Ash Heap of History: President Reagan’s Westminster Address 20 Years Later - Remarks by Lee Edwards (June 3, 2002)

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in November 1980, the United States and its allies had been laboring for 35 years to contain communism around the world with a wide range of diplomatic, military and economic initiatives that had cost tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. They had employed economic programs like the Marshall Plan, military alliances like NATO and SEATO, direct conflicts like the Korean War and the Vietnam War, surrogate operations like the Bay of Pigs, weapons treaties like SALT I, economic treaties like MFN, and covert operations around the world.

And yet, communism was not only alive and seemingly well in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, mainland China, Cuba, and North Korea, but had spread to sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, and Central America. In Southeast Asia, communist regimes were in place in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In southern Africa, Angola and Mozambique had fallen to communism with the help of several hundred thousand Cuban troops. A New York Times commentator went so far as to speak of "America in retreat."1

Seeking to take advantage of U.S. uncertainty in the wake of the Vietnam War, the Soviets accelerated their decades-long buildup of strategic weapons with a significant increase of theater nuclear forces in Europe. This followed "an unprecedented expansion of conventional forces" in the 1970s, including tanks, artillery, and tactical aircraft.2 Concurrently, the Soviet Union expanded its armed forces by 400,000 while the United States was cutting its military manpower by 1.4 million. By the beginning of the 1980s, Soviet leaders were stating with growing confidence that "the correlation of forces had shifted in their favor."3

Containment was not working, or at least it was not working fast enough to satisfy the new president. The time had come, Ronald Reagan decided, not merely to contain communism but to defeat it. He borrowed from fellow conservative Barry Goldwater, who had asked in his 1962 book, "Why not victory?" Richard V. Allen, President Reagan's first national security adviser, remembers visiting Reagan in California in January 1977 and engaging in a four-hour discussion of the Cold War. Reagan began the dialogue by saying, "My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: ‘we win and they lose.'"4 How would we go about achieving that? he asked Allen.

At his very first news conference as president in January 1981, Reagan bluntly denounced the Soviet leadership as still dedicated to "world revolution and a one-world Socialist-Communist state." Speaking at Notre Dame University a few months later, the president predicted that "the years ahead are great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom.... The West won't contain communism. It will transcend communism. It will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."5 Reagan was not shooting from the lip. As he put it in his autobiography, "I decided we had to send as powerful a message as we could to the Russians that we weren't going to stand by anymore while they armed and financed terrorists and subverted democratic governments."6

In May of the following year, one month before the Westminster address, President Reagan again talked about communism's imminent demise at a commencement address at his alma mater, Eureka College. "The Soviet empire is faltering," he said, "because rigid centralized control has destroyed incentives for innovation, efficiency and individual achievement." At the same time, the president pointed out, "the Soviet dictatorship has forged the largest armed force in the world." This military buildup combined with the preemption of the human needs of the Soviet people, Reagan predicted, "will undermine the foundations of the Soviet system."7

To liberal Democrats and Republican realists, such talk was deeply disturbing: any suggestion of victory over communism seemed quixotic and dangerous. Every knowledgeable person knew that the Soviet Union was economically strong and militarily powerful. The West's only responsible option was negotiation and accommodation -- in a word, détente. The liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., declared after a 1982 visit to Moscow: "Those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink, are...only kidding themselves." The liberal establishment's favorite economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, published a glowing appraisal of Soviet economics, explaining that "the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower."8 One wonders whether Professor Galbraith included the Gulag in his calculations of the Soviets' "full use" of manpower.

The distinguished Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1982 that "the Soviet Union is not now, nor will it be during the next decade, in the throes of a true economic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability that suffice to endure the deeper difficulties."9 Even as Bialer wrote, Leonid Brehznev was dying and Yuri Andropov was making plans to assume the reins of power, but concealing his own ill health.

Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson put the case for communist continuity even more strongly in his textbook Economics, published in 1981: "It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable."10 Obviously, Professor Samuelson did not accord much weight to the aroused people of Poland who organized Solidarity that same year in protest against the prolonged economic mismanagement of their country by the communists.

At the same time, the liberal establishment expressed open angst about Reagan's announced intention to build up the U.S. military, including our nuclear arsenal. The New Yorker devoted its entire February 1982 issue to Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth. Journalist Strobe Talbott charged that Reagan had increased the risk of nuclear war through his anti-communist obsessions and "deeply pessimistic" reckoning of the Soviet-American military balance.11

In truth, the more serious obsession was that of the analysts and academics who kept insisting that the Soviets were ten feet tall and must not be challenged or antagonized. What these experts could not accept was that the Soviet communists had failed, literally, to deliver the goods to the people. They had promised bread but produced food shortages and rationing for the people, except for the nomenklatura. They had promised peace but embroiled the nation and its long-suffering people in a series of conflicts from Berlin to Afghanistan.

By 1981, the Soviet Union was no longer a formidable fortress but a Potemkin village. And President Reagan determined to take full advantage of the inherent flaws and widening fissures in the Soviet system that were reported to him by CIA Director William Casey, national security adviser Richard Allen, NSC aides Richard Pipes and Roger Robinson, and others. "We adopted a comprehensive strategy," Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger later recalled, calculated to shift "the focus of the superpower struggle" to the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself.12

Casey depended for many of his analyses on his special assistant Herbert Meyer, a Soviet affairs specialist and author of a series of articles in Fortune magazine during the late 1970s that had described the Soviet Union's economic and social decline. According to author Joseph Shattan, Casey instructed Meyer to challenge the conventional wisdom at the CIA and "bring alternative views" to his attention. Meyer produced a "stream of assessments" that underscored the Soviets' economic distress and predicted its imminent collapse.13 Casey brought these reports to the attention of the president, who was especially interested in the anecdotal intelligence -- such as factories shutting down for a lack of spare parts, hard currency shortages -- they confirmed "his belief that the Soviet economy was in monumental trouble."14 As indeed it was.

Starting in 1981, the Reagan administration pursued a multi-faceted foreign policy offensive that included covert and other support to the Solidarity movement in Poland, a global campaign to reduce Soviet access to Western high technology, and a drive to hurt the Soviet economy by driving down the price of oil and limited natural gas exports to the West.

It implemented the strategy through a series of top-secret national security decision directives (NSDDs). NSDD-32, for example, which was approved in March 1982, declared that the United States would seek to "neutralize" Soviet control over Eastern Europe and authorized the use of covert action and other means to support anti-Soviet groups in the region. Conservatives had in fact been urging such a policy since 1959, when an annual National Captive Nations Week had been authorized by Congress and signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Even earlier, anti-communist writers like journalist Eugene Lyons and Georgetown University economist Lev E. Dobriansky had referred to the people behind the iron curtain as "our secret allies."15

NSDD-66, drafted by National Security Council aide Roger Robinson, stated that it would be U.S. policy to disrupt the Soviet economy by attacking a "strategic triad" of critical resources -- financial credits, high technology, and natural gas -- deemed essential to Soviet economic survival. NSDD-66 was tantamount, Robinson later explained, "to a secret declaration of economic war on the Soviet Union."16 NSDD-75, written by the distinguished Harvard historian Richard Pipes, called for the United States to no longer coexist with the Soviet system but rather to seek to change it fundamentally. The directive "was a clear break from the past," said Pipes. "At its root was the belief that we had it in our power to alter the Soviet system through the use of external pressure."17

A critical part of the Reagan strategy, political scientist Andrew Busch has pointed out, was public diplomacy. With the help of a small Reagan "cell" in the State Department, including world politics analyst John Lenczowski, the United States Information Agency (USIA), the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty were all strengthened. New media outlets such as Radio Marti and TV Marti, aimed at Cuba, and WorldNet, a USIA satellite TV network, were created. As Reagan asserted in his 1982 State of the Union address, "We've promised the world a season of truth -- the truth of our great civilized ideas: individual liberty, representative government, the rule of law under God."18 "When I had entered office," Reagan later wrote, "I'd been struck by something that didn't seem right: The democracies were up against an expansionist powerhouse that was trying all over the world to peddle its system, yet we who had the system of government that worked were doing nothing to sell our vision of freedom."19

A direct result of Reagan's Westminster Address with its reference to a "campaign for democracy" was the creation, in 1983, of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which subsequently assisted free trade union movements (including Solidarity when it was still banned in Poland) and trained third-world political figures in the techniques of democracy.20 Among the vocal public advocates of a NED dimension in U.S. foreign policy was Latin American specialist Constantine Menges, who at a January 1981 conference in Washington, D.C., had proposed "a National Foundation for Democracy" to help genuinely democratic groups within foreign countries.21 Brought into the Reagan administration by CIA director William Casey, Menges subsequently served as a special assistant to President Reagan for national security affairs.

Reagan's commitment to democracy was not just rhetorical. Dictators like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and "Baby Doc" Duvalier of Haiti departed with direct U.S. political help. In 1981, there were 54 democracies in the world; in 1992, there were 99, with 35 more countries in democratic transition. Looking back at the triumph of freedom and democracy during the Reagan years, the New York Times editorialized, "The cause of human rights came triumphantly of age in the liberating 1980s."22

Long-time Reagan adviser Ed Meese later outlined the core beliefs of Reagan's strategy: Communism "was torn by fatal contradictions" -- its overweening imperialist designs on the one hand and its crushing domestic problems on the other. Moscow could no longer afford guns and butter. It would have to choose one or the other. It was therefore incumbent on the United States and the rest of the West to take the initiative by refurbishing their defenses, assisting anti-communist forces around the world, and emphasizing the West's scientific-technological superiority. That meant, Meese later explained, that the West should "stop bailing the communists out of their technical and economic difficulties" through one-sided arms agreements, technology transfers, strategic trade, and economic credits.23

Reagan had already outlined many of these points when he challenged Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976 and in the years leading up to his 1980 presidential victory. In fact, he had discussed some of the measures that might be taken as early as 1964 in his national TV address for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. He then suggested that we "should open our mouths about the millions of people enslaved in Soviet colonies in the satellite nations." He said that the liberal policy of accommodation (or containment) was "appeasement" and called instead for a policy of peace through strength.24

