The US Presidential election will be won and lost on the domestic economy, so Mitt Romney’s recent trip to three capitals –London, Jerusalem and Warsaw—provided some distraction in the summer lead-up to the party conventions and the start of the real campaign season in the fall. His itinerary gave the presumptive Republican candidate an opportunity to profile himself to the American electorate: as a successful executive who had organized the Salt Lake City Olympics, as a firm supporter of Israel (in contrast to President Obama who has refrained from visiting there while in office), and as an advocate of the liberty of Eastern Europe. The warm support from Lech Walesa this summer will serve him well in the ballot boxes of western Pennsylvania in November.

Yet Romney is not the first American presidential candidate to campaign through European capitals, and his travels abroad invite a comparison with Barack Obama’s tour just four years ago, especially the main event, the speech at the Victory Column in Berlin in front of an enormous crowd of 200, 000 or more. That demonstration of Obama’s charisma and popularity in Europe certainly strengthened his credibility among American voters, frustrated with the apparent fraying of the Atlantic alliance during the administration of George W. Bush. Obama promised to calm the waters, restore old friendships and build a robust cooperation between the US and Europe.

The Romney visit is a chance to reevaluate the Obama visit and ask: has Obama fulfilled the hope to change the trans-Atlantic divide?

The tone no doubt has changed. The animosity once directed regularly toward the Bush administration is a thing of the past. American leaders do not face angry demonstrations when they travel abroad (although when Secretary of State Clinton recently visited Egypt, she encountered bitter protests from Coptic Christians, fearing that the US will sell them out to the Islamist regime).  Yet while Obama’s credibility—as the not-Bush—led to a ratcheting down of anti-American sentiment, the trans-Atlantic relationship has done well in the past four years mainly because it has done so little: The Obama White House has elicited European support for no major initiative whatsoever—hardly a success story.

In terms of international security, Europe and America cooperated in the international coalition Afghanistan, but ISAF had been organized by the Bush administration. In the Berlin speech, candidate Obama actually insisted on the need to “renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan.” Under Obama, ISAF fought on, but Europeans never matched the American surge proportionally, and when Obama set a date for a US withdrawal, the Europeans reasonably began to rush for the exits. Today a resurgent Taliban, increased violence and endemic corruption are ravaging Afghanistan, and the imminent western retreat will leave chaos in its wake. Obama’s Berlin promise to defend western security in Afghanistan has been broken.

In terms of economic security, trans-Atlantic cooperation has been even less successful. In the face of the travails of the Eurozone—sovereign debt, insolvent banks, fiscal instability and the crying need for reform of labor markets and the social state—the absence of an American presence is stunning. Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner’s visits are embarrassing for their inconsequentiality; when he recently barged in on German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s summer vacation on the island of Sylt, the only result was a joint statement of no substance. In the crisis of the Eurozone, key US allies, especially France and Germany, are pulling in opposite directions, but President Obama—despite all his charisma and political capital that was on display at the Berlin speech—has chosen not to try to play a role as an honest broker. Either he has figured out that he in fact has no credibility in Europe, or he has decided that, despite the homily at the Victory Column, Europe does not matter to him. It turns out that he fixed the trans-Atlantic problem primarily by pivoting to Asia—not that there’s been much success there either.

In fact, the Obama administration has been less engaged in Europe than any US President in living memory. Against that backdrop, Romney’s itinerary, especially the Poland visit, represents a commitment of a different order and a stronger moral fiber, a recognition of the accomplishments and potentials of what Donald Rumsfeld once named “new Europe.” No wonder the old European press is so unhappy with him.

Not long ago, the Economist ran an unsigned editorial called the “Auschwitz Complex.” The unnamed author blamed serial Middle East tensions on both Israel’s unwarranted sense of victimhood, accrued from the Holocaust, and its unwillingness to  “to give up its empire.” As far as Israel’s paranoid obsessions with the specter of a nuclear Iran, the author dismissed any real threat by announcing that “Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis,” and that “Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran.”

It is hard to fathom how a democracy of seven million people by any stretch of the imagination is an “empire.” Israel, after all, fought three existential wars over its 1947 borders, when the issue at hand was not manifest destiny, but the efforts of its many enemies to exterminate or deport its population. I would not otherwise know how to characterize the Arab promise of more than a half-century of “pushing the Jews into Mediterranean.”

