Worldmaking (74 page)

On the issue of China, Wolfowitz clashed bitterly with Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., who had previously served as Kissinger's deputy at the NSC and who held no doubts about China's strategic importance to the United States in the Cold War. In the spring of 1982, Wolfowitz drafted a memo that strongly criticized Haig's State Department for making unnecessary concessions to China on the subject of arms sales to Taiwan. As Wolfowitz's biographer Lewis Solomon writes, “In view of the growing friction between the two, the Secretary of State snubbed other proposals for Wolfowitz's policy planning staff and attempted to cut them out of the communication loop.”
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Wolfowitz's willingness to push the envelope had turned out to be counterproductive—he lacked the bureaucratic guile of a Kissinger or a Nitze. In Scooter Libby's judgment, Wolfowitz's assemblage of conservative talent achieved virtually nothing that was concrete and enduring. In March 1982,
The New York Times
reported that Secretary Haig “has notified Paul D. Wolfowitz, the director of policy planning, that he will be replaced … Associates reported that Mr. Haig found Mr. Wolfowitz too theoretical.”
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The Times
was a little ahead of the mark, though it did accurately characterize Haig's basic view. But Haig's own problematic relationship with President Reagan—his high self-regard and thinly disguised desire to aggregate power at Foggy Bottom—led to the secretary of state's downfall in June. Reagan appointed George P. Shultz to replace him. Shultz, in turn, promoted Wolfowitz to become assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific. Through sheer good luck Wolfowitz had survived another day. “Paul, this is an administrative job,” Shultz cautioned. “It's not just thinking. It's a big area. You've got to get around, get to see a lot of people.”
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Wolfowitz had been given a wonderful opportunity to manage relations with a pivotal region. The job also required him to sharpen his bureaucratic acumen and relational skills and to better recognize when the gap between theory and reality was unbridgeable.

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Ronald Reagan was a remarkable figure in many respects: a former B-movie actor, president of the Screen Actors Guild, Democrat, Goldwater protégé, governor of California, and devotee of supply-side economics and small government. He was also a presidential communicator par excellence.
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Yet contemporary bipartisan consensus on Reagan's varied attributes—his virtually uncontested status as one of America's ten to fifteen “great” presidents—can obscure how polarizing a figure he was, particularly during his first few years in office. George Kennan certainly did not pull his punches when assessing the administration at the time, identifying in Reagan and his advisers a “childishness and primitivism” that could serve only to damage America's global standing. “I love certain old fashioned values and concepts,” Kennan recorded in his diary, “but not
his
.” While Kennan recognized that the Soviet Union was not averse to hawkish bluster, he queried whether it was really necessary for the United States to follow suit; dignified silence was surely more elegant
and
diplomatically astute. Politburo posturing was “as Russian as boiled cabbage and buckwheat kasha. But what about my own government and its state of blind militaristic hysteria?” Kennan's level of despair would sink below anything he had felt during the wretched Eisenhower-Dulles era, though at least he was not alone in finding serious fault with Reagan's foreign policies. “I am only a small part of the resistance in the U.S. to the madness of the present-Am[erican] administration,” Kennan wrote hopefully in the spring of 1982.
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So how had the Reagan administration managed to rile Kennan quite so intensely? By offering a comprehensive repudiation of Kennan's strategy of containment. Eschewing the protocol diplomacy of civility and moderation, the president excoriated the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world” during a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983. More substantively—and vexingly, from Kennan's Atlanticist perspective—Reagan offered military support to any insurgent group in the developing world dedicated to overthrowing a leftist government; the initiative that became known as the Reagan Doctrine.
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Rather than “containing” communism behind the Iron Curtain, Reagan sought to extinguish it far beyond the European theater through supporting insurgencies in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Ethiopia.
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Allied to this rhetorical and proxy-supporting escalation of the Cold War was a vast increase in America's defense expenditures. In collaboration with Secretary of State Caspar Weinberger, Reagan set his first annual defense budget at $220 billion, the largest ever in peacetime. Reagan planned for annual increases in the budget of 7 percent, which ultimately led to the 1987 defense budget weighing in at a colossal $456.5 billion. He devoted significant resources to the B-1 stealth bomber, F-14 and F-15 fighter jets, and the new generation of MX intercontinental nuclear missiles.
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And then in March 1983, Reagan announced the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a satellite based, laser-armed system designed to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles that was soon dubbed “Star Wars” by incredulous critics. Wolfowitz's friend and ally Richard Perle embraced the nickname. “Why not?” he asked. “It's a good movie. Besides, the good guys won.”
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Wolfowitz applauded Reagan's rapid defense buildup and his willingness to lambast the Soviet Union on moral grounds—evil it assuredly was, why the fuss? But the aspect of Reagan's foreign policy that pleased him the most was his clearly stated desire to spread democracy. In a speech to the House of Commons, greeted enthusiastically by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her front bench but more cautiously by the rest of the chamber, Reagan observed that democracy promotion was one of America's principal goals, proposing a concerted effort to “foster the infrastructure of democracy” the world over. One passage on the world's vast capacity for democratic enlargement must have sounded to Wolfowitz like the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth:

This is not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences. It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy … Let us now begin a major effort to secure the best—a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation. For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.
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Reagan was deploying the Wilsonian language of democracy promotion—but applied without exception. According to Lou Cannon, a Reagan biographer, “The Westminster speech expressed more cogently than any other address of his presidency Reagan's belief that the forces of freedom would triumph over communism.”
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His words set off a chain of events that included the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy in November 1983—a nongovernmental organization funded by Congress devoted to supporting democratic institutions worldwide—and to a hardening of policy toward undemocratic but steadfast allies such as the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan.

