With the conclusion this past December of the INF accord and the prospect of other agreements to come, an American administration has once again placed arms control at the center of our foreign policy.
Many among the administration’s supporters and detractors alike have found this to be an unexpected turn of events. On the Right, the return to arms control has been taken as an abrogation, even betrayal, of the President’s conservative ideals. To the Left, it has signaled the success of the anti-nuclear campaign of the early 1980’s and the commitment of Mikhail Gorbachev and his reformers to harmonious relations with the West. By the foreign-policy establishment, meanwhile, the reemergence of U.S.-Soviet negotiations has been received as unexpected and welcome evidence of the administration’s willingness to abandon ideology for the dictates of realism.
Yet the surprise in these various camps is ill-founded. For on the fundamental soundness of arms control itself, the Reagan administration has been consistent almost from the outset. Supporters and critics to the contrary notwithstanding, the President and his advisers never abandoned the rationale for arms control adopted by preceding administrations. While acknowledging the failures of earlier agreements, officials have traced these failures not to the process of arms control per se, but to the unrealistic expectations that previous administrations attached to that process. Just as the Carter administration erred in trusting too much to negotiations with the Soviets, so too, as then-Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig said in 1982, “we must not allow ourselves the error of another extreme. We cannot claim that we are too weak to negotiate and at the same time insist that we are strong enough for a policy of all-out confrontation. . . . We can no more solve our problems by avoiding the negotiating table than by resting our hopes on it alone.”
On the other hand, the President and his advisers have also sought to distinguish their own approach to arms control from the failed attempts of their predecessors. They have done so by explicitly linking the intrinsic merits of particular agreements to the broader issues at stake. As Secretary of State George P. Shultz put it in 1984, “the endeavor to control armaments does not operate in a vacuum. It is a dimension of international politics, and it cannot be divorced from its political context.” Arms control, on this view, is “not just a technical exercise; it has to be embedded in a policy and in an environment that reduce our real dangers and make the world safer.” To take the administration at its word, then, is to consider its policies toward the Soviet Union not in artificial isolation from the rest of foreign affairs, but with an eye toward the balance of power in general, or what the Soviets know as the “correlation of forces.”
One way of measuring that correlation today is to return to some of the realities that the administration faced upon entering office in 1981. It is interesting to recall, in the post-summit climate of 1988, how different the international agenda looked to the United States in the early years of the President’s first term. Central America—particularly Nicaragua, where the regime emerging from Somoza’s downfall bore all the signs of a Marxist-Leninist vanguard—was an item foremost in the minds of policy-makers in those days. The appearance of anti-Communist resistance movements in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola, and elsewhere was another unexpected development, and one that suggested interesting opportunities for an administration claiming to have had enough of the Brezhnev Doctrine of the irreversibility of Communist regimes. But perhaps foremost among the problems that faced the administration was international terrorism. There was a broad feeling throughout the country that the United States, stung and stronger after its humiliation in Iran, was now determined to respond to terrorist assault.
In general, it appeared, this country would inaugurate a new chapter in its foreign policy—one in which it would take an active posture and seek advantage abroad, rather than acquiesce in its own undoing. To examine how the United States has fared with these disparate challenges, then, is to give—by its own standard—a fair measure as well of the success of the Reagan administration’s approach to the Soviet Union and arms control.
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In the early 1980’s, America and the world waited expectantly to see how a deeply conservative administration would respond to the triumph of Leninism in Nicaragua and the assault by Communist guerrillas on El Salvador. Few observers of those years could have predicted the turn that events in Central America have taken since.
The democratically elected government of El Salvador has been substantially strengthened, thanks in part to the determination of the people of that country and in part to the successful—and largely unremarked—prosecution of American policy there. These twin efforts have prevailed despite tremendous pressures from without, including a lengthy campaign of disinformation against the elected government that has been disseminated and even embellished by representatives of the American media. Today, apologists for the Communist FMLN and the guerrilla movement itself have seen their fortunes decline significantly, while the prospects for continued civilian rule in El Salvador appear palpably better than they were when President Duarte first took office.