While it is true that Israeli forces stayed put on neighboring lands after the 1967 war, subsequent governments eventually withdrew from the Sinai, southern Lebanon, and Gaza—areas from which attacks were and are still staged against it. The Economist’s choice of “appealing” is an odd modifying adjective of the noun “enemy,” particularly for Iran, which has both promised to wipe out Israel and is desperately attempting to find the nuclear means to reify that boast.

Continue reading Victor Davis Hanson…

Many people are looking to the many primary elections on March 6th — "Super Tuesday" — to clarify where this year’s Republican nomination campaign is headed.

It may clarify far more than that, including the future of this nation and of Western civilization. If a clear winner with a commanding lead emerges, the question then becomes whether that candidate is someone who is likely to defeat Barack Obama.

If not, then the fate of America — and of Western nations, including Israel — will be left in the hands of a man with a lifelong hostility to Western values and Western interests.

President Obama is such a genial man that many people, across the ideological space, cannot see him as a danger.

For every hundred people who can see his geniality, probably only a handful see the grave danger his warped policies and ruthless tactics pose to a whole way of life that has given generation after generation of Americans unprecedented freedom and prosperity.

The election next November will not be just another election, and the stakes add up to far more than the sum of the individual issues. Moreover, if reelected and facing no future election, whatever political constraints may have limited how far Obama would push his radical agenda will be gone.

He would have the closest thing to a blank check. Nothing could stop him but impeachment or a military coup, and both are very unlikely. A genial corrupter is all the more dangerous for being genial.

The four remaining Republican candidates have to be judged, not simply by whether they would make good presidents, but by how well they can cut through Obama’s personal popularity and glib rhetoric, to alert the voters as to the stakes in this year’s election.

Continue reading Thomas Sowell…

In a recent blog Paul Krugman, borrowing from the Economics of Contempt, takes on John Cochran and me for our interpretations of the events leading up to the panic of 2008, and in particular my point that it was not the Lehman bankruptcy per se that was the underlying cause of the panic but rather the ad hoc and unpredictable policy leading up to and following the bankruptcy. The only evidence Krugman gives against my point is a plot of the “B of A Merrill Lynch US High Yield Master II Effective Yield” over a two year interval in which the crucial timing of the day to day movements are barely visible.

I first wrote about the panic of 2008 (including the Lehman bankruptcy, the AIG bailout, and the rollout of the TARP) in my book Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged and Worsened the Financial Crisis, published three years ago in February 2009, which in celebration of the three year anniversary is now available as an e-book for only $2.40.

If you look at the charts in that book you will see a detailed consideration of the daily data. I focused on the spread between Libor and the overnight index swap (OIS), and showed that the major upward movements in this measure of stress occurred at the time of the TARP rollout. Moreover, this measure of risk peaked as soon as it was clarified that the TARP would be used for equity injections, suggesting that confusion about the TARP was a large source of the uncertainty and panic.

Continue reading John Taylor…

(photo credit: Squiggle)

There are a lot of new twists to the old story of massive demonstrations in Greece. This is the first time in my life (I first went to Greece in 1973) that I can remember Greek rioting and demonstrations that were not anti-American. Oh, there have been a few contorted efforts to blame the Wall Street “Jews” for the 2008 meltdown that in turn supposedly called in Greek credit, but it is a half-hearted attempt, and for the most part the Greeks seem bewildered that they cannot properly fault the U.S. for much of anything in their present disaster — so unlike the old days of the 1967 coup, the colonels, the Cold War, the American support for Israel, the oil boycotts of 1973, the 1974 Cyprus disaster, the bombing of a kindred Orthodox Milosevic, etc. But it has been a generation since the Greeks have had much to do with the U.S. The Greek lobby is long retired from the Congress. The Obama administration is enthralled with Turkey. Former prime minister and U.S. citizen Andreas Papandreou long ago cut any remaining close ties with the U.S. in a flurry of anti-American and pro-Soviet rhetoric designed to appeal to popular anti-Americanism. The Greek diaspora in the U.S. is mostly third-generation, intermarried, and assimilated, and the net result is that we are now spectators, not players, in the present tragedy.

The end of utopianism is certainly causing far more furor than had the utopian dream never materialized, so the anger against Germany in the popular press (“Gautleiters,” “The Fourth Reich”, “Dachau!”, etc) is far greater now than had the Germans and their friends never loaned the Greeks nearly $400 billion in the first place. What is strange to watch is the nature of the Greek furor: that the Germans are probably eventually willing to forgive hundreds of billions almost seems to enrage Greeks all the more — for their debtors’ unwillingness to go all the way by forgiving the entire huge sum. The thinking is almost, “Well, if they have that much money to forgive, why not forgive it all?”

Continue reading Victor Davis Hanson…

The same presumptions of superior wisdom and virtue behind the interventionism of Progressive Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the domestic economy also led them to be interventionists in other countries.

Theodore Roosevelt was so determined that the United States should intervene against Spain’s suppression of an uprising in Cuba that he quit his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to organize his own private military force — called "Rough Riders" — to fight in what became the Spanish-American war.

The spark that set off this war was an explosion that destroyed an American battleship anchored in Havana harbor. There was no proof that Spain had anything to do with it, and a study decades later suggested that the explosion originated inside the ship itself.

But Roosevelt and others were hot for intervention before the explosion, which simply gave them the excuse they needed to go to war against Spain, seizing Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

Although it was a Republican administration that did this, Democrat Woodrow Wilson justified it. Progressive principles of imposing superior wisdom and virtue on others were invoked.

Wilson saw the indigenous peoples brought under American control as beneficiaries of progress. He said, "they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice."

Continue reading Thomas Sowell…

"Often wrong but never in doubt" is a phrase that summarizes much of what was done by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the two giants of the Progressive era, a century ago.

Their legacy is very much alive today, both in their mindset — including government picking winners and losers in the economy and interventionism in foreign countries — as well as specific institutions created during the Progressive era, such as the income tax and the Federal Reserve System.

Like so many Progressives today, Theodore Roosevelt felt no need to study economics before intervening in the economy. He said of "economic issues" that "I am not deeply interested in them, my problems are moral problems." For example, he found it "unfair" that railroads charged different rates to different shippers, reaching the moral conclusion that these rates were discriminatory and should be forbidden "in every shape and form."

It never seemed to occur to TR that there could be valid economic reasons for the railroads to charge the Standard Oil Company lower rates for shipping their oil. At a time when others shipped their oil in barrels, Standard Oil shipped theirs in tank cars— which required a lot less work by the railroads than loading and unloading the same amount of oil in barrels.

Theodore Roosevelt was also morally offended by the fact that Standard Oil created "enormous fortunes" for its owners "at the expense of business rivals." How a business can offer consumers lower prices without taking customers away frombusinesses that charge higher prices is a mystery still unsolved to the present day, when the very same arguments are used against Wal-Mart.

Continue reading Thomas Sowell…

Although Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States, he is by no means unique, except for his complexion. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished a hundred years ago.

Many of the trends, problems and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price — and not just in money — for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration.

The two giants of the Progressive era — Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — clashed a century ago, in the three-way election of 1912. With the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt’s newly created Progressive Party, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, so that the Democrats’ version of Progressivism became dominant for eight years.

What Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had in common, and what attracts some of today’s Republicans and Democrats, respectively, who claim to be following in their footsteps, was a vision of an expanded role of the federal government in the economy and a reduced role for the Constitution of the United States.

Like other Progressives, Theodore Roosevelt was a critic and foe of big business. In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics, and his own business ventures lost money.

Continue reading Thomas Sowell…

In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount.

News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin — as Greece is squeezed to make interest payments to the supposedly euro-pinching German banks.

Such accounts may be exaggerations, but they should warn us that yearly progress is never assured. Instead, history offers plenty of examples of life becoming far worse than it had been centuries earlier. The biographer Plutarch, writing 500 years after the glories of classical Greece, lamented that in his time weeds grew amid the empty colonnades of the once-impressive Greek city-states. In America, most would prefer to live in the Detroit of 1941 than theDetroit of 2011. The quality of today’s air travel has regressed to the climate of yesterday’s bus service.

