Reagan Doctrine

• 1. We Win, They Lose

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  The Reagan Doctrine began as a blunt idea that Ronald Reagan put to Richard V. Allen in January 1977. Allen would later serve as his National Security Advisor, but at that point Reagan was not yet president. Reagan called his view of American policy toward the Soviet Union simple, and he admitted that some would call it simplistic. He boiled it down to a few words: "We win and they lose." Then he asked Allen, "What do you think of that?"

  Four years later Reagan was in the White House, and the idea became a formal strategy of his administration. The strategy was designed to overwhelm the global influence of the Soviet Union in the final years of the Cold War. It outlasted Reagan and continued under his successor, George H. W. Bush.

  What made this policy so different from the decades of American thinking before it? Who pushed for it, and where did it send weapons and money? And what did it cost the people living in the countries it touched?

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• 2. Beyond Containment

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  The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 started a habit that Reagan's strategy inherited. American presidents gave names to their foreign policy approaches, each meant to answer the challenges of its moment. Theodore Roosevelt added his corollary in 1904. In 1947 came the Truman Doctrine, which backed Greece and Turkey in a Cold War effort to keep both nations out of the Soviet sphere of influence. Doctrines named for Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Carter followed. Each one defined how that president would face the biggest global problems of his time.

  George F. Kennan and John Foster Dulles were among the foreign policy experts who defined containment after World War II. Containment guided American Cold War policy until Reagan's strategy arrived. Rollback replaced both containment and the policy of détente. Instead of simply holding the line, the United States would work to push Soviet-backed governments out of power.

  Fear of escalation and nuclear conflict had long kept the United States from confronting the Soviet Union directly. The Reagan Doctrine set those fears aside by aiming at something else. American support for rebel movements in targeted countries let Washington challenge Soviet-supported governments without a direct clash between the two powers.

  Supporters pointed to two practical benefits. Backing guerrilla forces cost relatively little compared with what the Soviet Union spent propping up its client states. No American troops were involved, so Washington could confront Soviet allies without taking casualties.

  One piece of the strategy, though, had started before Reagan ever took office.

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• 3. The Afghan Template

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  After the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, the Carter administration began limited covert military assistance to the Afghan mujahideen. The goal was to drive the Soviets out, or at least to raise the military and political cost of the occupation. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski proposed the policy, and American intelligence services carried it out. It enjoyed broad bipartisan political support.

  Democratic congressman Charlie Wilson became obsessed with the Afghan cause. He used his place on the House Appropriations committees to encourage other Democrats to vote for CIA money for the Afghan war. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill gave tacit approval. All of this happened while the Democratic Party was lambasting Reagan for the CIA's secret war in Central America. George Crile III described this complex web of relationships in his book Charlie Wilson's War.

  Gust Avrakotos, a CIA officer, partnered with Wilson to build a small team that expanded American support for the mujahideen. That support was channeled through the Inter-Services Intelligence agency of Pakistani president Zia-ul-Haq, known as the ISI. Avrakotos and Wilson charmed leaders from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and China into increasing their help for the rebels. Avrakotos also hired a young paramilitary officer, Michael G. Vickers, to improve the tactics, weapons, logistics and training of the guerrillas. Michael Pillsbury, a Pentagon official, and Vincent Cannistraro pushed the CIA to supply Stinger missiles.

  Afghanistan would remain the centerpiece of the doctrine. Meanwhile, other people in Washington were already drafting a plan to carry this model far beyond it.

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• 4. The Think Tank Blueprint

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  The Heritage Foundation and other conservative foreign policy think tanks saw the arrival of the Reagan administration as a political opportunity. They wanted to expand Carter's Afghan policy into a global doctrine of support for anti-communist resistance movements in Soviet-allied nations. Political analysts Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould wrote that it was Heritage that translated theory into concrete policy. By their account, Heritage targeted nine nations for regime change. They were Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iran, Laos, Libya, Nicaragua and Vietnam.

  Michael Johns, the foundation's expert on the Third World, was its principal Reagan Doctrine advocate throughout the 1980s. He visited resistance movements in Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua and other Soviet-supported nations. Back in Washington, he urged the administration to start or expand military and political support for them. Heritage experts also endorsed the doctrine in two of their Mandate for Leadership books, which gave comprehensive policy advice to Reagan administration officials.

  In practice, American aid went mainly to Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia and Nicaragua, and to a lesser extent Mozambique. In Angola and Nicaragua, the doctrine was applied quickly. The United States backed the UNITA movement in Angola and the Contras in Nicaragua, but it declared war on neither country. Aid to UNITA began to flow openly once Congress repealed the Clark Amendment, a long-standing ban on military aid to that group. In October 1989, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi told the Heritage Foundation that the efforts were "a source of great support" and that "No Angolan will forget your efforts."

  Ethiopia was the next target on Johns's list. He and Heritage argued that the Ethiopian famine grew out of the military and agricultural policies of the Soviet-supported government of Mengistu Haile Mariam. They also argued that Mengistu's decision to allow a Soviet naval and air presence at the Red Sea ports of Eritrea was a strategic challenge. In their view it threatened American security interests in the Middle East and North Africa.

  Cambodia posed a harder problem. The largest resistance movement fighting its communist government was made up largely of members of the former Khmer Rouge regime, whose human rights record was among the worst of the 20th century. Reagan therefore authorized aid to a smaller coalition, the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, or KPNLF, then run by Son Sann. The aim was to force an end to the Vietnamese occupation.

  The American Enterprise Institute joined Heritage in backing the doctrine, but the libertarian-oriented Cato Institute opposed it. Cato argued that most Third World struggles were far removed from legitimate American security needs. Instead of draining Soviet resources, it warned, the United States would dissipate its own. Even so, Cato conceded that the doctrine had "fired the enthusiasm of the conservative movement in the United States as no foreign policy issue has done in decades."

  According to The Wall Street Journal, Mikhail Gorbachev complained during his late-1980s summits with Reagan that Heritage's unyielding support was making Reagan unwilling to abandon the doctrine.

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• 5. A Name That Stuck

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  On the 6th of February 1985, Reagan used his State of the Union Address to describe the doctrine for the first time. He spoke of people risking their lives "on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua" to defy Soviet aggression. He also declared that "Support for freedom fighters is self-defense." His aim was to widen congressional support.

  That same year, columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote an essay for Time magazine as American support flowed to the mujahideen, to Savimbi's UNITA and to the Nicaraguan Contras. He labeled the policy the "Reagan Doctrine," and the name stuck. Looking back, Krauthammer said the Soviets had overextended their empire and were now meeting the rebellion that overextended empires provoke. He credited "the genius of Reagan" for instinctively seeing that the Soviets could be attacked indirectly, through their proxies, allies and clients. In Afghanistan they could be attacked directly. Krauthammer did not think Reagan had a plan. He did call the policy the opposite of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that whatever the Soviets controlled, they kept.

  Inside the administration, nearly all of Reagan's top national security and foreign policy officials embraced the doctrine quickly. They included Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. They also included a series of National Security Advisors: John Poindexter, Frank Carlucci and Colin Powell. Reagan, his advisers and his supporters framed the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and the doctrine as a moral imperative.

  Outside the government, activist Grover Norquist became a registered UNITA lobbyist and an economic adviser to Savimbi's movement in Angola. Dana Rohrabacher, a former Reagan speechwriter and former congressman, made several secret visits to the mujahideen in Afghanistan. His contact with the mujahideen, Jack Wheeler, led him there. Rohrabacher came back with glowing reports of their bravery against the Soviet occupation.

  Their enthusiasm would be tested in Congress, where the most important votes were extremely close.

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• 6. Secrecy and Congress

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  The book Rollback explains how the administration first carried out the Heritage plan in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia and Nicaragua. It did so covertly, and not as announced policy. In the book's words, this followed "the longstanding custom that containment can be overt but rollback should be covert." Over time the administration backed the policy more openly.

  In Congress, many votes on critical funding for the resistance movements were extremely close. That was especially true for the Nicaraguan Contras. The closeness of those votes made the Reagan Doctrine one of the more contentious American political issues of the 1980s.

  Funding for the Contras came from covert sources, because Congress did not authorize enough money for their efforts. The Boland Amendment barred further funding. In 1984, Congress ordered the intervention in Nicaragua to stop. In 1986, the Reagan administration illegally facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was under an arms embargo. In what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, it hoped the sales would win the release of hostages and let American intelligence agencies fund the Contras.

  In the same year Congress acted, a leaked training manual gave the public a look at what the Contras were being taught.

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• 7. Nicaragua Under Scrutiny

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  In 1984, a CIA manual titled "Psychological Operations in the Guerrilla War" leaked to the media. It had been written to train the Contras. It recommended the "selective use of violence for propagandistic effects" and the need to "neutralize" government officials. It named "judges, police officials, tax collectors, etc." as carefully selected targets who might be removed for psychological effect.

  Reagan labeled the Contras "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers" as he sought congressional support for them. The description was controversial, because the Contras had shown disregard for human rights. There were also allegations that some members of the Contra leadership were involved in cocaine trafficking.

  The International Court of Justice also ruled in 1984, in the case of Nicaragua v. United States. It found that the United States had violated international law by actively supporting the Contras and by mining Nicaraguan waters. The court held that the United States was obligated to pay reparations. The United States refused to take part after the court rejected its argument that it lacked jurisdiction. The United States later used its veto in the UN Security Council to block enforcement, so Nicaragua never received compensation.

  In her 2003 book Masters of War, Colombia's former ambassador to Cuba alleged that the CIA launched terrorist actions from a "mothership" off Nicaragua's coast. She alleged that in September 1983 rockets hit Puerto Sandino, Nicaragua's largest port. The next month, she wrote, frogmen blew up the country's only underwater oil pipeline. In October, she alleged, mortars, rockets and grenades struck Puerto Corinto and destroyed five large oil and gasoline storage tanks. More than a hundred people were wounded. The fire burned for two days and forced the evacuation of 23,000 people.

  Florida State University professor Frederick H. Gareau gave a similar account in his 2004 book State Terrorism and the United States. He wrote that the Contras attacked bridges, electric generators, rural health clinics, villages and state-owned agricultural cooperatives. He also wrote that CIA commandos raided port facilities, mined the major ports and set fire to the largest oil storage facilities. Gareau called these acts "wholesale terrorism" by the United States.

  Yale historian Greg Grandin, in his 2007 book The United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, found Contra behavior particularly inhumane. He wrote that the Contras mutilated civilians and foreign aid workers. In his analysis, the idealism used to justify the policy sat alongside support for political terrorism. Grandin wrote that in Latin America's dirtiest wars, "their faith in America's mission justified atrocities in the name of liberty."

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• 8. Verdicts and Afterlives

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  In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev called the war against the American-backed mujahideen a "bleeding wound" and ended the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. That same year an agreement in Angola met Savimbi's demand that Soviet, Cuban and other military troops and advisors leave the country. In Nicaragua, pressure from the Contras led the Sandinistas to end the State of Emergency. Facing military and political pressure, they agreed to new elections in 1990, in which the Contras' political wing took part. The Sandinistas lost.

  Doctrine advocates counted all of this as victory. Michael Johns argued that the effort to support freedom fighters led to "the first major military defeat of the Soviet Union." Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, also credited the doctrine with helping end the Cold War. In December 1997, she said it "proclaimed that the truce with communism was over."

  George H. W. Bush won the presidency in November 1988, and the doctrine continued under him. His term covered the last years of the Cold War and the Gulf War. The doctrine soon faded as the Cold War ended in 1991. Bush also noted a presumed peace dividend, with economic benefits from lower defense spending. After the presidency of Bill Clinton, his son George W. Bush introduced the Bush Doctrine and raised military spending in response to the September 11 attacks.

  Since the September 11 attacks, some critics have argued that the Reagan Doctrine produced blowback. By helping move large amounts of weapons into various regions and by training military leaders there, they say, it strengthened movements that later turned hostile to the United States, including al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. However, no direct American aid to Osama bin Laden or any of his affiliates has ever been established.

  Charlie Wilson's War, a film released by Universal Pictures in December 2007, depicts the early American effort to arm the Afghan mujahideen. It was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar. Joan Didion's 1987 book Miami looked at the same impulse closer to home, in efforts to overthrow communist governments, including that of Fidel Castro in Cuba.

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