The Reagan administration, economic warfare, and starting to close down the cold war

Diplomatic History

Volumn 29, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 531-556

  Dobson, Alan P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 21144437894     PISSN: 01452096     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7709.2005.00502.x     Document Type: Article

References (153)

1. Norman A. Bailey, The Strategic Plan that Won the Cold War: National Decision Directive 75 (MacLean, VA, 1999), "Forward."
2. Ibid., 8.
3. National Security Decision Directive 75 (NSDD 75), "US Relations with the USSR," 17 January 1983.
4. I b i d.
5. "That's always the expression. How we prevail." Interview by the author with Gus W. Weiss, 28 April 2003, Washington DC.
6. Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge, MA, 1984);
7. Joel Krieger, Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Decline (Cambridge, UK, 1986);
8. Geoffrey Smith, Reagan and Thatcher (London, 1990);
9. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York, 1991);
10. "President Reagan, who may have had cynical advisers was not cynical himself. ...took the principle of 'negotiation from strength' literally: once one had built strength, one negotiated." John L. Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York, 1992), 125.
11. Peter Schweizer, Reagan's War: The Epic Story of this Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph over Communism (New York, 2002);
12. Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory (Boston, 2002).
13. Members of the Reagan administration who have written in a similar vein include Caspar Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon (New York, 1990);
14. Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Inside Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York, 1996);
15. Richard Pipes, "Misinterpreting the Cold War," Foreign Affairs 74 (January/February 1995): 154-61;
16. Gus W Weiss, The Farewell Dossier: Strategic Deception and Economic Warfare in the Cold War-An Insider's Untold Story (http:// www.cia.gov.csi/studies/96unclass/farewell.htm and hardcopy supplied by Weiss to the author);
17. and Bailey, The Strategic Plan that Won the Cold War.
18. The idea that the U.S. military buildup was a major factor that led to the demise of the Cold War and Western "victory" is rejected by Russian insider experts such as Georgi Arbatov, The Soviet System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics (New York, 1992)
19. and by scholars such as Frederich Kratchowil, in his scathing attack on neorealism, "The Embarrassment of Changes: Neo-realism as the Science of Realpolitik without Politics," Review of International Studies 19, no. 2 (1993): 63-80.
20. Beth A. Fisher, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia, MC, 2000), raises substantial doubts about cause and effect from both the U.S. arms buildup and the early Reagan administration hard line by close scrutiny of the chronology of Soviet policy developments.
21. R. Davy, ed., European Détente: A Reappraisal (London, 1992);
22. K. Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Reform (Cambridge, UK, 1990);
23. David Ryall, "The Cross and the Bear: The Vatican's Cold War Diplomacy in East Central Europe"
24. and Robert Bideleux, "Soviet and Russian Perspectives on the Cold War," in Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Cold War, ed. Alan P. Dobson with S. Malik and G. Evans, assoc. eds. (Andover, UK, 1999).
25. A closely associated approach emphasizes the importance of the beliefs of Gorbachev and his associates: Don Oberdorfer, The Turn from Cold War to a New Era (New York, 1991)
26. and McGeorge Bundy, "From Cold War to Trusting Peace," Foreign Affairs 69, no. 1 (1990): 197-212.
27. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1988).
28. J. S. Nye, Jr. Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York, 1990).
29. Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbot, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston, 1993);
30. Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 1995).
31. A highly persuasive argument against the Reagan Cold War victory thesis is presented by Beth A. Fisher in a paper for the Norwegian Nobel Institute, "Reagan's Triumph? The U.S. and the Ending of the Cold War," 16 May 2002;
32. see also her The Reagan Reversal. An interesting overview of the rather narrow "causal" accounts of the end of the Cold War is in Charles W. Kegley, "How Did the Cold War Die? Principles for an Autopsy," Mershon International Studies Review 38, no. 1 (1994): 11-41.
33. For a more elaborate discussion of these matters see Alan P. Dobson, US Economic Statecraft for Survival 1933-1991: Of Sanctions, Embargoes, and Economic Warfare (London, 2002), chap. 11.