Continue reading Victor Davis Hanson…

My day job as an historian of contemporary affairs obliges me to keep up with op-eds, those snippits of opinion unburdened by the perspective of time or the weight of information. True, they do not pretend to be more than snapshots of the passing scene. But they also have a larger revelatory value, as vivid displays of the impressive ability of experts to get things wrong.

A few caveats:

My examples come from the mainstream media, and thus reflect a liberal rather than a conservative bent. I’m ready to believe that comparable instances of opinion gone haywire can be found on the other side of the ideological divide.

To select the worst examples of the op-ed genre is no easy matter. These are my standards: (1) The author must be highly regarded–or at least highly regard himself–as an informed commentator on his topic. (2) The author must have gotten an important thing wrong in a spectacular way. (3) There must be no glimmer of awareness, either in the offending piece or in the author’s follow-up response, that modification or qualification might be called for.

I should point out that my examples date from 2009-2010. This is not because these were exceptional–so to speak, vintage–years for opinion gone off the tracks. I certainly do not mean to imply that there were fewer execrable op-eds before then, or since, or are likely to be in years to come. This is, as I say, merely a preliminary ranking. I will be delighted to cede pre-eminence to those who come up with even more noxious specimens.

So: the envelopes, please.

First, in chronological order, is Roger Cohen’s February 23, 2009 New York Timesitem, “What Iran’s Jews Say.” As Abraham Lincoln observed of Roger [another Roger!] Taney’sDred Scott decision, this is an “astonisher.”

Cohen visited with the Jews of the Iranian city of Esfahan and found that they (and other Iranian Jews) live, work, and worship “in relative tranquility.” Of course their number has dwindled a bit over the years: from about 100,000 in 1948 to “perhaps 25,000” (or perhaps less) in 2009. He finds this to be a tribute to tolerance, compared to the near-complete disappearance of the 800,000 Jews who once lived in Arab countries.

Cohen has “a bias toward facts over words,” and the operative fact, he finds, is “Iranian civility toward Jews.” Admittedly there are deviations: the regime’s stated readiness to rid the world of Israel and its not inconsiderable Jewish population, or the 1999 “trumped-up” charges that a group of Iranian Jews spied for Israel, or the fact that no Muslim can vote for a Jew.

But countering these unpleasant “facts” is his belief that “one way to look at Iran’s scurrilous anti-Israel tirades is as a provocation to focus people on Israel’s bomb, its 41-year occupation of the West Bank, its Hamas denial, its repetitive use of overwhelming force.” In short: to understand all is to forgive all. In shorter short: Lenin’s “useful idiot” is alive and well in the hallowed hallways of the New York Times.

Fareed Zakaria offered another insight into the Iran scene on May 23, 2009, when he informed his Newsweek readers that “They May Not Want the Bomb.” While “the regime wants to be a nuclear power,” he concludes that it “could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program.” The evidence? Senior officials have “repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons.” Even more, president Ahmadinejad cites Ayatollah Khomeini, he of blessed memory, to the effect that nuclear weapons are “un-Islamic.” And Khomeini’s successor Ayatollah Khamenei is reported to hold that they are “immoral.”

Besides, many of the regime’s leaders have bank accounts in Dubai and Switzerland: not the behavior of fanatics hell-bent on nuclear war. And while Iran ”is certainly not a democracy,” neither is it “a monolithic dictatorship.” So: not to worry. All that is needed is that uranium enrichment in Iran proceed “under the control of an international consortium.” Voice-of-reason Zakaria concludes: “Why not try this before launching the next Mideast war?”

Two-plus years later, even the International Atomic Energy Agency has abandoned its previously robust doubts as to the Iranians’ nuclear weapon intentions. Zakaria would be well-advised to thoroughly Windex his crystal ball.

Finally, there is Paul Krugman’s “Learning from Europe,” from the Times of January 11, 2010. Here the noblest Nobelist of them all sets right benighted conservatives who fear that we are on the road to European-style social democracy. Their “wailing and rending of garments” is, he assures us, unsupported by reality. And what is that reality? “Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.”

As with Zakaria’s Iranian nuclear fantasy, Krugman’s European social democracy fantasy has not gained credibility with the passage of time. There is an international consensus on the Iranians’ nuclear intentions, and the lyrics of ”Kumbaya” do not quite convey what that is. Nor would Europe’s leaders, or its people, share Krugman’s content with their social democracy-economic mix. The Greater West European Co-Prosperity Sphere is creaking at most of its joints.

Op-eds (including this one) should be taken with a grain of salt. My profession has taught me that writing about the past is, in historian Charles Beard’s words, like dragging a cat across a Brussels carpet. Figuring out the present, as these instances richly demonstrate, is not a bit easier. As for the future: fuggedaboutit.

In this recent post, I suggested that Wallison and Pinto were wrong in their relentless arguing that Fannie and Freddie caused the financial crisis because of government requirements that F and F buy loans made to low-income borrowers. For one, Wallison and Pinto ignore the role of the investment banks in generating subprime loans and bundling them into mortgage-backed securities. I also pointed out the possibility that Fannie and Freddie seemed to be a lot like the investment banks–maybe they bought up risky loans simply to make money:

One more point–the SEC suit doesn’t really fit the “government made Fannie and Freddie buy up lousy loans” story.  The whole point of the suit is that these were secret behaviors by Fannie and Freddie. They were buying a lot of loans that were a lot like subprime–loans with high default risk. But were these to satisfy ever more demanding affordable housing requirements imposed by the government? Who knows? I suspect they were just trying to make money like the other players. They just stayed in too long.

William Black, in this lengthy essay, makes the same point but also provides some evidence rather than just speculating as I did. He takes down Wallison and Pinto as well as critiquing some of those such as Joe Nocera who have dismissed Wallison and Pinto entirely.

Continue reading Russ Roberts…

An account from Agence France-Presse about demonstrations in Fallujah by Sunnis celebrating the American withdrawal from Iraq included this strange passage about the battles of Fallujah:

That year, the U.S. military launched two massive offensives against Fallujah, signs of which are still visible today in collapsed buildings and bullet holes in walls. The first offensive in April aimed to quell the burgeoning Sunni insurgency but was a failure — Fallujah became a fiefdom of Al-Qaeda and its allies, who essentially controlled the city. In November, a second campaign was launched, just months before legislative elections in January 2005. Around 2,000 civilians and 140 Americans died, and the battle is considered one of the fiercest for the U.S. since the Vietnam war.

“But was a failure” is not a good description of the first siege. The Marines were on the verge of taking the city until the Iraqi Governing Council petitioned Paul Bremer to call off the assault, making it more a tragedy than a failure, in that too many courageous Marines died on the verge of victory.

Continue reading Victor Davis Hanson…

I hope I find the time to comment more fully on this recent column in the WaPo by Robert Samuelson defending the Fed. But for now, let me pull out one paragraph:

After Lehman Brothers’ failure in September 2008, American credit markets began shutting down. Banks wouldn’t lend to banks. Investors balked at buying commercial paper — a type of short-term loan — and many “securitized” bonds. Fearing they’d lose credit, businesses dramatically cut spending. Layoffs exploded: 6.3 million jobs vanished between that September and June 2009. Firms canceled investment projects in plants and equipment. In the first quarter of 2009, business investment spending fell at a 31 percent annual rate.

This is a common view–that Lehman’s collapse and the failure of the policymakers to rescue Lehman precipitated the crisis. It could be true but the evidence is quite cloudy. The claim also ignores the possibility that it once the Fed had rescued the creditors of Bear Stearns in March of 2008, lenders to Lehman (such as Reserve Primary–a money market fund!) figured they were safe. It was the unexpectedness of the government actually letting creditors lose money that caused the dislocations, not the failure of Lehman, per se.

Continue reading Russ Roberts…

One result of the financial crisis and the ensuing global economic slowdown has been a revival of interest in the thinking of John Maynard Keynes. Much of what is being written about Keynes is an attempt to make him relevant to today’s problems and to persuade a modern audience that Keynes was right about a lot of things. Along these lines, economists Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley Bateman have recently authored, Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes.¹ Backhouse is a professor of history and the philosophy of economics at the University of Birmingham in Britain and Bateman is a professor of economics at Denison University

Backhouse and Bateman argue, as the book’s title implies, that although Keynes wanted a substantial amount of government intervention, he did believe in preserving large elements of capitalism. This part of the book is somewhat persuasive, although their discussion of Keynes’s famous “socialization of investment” advocacy was not completely convincing. But the authors also have another important theme: They argue against the classical liberal view that government should basically keep its hands off the economy. Their attempt fails. They get some basic and important facts wrong, have trouble accounting for the stagflation of the early 1970s that persuaded many economists to abandon the Keynesian model, often misstate the views of Keynes’s critics, and occasionally use subtle shifts in language and even ad hominem attacks to undercut the views of free-market economists, most notably Milton Friedman.

Continue reading David Henderson…

Egyptian history plays tricks with its interpreters. This ancient society is known for the stability given it by the Nile, a well-mannered and orderly river, and by a pharaonic culture where the rulers were deities. But this timeless image is largely false. Egypt’s peasant society has been prone to violent upheavals. Order has often hung by a thread, as a proud people alternate between submission and rebellion.

We are now in the midst of one of these alternations. On Feb. 11, Egypt’s last pharaoh, Hosni Mubarak, bent to the will of his people and relinquished power. What we are witnessing in Egypt today is not the consequence of democracy but rather a half-century of authoritarianism. The chaos and the lawlessness issue out of the lawlessness of the former regime. As crony capitalism had its way with the economy, the military elite, the officer corps, had to be given its share of the loot. Having turned away from war and military adventures abroad, they were rewarded with economic enterprises and privileges of their own—exclusive clubs, vacation homes, land grants, you name it.

Continue reading Fouad Ajami…

James Madison was the Father of the U.S. Constitution. Madison, more than any other of the Constitutional framers, insisted on limited government. Madison argued that the Constitution’s task was to limit the powers of government:  “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Few today know that Madison’s greatest fear was of an “overbearing majority” that would act against minorities. Madison and the other founding fathers used the separation of powers and the protection of private property (the Fifth Amendment) to rein in out-of-control majorities. In Madison’s words: “Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”

Continue reading Paul Gregory…

We are in a fresh round of declinism — understandably, after borrowing nearly $5 trillion in less than three years and having very little to show for it. Pundit strives with op-ed writer to find the latest angle on America’s descent: We are broke; we are poorly educated; we are uncompetitive; we have gone soft; our political institutions are broken; and on and on. The Obama administration does its part, with sloganeering like “reset,” “lead from behind,” “post-American world,” and America as exceptional only to the degree that all nations feel exceptional.

This is not new. In the late 1930s, the New Germany and its autobahns were supposed to show Depression-plagued America how national will could unite a people to do great things. After all, they had Triumph of the Will Nuremberg rallies; we still had Hoovervilles. They flew sleek Me-109s; we flew lumbering cloth-covered Brewster Buffaloes. We, the victors of a world war, were determined never to repeat it; they, the losers, were eager to try it again.

Continue reading Victor Davis Hanson…

The war in Iraq has been costly, though most of the cost was avoidable. Taking sovereign power in Iraq to convert it into the first genuine Arab democracy was unnecessary and unwise. We must avoid making the cost of securing our future against potentially ruinous dangers unaffordable.

But the war was worth the cost, for one reason above all: It freed the world of a dangerous, determined, and irrational leader who had the means and inclination to continue inflicting massive destruction and suffering on the Iraqi people, neighboring states, and the international community.

Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz supported the invasion after reciting the litany of Saddam’s many crimes, in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and elsewhere. He wrote: “No other dictator matches his record of war, oppression, use of weapons of mass destruction, and continuing contemptuous violation of international law, as set out by unanimous actions of the UN Security Council.”

Continue reading Abraham Sofaer…

(photo credit: Haddy Bello)

These remarks were delivered at the November 2 Conference on Ronald Reagan, Intelligence and the End of the Cold War, co-sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Reagan Presidential Library.  They were taped by C-SPAN for later airing.

The Central Intelligence Agency and the Reagan Presidential Library have put together a fascinating collection of documents, recently declassified, of two different and complementary types– CIA documents produced during the Reagan administration, primarily on the Soviet Union, and some of the Reagan Presidential Library’s documents from the National Security Council (NSC). They’re available at the Reagan Library and on the CIA web site.

The CIA documents reveal what the agency was telling Reagan and his administration–their best estimates and predictions about the Soviet economy, the military, changes in their leadership, their foreign currency problems, the importance to them of the Siberian gas pipeline. In other words, the intelligence Reagan was getting, directly or through his advisers.

It’s the National Security Council documents that show Reagan in action. Reagan chaired 355 meetings of the NSC, and a note taker recorded what everyone, including the President, said. The documents were first used in the book Martin Anderson and I wrote, Reagan’s Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster (2009). Following the meeting the President signed directives on the decisions he reached, and some of those too–National Security Decision Directives and National Security Study Directives–are part of this collection. That’s what I’m going to talk about–the decisions Reagan made and how he made them.

Here are the basic points:

First, Ronald Reagan’s views on the Soviet Union and his strategy for dealing with them were well established when he took office, and he knew what he wanted to do.

Second, Reagan made all the decisions. This is the most striking conclusion that comes from reading the minutes of the NSC and Reagan’s personal diary, in which he wrote virtually every day.

Third, Reagan’s policies and the decisions he made had a profound effect on what the Soviet Union did, its leadership, and its decision to abandon the Cold War. It wasn’t all baked in the cake.

Reagan was at once so personally courteous and amiable and at the same time painted by the press as a cowboy inclined to shoot from the hip that it took a long time for us to understand him–and how well and adroitly he used the intelligence he got from CIA and elsewhere.

Reagan the Strategist

First, Reagan’s Strategy. We know a lot more about Reagan’s views and strategy he intended to follow than we did then because of the publication of Reagan’s own writings, which weren’t all available at the time. Reagan’s strategy did not change while he was in office, as some writers think it did.

On Reagan’s strategy, here’s a quotation from a speech draft he wrote in 1963. It sums up his strategy and his goals. He said, “…the only sure way to avoid war is to surrender without fighting. ..the other way is based on the belief (supported so far by all evidence) that in an all out race our system is stronger, and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause. Then a noble nation believing in peace extends the hand of friendship and says there is room in the world for both of us.” Think of it, 1963.

Reagan continued to have confidence in the American people and democracy and free markets. It was fundamental in his 1980 campaign. We forget quickly the prevailing views in the 1970s–including those of Henry Kissinger–that the United States, with democracy and free markets, might not be able to compete with a totalitarian government that could allocate resources–which they heavily allocated to military purposes –and repress dissent among the population.

Reagan told the nation his views on military strength in a radio commentary in early 1975, not long after the end of his two terms as governor of California: “Enough evidence of weakness or lack of will power could tempt the Soviets as it once tempted Hitler and the rulers of Japan. . . . Power is not only sufficient military strength but a sound economy, a reliable energy supply, and credibility–the belief by any potential enemy that you will not choose surrender as the way to maintain peace.”

From 1975 to 1979 Reagan did 1,024 radio commentaries, 686 of which he wrote himself on yellow pads. In a 1975 commentary he said that “Communism is neither an economic or a political system–it is a form of insanity–a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature.” In a December 1976 commentary he credited American’s economic and political strength to the system that “freed the individual genius of man.”

That was all in the time between his 8 years as governor and his 1980 campaign for the presidency. In an August 18,1980 campaign speech Reagan made his “peace without surrender” policy clear, calling for a military buildup. He said:

“I’ve called for whatever it takes to be so strong that no other national will dare violate the peace…world peace must be our number one priority….But it must not be peace at any price; it must not be a peace of humiliation and gradual surrender….It is important, also that the Soviets know we are going about the business of building up our defense capability pending an agreement by both sides to limit various kinds of weapons.”

Reagan did not think the Soviets wanted war. They wanted, he thought, victory without war:

“The Soviets want peace and victory,” Reagan said in the same 1980 campaign speech. “They seek a superiority in nuclear strength that, in the event of a confrontation, would leave us with a choice of surrender or die…but if we have the will and the determination to build a deterrent capability we can have real peace because we will never be faced with such an ultimatum. Indeed, the men in the Kremlin could in the face of such a determination decide that true arms limitation makes sense.”

Once in office Reagan pursued verifiable arms reduction, not just limitation, and from 1982 on expressed his ultimate goal–a dream, he called it– as the complete elimination of nuclear weapons from the earth.

Reagan the Decision Maker

Second, Reagan carried out his policies with concrete decisions. In his first NSC meeting, February 6, 1981, with all his top advisers present, said this: “I will use the NSC structure to obtain your guidance, but I will make the decisions.”