This democracy-promoting yin was counterbalanced to some degree, however, by a realist yang. In 1979, Jeane Kirkpatrick published an influential article in
Commentary
titled “Dictatorships & Double Standards.” While her preference in ideal conditions was the Wilsonian proliferation of virtuous democracies, Kirkpatrick cautioned that the Cold War world was not so simple. The article launched a strong attack on the Carter administration for pushing autocratic leaders, such as the shah in Iran and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, to liberalize and democratize their governments too quickly. Kirkpatrick faulted Carter for encouraging far-reaching changes only in nations “under pressure from revolutionary guerrillas … We seem to accept the
status quo
in Communist nations (in the name of ‘diversity' and national autonomy), but not in nations ruled by ‘right-wing' dictators or white oligarchies.” Here was the double standard of Kirkpatrick's title. Instead of pursuing laudable but self-defeating pipe dreams, she recommended that political leaders be patient with authoritarian governments that support U.S. policy. These regimes are more likely to evolve gradually in the direction of liberal democracy than Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. Allied to this was Kirkpatrick's contempt for ahistorical wishful thinking. Wilsonianism was clearly the intended target:

Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances … Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary discipline and habits [of democracy].
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Kirkpatrick's article made an immediate impression on Reagan, who read it soon after publication and sent her a note expressing admiration for her logic. After assuming the presidency, Reagan appointed Kirkpatrick as ambassador to the United Nations, the first woman ever to serve in that position.

In 1983, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and CIA Director William Casey both urged Reagan to appoint Kirkpatrick his national security adviser, which would have been another first for a woman. Secretary of State Shultz persuaded Reagan otherwise, however, later observing, “I respected her intelligence, but she was not well suited to the job. Her strength was in her capacity for passionate advocacy.” Shultz remarked that the role of national security adviser required the temperament of a “dispassionate broker,” which he believed did not describe Kirkpatrick. He may have been right. But then again, few national security advisers have historically resembled dispassionate brokers, a criterion that certainly would have excluded Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski from service. Perhaps the more likely explanation is that the path-breaking Kirkpatrick hit a glass ceiling. Yet while Kirkpatrick was prevented from hitting the heights, her distinction between useful right-wing and irredeemable left-wing versions of authoritarianism had a significant influence on the policies pursued by the Reagan administration, much to Wolfowitz's chagrin.
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One of Wolfowitz's primary goals at the State Department was to deploy U.S. influence in East Asia to compel various authoritarian governments—in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan, most notably—to transition to democracy. In collaboration with Richard Armitage, based at the Pentagon, and Gaston Sigur, on the NSC staff—the so-called troika—Wolfowitz began to consider how democratic change might be effected. They began with the Philippines, where Ferdinand Marcos had led the nation in dictatorial style since 1965—and whose wife, Imelda, was known globally for her extravagant tastes and spending. They had quite a task ahead of them. When Vice President George H. W. Bush visited Manila in 1981, he told a glowing Marcos, “We love your adherence to democratic principles and democratic processes,” a statement that rather underplayed his tendency to declare martial law whenever his regime was electorally threatened. When Jeane Kirkpatrick visited Manila a few years later, the savvy Marcos quoted verbatim from “Dictatorships & Double Standards” during a banquet toast. He thanked her ostentatiously for providing such a compelling rationale for continued U.S. support for anticommunist regimes such as his.
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Yet slowly but surely, aided by the support of Secretary of State George Shultz—who viewed the removal of Marcos as a strategic victory for Washington regardless of Wilsonian niceties—U.S. policy toward the Marcos regime hardened. In January 1985, Wolfowitz, accompanied by his aide Scooter Libby, traveled to Manila, where they met and encouraged Marcos's principal political opponents. During congressional testimony, Armitage and Wolfowitz stated their clear preference for policies that would apply pressure on Marcos to liberalize the political system of the Philippines. In late 1985, the opposition leader Corazon Aquino appeared to win a snap general election, but Marcos refused to accept the result. Washington soon learned that Aquino was the fair winner, and that Marcos was clinging to power through the traditional recourse to electoral fraud. Shultz urged Reagan to threaten to cut off military aid to Marcos if he continued to refuse to accept the popular verdict and step down.

Reagan agonized over this for a while—such a move certainly contradicted Jeane Kirkpatrick's theory—before following his secretary of state's counsel and dispatching the ultimatum. This led inevitably to the end of Ferdinand Marcos, who was flown out of the Philippines with his wife on an American Air Force plane. A precedent had been set. A year later, massive street demonstrations demanded the removal of Chun Doo Hwan's authoritarian government in South Korea. Reagan again urged the leader of a flailing, unloved autocracy to step aside and allow history—marching toward a liberal-democratic endpoint—to run its course.
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Henry Kissinger was distressed to witness the repudiation of yet another of his strategic maxims. Détente was a dead accented letter, balance-of-power diplomacy had been dismissed as anachronistic and contrary to American values, and now “better the devil you know” had been rent asunder. He attacked the Reagan administration for its democracy-promotion agenda: “Are there no other overriding American interests?” he asked despairingly. What would other American allies with an authoritarian coloring (and there were many) make of Reagan's shabby treatment of Marcos? “Whatever else may be said about the Marcos regime,” wrote Kissinger, “it contributed substantially to American security and had been extolled by American presidents for nearly two decades.” Kissinger closed his article by recording “grave concerns” about this Wilsonian resurgence.
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