The case of Nicaragua, by contrast, has been shockingly transformed. That transformation is all the stranger in that year after year, the facts emerging from Nicaragua itself have thoroughly vindicated the administration’s support of the contras and its opposition to the Sandinista regime.
By 1987, all of the most impassioned arguments that were marshaled against the administration’s stand in the early 1980’s had been decisively discredited by a steady stream of Nicaraguan exiles and defectors whose reports were confirmed—usually unwittingly—by the brazenness and occasional ineptitude of the Communist regime itself. By the time of the Iran-contra hearings in the summer of 1987, it was a matter of public record that the Sandinistas operated as a Leninist vanguard within the country and were systematically quashing all public and private domestic opposition; that the regime was supporting subversion in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and even Colombia; that its military might, thanks to Soviet support, was now superior to the combined resources of all its Central American neighbors; that Managua had become a safehouse for guerrillas and international terrorists; that the regime’s campaign against religious groups was singularly vicious and, in the case of Jews, classically anti-Semitic; and that its treatment of Indian minorities in the northeast invited charges of racism and even attempted genocide.
Nor were these facts about Nicaragua difficult to discover. They appeared in the liberal and conservative press alike; they were tirelessly repeated and verified by spokesmen for the administration, whose efforts to educate the public to the realities in Nicaragua outstripped all other efforts at public diplomacy. Whatever their disagreements behind closed doors, officials from all corners of the foreign-affairs bureaucracy—the State and Defense Departments, the National Security Council, and the White House—were largely of one mind on the profile that events in Nicaragua should receive.
Whether the administration’s critics—particularly those in Congress—chose to avail themselves of this public record was of course a separate matter. Nevertheless, by the mid-1980’s the terms of debate over American policy toward Central America had been dramatically reversed. Opponents of aid to the contras mustered fewer and fewer objections, and with each passing revelation their objections drew less blood. No wonder, then, that these critics felt such palpable relief at the exposure in 1986 of the possible illegalities which had attended aid to the contra movement; indeed, the zeal with which they fastened on the technicalities involved only underlined the exhaustion and obsolescence of their case on its merits.
As if further to justify the administration’s position, meanwhile, and to underscore its sense of urgency, the Soviets and their allies in the Nicaraguan regime had been proceeding from strength to strength. By 1987, according to the testimony of defector Roger Miranda Bengoechea, a former major in the Nicaraguan military, the regime was planning to have 600,000 troops under arms (in a country of some three million souls). In that number lay the full measure of the institutionalization of the Soviet-backed dictatorship and the intentions of that regime and its patron toward the region as a whole.
Despite these revelations, however, and despite the ongoing conversion of former opponents to its own side, the administration itself has suffered setback after setback in its attempts to alter events. The largest obstacles placed in its path have been erected by the U.S. Congress. The Boland amendments, in particular—which effectively foreclosed an American response as aid from the Eastern bloc reached staggering proportions—have proved the most crippling of all afflictions which have beset official policy. Large segments of the American media, as well, bear some responsibility for events as they have continued—against all evidence—to resist the implications of their own revelations and to denigrate the contras as an outfit staffed by former members of Somoza’s guard. Then, too, the administration has itself appeared divided from within, unable or unwilling to choose between the objectives of victory for the resistance forces and a negotiated arrangement aimed at reconciliation with the Communist regime.
Today, through the combination of these various obstacles, American policy has been largely surrendered—in the eyes of the world and at home—to the frantic efforts at accommodation that have been undertaken by the leaders of Nicaragua’s weak and frightened neighbors in Central America. These efforts, institutionalized as various “peace plans,” would deny the contras a military victory and effectively legitimize the Communist regime in Managua. Thus have the recipients of American foreign aid become the arbiters of its policy toward the Soviet challenge in this hemisphere.
