any thoughts you might have.

Sincerely,
Henry Yang

Well-said, Henry. Here's my response:

I am much obliged for your extensive comments on President Reagan. And I apologize for not responding sooner. In case you didn't notice my recent post on the subject, my e-mail has been down, thus preventing me from sending responses to all those who've been in touch.

Anyhow, moving on to more substantive matters, let's talk about realism. First of all, I take issue with your definition of a realist (or "realist statesman") as someone whose "primary interest is the interest of his country." Absent a clear definition of what the national interest is, this definition is nothing more than a place holder. It was precisely because Hans Morgenthau relied on such a vague definition that his work come under such heavy assault in the decades after its publication. While Ken Waltz sought to improve on Morgenthau's work, his work proved to be just as maddeningly evasive on the question of what the national interest is. In essence, Waltz insisted that the national interest consists of "security", which he does not define any better than Morgenthau did the national interest. [Note: Amazon's prices for the Morgenthau and Waltz books are outrageous. Any campus bookstore should used copies available for a tenth of the price. --ed.]

Before descending from this high theoretical plane to the world of actual politics, I think it's worth considering the ideas of John Mearsheimer and other "offensive realists". In essence, they attack Waltz for presuming that states tend to defend the status quo rather than expand their territory or resources. I hope you'll agree with me that the Waltz-Mearsheimer dispute has ended in a fundamental and unresolvable deadlock about state motivation. What's so interesting about this deadlock is how it EXACTLY REPRODUCES Morgenthau's distinction between "status quo" and "revisionist" states. In the final analysis, 60 years of realist scholarship has not moved the realist camp any closer to an account of state motivation any more specific than Morgenthau's original insistence that some states are aggressive and some states aren't.

So let's talk about Reagan. How can we assess whether or not he was a realist if we don't have a clear definition of the national interest? My answer: By examining his attitude toward the most important realist doctrine of statecraft, i.e. the pursuit of a balance of power. As Martin Wight and others have pointed out, the notion of a balance of power has proven just as hard to define as the national interest. In practice, however, realists have consistently defined it as the belief that stability results from balanced relations between the great powers and CANNOT be achieved through the pursuit of dominance. This, fundamentally, was the motivation for Kissinger's vision of detente. While I endorse your comments with regard to Kissinger (moreso, Nixon) recognizing the limits that Vietnam had placed on American foreign policy, the fact remains that Kissinger closely adhered to a historical vision which saw the civilized world in decline. To arrest this decline, the United States best hope was to accept the Soviet Union as its equal and avoid any sort of devastating conflict with it.

Reagan's historical and political vision could not have been further removed from the one advocated by Kissinger. Reagan was an eternal optimist who believed that the United States was destined to triumph over all adversaries and become the greatest and most powerful nation of all time and for all time. Rather than refer to Reagan's speeches to make this point, I refer you to the remarks he made in private to his colleagues throughout his political career. You can read more about them in the many memoirs such men have written. However, I think that the best account of Reagan the man is Lou Cannon's biography of him, which carefully demonstrates that there WAS NO DIFFERENCE between the public and the private Reagan. While I certainly accept your insistence that one must approach political rhetoric with a dose of skeptical disregard, Reagan made no attempt to persuade the American people of anything that he himself did not believe.

The natural corollary of Reagan's optimism was his belief that the United States must aggressively confront and triumph over the Soviet Union. In practice, this strategy may seem little different from the sort expected by "offensive realists". Given your standard of judging statesmen by their actions rather than their words, you would no doubt object that Reagan was therefore an offensive realist. However, one must be more precise about the nature of offensive realism. Whereas offensive realists predict that states will engage in aggressive behavior, they also accept that such behavior is ultimately self-defeating because of the inevitability of a restored balance of power. According to offensive realists, the only reason that statesmen pursue such self-defeating strategies is because they fail to recognize the inevitability of a restored balance of power.

