My Review of William Inboden's "The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War......"

 Reagan v. Evil Empire

 

On March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan spoke before an evangelical conference where he called out the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world.” This became known as his evil empire speech. Although he was roundly criticized for his choice of words, Reagan was dead right. University of Texas professor and former national security aide to George W. Bush, William Imboden rightly focuses on the ideological content of Reagan’s foreign policy which became known as the Reagan Doctrine in his deeply researched history.

Although known as a super-hawk during his career, Reagan’s goal was to seek peace through a negotiated surrender of the Soviet Union. In this task he succeeded and along the way he liberated Eastern Europe and started the process of reducing the huge stocks of nuclear weapon controlled by the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Reagan’s policy was that of peace through strength. He orchestrated a huge arms build-up and started the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) which scared the living daylights out of the Soviet Union. Listening more to Andrew Marshall Office of Net Assessment in the bowels of the Pentagon than the CIA, he understood that the Soviet economy was far weaker than previously thought. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Andrew Krepinevich's and Barry Watts' "The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy") Simply put, the Soviets couldn’t keep up.

Inboden covers the shaky start of the administration where both his national security advisor and Secretary of State were fired. While looking to meet with the Soviets, three of their leaders died on him, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. But once Gorbachev came into power the way was open for both of them to achieve Reagan’s longstanding goal of reducing nuclear weapons. Reagan was aided by having A-players in his administration. These would include William Clark, George Schultz, James Baker, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Paul Nitze, Colin Powell, and George H.W. Bush. It is sad that today A-players in today’s Washington, D.C. are few and far between.

Reagan really did care about human rights. He consistently supported the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union to emigrate. He worked hard to end the dictatorships in Chile, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Korea. He learned the lesson from Iran and Nicaragua, that right wing dictatorships despite being allied to the U.S., were brittle. Hence, he supported the transition to democracy among many of our allies.

Throughout his administration Reagan had the support of Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and especially of Yasuhiro Nakasone of Japan. He viewed Japan as our most strategic ally. He also received advice from Richard Nixon, mostly good, some bad; and Russia expert Suzanne Massie who came up with the “trust but verify” policy.

Inboden does not sugar coat the Iran/Contra scandal that nearly brought down his administration. How these presumably smart people got sucked into doing an arms for hostages deal with Iran and then using some of the proceeds to illegally fund the Nicaraguan Contras. You couldn’t make up the comedy of errors involved in this fiasco.

 

Inboden’s history of Reagan’s foreign policy sheds new light on this one of our most consequential presidents. It is well worth the read.

My Review of James Graham Wilson's "America's Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan"

A Man of Action

 

Where is Paul Nitze when we need him? Paul Nitze engaged in national security policy for every president from Roosevelt to Reagan. The lesson he learned from Pearl Harbor carried through his entire career and that was in order to defend the United States, the United States had to be stronger than any potential aggressor. His policy was the essence of peace through strength.

 

James Wilson’s biography fully discusses Nitze’s professional career from being an investment banker in the 1930’s to being a tribune in the highest councils of government on national security affairs.  Nitze modeled himself on what he called “men of action.” They included his first boss Clarence Dillon, Navy Secretary James Forrestal, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and presidents Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. While working for Clarence Dillon at the Dillon Reed banking firm Nitze was involved in putting together the Cal-Tex agreement which sent middle eastern oil to Asia and the financing of the Triboro Bridge.

 

As war clouds loomed in 1940 Nitze followed his mentor at Dillon Reed, James Forestal into government. He could well afford to work in government because of his wife’s wealth and his own personal investments. During World War II he worked on the strategic bombing survey and after the war he found himself at the State Department working under George Kennan. In 1950 he succeeded Kennan as the Director of Policy Planning. There he authored the now famous NSC-68 memorandum which called for a massive defense build-up wrapped in American values. The build-up would come with the onset of the Korean War a few months later.

