REYKJAVIK: BEGINNING OF THE END OF REAGANISM!
Clark, Joseph
The Reykjavik summit may have been a failure— as the demeanor of its participants clearly indicated when it was over; or, it may have been a tremendous success—after the participants...
...The outcome of most of the senatorial races was influenced in part by this issue even though local economics often overshadowed other considerations...
...after films, books, stories, and articles impressed the world with the total devastation that would follow a nuclear conflict...
...It was also noteworthy that interviews with Russian school children revealed that they too feared the destruction of all life in the event of a nuclear war...
...this despite those Soviet military experts who are still being quoted by their counterparts in this country as believing that nuclear wars can be fought and won...
...But Reagan produced a kicker to go with that avowal—Star Wars...
...ON REFLECTION IT MAY BE that Reaganism produced an earlier sign—about three years ago—that it had attained its zenith and was about to begin its historical descent...
...We cannot reduce existing limits by scrapping them...
...The one Dissent Power...
...George F Kennan, for example, who was the first to make the proposal for a 50 percent reduction of nuclear arms, joined with reputable colleagues to urge that Reagan be supported in his position on Star Wars...
...Electioneering Efforts REAGAN'S TURNABOUT ON THE MATTER Of winning a nuclear war was accompanied by his discovery of a new panacea, Star Wars or the Strategic Defense Initiative...
...He got around that one by officially declaring that the meeting of the two people at the summit of their respective governments—was not a summit...
...Off-the-Mark Criticism AT THIS POINT THE SADDEST RESULT of the Reykjavik meeting is that so much of the comment, even from persons of good will who would ordinarily be on the side of nuclear disarmament, has been critical of the "utopian" goals that were discussed and even agreed upon at the meeting...
...In his haste to meet with Gorbachev before the elections, Reagan revealed a capacity for bumbling and confusion that seemed, in a perverse sort of way, destined to make Gorbachev look much better...
...Gorbachev knew what a political animal he was dealing with at a moment when Reagan was more than anxious to impress the electorate (and Nancy, too, it is said) with his devotion to nuclear disarmament and world peace...
...As a matter of record, Georgi Arbatov, a top Soviet American-affairs expert, appearing on American television, said the Soviets were only too happy to help Reagan assume the role of peacenik...
...The alacrity with which Reagan accepted Gorbachev's invitation was surely evidence that the nuclear arms race would become an important issue in the senatorial campaigns...
...but it could not withstand the sentiments of people everywhere, even in the darkest and farthest reaches of geography and politics...
...To put the matter more sharply: the Bostonbased Council for a Livable World conducted a nationwide effort in behalf of nuclear disarmament and it endorsed seventeen Democratic senatorial candidates who supported this position...
...This obscured the fact that real issues were in the center of the campaign, and these included the nuclear arms race and disarmament...
...Not enough has been noted of the extraordinary lengths to which he went in the weeks before November 4 to influence the outcome of these senatorial campaigns...
...Much has been made, and properly so, of the impact, or lack of impact, of Reagan's whirlwind electioneering tour in all the major senatorial races...
...Thirteen 14 were victorious after Reagan campaigned in almost all their states, putting his emphasis on Star Wars and condemning the Democrats for not supporting it...
...WHEN REAGAN FINALLY DISAVOWED the possibility of winning a nuclear war he was following in the footsteps of a hero of his, General Douglas MacArthur...
...He made a deal with Japan for a drop in its interest rates in order to get our stock market moving upward...
...The administration would like to dump the 15 SALT II agreement, after years of adherence, by deploying a 131st cruise missile-carrying B-52 bomber...
...As Paul Warnke wrote recently, "We cannot facilitate new agreements by throwing out old ones...
...We'll get to it next time...
...REAGAN CAME BACK AND IN HIS ELECTION barnstorming gave as many as four differing versions of what he and Gorbachev had agreed to before the meeting broke up over Star Wars...
...issue of the socialist journal Dissent to the current populist campaign against gentrification and new luxury condominiums...
...SAMUEL LIPMAN, The New Criterion, SUMMER 1986 q issue that can be settled between the Communists and the United States, MacArthur lectured the veterans, is that of war in the nuclear age...
...or, it may have been a tremendous success—after the participants reconsidered their Icelandic labors twenty-four hours later, both here and in Moscow...
...With respect to the latter, some of those who criticized descriptions of the dire consequences of nuclear war have been unfair and irrelevant...
...If anything is clear from all that happened before, during, and after Reykjavik, it is that Star Wars is the single major obstacle standing in the way of nuclear arms reduction...
...Justified criticism has been leveled against the conduct of the recent congressional elections because of the mud-slinging and in many instances because candidates failed to discuss the real issues...
...q This issue of Dissent was prepared before the news broke of the Reaganite-Iran scandal...
...No longer does it possess the chance of a winner of a duel—it contains rather the germs of double suicide," he told the astonished Legionnaires...
...This view promised humankind a straightforward march to oblivion...
...Never had people pronounced a more decisive veto than this one—that a nuclear war must never be fought...
...Almost everywhere the Republicans outspent the Democrats many times over, but the one-and-a-half million dollars that the Council raised and contributed to these candidates was apparently better spent...
...One major conclusion can be drawn: Nuclear arms reduction and the elimination of nuclear arms have returned to the center of world affairs...
...and even more terrifying, that nuclear wars can be fought and won...
...Though my favorite American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., thinks the next switch of the American historical cycle is not due till the 1990s, the Democratic sweep of the Senate and House can well be the harbinger of a decisive turn away from the philosophy of greed as the ultimate arbiter of all economic matters, and a nuclear arms race as the basis of foreign policy...
...Reagan's turnabout on the "no win" aspect of nuclear conflict came after western Europe was swept by antinuclear movements and demonstrations...
...its corollary, that we cannot make deals with the Evil Empire...
...EDS...
...after an amazing demonstration in New York's Central Park brought together the largest 13 rally this city had ever seen, some three-quarters of a million people...
...they stand where they belong—at the top of the world agenda...
...That Reagan is using it with all deliberation as a means of blocking real progress on the issue is indicated by the efforts to kill SALT II...
...Arranged hastily, the Icelandic meeting was significant for its timing—three weeks before the U.S...
...Upon his election in 1980 and till 1983, a fundamental tenet of pure and unadulterated Reaganite foreign policy was the striving for nuclear arms supremacy...
...Similarly, the past twenty-five years have been full of the demand for the elimination of private driving from Manhattan...
...But the subsequent Vienna meeting of the secretary of state and the Soviet foreign minister underlined the failure and reiterated the obstacle—call it Star Wars or Strategic Defense Initiative...
...when he got there he didn't know where he was...
...whether all life, or "just" most life will be extinguished, doesn't matter that much...
...He made a deal to subsidize wheat sales to the Evil Empire so that it could buy bread cheaper than we do...
...And now we are experiencing an unprecedented development—widespread disillusionment with Reagan and Reaganism because of the secret deals with Iran to swap arms for hostages...
...Reagan was an early convert to the fundamentalist mumbo jumbo about the inevitability of Armageddon, and he affirmed it on several occasions...
...He made deals with the Iranian terrorists for release of a few American hostages, while warning our allies and the Arab states not to dare negotiate with Iranian terrorists...
...Gorbachev knew his adversary far better than Reagan knew his...
...If you lose, you are annihilated...
...He upped farm subsidies to levels demanded by farm-state Democrats, the highest in history...
...The general had urged the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War, but by the time of his seventy-fifth birthday in 1955, he traveled to Los Angeles to tell an American Legion banquet that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States could win a nuclear war...
...After much denial there was finally an admission that Reagan and Gorbachev had indeed agreed that in the second five-year period of nuclear arms reduction the aim would be to get rid of all, emphasis on all, strategic nuclear arms, not just ballistic missiles...
...We cannot move toward a safer world by shooting SALT between the eyes and ourselves in the foot...
...Jerome Grossman, executive officer of the Council, points out that in Colorado the senatorial race was a referendum on nuclear disarmament...
...The Council also endorsed fifty-one House candidates, of whom thirty-three won...
...and when he returned he didn't know where he had been...
...there is a straight line connecting Percival and Paul Goodman's impassioned plea for such a ban in the very same issue of Dissent with the now successful fight against the Westway super-highway project...
...after members of both House and Senate indicated they would vote for a moratorium on nuclear bomb testing...
...The biggest ploy of all was the summit at Reykjavik, after the president had solemnly promised not to stage a summit before the elections...
...This would be in direct violation of the SALT II agreement...
...The lack of preparation by "our side" was indicated by the surprise and confusion of the president when the Soviets made their proposals...
...One of the best-informed Washington correspondents, Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News, compared Reagan at Reykjavik to Columbus: he didn't know where he was going...
...If you win, you stand only to lose...
...Finally, in his third year of office, Reagan responded, declaring and repeating what most had known for a long time: that no one, no power in the world can win a nuclear war...
...The charge of speculative and unplanned overbuilding leveled against the real-estate industry in New York is a constant theme, running from Daniel M. Friedenberg's piece in the 1961 New York, N.Y...
...elections...
Vol. 34 • January 1987 • No. 1
