The Reagan Doctrine and Counterrevolution
WRITING A YEAR AND A HALF AGO IN THE New York Times, former Nixon speechwriter William Safire warned that "openly paying the bills for the overthrow of a government is an act of war, and that...
...Proponents of this outlook came into public view briefly in the 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater...
...America will support you with moral and material assistance, your right not just to fight and die for freedom but to fight and win freedom in Afghanistan...
...We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country.'"6 Among the New Right variants, the most prominent common denominator is anti-communism--constituting an ideological lodestar as well as a means to capture political power...
...As an issue, Central America was a national security problem, close to home, and a metaphor for challenging the ideological advance of communism...
...For their part, the Administration believed that its Nicaragua policy could be exploited more easily than any domestic issue: it played on the fundamental anti-communism of the political culture...
...The consequence of casting the Nicaraguan conflict in universal terms is having to confront intolerable loss in the absence of total victory...
...But in the wake of his defeat New Right interventionists melted into the political spectrum, promoting President Johnson's conduct of the war in Vietnam...
...4 (Spring 1985), p. 713...
...the Republicans recognize they need this grassroots constituency if they are going to wrest permanently the mass base from the Democrats...
...The attitude was driven by a belief that in the past 10-15 years, while the United States had droppped its guard, the Soviets had exploited economic and political difficulties in the West to expand their own influence, boldly intervening in Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Afghanistan and most recently in Nicaragua...
...For Ronald Reagan, the real threat to the United States is no longer Nicaragua as a perceived Soviet beachhead...
...The Reagan Doctrine accordingly proclaims that the effort must be total-ideological, economic, psychological, military...
...resolve...
...4 In Eastern Europe the Eisenhower Administration's rhetoric was mistaken for policy-with disastrous consequences in 1956...
...A realistic analysis of the nation's foreign policy options has given way to a single imperative: to protect the credibility of U.S...
...6 The president's public embrace of a worldwide goal of rollback constituted a signal triumph for the New Right and Neoconservatives, who had been hawking the idea incessantly since Reagan took office...
...7. Shultz, in Foreign Affairs, p. 707...
...6. The New York Times, March 3, 1985...
...To those imprisoned in regimes held captive, to those beaten for daring to fight for freedom and democracy . . . we say to you tonight: you are not alone, freedom fighters...
...A direct military intervention to salvage the policy, while devoutly hoped for in certain circles of the New Right, would violate the fundamental tenets of the Reagan Doctrineand probably bury it...
...It also involves a small amount of money...
...Our nation's vital interests and moral responsibility require us to stand by our friends in their struggle for freedom...
...George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp...
...Ibid., p. 93...
...foreign policy during the Carter years, they regrouped behind the rising star of Ronald Reagan and successfully portrayed the United States under the Democrats as a "helpless giant...
...For the Reagan Administration, friendly regimes-democratic or not-are the goal...
...it has become a major prop for Administration policy--lobbying, publicizing and, most prominently in the case of the Nicaraguan rebels, implementing it...
...As the New Right defined it, regional conflicts involving Soviet interests would become critical tests of U.S...
...FitzGerald, in The New Yorker, p. 100...
...A foreign policy informed primarily by moral idealism is a slippery slope...
...The evangelical Right today goes well beyond the tradition of missionaries acting as the imperial handmaidens of "American civilization...
...The Reagan Doctrine has enabled the Administration to reinforce its links to the religious Right...
...One either plants the flag of victory at the top or tumbles to ignominious defeat...
...And referring specifically to Central America he added that "our policy is to promote democracy, reform and human rights . . . to help provide a security shield against those who seek to spread tyranny by force...
...had no immediate impact on people's lives...
...prestige in the effort's success have combined to reduce the "lowrisk" attractiveness of the Reagan Doctrine as applied to Nicaragua...
...But this is more than a power struggle with the Soviet Union...
...But the ideological zeal with which the Administration has pursued its campaign against Nicaragua has ironically made it particularly vulnerable to defeat...
...policy in the Caribbean Basin has been predicated on the need to preserve U.S...
...power abroad...
...defeat in Southeast Asia was devastating to the Right and made them determined to rebuild American power worldwide...
...military aggression secured a favorable climate for trade and investment in the region and U.S...
...For the struggle here," he continued, 'is not between Right versus Left, but right versus wrong...
...and for a time, rhetoric could substitute for success and even front for a coherent policy...
...This aggressive new approach dates back to early 1985, when in his February State of the Union address, President Reagan declared: "We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives-on every contiREPORT ON THE AMERICAS 14nent . . . to defy Soviet-sponsored aggression and secure rights which have been ours since birth...