 

In the mid-1950’s he would switch parties and became a Democrat because of his disagreement over Eisenhour’s massive retaliation strategy and his thinking was very influential in the Kennedy campaign of 1960. Nitze was in the room when during the height of the Cuban missile crisis. Nitze thought Kennedy’s policy only worked because the U.S. had superior forces relative to the Soviet Union. That advantage would erode away in the 1960’s and turn into a severe disadvantage in the 1970’s. Though now a Democrat, Nitze participated in arms control negotiations under Nixon. He was respected by hawks across the aisle.

 

When not in government during the Nixon-Ford era he found a home at the Johns-Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, which is now named after him. His interns there included Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz who would soon become real players in the Reagan Administration and beyond. His contribution to the arms debate in the 1970’s was his leading role in the Committee on the Present Danger which anteceded the Reagan military build-up of the 1980’s.

 

Reagan hired him as an arm control negotiator and in 1982 he had his famous walk in the woods with his Soviet counterpart, Kvitsinsky. Although nothing came of it at the time, it was a percussor of all of the arms control agreements that would follow. In the 1980’s Nitze was far too suspicious of Gorbachev and overestimated Soviet strength. He didn’t realize how much the Soviets feared Reagan. ( See: Shulmaven: My Review* of Sergey Radchenko's "To Run the World: The Kremlin's Bd.........." )Nitze wasn’t perfect, but he got most of the big things dead right. Further his brittle personality kept him from being either Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State, although he served admirably in both departments. Wilson has done us a real service in writing Nitze’s biography at this time. We surely need someone like him today. 

My Review of Maurice Isserman's "Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism"

Original Sin

Maurice Isserman, a man of the Left and a history professor at Hamilton College, has written an important history of the American Communist Party. Isserman tells two stories: one of misplaced idealism of those who supported labor rights and civil rights in support of a socialist America and the other of a group of Americans who bowed to every wind coming out of Moscow. The latter is the original sin of American communism by blindly following the party line coming out of Moscow which twisted its members into pretzels.

 

From the beginning in 1919 the American Communist Party was subsidized by “Moscow gold” to 1989 when Gorbachev finally cut them off. Isserman thoroughly recounts the changes in the party line from calling for outright revolution, supporting existing trade unions to supporting dual unionism, and with the rise of fascism in Europe working in a broad coalition of leftists to form the popular front. All that would come to an end with the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 calling World War II a capitalist war until the Soviet Union was invaded in 1941.  Of course, during the 1930’s American communists refused to believe that there was mass starvation in Ukraine and looked the other way as the purge trials in Moscow led to the deaths of their former heroes. Along the way we meet Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson and Dashiell Hammett, among others affiliated with the party.

 

If there are heroes in the book, they are those communists who helped build the CIO, Earl Browder, and Dorothy Healey.  Browder, who as leader of the party, actually changed the party to a political association to make it easier to participate in the normal political processes. However, his reforms went array when Moscow criticized him via what was called the Duclos letter in 1945. Within a year he was expelled. Isserman underplays the Duclos letter because it was a harbinger of the Cold War to come. His other hero was Los Angeles communist Dorothy Healey who was also a reformer, be she stayed with the party through Khrushchev’s 1956 speech condemning Stalin, the Hungarian revolt, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. She wouldn’t leave the party until 1972. This highlights the fact how hard it was for long-term members to quit; their whole lives were bound up in it. As an aside I was once acquainted with Healey.

 

I have three criticisms of Isserman. The first is that although he discussed the use of party members in the Soviet spying apparatus, he doesn’t show how deep the penetration was in the New Deal and in the role of the Rosenberg spy ring. He wrote that rank and file members were oblivious to the secret work those communists were involved in. I don’t think they were that naïve.

 

My second criticism is that he underplays the role of the Comintern’s American Commission which Stalin actually chaired. Theodore Draper, in his “American Communism and Soviet Russia” highlighted its importance. Simply put, under the orders of Stalin, such leading communist officials as Jay Lovestone, Benjamin Gitlow, and Bertram Wolfe were purged. That sent a message to the American party that the knee must be continually bent towards Moscow. Thus, there would be no Titoist party in America, meaning the party could not adapt to the unique conditions in America.

