Diplomatic Hubris
Matlock, Jack F. Jr.
Diplomatic Hubris Reagan and Gorbachev: How The Cold War Ended Jack F. Matlock, Jr. (Random House, 363 pages, $27.95) Reviewed by Angelo M. Codevilla JACK MATLOCK was a fine career Foreign...
...system could change...
...It comprised "protection for human rights, opening of the Soviet Union, reducing weaponry, and disengaging from armed conflicts in third countries...
...Correct or not about Reagan's benevolence toward the Soviet Union, Matlock is certainly right about George H.W...
...In 1989-91, instead of pressures from the outside, the Soviet Union got all the aid that America's and Europe's best and brightest could think of...
...The Soviet Union was built on the Communist Party's ability to kill its enemies...
...If this were true, Reagan's speeches to the effect that the Soviet Union had to die because its evil core was not reformable were window dressing...
...To no avail...
...Random House, 363 pages, $27.95) Reviewed by Angelo M. Codevilla JACK MATLOCK was a fine career Foreign Service Officer...
...Protecting human rights and opening places they ruled to the movement of people and ideas was poison to their regime...
...The Cold War ended, Matlock argues, because BOOKS IN REVIEW Ronald Reagan pursued a four-part diplomatic agenda that was "worked out in Washington in 1983 and announced as official U.S...
...That fear gone, the Soviets felt safe in turning foreign policy from a search for advantage to the joint promotion of human welfare, and domestic policy from monopolizing Communist power to something like democracy...
...Nevertheless Matlock acknowledges that Gorbachev did not reform the Soviet Union, in part because of "the inherent difficulty of the task" as well as because of "tactical mistakes...
...Thus he praises Reagan for allegedly believing "unlike many of his advisers" that the Soviet Angelo M. Codevilla is a professor of international relations at Boston University, a fellow of the Claremont Institute, and a senior editor of TAS...
...The main problem with Matlock's explanation of what happened in 1989-91, as well as with those of others "at the highest levels," is that they take no account of the popular tidal waves on which they were, at best, surfers...
...That impotence ended both the Cold War, and the Soviet Union...
...He made no commitment to withdraw from Eastern Europe or to let go of Afghanistan...
...Matlock's premise is that the increase in diplomatic contact that he and Secretary of State George Shultz made part of Reagan policy, despite Caspar Weinberger and William Casey, really convinced Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze that they had nothing to fear from America...
...But if Gorbachev meant what he said, he had overcome the ideological and material bases for the Cold War...
...Matlock is also not immune to another of professional diplomats' temptations: to see their own attitudes and agendas as the truest reflection of their government's...
...that Soviet foreign policy would serve the interests of mankind, and the Politburo that he would cut the size of the Soviet armed forces...
...He acknowledges that Gorbachev couched his arguments in anti-American terms...
...Matlock writes that the Cold War ended—in principle—in December 1988 when Mikhail Gorbachev told the UN...
...The dictators knew that superiority in armament and expansion of the empire were necessary to its survival, and to their own power...
...So, what could possibly persuade them to drink the Hemlock...
...Bush's...
...Recall, as few do, the subtle diplomatic formulas laboriously elaborated by American and European diplomats in 1990 for balancing Soviet and NATO troops in central Europe and for federating East and West Germany...
...could serve the Soviet peoples better than confrontation...
...Of course what made the Soviet Union such a problem was that its dictators never cared for the interests of the peoples they ruled...
...They came to naught because Germans wanted to reunite, period, central Europeans wanted zero Soviet troops, period, and the Soviet Communist party had lost the wherewithal to drown them in blood...
...He "advised the non-Russian Soviet republics in August 1991 to endorse Gorbachev's union treaty...
...Even if one holds that it did not end until all the major problems engendered by the Cold War had been solved, one can hardly argue that it continued after that...
...But surely those problems—from East Germany to Nicaragua—became soluble only because the Soviets who made them problems were collapsing at home...
...In 1983 he succeeded Richard Pipes as President Reagan's senior adviser on Soviet affairs...
...We do know that during the two years he remained in his job thereafter, Gorbachev lost whatever capacity to hold on to power OCTOBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 BOOKS IN REVIEW anywhere, including Moscow...
...Promised democratic reforms at home had not been implemented and might easily be undone by fraud or force...
...Though Matlock accepts implicitly a causal relationship between high level meetings and revolutionary events, the reader is likely to see only correlations...
...How wise then was anyone who, as did "American and West European leaders" in 1991, "preferred to see the Soviet Union preserved as a democratic federation (minus the Baltics of course) rather than broken up, as actually occurred...
...Matlock sees things differently: "The Cold War ended well before the Soviet Union collapsed...
...Lots of human contact showed them we were nice guys—but tough...
...The book's beginning, but chiefly its end, argues that the diplomatic activities in which he played a part were a sine qua non of the Cold War's end—while the Soviet Union's collapse was not...
...The end of the Cold War gave its leaders an opportunity to reform its system of governance without pressures from the outside...
...So long as it did that, no diplomacy could mitigate its evil...
...Between 1986 and 1989 he served as U.S...
...According to Matlock, Reagan believed "he could convince the Soviet leaders that these goals...
...When it ceased being able to kill, no diplomacy could save it...
...Matlock's Reagan—just like Franklin Roosevelt—really aimed at cooperation with the Soviet Union, and believed that the negotiating process would help change it...
...Neither Soviets nor captive Europeans could travel freely...
...The bulk of this book is his professional memoir of the years that preceded the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War...
...policy in 1984...
...Soviet support was still flowing to allies in the Third World...
...This belief in the thaumaturgic power of contact is the essence of diplomats' deformation professionelle...
...ambassador in Moscow...
...Matlock is on firmer ground when he writes: "The Soviet Union collapsed as a state despite the end of the Cold War, not because of it...
...We will never know what Gorbachev meant...
Vol. 37 • October 2004 • No. 8