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The explanation now making the rounds for this surreal spectacle is that the Reagan administration was done in by the exposure of the covert operation that supplied the contras with funds derived from the 1985 sale of arms to Iran. This explanation, however, only grazes the surface of the impact of that exposure on American policy. The most telling revelation of the Iran-contra hearings was not what Oliver North and his aides did in their attempts to supply the resistance, but what their superiors did not do when the hearings became, in another surprising reversal, a potential medium for the selfsame message about Nicaragua that the White House had tried to purvey over some six years’ time.
For two weeks in the summer of 1987, thanks to his own talents and the arrogance of his would-be tormentors, Oliver North had at his personal disposal more public sympathy, more airtime, and a larger audience than any other official had enjoyed in the effort to win American hearts and minds to the contra cause. No moment in the history of the Reagan administration could have been riper for a populist appeal to the nation on behalf of that cause. Yet the President and his men—who had insisted, through the years, that the strategic threat looming in Nicaragua dwarfed all other events in this hemisphere; who had argued that to neglect the contras was to risk, as Secretary Shultz once put it, “two, three, many Nicaraguas” in the years to come; who had compared the contra movement with the Founding Fathers and the French resistance in World War II—all fell mute.
There are those who argue that the failure to capitalize on Oliver North’s success was but one in a series of such opportunities missed by an administration weakened by the Iran-contra hearings. Others lay blame at the door of those ubiquitous, risk-averse guardians of the President’s personal popularity. Such explanations have their place. But the plain fact is that by the summer of 1987, midway between the “success” of the meeting in Reykjavik in October 1986 and the hoped-for summit with Gorbachev, the administration could not, with any credibility, rest a popular appeal for aid on the only pillar without which all its arguments would collapse. That pillar was Soviet intentions—toward the United States in general, and as manifested in the case of Nicaragua in particular.
Unless the argument for the contras is anchored in the seriousness of Soviet intentions, Nicaragua becomes just another dictatorship, a Marxist variation on the familiar caudillo theme. Take away Soviet intentions, and the contras become a disgruntled band of have-nots, an annoying complication in Central America’s search for peace. Without the ingredient of Soviet intentions, Communist Nicaragua becomes a regional, not an international, issue; it becomes an issue to be settled—as reason would suggest—by the leaders of Central America itself. Absent the Soviet Union, in sum, the question of Nicaragua becomes what it has become today.
Thus, by the summer of 1987, the administration could not give Nicaragua the importance that earlier rhetoric implied it deserved. Such an emphasis would have been impossible for two reasons. First, as a practical matter, it would have been self-defeating to keep the foreign-affairs bureaucracy engaged in two major efforts, of which one was conciliatory toward the Soviet Union and the other militantly antagonistic. But this practical problem shrinks beside the more abstract conundrum involved in such an effort, which would have called into question the very coherence of the administration’s views.
If the United States could negotiate amicably, and fairly, with the Soviet Union over nuclear weapons—those threats to the very existence of life on our planet, as spokesmen have repeatedly recalled—then who were the Nicaraguan rebels to stand in the way of that process? What were their problems, against the problem of the survival of mankind? When, moreover, the administration itself was citing the Soviets’ search for peace under a vigorous new leader as the justification for ongoing negotiations over arms control, how could it simultaneously accuse them of harboring serious designs on this hemisphere?
Up to a point, of course, any government will risk charges of hypocrisy in the interests of expediency. To invite charges of wholesale incoherence, however, is a more dangerous matter altogether. This is especially true when, as happened after 1986, the executive and legislative branches are controlled by different parties, with the result that each must vie even harder for public attention and support. To risk incoherence is to risk confusing and alienating that public—as, more prosaically, it is to risk deflecting the bureaucracy from the expedient pursuit of objectives.
That is why the Reagan administration could neither capitalize on Oliver North’s testimony nor mount a major drive for popular support on its own; and that, together with public and congressional pressures for neglecting Nicaragua and pursuing arms negotiations instead, is why the story of American policy toward Nicaragua has become one of abdication and inaction. “Could there be any greater tragedy,” the President once asked, “than for us to sit back and permit this cancer to spread, leaving my successor to face far more agonizing decisions in the years ahead?” Today that tragedy has become an offering on the altar of arms control.
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Nor is Nicaragua the only example of how policy and principle have unraveled in the course of the administration’s overtures to the Soviets. Indeed, Nicaragua is but a case in point of the undoing of official policy toward anti-Communist resistance movements at large.
It is now eight years since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and began a war there that has included such longstanding practices as the indoctrination and Russification of Afghan youth and such now-familiar barbarities as torture, the bombing of refugees, the use of mines disguised as everyday objects including toys, and battlefield tactics conducted, as Under Secretary of State Michael Armacost put it, “without regard for civilian casualties.” Some three to four million Afghans have fled the country; some one to one-and-a-half million—there is no reliable census of the dead—have perished. Against this onslaught the Afghan resistance has grown stronger year by year, defying all odds, all reason, and all expectation in its efforts to vanquish the Soviet army.
Until recently, the American response to this war has remained consistent and, generally speaking, effective. It was Afghanistan that roused President Carter from his dogmatic slumber and prompted American withdrawal from the 1980 Olympics and the cancellation of a U.S.-Soviet grain deal. (President Reagan did, in 1981, renew grain sales in an unconcealed attempt to placate American farmers.) It was Afghanistan, likewise, that proved easiest for the Reagan administration to defend among its policies toward anti-Communist resistance forces. For several years the United States has run what appears to be a successful covert operation of supplying aid to the Afghan mujahideen. It has also maintained a continuing, not-so-covert policy of substantial aid to Pakistan, which bears the brunt of Afghanistan’s refugees and Soviet political wrath. In late 1986, after years of debate in the United States, the Afghan resistance at last began to receive shoulder-fired Stinger missiles—a move that substantially altered the balance of forces on the ground as the resistance has since managed to shoot down hundreds of Soviet planes.
Meanwhile, however, the political war—one equally critical for a force as vastly outnumbered and outgunned as the Afghan resistance—has taken a more tragic turn. That turn is all the more dramatic for having been so unexpected. Over the years since the Soviet invasion, American support for Pakistan and the Afghan resistance has been remarkably strong and bipartisan. It has remained so not only because of the extraordinary efforts of the mujahideen, but because the United States and much of the world have seen the Soviet occupation for what it is: an indisputable attempt to subjugate a neighboring state and erase its people as an independent ethnic and political entity. Even the United Nations General Assembly—as faulty a moral arbiter as can be found—has been unable to ignore the carnage in Afghanistan, which it has condemned by majority vote for eight consecutive years. The ability to comprehend and tell the truth about Afghanistan has thus been a mainstay not only of domestic support for the resistance, but of whatever exists in the way of international pressures against the Soviets for their actions. Without this political and moral understanding, the mujahideen successes would have been unthinkable, as would any lasting settlement for that ravaged nation today.
Yet this crucial advantage is fast disappearing at the hands of an administration that once mocked Jimmy Carter for his illusions about Soviet intentions. It was not the Carter but the Reagan administration that has now transformed Afghanistan from a singular and clear-cut episode of Soviet expansion into one among many “regional conflicts” that are judged to bedevil relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
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The theology of “regional conflicts” has evolved as part of the four-point agenda now guiding American negotiations with the Soviets. It features, in practical terms, ongoing talks between American diplomats and their Soviet counterparts over events in these various battlegrounds. It has also come to include annual calls at the United Nations by the President himself on behalf of his four-point agenda for “resolving” such “problems” as Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, and Cambodia. Each of these has been stripped of its political distinctiveness to become fodder for ongoing U.S.-Soviet “talks” about areas that are in plain fact consumed by Soviet-sponsored war.
“The purpose of these talks,” as outlined by Under Secretary Armacost, “is not to negotiate solutions behind the backs of the parties concerned. Rather, they provide a forum for airing concerns in order to lessen the risks of misperception or miscalculation.” Today, as a direct consequence of this “airing,” the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan stands equated in official documents with the war for Nicaragua and other anti-Communist efforts as a problem of mutual concern to both sides.
The unique facts about Afghanistan—the blatant Soviet expansionism, the brutality of the occupation, the forcible attempt to diminish and then absorb an entire sovereign people—have very nearly disappeared from official and unofficial view. Any American who depends on his government to tell the truth about Afghanistan would know less today, eight long years and over a million Afghans later, than he would have learned by listening to President Carter. “Afghanistan Day,” to be sure, remains an annual event, accompanied by masculine rhetoric from the President and other officials. Yet these exercises have as little weight as any other routine pronouncements; and they continue to be refuted by reality. By January 1988, after the Soviets pledged to withdraw their forces, the State Department and the White House could be heard wrangling over how soon the United States might stop supplying the mujahideen. American aid, once justified as a strategic and moral necessity, appeared to have become a diplomatic bargaining chip.
Nor are truth and clear-cut policies the only victims of the process that has developed around “regional conflicts.” American friends on the edge of the battlefields in Central America, Africa, and Asia are uneasy about American intent, and thus more vulnerable to Soviet and Soviet-inspired pressures; American allies elsewhere have less reason than ever to lend moral, much less material, support to the anti-Communist side; and anti-American radicals everywhere are free to draw heartening conclusions about the persistence of American will against the temptations of the negotiating table.
What has the administration gained from this squandering of its moral and political capital? The Soviets may, indeed, remove themselves from Afghanistan under diplomatic cover; but the character of the regime left in their wake depends entirely on America’s commitment to the resistance—a commitment that appears to be eroding already. Nor have the Soviets proved accommodating elsewhere. On the contrary: Soviet involvement in other “regional conflicts,” as measured by men and materiel, is on the rise.
But while the international value to the United States of talks over “regional conflicts” has been negative, something has indeed been won by the administration in its attempt to engage the Soviets in problems of their own instigation. As with the “human-rights” portion of the administration’s agenda, talks over “regional conflicts” have sometimes served to soften objections at home to the simultaneous pursuit of arms control. The President and his advisers know well the derisive verdict that has fallen on the détente of Nixon and Kissinger, and they have sought to avoid a similar legacy for themselves. “Regional conflicts” and “human rights” have become, in reality if not by design, domestic figleafs for the pursuit of arms agreements.
Yet it is arms control that has driven these other “concerns,” not vice versa. Neither Afghanistan, nor Nicaragua, nor Angola has prompted the United States to cancel any talks over arms control; nor has the conclusion of any arms agreement ever been made contingent on success in other parts of the agenda. The administration has repeatedly observed, as Kenneth Adelman (then head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency) put it in 1985, that “the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and intervention in the affairs of Angola and Ethiopia . . . effectively iced arms control in general and SALT II in the late 1970’s.” It has just as consistently failed to show that Soviet involvement in these and other battlefields has diminished, or to make any other effective connection between Soviet behavior and U.S.-Soviet negotiations over arms control. “Linkage,” whatever life it once had, is a corpse today. It was not regional conflicts or human rights that sent the President to Reykjavik; nor did any of these “concerns” bring Gorbachev to the United States. Without arms control, the process that today surrounds “regional conflicts” would have been stillborn.
That events have turned out so very differently from what might have been expected in 1981 is of serious consequence not only to the United States, but to the forces whose anti-Communist cause it has professed to champion. The gravity of this result is only emphasized by the fact that military aid to the various movements has itself scarcely ever been commensurate with the strategic and moral stakes that justified U.S. support in the first place. The Reagan “doctrine” lost its principles in the pursuit of arms negotiations, and lost its momentum as it failed to produce victory anywhere on the ground. Each failure reinforced the other.
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Still, of all the policies affected by the administration’s pursuit of arms control, probably none is more important—or has been less remarked upon—than the rise and fall of the American position on terrorism.