...The Reagan Doctrine and Counterrevolution 1. The New York Times, February 14, 1985...
...Neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol writes that the "war of the worlds," as he puts it, is likely to go on, and the United States should aim "to win this war, instead of pursuing a defensive policy that sees stalemate as the goal...
...rather it is the collapse of his Nicaragua policy...
...Such a policy is at once a logical extension and the obverse of counterinsurgency support for pro-Western governments threatened with revolution...
...The strategy involved the establishment of military units of exiled soldiers for liberating the "captive nations" of Eastern Europe and the recognition of exile governments...
...Shultz, in Foreign Affairs, p. 707...
...The image of Central America under attack from godless communists was created and elaborated to rescue the faltering alliance...
...Realizing this, Reagan is determined to pursue the bloody war of attrition which he began in 1981...
...4 Central America-and Nicaragua in particular-was in fact the crucible in which the Reagan Doctrine was forged...
...resolve...
...troops are not involved...
...Right-wing evangelicals, already convinced of the need to wipe out the Nicaraguan communists, rallied to the new crusade almost immediately...
...In the international arena fundamentalists share with Ronald Reagan "a suspicion of the rest of the world, an impatience with its complexities, and a desire for solutions that are simple...
...This is not surprising...
...The latter's passionate embrace of a born-again society converges neatly with the throaty revival of U.S...
...As Secretary of State Shultz said in April 1984, "American credibility is itself a vital interest...
...8. Ibid., pp...
...Ibid., p. 95...
...As such, however, it goes beyond the postwar goal of containment, proposing to shape events by projecting U.S...
...The Washington Post, February 4, 1984...
...BOTH THE NEW RIGHT AND NEOCONSERvatives are obsessed with the Third World as the ideological and practical battleground in which the struggle for world dominance between the United States and the Soviet Union will be played out...
...But this time U.S...
...interests in the world, not just react to Soviet behavior...
...9. Layne, in Foreign Policy, p.77...
...HE ASCENDANCY OF THE NEW RIGHTboth religious and secular-owes a great deal to its ability to project a moral vision in its domestic and international agenda...
...Gradually a new vision evolved, which policy analysts began calling the "Reagan Doctrine...
...Historically mistrustful of political involvement, fundamentalists have in recent years spearheaded the social and political activism of the Christian Right...
...WRITING A YEAR AND A HALF AGO IN THE New York Times, former Nixon speechwriter William Safire warned that "openly paying the bills for the overthrow of a government is an act of war, and that requires a declaration of war by Congress," concluding the U.S...
...The means by which this goal is to be realized is worldwide sponsorship of counterrevolution, specifically by the use of proxy armies...
...The revolt of the Hungarian "freedom fighters" in that year stemmed in great part from the conviction that Eisenhower would deliver on "his promise" to push back the Soviet lines in Europe...
...Thus, hard-nosed anti-communism is given a democratic veneer and infused with moral passion...
...it is a transcendent crusade for "hearts and minds" and it must be joined on all levels, in every corner of the earth...
...Since the battle was for the world, "the only alternative to the communist World Empire is an American Empire which will be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control...
...The stakes now in Nicaragua are much greater than any combination of regional security concerns...
...As El Salvador appeared to stabilize under newly elected president Jos6 Napole6n Duarte and media attention faded, Nicaragua became the touchstone of the Administration's global anti-communism...
...The humiliation of the U.S...
...Secretary of State George P. Shultz wrote in 1985: "Our ties with our democratic friends abroad have an enduring quality precisely because they rest on a moral base, not only a base of strategic interest...
...Surrogate armies will avoid direct confrontations with the Soviets or fatal quagmires such as Vietnam that could reverse the momentum...
...It is low-risk warfare with a tremendously high political pay-off...
...foreign policy interests...
...For their part, TV evangelists such as Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggert encourage "obedience to political leaders as representatives of God...
...The clash of U.S.-Soviet interests is thus central to the vision as well as the justification of U.S...
...2. The New York Times, February 5, 1986...
...Its ties reach into Congress and to the very top of the executive branch...
...If the rhetoric never liberated a captive nation, it was more successful at home, engendering the victory of New Right internationalism over the traditional isolationist wing of the Republican Party and legitimating "global anti-communism...
...Today, as yesterday, moral imperatives are offered to cloak naked aggression and military occupation in the region...
...Right, such as James Burnham, rejected the fatalism implicit in the strategy of containment, which was based on acceptance of post-World War II spheres of influence...
...The strategy is seen by its enthusiasts as maximally efficient...
...Our credibility would collapse, our alliances would crumble, and the safety of our homeland would be put in jeopardy...
...it reflected a shift within the Reagan Administration itself...
...interests worldwide...
...61 (Winter 1985-1986), p. 77...
...BACK IN THE COLD WAR DAYS OF THE 1950s, the first and most forceful advocates of Soviet rollback were Central European intellectuals such as Gerhart Niemeyer, Stefan Possony (later a leading member of the World Anti-Communist League) and Robert Strausz-Hup6 (a personal mentor of the current Navy Secretary, John F. Lehman), who emigrated to the United States in the 1950s and soon became prominent anti-Soviet strategists for the right wing of the Republican Party...
...The goal of dictatortoppling is not to share power...
...We are different from previous generations of conservatives," says New Right ideologue Paul Weyrich...
...i~U~Witart W HAT DISTINGUISHES THE RELIGIOUS right today is not its political involvement but its understanding and use of political power...
...In the intervening period, the foreign policy doctrine of rollback, once a dream of the far Right, had become stated Administration policy, formalized in the so-called Reagan Doctrine...
...While some continued to see a need for a clear-cut issue around which to crystallize an aggressive anti-Soviet stance as late as mid-1985, the Administration early on saw Central America as such an issue, infusing it with apocalyptic urgency...
...But such pragmatic reductionism dilutes the idealism professed by the Administration, and makes it difficult to generate public support for its ideological projects...
...7 U PON ASSUMING OFFICE IN 1981, THE REAgan Administration set out to restore what it saw as the loss of credibility of U.S...
...From their bully pulpits they called for aid to Reagan's "freedom fighters," regarding Nicaragua as the central battle in a holy war in defense of the Christian West...
...Early in his first term Reagan came under withering attack from ultra-conservatives for his lack of commitment in pursuing their domestic agenda...
...authority through exuberant power projection and a return to the principle of active intervention...
...4. Cited in Frances FitzGerald, "The American Millenium," The New Yorker, November 11, 1983, p. 109...
...In its reliance on proxies, the doctrine owes much to John Kennedy's counterinsurgency projects and the Nixon and Truman Doctrines, according to which the United States could intervene through the surrogate forces of friendly governments to protect U.S...
...At its radical core, the doctrine of rollback asserts that only by taking offensive action can the Soviet Union be contained...
...and in Nicaragua.'"2 And a month later, in a message to Congress entitled "Freedom, Regional Security, and Global Peace," he reiterated his commitment to the "democratic revolution...
...In March 1986, the columnist argued in the same space that we must give the contras enough money to triumph: "not to settle with the Sandinistas but to topple them...
...Many saw-and continue to see-the growing movement led by the Right as the vanguard of a new and self-defined concept of morality and the chrysalis for breathing life into an array of unadulterated "American" values...
...In their view, the world is a matrix of interdependent situations, the unfolding of which results in gains or losses for one or the other of the two superpowers and their respective economic and political systems...
...Consequently, they saw traditional balance-of-power strategies, which had informed past great power rivalries, as dangerously irrelevant...
...For them, the USSR was not simply the chief rival of the United States, but "the state form taken by a materialist faith determined to rule the world...
...63, no...
...The goal of the Reagan Doctrine is to roll back the Soviet empire by attacking it at its weaker extremities in the Third World...
...They enthusiastically embrace a dualistic view of truth and purity in ongoing global conflict with evil and corruption...
...The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), p. 49...
...Arnaud de Borchgrave on William Buckley's Firing Line, Public Broadcasting System, February 2, 1986...
...in Cambodia...
...political and economic dominance-by force, if necessary...
...The problem the Administration faces in posing a counter-ideology to that of the Soviet Union is that the United States, unlike the Soviet Union, does not necessarily derive a greater sense of security from the replication of its own system in governments around the world...
...268-269...
...The policy was forcefully articulated in President Reagan's February 4, 1986 address before a joint session of Congress...
...White House decision-makers also knew that ideological ardor aside, the resistance of a majority of the population to social rollback and the complexities of domestic politics would make it difficult to deliver on the New Right's shopping list...
...prestige than abandoning the rebels...
...Despite the affinity of interests, however, the Administration soon learned that it could not always rely JULY/AUGUST 1986 0 L m 17ROWING DRAGON A'S TEETH SOWING DRAGON'S TEETH on the New Right's allegiance to Republican politics...
...3 Burnham stressed the vulnerability of the Soviet camp to "political-subversive warfare" and recommended using refugees and resistance movements as surrogates to open up fronts behind the Iron Curtain...