34. See Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York, 1996), chap. 12. In fact the Reagan record, both before and during his presidency, is replete with references to the unsustainability of the Soviet economic system in the long term, but one should not deduce from this that Reagan was bent on destroying the Soviet Union during his terms of office or that he expected his policies would cause its swift collapse.
35. Hedrick Smith et al., Reagan the Man, the President (Oxford, 1980), 120-21, citing sources International Associated Press interview, 1 October 1980.
36. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York, 1992), 588;
37. Garthoffs judgment echoes this and even includes Reagan's more extreme colleagues: "Reagan was not disposed to take confrontational courses of action that risked a direct clash with the Soviet Union, nor were any of his principal advisers..." R. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC, 1985, revised 1994), 1013.
38. Quoted from Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven, CT, 1989), 227-28.
39. G. Hyland, Mortal Rivals: Superpower Relations from Nixon to Reagan (New York, 1987), 232.
40. Steven Elliott, "The Distribution of Power and the US Politics of East-West Energy Trade Controls," in Controlling East-West Trade and Technology Transfer: Power, Politics and Policy, ed. G. K. Bertsch (Durham, NC, and London, 1988), 78.
41. Brady had been fired by the Carter administration for publicly criticizing lax implementation of export controls; Reagan reappointed 1him at a higher level. B. W. Jentleson, Pipeline Politics: The Complex Political Economy of East-West Trade (Ithaca, NY, 1986), 175.
42. The issue here is more complex than a straightforward inventory of U.S. military power. As Hyland argues, both U.S. weakness in 1981 and strength in 105 were overexaggerated, but by 1985 Reagan had managed to change perceptions and most crucially of all, so far as Soviet assessments were concerned, he had set in train a trend of U.S. military buildup. Hyland, Mortal Rivals, 232.
43. Quoted from Louis J. Walinsky, "Coherent Defense Strategy: The Case for Economic Denial," Foreign Affairs 61 (Winter 1982/83): 471.
44. Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only, 468,
45. citing Reagan, An American Life, 316, 320, Diary, 26 March 1982;
46. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), 324, and on the wisdom of Reagan holding out at Reykjavik, 471;
47. Reagan, An American Life, 66,
48. and Donald T. Regan, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington (London, 1988), 295-98.
49. Most notably the leading scholars in this field, M. Mastanduno, Economic Containment: COCOM and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 233-34 and elsewhere in his various publications;
50. Philip Hanson, "Soviet Responses to Western Trade Policies," in East-West Trade and the Atlantic Alliance, eds. David A. Baldwin and Helen V. Milner (London, 1990), 50;
51. Jentleson, Pipeline Politics, 175.
52. Alexander Haig, Caveat (New York, 1984), 57, 80-81, 210.
53. P. J. Fungiello, American-Soviet Trade in the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 196.
54. Carter, an engineer by profession, was probably the first president to take high-technology transfers such as computers really seriously.
55. United States Government, Soviet Acquisition of Western Technology (Washington, DC, 1982);
56. United States Government, Soviet Acquisition of Military Significant Western Technology: An Update (Washington, DC, 1985).
57. Quoted from Smith, Reagan and Thatcher, 53. Smith comments: "At Ottawa her [Thatcher's] interest was to save him from political embarrassment without endorsing his entire position on East-West trade."
58. The coordinating committee, or COCOM, was established in 1949. It was made up of NATO members except for Iceland and included Japan from 1952. It met periodically in Paris to establish lists of prohibited and restricted goods for export to the Soviet bloc and Communist China.
59. Both are quoted from Bertsch, Pipeline Politics, 17, 21, citing as sources Perle testimony before House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Sub-Committee on International Economic Policy and Trade, 12 November 1981, and Weinberger speech, Foreign Policy Association, New York, 21 May 1982.
60. Quoted from Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only, 465,
61. citing sources C. Andrew and O. Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York, 1991), 621-23;
62. Philip Hanson, Soviet Industrial Espionage: Some New Information (London, 1987);
63. and Pierre Favier and Michel Martin-Roland, La décennie Mitterand (Paris, 1990), 1:95.