Throughout the first term of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the subject of international terrorism—its causes, consequences, and hoped-for defeat—remained foremost among the concerns of his chief policy-makers and advisers. It achieved this prominence for reasons both practical and political. It was terrorism, after all—in the form of the seizure and long imprisonment of American personnel in Iran—that had ensured Jimmy Carter his unhappy exit from the White House and destroyed any hopes he might have harbored for a second term. Too, America’s humiliation in Iran had seemed to whet the appetite of hostile forces elsewhere; even after Reagan’s election, the number of recorded attacks, by official count, remained steady and high, with over 200 directed against the United States in 1983 alone. These included the destruction of the American embassy in Beirut and the murders of hundreds of Marines in their barracks, as well as the attack on the embassy annex in Kuwait.
Against this grim reality the administration mounted a fierce campaign to educate the American public to the causes of terrorism and the necessity of a vigorous response. Its position, as advanced by Secretary Shultz and repeated well into the President’s second term, included the recognition that terrorism was not random violence but a form of deliberate political warfare; that it was directed against democracies by forces hostile to their principles and civilization; that the democracies had the right, indeed the obligation, to defend themselves by retaliatory and even preemptive force; and that the United States in particular must never become, in Shultz’s famous phrase, the “Hamlet of nations,” hesitating over its response when persistence and action were demanded. The corollary of “no deals with terrorists” became a catch-phrase for this position and was reiterated before the allies and indeed the world.
Nor was evidence lacking to suggest that the United States intended to act on its words. The forcing down of an Egyptian plane carrying terrorists responsible for the Achille Lauro hijacking demonstrated the American willingness to step in when other governments suffered a failure of nerve. The air strike against Libya in April 1986 confirmed that the United States was prepared to act on its view that governments, too, could be held to account for sponsoring terrorist activities. True, the American failure to retaliate when hundreds of Marines were killed in their sleep in Lebanon—to cite only the most shocking such failure—opened a chasm between rhetoric and reality which would only widen with time. Nevertheless, for a substantial period in the mid-1980’s it appeared that the United States had made considerable progress toward understanding the nature of terrorism and defending itself against assault. Even the European allies, whose relative timidity and reluctance were greeted scornfully in the United States, rallied for a time in the form of summit declarations and practical measures aimed at improving coordination and cooperation.
Today, however, the United States stands humiliated for these efforts, reduced to entering timorous objections in the face of episodes—such as France’s blatant deal returning a terrorist to Iran in December 1987—that would have roused public and official wrath here only two short years ago. Seldom in American foreign policy has a position unraveled so quickly and so publicly, or brought so much shame to its proponents.
As with Nicaragua, the failure of America’s terrorism policy is an issue destined for a long and grisly dissection. Adverse events may be recalled in passing: America’s failure to retaliate against Syria for repeated assaults; Israel’s exchange, in the spring of 1985, of 1,150 terrorists and political prisoners for three of its own captive POW’s; the reluctance of the European allies to cement a unified position. These and other setbacks have played a part in the demise of what once appeared to be a program of effective Western resistance. Nevertheless, the responsibility for America’s own failure to maintain the position on terrorism that its leaders set out for themselves remains squarely, and inescapably, at home.
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The most obvious villain of the piece, and the one now most often cited, is the administration’s decision, taken in December 1985, to attempt to bribe Iranian officials for the release of American hostages in Lebanon. The revelation of that decision has indeed dealt stated policy a blow from which it has not recovered—and will not recover, at least for the duration of Reagan’s presidency. Yet it is critical to ask not only how the decision was taken, or who opposed it and when (the Tower Commission having reported as much as anyone could want to know about these matters), but why the damage suffered by the folly of the Iranian initiative should have proved so irremediable. After all, 1987 was not the first year in which American officials were exposed subverting official policies. Under President Carter, for example, Ambassador Andrew Young was revealed to have met with the PLO in a clear violation of American policy; yet that fiasco caused no lasting damage to the American position toward Israel. If the Iranian initiative was indeed likewise an aberration, an independent departure from policy—as the President has subsequently come to admit—then why the enduring humiliation, the abject sense of defeat, the wholesale collapse of a position as carefully constructed and even as popular as the administration’s on terrorism?
The answer is that the intellectual foundations of that policy were already tottering months before America and the world received news of Robert McFarlane’s fateful trip to Teheran. What brought them to a crash was not the revelation in November 1986 of an arms shipment, but the events of September and October of that year that culminated in the exchange of an American journalist, Nicholas Daniloff, for Gennadiy Zakharov, a Soviet spy.
In August 1986, after Zakharov, a UN employee, had been detained by the FBI for spying, the Soviets responded promptly by seizing Daniloff, a reporter for U.S. News & World Report. It is difficult to remember, after months of media attention toward the events leading up to Gorbachev’s visit to the United States, the public response to Daniloff’s release from the Soviet Union on September 30 and Zakharov’s departure for home the next day. For one thing, the President followed his announcement of Zakharov’s release with the revelation of his upcoming meeting in Reykjavik with General Secretary Gorbachev. The result was, as one reporter put it, “a dizzying pace” of announcements after which—as American officials so clearly hoped would happen—public attention was quickly focused away from the question of Daniloff and toward the agenda in Reykjavik. True, that diversion also appeared to be welcomed not only by the media at large, but by those segments of the American public that are perennially mesmerized by all U.S.-Soviet diplomatic maneuvers. Nevertheless, the significance of the deal for Daniloff and its effect on the policy toward terrorism remains clear.
American officials themselves drew the connection—and loudly so—in their initial response to Daniloff’s kidnapping. “Let there be no talk,” Secretary Shultz declared at Harvard shortly after Daniloff was seized, “of a deal for Nick Daniloff.” The United States and Daniloff himself, Shultz asserted, had ruled out that possibility. “No deal” was repeated by other officials in the days to come, as was Shultz’s assurance that “these two people, Zakharov and Daniloff, are in no way comparable, and we are not going to trade them off against each other.” In a speech at the United Nations later in the month, the President himself announced that “in effect, he [Daniloff] was taken hostage”—a formulation again reiterated at the highest levels. The implications of this rhetoric were unambiguous: the United States, whose public position on the seizure of Americans abroad was deemed to be unmistakable, would make no exception for a Soviet kidnapping. Behind the insistence that no deal would be made for Daniloff lay the moral and political weight of the American stand against terrorism.
When, some three weeks later, Daniloff and Zakharov nearly passed through the same airspace en route to their respective homes, the implications were equally unambiguous. The official insistence that, as the President put it, “there was no connection between these two releases” met with inevitable disbelief and even shock. So widespread was public skepticism that when Secretary Shultz was asked by a television journalist whether the administration would have to live with the impression of a “swap,” Shultz could only respond, “I suppose so.” None of the arrangements that were recited in order to focus attention elsewhere—the release of Yuri Orlov and his wife from Soviet custody, the on-and-off-again expulsion of Soviet “diplomats” in New York, the hasty scheduling of the meeting in Reykjavik—could erase the significance of the Daniloff exchange for the policy against terrorism at large.
Blatant as it was, however, the Daniloff episode only captured in miniature an incoherence which had threatened to dissolve the terrorism policy all along. A central tenet of that policy, after all, had been that terrorism was directed against the democracies by their common enemies. Shultz himself had spelled out the implications of this view precisely: “If freedom and democracy are the targets of terrorism, it is clear that totalitarianism is its ally. . . . [W]hen the Soviet Union and its clients provide financial, logistic, and training support for terrorists worldwide . . . they hope to shake the West’s self-confidence and sap its will to resist aggression and intimidation.” Nor was there ambiguity about the Soviets’ ultimate intent: “They connive with terrorist groups when they think it serves their own purposes, and the goal is always the same: to weaken liberal democracy and undermine world stability.”
The more the United States pursued an arms agreement with the Soviets, the more the very foundations of its position against terrorism eroded. It was difficult to reiterate the manifold arguments against negotiating with terrorists while conducting a four-point agenda of negotiations with a power identified as one of terrorism’s chief sponsors. It challenged credibility to oppose making deals for individual hostages while dealing with the Soviets not only for Daniloff, but for the endless supply of domestic hostages available to that regime in the form of dissidents, refuseniks, and other persecuted individuals. To render these policies compatible was to square the circle. The President and his advisers had a decision to make; in effect, if not by design, with the prospects for an INF accord and a meeting in Reykjavik dangling, they made it.
The lingering demise of the terrorism policy and the momentum of arms control fueled each other. The more humiliation they endured through revelations of the attempted deal with Iran, the more officials turned to arms control, both to shift the public agenda and to bolster the President’s popularity at home. The more overtures they made to the Soviets, the more the premises of the terrorism policy disintegrated, inviting other violations to follow. By January 1987, Secretary Shultz could receive Oliver Tambo, the leader of the African National Congress, at the State Department—a man more clearly and publicly linked with terrorist activities than most of his counterparts in the Middle East. By then, few commentators even bothered to question the implication of Tambo’s visit for the American position toward terrorism. Yet this move, like so many others the administration has made since centering its foreign policy on U.S.-Soviet agreements, would have been unthinkable in the heyday of Shultz’s own adumbration of the terrorism policy. Thus did the policy on terrorism become a chief casualty of the press for an arms accord.
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In the course of its overtures to the Soviets, therefore, the administration has sacrificed most of the momentum and many of the principles and initiatives that marked its early years. The consequences of that surrender must weigh heavily on any estimation of whether the Reagan presidency has, according to its own standard of success, made the world a safer place.
Within the foreign-affairs bureaucracy, the damage done to the very idea of an activist, anti-Communist foreign policy will prove severe. The loss of the Reagan agenda has appeared to vindicate the intellectual and bureaucratic power of the foreign-affairs establishment and to elevate to the level of statesmen the administration’s most persistent critics. The career service is not, contrary to the claims of those most bruised by their experience of it, a political monolith. Biased as it is on the whole toward a passive view of American interests and power, the bureaucracy nevertheless includes, like any other American elite, representatives of the spectrum of political opinion. It also includes, as a majority, officers who believe and follow their creed of service regardless of their personal beliefs. The effect of the administration’s reversal has been to penalize the efforts of those who have sought to break with established mores and to prosecute a more active foreign policy. The personal and political disincentives for such dissidence are now committed to bureaucratic memory.
Still, it is the costs to America abroad that remain most critical. The effective collapse of the administration’s terrorism policy has revived agonizing questions of credibility and staying power in areas of the world where such doubts are most subversive of American interests. The establishment of a Soviet stronghold in Central America will indeed become, as officials predicted, a cancer to be removed by the President’s successors at vastly greater human and material costs. The fate of anti-Communist resistance movements elsewhere remains more uncertain now than when the United States first sought to capitalize on them. The American failure to help any one of these movements press for genuine victory has been deleterious enough, if only from the standpoint of American strategic interest. But the wholly unnecessary collapse of official support into anonymous negotiations over “regional conflicts” has dealt a political blow that may prove mortal to some anti-Communist forces and at least crippling to others. The damage to the American moral claim of some two centuries’ standing to being the “well-wisher” of those seeking independence has been inestimable.
As against this surrendering of political and moral advantage, the American government has produced an agreement to remove its INF missiles from Europe and has held out the hope that a more sweeping accord may be signed before the President leaves office. To its assertion that the pursuit of these agreements has made the world safer, the following qualifications may be added. It is not safer for the people of Central America, now subject to the designs of a Soviet—and Sovietized—ally whose strength in men and materiel is greater today than it was when Ronald Reagan first took office. Nor is it safer for those Americans who will ultimately pay the price for the Reagan administration’s abdication of American power in that region. It is not safer for our personnel abroad, who have seen the humiliations in Iran and elsewhere effectively vindicated by the collapse and disappearance from view of an American response to terrorist attack. It is not safer for the troops and civilians on the battlefields of the Brezhnev Doctrine, who are fighting, to the strategic advantage of the United States, against regimes whose strength outstrips theirs by egregious proportions. For the pursuit of Soviet expansion, however, and for the designs of others pledged to the bleeding and diminishing of the United States, it remains a safe enough place, even an inviting one.
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