Reagan was very conscious of his prerogatives as a decision maker. When Reagan fired Alexander Haig, his first secretary of state, and replaced him with George Shultz, he commented in his personal diary on Haig’s claims of policy differences: “Actually the only disagreement was over whether I made policy or the Secretary of State did.”

Reagan was well aware of conflicts among his policy advisers. Half a dozen entries in his diary show his concern–not that they differed in policy, but that they weren’t working effectively together and were talking to the press about it. It’s a mistake, I believe, to characterize them as hawks versus doves. None of them was a sympathizer with the communist system; rather, they disagreed about the approaches to achieve objectives they in fact shared.

Two of President Reagan’s decisions early in his administration are especially important: first, his “zero-zero” decision, announced November 18, 1981, to pursue the elimination of intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe and, if the Soviets didn’t remove their missiles targeted on cities in Europe, to introduce Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe; and second, his decision, announced March 23, 1983, to undertake research on a defense against ballistic missiles–the Strategic Defense Initiative announced in March 1983.

The NSC minutes of various meetings also reveal the many decisions he made to limit Soviet access to Western technology and sources of hard currency and his efforts to encourage U.S. allies to do the same. In doing so he was taking specific actions to carry out his long-held view that the Soviet Union should bear the full burden of its economic system–the West shouldn’t help them. Let me go back to the same 1963 speech I quoted earlier. In that speech he also asked, “If we truly believe that our way of life is best aren’t the Russians more likely to recognize that fact and modify their stand if we let their economy come unhinged so that the contrast is apparent? Inhuman though it may sound, shouldn’t we throw the whole burden of feeding the satellites on their slave masters who are having trouble feeding themselves?’

Reagan’s Accomplishments: It Wasn’t All Baked in the Cake

Third, Reagan’s accomplishments as president were considerable, and they changed the way the Soviet Union behaved. The Soviet Union had to deal with U.S. policies–not only the military buildup, but the revitalized U.S. economy. The U.S. economy recovered from the 1981-82 recession not only with economic growth and jobs, but with extraordinary developments in technology–including computers and weapons technology.

It wasn’t until the U.S. economy was clearly booming and Reagan got reelected that the Soviets decided to return to the arms control bargaining table. They agreed to do so just days after Reagan’s reelection. It’s possible to argue that the leader the Politburo selected in March 1985–Mikhail Gorbachev–was himself a product of the challenges the United States posed to the Soviets. They badly needed reform and revitalization.

Eventually, in October 1987, after two Reagan-Gorbachev summits and six years after Reagan first proposed zero-zero, they agreed to complete the negotiations on eliminating intermediate range weapons targeted on Europe. Gorbachev had long tried to get Reagan to restrict SDI research to the laboratory in exchange for an agreement and a summit to sign it. The treaty was finally signed in Washington on December 8, 1987.

The CIA documents provide additional evidence that the Strategic Defense Initiative frightened the Soviets and also show that the Soviets were working hard to develop further their own defense against ballistic missiles. Reagan’s concern is reflected in the NSC minutes.

The CIA documents show that the agency did a good job of analyzing the problems of the Soviet economy. They’re less clear, presenting differing views, on the Soviet military buildup. In spite of their economic difficulties, the Soviets were modernizing their nuclear arsenal, developing new weapons, and adding warheads as they had been doing since the Eisenhower administration. By 1978 they had more warheads than the United States. They added to their arsenal at about 2,000 a year through 1986–two years after Gorbachev came to power–when they had almost twice as many nuclear warheads as the United States.

In 1987 the number of Soviet nuclear warheads began declining. The START I treaty on strategic weapons was in the works. Mikhail Gorbachev stated in 2009 that he and Reagan negotiated 75 percent of that treaty. Both sides continued to reduce their nuclear arsenals, and by 2010 the Russians had about 12,000 warheads; the United States was down to about 5,000. It was dramatic change.

Reagan was the first president in history to persuade the Soviets to actually reduce their nuclear arsenal. In 1988, Reagan’s last year in the presidency, Gorbachev announced reductions in conventional forces, especially those in Eastern Europe. The Cold War was over.

Reagan did not crow. “Freedom won,” he said, “as we always knew it would.”

(photo credit: macprohawaii)