...They also clearly hoped to ride the issue to political power...
...We are no longer working to preserve the status quo...
...Thus, in Reagan's words, the rebels trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua are "the moral equal of our Founding Fathers...
...Parodying Soviet rhetoric, George Shultz spoke of shifting the "global correlation of forces" and creating "objective realities that give the Soviets a growing stake in better relations with us across the board...
...entrepreneurs in turn enthusiastically embraced Washington's regional power projection...
...By multiplying the costs for establishing Third World socialist regimes, the policy of global counterrevolution would give Moscow a taste of its own medicine by creating a demonstration effect in reverse: a model for deterring future revolutions...
...3. Cited in Christopher Layne, "The Real Conservative Agenda," Foreign Policy, no...
...5 The morality invoked for the support of anticommunist insurgencies is the spread of freedom and democracy...
...Representative of the new political thrust of rightwing fundamentalists are the electronic crusades of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network...
...March 3, 1986...
...John S. Saloma, Ominous Politics...
...see also bookmark distributed by CBN's 700 Club...
...Throughout the 20th century U.S...
...Jerry Falwell spoke of America's mission for "world evangelization," with Central America its first target and Nicaragua the foremost testing ground for the defeat of atheistic communism...
...In a May 1983 speech to a joint session of Congress, Reagan stated: "If we cannot defend ourselves there, we cannot expect to prevail elsewhere...
...Safire's commentary signaled more than a change in right-wing rhetoric...
...Support for freedom fighters is self-defense...
...The extensive Administration involvement with the rebels and their outside support network, the military build-up in Honduras and the investment of U.S...
...In return for the support of the Christian Right, which preaches the Administration's foreign policy in the language of the Gospels, Republicans have incorporated into their domestic program such single-issue concerns of conservative Christians as prayer in schools, creationism and the evils of abortion, pornography, and homosexual and women's rights...
...aim "should not be revolution but to restore free elections...
...In the long run such a costly and unpopular war would be more damaging to U.S...
...Boosted by a popularly perceived weakness in U.S...
...5. George P. Shultz, "New Realities and New Ways of Thinking," Foreign Affairs, Vol...
...in Angola...
...The religious Right has been able to hitch its wagon to an ascendant Republican conservatism...
...In 1980 the Right capitalized on this perception to help elect Ronald Reagan, who promised to reinvigorate the nation's prestige abroad...
...707-708...
...The disintegration of the insurgency is reckoned to be worse than a specific policy failure: the prospect looms as a major setback for U.S...
...For an Administration that perceives the United States as a righteous empire, partnership with the religious REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 16Right on foreign policy has been both comfortable and politically expedient...
...Besides being courted by both the president and vice president, the religious Right has close White House staff connections...
...Grassroots, May 9, 1984...
...Transferring this demonology to the political arena, adversaries are by definition disciples of Satan...
...We may never have another chance with a born-again president...
...interests anywhere...
...NICARAGUA WAS THE ACID TEST OF THE Reagan Doctrine...
...The rationale is the defense of "freedom...
...Such acceptance, they argued, contradicted the American tradition of voluntarism and reflected a lack of precisely that spiritual force necessary to defeat messianic communism...
...synonymous with "freedom" and "American values," it is transformed into a radical social crusade...
...emphasis in original...
...The ideological dimension of the doctrine when applied to Nicaragua may ultimately have set a trap for its executors...
...hostage crisis in Iran, coupled with the aggressive military thrust into Afghanistan by the Soviet Army, furthered this image...
...The concept envisions a groundswell of successes beginning at the margins of Soviet influence...
...Carol Sundseth, an associate director for public liaison in the White House, told a group of religious broadcasters, "The nation got in the shape it is because Christians abdicated their responsibilities in public life...
...allies are to be insurgents fighting "unJULY/AUGUST 198615 JULY/AUGUST 1986 15SOWING DRAGON'S TEETH friendly" governments...
...As Shultz declared: "History will not do our work for us...
...Other influential spokespeople for the U.S...
...Henry Fairlie, cited in Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 89...
...Who," Burnham asked, "will willingly suffer, sacrifice and die for containment...
...With a belief that the United States has vital interests everywhere, any situation contains the potential for affecting the credibility of the nation in other areas...
...In the words of New Right drumbeater Arnaud de Borchgrave: "It is low-intensity warfare in which U.S...
...The U.S...
...They see their opponents, whom they generally lump together as secular humanists, as engaged in a satanic conspiracy to undermine the basic tenets of the Christian faith...
...The goal is to win...
Vol. 20 • July 1986 • No. 4