64. Weiss interview. Undoubtedly some highly sensitive materials were pirated, but just what their overall impact was on the military and strategic balance is currently impossible to say.
65. Weiss interview.
66. Gus W. Weiss, The Farewell Dossier, http://www.cia.gov/csi/ studies/96unclass/farewell.htm;
67. see also Weiss, Farewell Dossier.
68. Or indeed is, as Weiss claims that it is still in operation. When asked targeted against whom, his reply was, "Whoever tries to steal it."
69. Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (London, 1995), 440;
70. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, 470. It could be argued, of course, that expulsions were not made because the United States wanted to continue to feed the Soviets defective information, but there has been no suggestion that the British were also involved in that, so why they waited so long to expel Soviet agents is a little puzzling.
71. Weiss interview.
72. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, 25.
73. See Dobson, US Economic Statecraft for Survival, 249-62.
74. Haig, Caveat, 96.
75. I b i d.
76. Malcolm Byrne, "New Evidence onthe Polish Crisis 1980-81," Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998): 3.
77. Reagan, An American Life, 302;
78. and Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only, 462.
79. Ibid., 468.
80. Smith, Reagan and Thatcher, 73.
81. Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only, 466,
82. citing Reagan, An American Life, 303.
83. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, 253, the letter arrived 19 December 1981.
84. Public Papers of the President: Ronald Reagan 1981 (Washington, DC, 1981), 1202
85. Mark Kramer, "Jaruzelski, the Soviet Union and the Imposition of Martial Law in Poland: New Light on the Mystery of December 1981," CWIHP Bulletin 11 (1998) and Jaruzelski's reply, 32-40.
86. Mastanduno, "The Management of Alliance Export Control Policy," in East-West Trade, ed. Bertsch, 302-3;
87. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, 354-55;
88. Haig, Caveat, 255.
89. Bruce W. Jentleson, "The Western Alliance and East-West Energy Trade," in Controlling East-West Trade, ed. Bertsch, 331;
90. Mastanduno, Economic Containment, 246.
91. Smith, Reagan and Thatcher, 73.
92. Jentleson, Pipeline Politics, 173.
93. Haig, Caveat, 254.
94. Reagan, An American Life, 303.
95. Mastanduno, Economic Containment, 260.
96. Mastanduno, "COCOM and American Export Control Policy: The Experience of the Reagan Administration, in East-West Trade and the Atlantic Alliance, eds. D. Baldwin and H. V. Milner (London, 1990), 195.
97. S. Alam, "Russia and Western Technology Controls," International Relations 11, no. 5 (1993): 469-91, and 477, citing source, National Academy of Sciences, Balancing the National Interest: US National Security Export Controls and Global Economic Competitiveness (Washington, DC, 1987).
98. Jentleson, Pipeline Politics, 180.
99. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, 255.
100. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York, 1993), 137.
101. Haig, Caveat, 305.
102. Ibid., 312.
103. Haig, Caveat, 240;
104. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 137.
105. Stephen F. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism.: American Foreign Policy since 1938 (Harmondsworth, 1988), 316.
106. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 138. However, on 9 October 1982, U.S. disregard for legalities was demonstrated when it withdrew MEN status from Poland, contrary to the rules of GATT;
107. see James Mayall, "The Western Alliance, GATT and East-West Trade," in Baldwin and Milner, East-West Trade, 28.
108. Ibid., 141.
109. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 1035.
110. G. C. Hufbauer and J. S. Schott, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy (Washington, DC, 1985;
111. 2nd ed. with Ann Elliott, 1990), 699-700, citing sources, Congressional Quarterly, 20 November 1982, p. 2883;
112. Department of State Bulletin, January 1983, p. 28.
113. John Dumbrell, American Foreign Policy from Carter to Clinton (Basingstoke, 1997), 59. The disagreements and feuds were not just between departments and agencies, but within them as well;
114. for example, Michael Pillsbury, acting director of the Arms Control Agency in the Department of State, see Strobe Talbot, Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Deadlock in Nuclear Arms Control (New York, 1984), 45.
115. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 690.
116. Dumbrell, Carter to Clinton, 117;
117. Peter Boyle, American-Soviet Relations: From the Russian Revolution to the Fall of Communism (London, 1993), 207.
118. Mastanduno, "COCOM and American Export Control Policy: The Experience of the Reagan Administration," in East-West Trade, eds. Baldwin and Milner, 213.
119. To be fair to Mastanduno, whose work I have the utmost respect for, at times he seems to be arguing that the intent of the Reagan administration was to develop and wage a strategy of economic warfare, rather than actually succeeding; see ibid. and Economic Containment, 233-36, 263-64. But at other points he seems to suggest that economic warfare was actually practiced;
120. see ibid., 13, where he identifies 1949-1958 and 1980-1984 as periods of U.S. economic warfare and defines it: "Economic warfare is aimed to weaken the military capabilities of a target state by weakening the state's economy." However, as demonstrated here, actual policy never approached the scope, effectiveness, or consistency required for economic warfare. On this latter point, the area of difference between Mastanchino and my position seems to hinge on different understandings of economic warfare.
121. Defense Science Task Force on Export of U.S. Technology, An Analysis of Export Control of US Technology-A Department of Defense Perspective (Washington, DC, 4 February 1976);
122. F. Bucy, "On Strategic Technology Transfer to the Soviet Union" and "Technology Transfer and East-West Trade: A Reappraisal," International Security 1 (Spring 1977) and 5 (Winter 1980/81).
123. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, 255;
124. Haig, Caveat, 255-56.
125. Smith, Reagan and Thatcher, 100-102.
126. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 691.
127. Mastanduno, COCOM and American Export Control Policy, 195.
128. Talbot, Deadly Gambits, 49, 233.
129. Andrew, For the Presidents Eyes Only, 468;
130. Mastanduno, Economic Containment, 238;
131. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 1012.
132. Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War, 125.
133. Jentleson, Pipeline Politics, 210;
134. P. Hanson, Western Economic Statecraft in East-West Relations: Embargoes, Sanctions, Linkage, Economic Warfare and Détente (London, 1988), 43, quoting Shultz from the New York Times, 14 September 1983, "Trade sanctions, particularly agriculture, would not be invoked unless we got Canada, Australia, and Argentina to go along with us."
135. Hufbauer and Schott, Economic Sanctions, 683-711.
136. In actual fact, the tone of the speech was much more moderate than one might think from the reports. Most of the speech was not about the Soviets. Ironically, Reagan used the phrase "evil empire" in the midst of a plea for toleration for the opening of negotiations with the Soviets. Source: The Greatest Speeches of All Time [this speech certainly does not merit such an accolade], Jerden Records, 1996, Ronald Reagan, "Evil Empire" extract.
137. A. Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents 1962-1986 (New York, 1995), 511-12.
138. R. Crockatt, The Fifty Years War: The United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics 1941-1991 (London, 1995), 317;
139. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 1013;
140. Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War, 125.
141. Dobrynin, In Confidence, 545;
142. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan 1984 (Washington, DC, 1986), 40-44.
143. Quoted from Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, Reagan's speech to the UN General Assembly, citing Presidential Documents (1 October 1984), 20:1356.
144. Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (London, 1995), 350.
145. I b i d.;
146. and Thatcher, Downing Street Years, 454-58.
147. Smith, Reagan and Thatcher, 123. For details of Soviet fears, their reactions to perceptions of Western aggression, and Western analyses of all this, see the work of Ben F. Fischer and especially his A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare (Washington, DC, 1997)
148. and "More Dangerous Than We Thought? New Evidence on the Soviet War Scare," paper to the Norwegian Nobel Institute, 2 May 2002.
149. Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only, 476-77;
150. Reagan, An American Life, 588-89.
151. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, 463.
152. Dobrynin, In Confidence, 564.
153. Beschloss and Talbot, At the Highest Level, chaps. 1-3.