In his radio commentaries from 1975-1979, which he drafted in longhand on yellow legal pads, Reagan frequently discussed communism from a philosophical as well as a public policy point of view. In May 1975, for example, he said that communism was "a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature."25

The language anticipates Reagan's words at Westminster: "The march of freedom and democracy...will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people."26

Ronald Reagan sought, as author Joseph Shattan puts it, not to contain the Soviets but to "overwhelm them" with such demonstrations of American power and resolve they had no alternative but to undertake systemic reforms, including the abandonment of Lenin's goal of socializing the world. Reagan's strength, Richard Pipes said, "lay in understanding the crisis and vulnerability of the [Soviet] system, which all the academics were telling him was stable and solid and popular. And he would buy none of this. And that took a lot of courage."27

The basic principles that guided President Reagan's foreign policy -- peace through strength, "trust but verify," tyranny is evil, and evil must not be allowed to triumph -- proved more effective, concludes political scientist Andrew Busch, than the rationalizations and moral equivocation offered by many academics and liberal policymakers during the 1980s.28 Margaret Thatcher has recounted a private conversation with President Reagan in 1983 in which he expressed his conviction that if the United States built up its armed forces as far as necessary, the Soviets would have to change their attitude because "they knew they could not keep up the pace."29

There were many important actors -- and actions -- in the 1980s that led to the collapse of communism first in Eastern and Central Europe and then in the Soviet Union, including the leadership of Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, the rise of Solidarity and the impact of the Velvet Revolution, valiant dissidents in the Soviet Union and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain, but the United States led by President Ronald Reagan was the central player. And a turning point in the decade was President Reagan's eloquent and prescient address to the British Parliament in June 1982, a carefully designed rhetorical volley in a strategy calculated to take full advantage of fundamental Soviet weaknesses and bring an end to the Cold War on terms favorable to the forces of freedom.

Note: The preceding remarks were part of a panel discussion held in The Heritage Foundation.

[1]. Ben J. Wattenberg, "It's Time to Stop America's Retreat," New York Times Magazine, July 22, 1979: 14-16. Also see K. Lynn Stoner, "Cuba," Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2002.

[2]. Andrew E. Busch, Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Freedom. Lanham, Maryland, 2001:186.

[3]. Paul H. Nitze, "Strategy in the Decade of the 1980s," Foreign Affairs (Fall 1980): 86.

[4]. Cited by Joseph Shattan, Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War. Washington, D.C., 1999: 245.

[5]. "The President's News Conference, January 28, 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents: Ronald Reagan 1981. Washington, D.C., 1982: 57; "Address at Commencement Exercises at the University of Notre Dame, May 17, 1981," Public Papers of the Presidents: Ronald Reagan 1981, Washington, D.C., 1982: 434.

[6]. "Start of the Reagan Era," U.S. News & World Report, January 26, 1981: 18-20; Ronald Reagan, An American Life, New York, 1990: 267.

[7]. Dinish D'Souza, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, New York, 1997: 140.

[8]. Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, New York, 1994: xiv.

[9]. Peter Schweizer, Victory: xiv.

[10]. Ibid: xiv-xv.

[11]. Strobe Talbott, The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace, New York, 1988: 3-4.

[12]. Schweizer: xv.

[13]. Shattan, Architects of Victory: 247.

[14]. Ibid: 247-248.

[15]. See Eugene Lyons, Our Secret Allies: The Peoples of Russia. New York, 1953.

[16]. Schweizer, Victory: 126.

[17]. Ibid: 131.

[18]. "Address before a Joint Session of Congress Reporting on the State of the Union, January 26, 1982," Public Papers of the Presidents: Ronald Reagan 1982, Washington, D.C., 1983: 78.

[19]. Ronald Reagan, An American Life: 555.

[20]. Andrew E. Busch, Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Freedom, Lanham, Maryland, 2001: 208.

[21]. Constantine C. Menges, Inside the National Security Council: The True Story of the Making and Unmaking of Reagan's Foreign Policy, New York, 1988: 46.

[22]. "Human Rights: Now the Hard Part," editorial, New York Times, December 30, 1989.

[23]. Edwin Meese III, With Reagan. Washington, D.C., 1992: 169-170.

[24]. Ronald Reagan, "A Time for Choosing," a televised national address on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater, October 27, 1964, as reprinted in Ronald Reagan, Speaking My Mind, New York, 1989: 22-36.

[25]. "Communism, the Disease," Ronald Reagan, May 1975 radio commentary, as reproduced in Reagan in His Own Hand, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson. New York, 2001: 12.

[26]. Ronald Reagan, "Address to the Members of the British Parliament," [The Westminster Address], June 8, 1982, as reprinted in Speaking My Mind, New York, 1989: 107-120.

[27]. Joseph Shattan, Architects of Victory: 294; Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time, New York, 1996: 359.

[28]. Andrew E. Busch, Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Freedom: 213.

[29]. Schweizer, Victory: 123.