 

Third he doesn’t fully cover the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948, a campaign that run entirely by the Communist Party. ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Benn Steil's "The World that Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century" ) Today we would call that foreign election interference.

 

Those criticisms aside, Isserman has written an important book about a movement that enthralled more than a few Americans and far more fellow travelers. In a very real sense, the taint of Soviet Russia has haunted the American Left for decades. Isserman tells us in a very interesting way what went wrong. 

My Review* of Sergey Radchenko's "To Run the World: The Kremlin's Bd.........."

 The Rise and Fall of Soviet Foreign Policy

 

Johns Hopkins professor Sergey Radchencko has given us a deeply researched and encyclopedic book on Soviet foreign policy from 1944 – 1991 from the point of view of the Soviet leadership. He gets into the heads of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and their foreign policy minions. The Soviet leadership faced the tension among three incompatible goals of maintaining its revolutionary ideology, the need for security and its search for legitimacy among the nations, especially the United States.

 

He starts off with Stalin as the ultimate European focused leader whose “percentages agreement” with Churchill in late 1944 opened the way for Soviet control over Eastern Europe. He argues that Stalin did not initially want to Sovietize the Eastern Europe economies until he witnessed the failure of the French and Italian Communist parties to win electorally in the mid-1940’s. I don’t really buy that because the hardening of the Soviet position occurred while the war was still going on. Further, Radchenko fails to mention the Duclos letter to the American Communist Party in April 1945 criticizing its softness which signaled a hardening of the Soviet position worldwide.

 

What Stalin envisioned in 1945 was that Russia, as in 1815, would be part of a new Concert Europe that would run the continent. Hence Soviet power would be viewed as legitimate. Russian actions in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Berlin soon stripped away any sense of legitimacy, and in response NATO was formed. What I found fascinating was that anglophiles in the foreign ministry, Maksim Litvinov (ex-foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S.) and Ivan Maisky (ex-ambassador to the U.K.) played leading roles in developing Stalin’s European policies.

 

In Asia Stalin did not believe that Mao would succeed and for a time played the nationalists off against Mao’s communists. Mao accepted Stalin’s leadership as a junior partner. He would not feel such obedience under Khrushchev. In Iran Stalin was very cautious and he withdrew his forces from northern Iran thereby selling out the local communists who supported him.

 

Khrushchev was far more reckless. In Europe he ignited a Berlin Crisis, n caused a nuclear war over missiles in Cuba, and was an early supporter of Third World revolutionaries. Russian influence had to be reckoned with throughout the world. All the while the Soviets were building up their missile and nuclear capabilities in a direct challenge to the United States. This was crucial to Khrushchev because he sensed the unfairness of the United States having military bases surrounding the Soviet Union while he couldn’t have bases close to the United States. Hence, the big play in Cuba.

 

Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin sent ripples throughout Communist Parties around the world triggering revolts in Poland and Hungary. While Chairman Mao respected Stalin, he had no such respect for Khrushchev and hence the long simmering Chinese jealousy towards Russia began to boil.

 

The split with China would widen to even include military action and a break in diplomatic relations with the Soviets and the opening of relations with the U.S. after the Nixon visit in 1972.  In 1978 Deng Xiaoping took power and embarked China on a capitalist road to prosperity. His goal was modernization, but as early as 1982, after he realized that the U.S. would stand by Taiwan, China gradually began its drift back towards Russia. In fact, two weeks before the 1989 Tiananmen massacre China resumed diplomatic relations with Russia. Thus, it should not be surprise to see Putin’s Russia and China cozying up in recent years.

 

In 1964 Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev and simultaneously accelerated the nuclear arms race and sought détente with the United States. In making arms deals with Nixon, Brezhnev at once lowered the risk of a nuclear holocaust and achieved the legitimacy he sought from the United States. One of the most powerful vignettes in the book is that Radchenko recounts that at the height of the 1973 Yom Kippur War Nixon was asleep and drunk and Brezhnev was zonked out on sleeping pills. The decision over war and peace was thus made by Kissinger and Andropov.