Naturally, many realist scholars (both offensive and defensive) criticized Reagan on precisely such grounds. However, I gather from your letter that you think of Reagan as a masterful practitioner of the realist art. That, however, forces you to explain away Reagan's belief that the United States could triumph over the Soviet Union once and for all. (Moreover, if you are a committed realist, you will also have to deal with the attendant problems of explaining how the United States actually did manage to win the Cold War and establish the first ever unipolar international order in modern history.)

But if Reagan was such a realist, what then of all the ruthless forays his administration made into Third World politics? In fact, you were so concerned about the immorality of Reagan's policies that you hoped I wouldn't "misunderstand [you] and think that [you are] an embittered Leftist" ranting against the evils of Reagan and Bush. You can rest easy, however. I recognize that you are advancing a principled defense of unprincipled behavior in international affairs (which, I might add, constitutes an ideology, something that "realism" most definitely is.)

Getting back to Reagan, the critical thing to understand is that by describing him as an idealist or even a Wilsonian I do not mean to say that his version of American idealism was the same as that of his liberal critics. For Reagan, the United States ultimate commitment to a democratic and capitalist world order justified its ruthless efforts to destroy Communism in all of its many forms. Sadly, Reagan didn't appreciate the degree to which this sort of idealistic ruthlessness hurt the United States far more than it helped it.

With regard to Latin America, the issue was not that Reagan accepted the prevalence of right-wing death squads as an acceptable price to pay in exchange for preventing Communist takeovers. Rather, Reagan's appalling ignorance of the facts on the ground resulted in his delusional belief that the death-squad massacres were covered incessantly by the same liberal media that ignored the (allegedly) far worse crimes of left-wing terrorists. Given this sort of inexcusable detachment from reality, it is hard to describe Reagan as any sort of realist at all.

There are many other interesting issues you raise in your post which I have not addressed. However, I think my response is long enough for the moment. While our beliefs about what is wise and just in international relations are diametrically opposed, I think I can say without hesitation that I admire your consistency, your honesty, and your commitment to an all-encompassing vision.

Sincerely,
David

For those of you haven't had enough, I suspect that there is more to come...

UPDATE: PS says that

I'm not going to weigh in on whether or not Reagan is a realist or idealist, but I do think you might be misinterpreting Mearsheimer-ian offensive realism. You state that

"Whereas offensive realists predict that states will engage in aggressive behavior, they also accept that such behavior is ultimately self-defeating because of the inevitability of a restored balance of power. According to offensive realists, the only reason that statesmen pursue such self-defeating strategies is because they fail to recognize the inevitability of a restored balance of power."

I think this is actually more true of defensive realists - see Jack Snyder's "Myths of Empire", in which he talks about self-encirclement as a result of foolish domestic ideologies of expansion (Van Evera and Waltz are other defensive realists who can strike similar tones). Mearsheimer (who I have had the pleasure of being taught by) doesn't think that balancing is under all conditions inevitable. States act offensively to gain regional hegemony,
which, if successful, eliminates the possibility of regional balancing. The US is his classic regional hegemon, and he defends Germany, Japan, and France's attempts at regional hegemony over the centuries. As Mearsheimer puts it, offense sometimes does pay and states can be acting quite rationally when they act aggressively. In at least Mearsheimer's offensive realism there is not "inevitability of a restored balance" nor is offense always "self-defeating." States and statesmen will act offensively not because they do not
understand balancing, but because it is possible to eliminate the threat of balancing through conquest. More often that not they fail to achieve hegemony, but they don't act as they do because they are foolish or short-sighted - they recognize all too well the likelihood of balancing and try to escape it by force, sometimes successfully.

PS is right that I have given short shrift to Mearsheimer's thoughts on regional hegemony. Prresumably, John M. lays out those thoughts in his new book, which I haven't yet had the time to read. Still, given the content of Mearsheimer classics such as "Back to the future: instability in Europe after the Cold War" (International Security 15:1, Summer 1990), one has to wonder if he has been revising his theories to account for his failed prediction of Europe falling apart in the 1990s.

More importantly, with regard to Reagan, potential arguments about regional hegemony cannot enable offensive realists to reconcile Reagan's views with their own since Reagan unabashedly believed in the inevitability of American global dominance. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion