Engaging the Evil Empire

Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War

Simon Miles

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501751691, 9781501751691
• eBook ISBN: 9781501751714
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts

In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities.

The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan in particular opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, Miles clearly demonstrates, Reagan and ranking officials in the National Security Council had determined that the United States enjoyed a strategic margin of error that permitted it to engage Moscow overtly.

As US grand strategy developed, so did that of the Soviet Union. Engaging the Evil Empire covers five critical years of Cold War history when Soviet leaders tried to reduce tensions between the two nations in order to gain economic breathing room and, to ensure domestic political stability, prioritize expenditures on butter over those on guns. Miles's bold narrative shifts the focus of Cold War historians away from exclusive attention on Washington by focusing on the years of back-channel communiqués and internal strategy debates in Moscow as well as Prague and East Berlin.

CHAPTER 1

Red Star Rising

The World according to Washington and Moscow

Ronald Reagan availed himself of only one intelligence briefing during the 1980 presidential election, conducted on October 4, 1980, by Central Intelligence Agency Director Adm. Stansfield Turner and three aides. Reagan and his running mate, George H. W. Bush, brought with them the putative transition director Ed Meese, the campaign manager William Casey, and the top national-security aide Richard Allen. Crammed into the living room of a Virginia country estate, the briefing was “a circus,” according to participants. Lasting an hour and focusing on the situation in the Middle East, the CIA contingent concluded that they were only invited to brief the candidate because they had offered to do so in the first place—an offer made, according to Turner, “because [CIA leadership] didn’t want him saying something he would regret if he became president.” That meeting reinforced the Reagan team’s preexisting belief that the United States was in grave trouble, both at home and abroad. As Bush put it afterward, “I feel better informed about the world, [but] I can’t tell you I feel more optimistic about it.”¹ “They came to their task with their minds made up,” Turner bemoaned, “and no facts were going to change their conclusions.”² Knowing how the remainder of the decade unfolded, the Reagan team’s pessimism at the dawn of the 1980s is striking. Why were policy makers in the United States convinced that they had fallen behind the Kremlin at a time when, as it later became clear, the Soviet Union was already beginning to come apart at the seams? Why were Soviet leaders so confident in their own position despite the acute problems plaguing their country? The leaders of the superpowers—the incoming Reagan in Washington and the long-in-the-tooth Brezhnev in Moscow—saw the world and their country’s position therein very differently. But both viewed the perceived balance of power as one tipped in the Kremlin’s favor.

Throughout the 1980 campaign, Reagan stressed that the United States was losing the Cold War. He pointed to the Iranian hostage crisis, the ever-growing Soviet nuclear arsenal, and Moscow’s international troublemaking, overt in Afghanistan and covert in Latin America, while Americans could barely fill up their cars with gasoline. He was a pessimist on the campaign trail, even if history remembers him as the ultimate optimist. When Turner tried to persuade the president in a January 20, 1981, briefing that his beliefs regarding Soviet superiority in various domains were basically wrong, Reagan ignored him.³ Meanwhile, in Moscow, the aging Brezhnev found reason to be confident about the Soviet Union’s place in the world, despite real problems at home and abroad. Whatever challenges the East faced, the West’s situation seemed even more dire, with Time magazine asking in one cover story, “Can Capitalism Survive?”⁴ And the capitalist world—above all, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—seemed similarly in trouble, riven by discord.⁵ Unlike Reagan, Brezhnev was optimistic.

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Ronald Reagan’s speech at the 1980 Republican Party Convention accepting his party’s nomination for the presidency ran through a laundry list of solemn challenges facing the United States: skyrocketing Soviet expenditures on nuclear and conventional arms, revolution in Iran, economic malaise at home, Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the accompanying threat to the Persian Gulf, a Third World seemingly gravitating toward Moscow, and allies looking to Washington for leadership and finding none. “Why?” Reagan asked his Detroit audience. “Because the Carter administration lives in the world of make-believe.… The rest of us, however, live in the real world. It is here that disasters are overtaking our nation without any real response from the White House.”⁶ When Reagan looked at US foreign policy, he did so from a position cultivated through years of thinking about US decline—and found an abundance of evidence to support his worldview.

Détente may have been a golden age of US-Soviet arms control agreements, but by the beginning of the 1980s, Reagan and many others believed that those agreements had failed to make the United States and its allies any more secure.⁷ Soviet defense spending had nearly doubled in real terms since Brezhnev came to power in 1964, as had the size of the Soviet military research-and-development establishment. The Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile force increased sixfold, while short-range ballistic missile stocks tripled. The Soviet civil defense apparatus also underwent a major overhaul, hardening Soviet cities against nuclear attack.⁸ Over the late 1970s, the Soviet Union had deployed new SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear weapons to the European theater. Faster to launch and more accurate, the new systems counterbalanced the British and French independent nuclear forces (which later came to be the bête noire of superpower arms control negotiations) as well as US forward-based systems, such as attack aircraft and nuclear-armed submarines assigned to NATO.⁹ It seemed that the United States was losing the Cold War arms race, undercutting the credibility of NATO nuclear forces as a counterweight to numerically superior Warsaw Pact conventional forces in Europe. The US intelligence community could only conclude that the Soviet Union sought superiority in order to fight and win a nuclear war.¹⁰ It was right.¹¹

The January 16, 1979, overthrow of US ally Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran dealt a triple blow to the United States. First, Washington lost a key partner in the Middle East. Then, after a group of militants loyal to his usurper, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seized the US embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two embassy workers hostage, nothing seemed to encapsulate US weakness better than a group of university-aged revolutionaries seizing its territory and citizens—and its military unable to dislodge them after a rescue attempt by special operations forces had to be abandoned.¹² (The Carter administration’s ensuing negotiations, brokered by Algeria, remained secret.)¹³ Moscow was gleeful at these setbacks, whatever the human cost.¹⁴ At the same time as things were unraveling in Iran, the Carter administration believed that it was getting stagflation under control at home, as economic growth and employment were enjoying an uptick. However, the Iranian Revolution ensured that this was brief. As militants began occupying oil refineries and taking them offline, demand rose due to uncertainty, exemplified by motorists keeping their tanks as full as possible and oil companies hoarding product in vast storage depots. Sellers, namely the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, gouged consumers. Crude oil prices skyrocketed, and with them, inflation.¹⁵ The hostage and oil crises compounded to make the United States look not just weak but beleaguered.

In neighboring Afghanistan, the Kremlin’s attempt to secure a reliable client state mired the Soviet Army in a brutal counterinsurgency almost immediately after it invaded in December 1979.¹⁶ To Western observers, however, it seemed that Moscow was becoming increasingly aggressive and that Afghanistan might be the first step in a Soviet move on the Persian Gulf. These assessments were wrong, but the Carter administration retaliated nonetheless, reducing trade (including in grain, on which the Soviets depended), halting diplomatic and cultural contacts, withdrawing the SALT 2 arms control treaty from Senate consideration for ratification, and boycotting the 1980 Olympics to be held in the Soviet Union—the first time the games would be held in a communist country. Washington’s allies proved less enthusiastic. None relished imposing trade sanctions on the Soviet Union at considerable cost to themselves and their diplomatic agendas.¹⁷

Afghanistan was but one Third World trouble spot in the eyes of US policy makers. The Caribbean, Reagan concluded, “was becoming a ‘Red’ lake.”¹⁸ In Latin America, brutal civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador pitted guerrillas against authoritarian regimes. In Nicaragua, the left-wing Sandinista regime had come to power in 1979, bringing with it a right-wing insurrection. Communist agitation in El Salvador and Nicaragua, according to Reagan, was “only a down payment. Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica were next, and then would come Mexico.”¹⁹ For the region, the 1980s had “an apocalyptic quality,” made worse by the involvement of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba.²⁰ Fears of a Soviet Union on the march in the Third World gave rise to notable efforts to counter Moscow’s influence, such as Britain’s Operation Commonsense, the patronizing name—even by Whitehall’s standards—given to a push to educate African and other Third World leaders about Moscow’s pernicious designs.²¹ “In a rating of threat and troublemaking,” as one Reagan staffer summed up, the Soviet Union was “a true [ten out of ten], while all others are [five] or less.”²²

“While Reagan may not have the qualities necessary for the presidency,” the Carter campaign acknowledged, “his arsenal as a presidential candidate is formidable.”²³ Reagan and his campaign advisers laid the blame squarely on Carter. Reagan’s focus on the incumbent’s perceived soft attitude played well with an electorate suffering from what Carter himself had termed a “crisis in confidence,” though that had much more to do with the United States’ domestic situation than with events abroad, as economic difficulties dominated the public’s concerns.²⁴ The 1950s and 1960s had been an era of growth in the US economy, but the 1970s were a different story. The decade was a wake-up call; the world was becoming increasingly globalized, and the US economy’s transition to that new reality was a painful one.²⁵ The winner in such a world was not the Soviet Union, whose quasi-autarkic system would struggle even more to adjust, but US ally Japan and its apparently superior capitalist system. Japan had once been a defeated enemy occupied by US troops, but by 1981, the New York Times was publishing tongue-in-cheek op-eds with titles like “Please, Japan, Return the Favor: Occupy Us.”²⁶ At a debate between himself and Carter just a week before election day, Reagan asked the audience, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” He knew the voters’ answer: an emphatic no.²⁷

Western European public opi...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Note on Transliteration and Translation
• Introduction
• 1. Red Star Rising
• 2. Arm to Parley
• 3. Talking about Talking
• 4. Trial Balloons
• 5. New Departures
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index