CHARLES MCCARRY
Nov. 6, 2015
Reagan set aside the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, and set off an arms race.
According to Oxford don Robert Service’s exhaustive study of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decapitation of world communism, the architect of these events, Ronald Reagan, came to the presidency in 1981 with three objectives in mind: to restore the confidence of the American nation after the debacle of the Vietnam War; to re-establish the political, moral and military pre-eminence of the United States throughout the world; and to make a third world war impossible through the total elimination of nuclear weapons.
Reagan proposed to abandon the doctrine of mutually assured destruction that had deterred nuclear apocalypse since the Eisenhower presidency, while reconsidering the seminal U.S. Cold War policy of containment. His goal: “to reverse the expansion of Soviet influence around the world” by breaking the deeply—and as it turned out, fatally—troubled Soviet economy. The new administration, in the words of Mr. Service, would “increase the American military budget and put the USSR’s finances under the strain of an arms race.”
These were not modest goals, and few of Reagan’s detractors at home or abroad, including elements of his own party, believed that the lightly regarded new president was capable of conceiving them, let alone achieving them. Toward the beginning of “The End of the Cold War,” Mr. Service summarizes the thinking in the Kremlin: “Reagan seemed like an ignorant old fool whose simplistic militarism” might well bring about the holocaust he feared.
On October 15, President Barack Obama announced a change in the plan regarding the U.S. troops that are currently in Afghanistan. The original planhad been to reduce their number by half before the end of this year and withdraw the rest by 2016, leaving only enough to protect the embassy. Now, as the President said, the U.S. will “maintain our current posture of 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through most of next year, 2016.” Critically, he also added that the troops’ “mission will not change.” That is regrettable. American efforts in Afghanistan, through two consecutive administrations, have resulted only in seeing the war worsen and American interests deteriorate. If ever there was a time to change the mission, it is now.