 

Brezhnev’s failing health later in the 1970’s was emblematic of sclerosis seizing up in the Soviet economy. Even allowing for Soviet gains in Africa, Soviet power was falling under the weight of its weakening economy. That economy would be put to the test with Reagan’s military buildup in the early 1980’s. Simply put the Russian leadership went into panic mode fearing they could not keep up. If you learn one thing from this book, it is that Reagan’s foreign and defense policies brought the Soviets to their knees.

 

Gorbachev tried to turn things around with his glasnost and perestroika, but the Soviets were too far gone. To ease the pressure on the economy he made a series of arms control deals with Reagan and Bush thereby legitimizing his country and he cut loose Eastern Europe because the economy could no longer afford to subsidize its satellites.

 

Gorbachev was a proponent of the Gaullist notion of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. He called it “Our Common European Home.”  It was too late. Radchenko notes that there were discussions about limiting NATO’s reach in Eastern Europe. However, not commitments were reduced to writing and thus under Clinton NATO expanded to the borders of Russia.

 

One last point the Soviet Union had two diplomats who were survivors, and they appear throughout the book. Andrei Gromyko was a power from 1945-1988 and Anastas Mikoyan was a major player from 1935-1966. It was though them that Soviet foreign policy has continuity and historical memory. Radchenko has written an important book, and it will be useful in gaining insights into how Putin’s policies are both a continuation and a departure from the history he has outlined.

*- I am engaged in a dispute with Amazon about my ability to post reviews on their site. Amazon alleges that I have gone afoul of their community guidelines. Amazon is very difficult to communicate with so dear readers if you have a way of weighing in with Amazon, please do.

My Amazon Review of Ian Kershaw's "The Global Age: Europe 1950-2017"

From Renewal to Decline

After giving a rave review to Ian Kershaw’s “To Hell and Back” three years ago, I was looking forward this sequel on the history of Europe from 1950- 2017. Unfortunately I was somewhat disappointed. Perhaps it is difficult for historians to write about events they lived through, and like him I lived through many of the events he discusses.

In 1950 Europe was in ruins and the nuclear sword of Damocles was hanging over the continent by the American and Soviet super powers. The Marshall Plan was just beginning to take effect and it remained to be seen whether or not a real recovery would take place. Twenty years later Western Europe was largely booming and in the east a drab poverty was the rule of the day.

To Kershaw Europe’s great success during that period was the establishment of the welfare state. To me, on the other hand, the great achievement was placing the economy largely on a market-oriented footing that enabled the boom. Here much credit goes to the German economic miracle.

Kershaw is a child of 1968, but never mentions his own role in the youthful cultural and political revolution that took place then. He was 25 at the time. Although I experienced 1968 in America it is my understanding that far from being separate, the cultural revolution was part and parcel with the political revolution. Even the most serious of politicos of the day we caught up in sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.  Nevertheless Kershaw rightly states that to the youth in the East, the western revolutionaries were clueless had had no idea how repressive a state could be. In other words they were spoiled children.

Kershaw gives great credit to Gorbachev in ending the Cold War Personality is important, just as the roles of Hitler, Stalin and Churchill were important in his earlier volume He also rightly gives credit to German prime minister Helmut Kohl However, he fails to credit the very deft handling of bringing about the end of the Cold War to the Bush-Baker team in the U.S.

He is way too critical of Margaret Thatcher’s harsh neo-liberalism. In my opinion Thatcher saved Britain by being Churchillian in reorganizing the economy for economic growth. Kershaw is way too concerned about the collateral damage, but to paraphrase the master builder Robert Moses, “you have to break eggs in order to make an omelet.  

Although the E.U. started with great promise, its survival is open to question. The first failure was its lack of intervention in the Yugoslavian Wars, a humanitarian disaster that required U.S. military force and diplomacy to bring it to an end. The E.U. failed to listen to the anti-immigrant stirrings in the late 1990s that would come to a full boil in 2015. To all too many Europeans the E.U. is being run for the elite by a group of nameless and faceless bureaucrats. That is one reason why the U.K. wants to leave. Kershaw is part of that elite. And to top it off, Europe remains unwilling to fund its own defense.

He rightfully calls out unregulated finance capitalism to for causing the 2008 financial crisis. Although the crisis had its origins in the U.S., Wall Street was aided and abetted by greedy European banks chasing yield. Further, while the U.S. required its banks to recapitalize, Europe did not. Hence the crisis lingers today where negative interest rates are becoming normal.

I don’t think Kershaw was harsh enough on the communist governments of the East. I was in East Berlin and Moscow in the spring of 1990. The contrast between East and West Berlin was striking. Simply put the West was alive and the East was dead. In Moscow such common drug store items as Bayer Aspirin and Tampax was not available even for upper middle income consumers.

I have two other quibbles he leaves out data on the collapse in birthrates across Europe, especially in the East, Italy and Spain. That is evidence of the lack of a future orientation and it will make the welfare state promises made to elderly untenable. Lastly he completely leaves out the rise of antisemitism, the scourge of Europe in his first volume.  It is not only coming from the far right, but we see it in the Moslem immigrants and in Britain’s Labour Party.

Despite my criticisms, Kershaw has given us a very usable history of how modern Europe came into being and for that he deserves credit.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1AIX5VT8R7ZF4/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Adam Higginbotham's "Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster"

Meltdown

Adam Higginbotham’s account of the meltdown of RBMK Reactor #4 at Chernobyl and its aftermath for the most part reads like fast-paced thriller that keeps wanting you to turn the next page. Using secondary sources and direct interviews over a period of decade with many of the principals involved, the author gets you into the heads of the decision makers and the thought process that led to the meltdown and the subsequent cover-up.

On April 25^th 1986 a failed safety test triggered the meltdown of Reactor #4. Radiation immediately spewed into the surrounding town of Pripyat, which was built to support the Chernobyl reactor complex. As an aside some of the heaviest fighting during World War II took place in the nearby Pripyat marshes. All of the staff at the nuclear power station lived in the town with their families. It took several days before an evacuation order was given and in nearby Kiev the planned outdoor celebration of May Day took place as radiation from the failed reactor rained down on the residents.

Higginbotham takes you very deep into the nuclear science of atomic reactors and the nature of the radiation that was leaked during and after the meltdown. At points this is heavy going, but I believe it is necessary to tell the story. Because the real story was not so much the meltdown, but the associated radiation. He tells a riveting tale of the Russian helicopter pilots dropping sand and boron into the reactor to cool it. The pilots were at enormous personal risk and in the end their brave efforts did little to cool the reactor.

The author also takes you into Moscow Hospital #6 where many of the radiation sickness patients were treated and he follows their treatment protocols. Of course most of them die, but there were several survivors that he interviewed at length.

Of course Higginbotham saves his wrath, not for the power plant operators who were put on trial for the reactor failure, but rather for the entire Soviet system that allowed inherently unsafe reactors to be put online in the first place. Simply put a major nuclear accident at an RMKB reactor was inevitable because of inherent design flaws and the faulty construction that was endemic. The Soviet system both before and during the Stagnation Period under Brezhnev could not admit failure. Both the political and scientific bureaucracies were ossified and defensive. And by the time Gorbachev arrived in 1985 the Russian people had little faith in the system.

Thus as the full horror of Chernobyl became known it became obvious that the Soviet government cared little for its citizenry and if you like you can draw a straight line from Chernobyl to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  But I end on a word of caution; we here in the U.S. are not exempt from cover-ups. I will only cite the deception given by New York City officials that the post 9/11 air quality south of Canal Street was safe to breathe. It wasn’t.

The full Amazon review appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R3CIWZBWEGVHF7/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv