Deciding to Intervene: The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy
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Deciding to Intervene: The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy
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Overview
Using a comparative case study method, Scott examines the historical, intellectual, and ideological origins of the Reagan Doctrine as it was applied to Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. Scott draws on many previously unavailable government documents and a wide range of primary material to show both how this policy in particular, and American foreign policy in general, emerges from the complex, shifting interactions between the White House, Congress, bureaucratic agencies, and groups and individuals from the private sector.
In evaluating the origins and consequences of the Reagan Doctrine, Deciding to Intervene synthesizes the lessons that can be learned from the Reagan administration’s policy and places them within the broad perspective of foreign policy-making today. Scott’s measured treatment of this sensitive and important topic will be welcomed by scholars in policy studies, international affairs, political science, and history, as well as by any reader with an interest in the formation of American foreign policy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822379423 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/30/1996 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Lexile: | 1460L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 536 KB |
About the Author
James M. Scott is Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at the University of Nebraska, Kearney.
Read an Excerpt
Deciding to Intervene
The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy
By James M. Scott
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7942-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In April 1985, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer (1985, 54) claimed that "Ronald Reagan is the master of the new idea.... [After his political achievements] all that was left for him to turn on its head was accepted thinking on geopolitics. Now he has done that too. He has produced the Reagan Doctrine ... [which] proclaims overt and unabashed American support for anti-Communist revolutions. The grounds are justice, necessity and democratic tradition." With these words Krauthammer labeled a foreign policy strategy that originated in the worldview of Ronald Reagan and his conservative supporters. The Reagan Doctrine represents one of the most interesting and significant strategic initiatives developed by the Reagan administration. Its authors believed the doctrine would reverse Soviet advances in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Central America; rebut the Brezhnev Doctrine; and reassert U.S. power and purpose in the post-Vietnam world by providing aid to anticommunist insurgencies intent on overthrowing Marxist regimes.
This publicly declared policy of intervention was both a product and an innovation of post-World War II foreign policy. It may be seen as a logical extension of other postwar presidential doctrines of foreign policy (Kirkpatrick and Gerson 1989, 24). For example, the Truman Doctrine, the Eisenhower Doctrine, and the Carter Doctrine all shared an overriding concern for preventing "outside powers" from gaining control of certain governments or geographic areas: the Truman Doctrine emphasized Greece and Turkey, though its language was universal; the Eisenhower Doctrine stressed the Middle East; and the Carter Doctrine focused on the Persian Gulf. The Reagan Doctrine was a corollary of the principle behind these earlier credos: while they were concerned with prevention, the Reagan approach emphasized cure. If outside powers happened to gain control of key areas, then a strategy for wresting control from them must exist.
In a more important sense, however, the Reagan Doctrine represented the abandonment of Containment. Its advocates held the view that containment was a defeatist strategy that ceded control of important areas to the Soviet Union without offering a remedy. In light of the events of the 1970s, which many interpreted as a period of major advances and victories by the Soviet Union, to continue only to contain the Soviet Union in those places where its influence already existed meant acceding to Soviet inroads into the Third World and acquiescing in the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Hence, from this perspective, the containment strategy had failed and a new approach was required. This is precisely what the Reagan Doctrine offered: a guide for U.S. policy when containment failed.
The origin of this strategy had its roots in the highest levels of the Reagan administration and stemmed from the right-wing skepticism of containment dating back to the 1950s. However, the attempt to convert the idea into policy reality (i.e., to implement the initiative in concrete instances) involved a much wider group of policy makers. In fact, the process by which this strategy was formulated and applied was complex, messy, and laden with individual, organizational, and institutional conflict, compromise, and cooperation. Policy emerged from the shifting interactions between the White House, Congress, bureaucratic agencies, and groups and individuals from the private sector. Hence, the formulation and application of the Reagan Doctrine illustrate a characteristic of U.S. foreign policy in general: what goes on inside the American political system is as important for the resulting policy as what goes on in the world without.
This book uses the comparative case study method known as "structured, focused comparison" (see, e.g., George 1979, 1982; George and McKeown 1985) to examine the historical, intellectual, and ideological origins of the Reagan Doctrine and its application to Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Nicaragua (Chapter 2 treats the "noncase" of Ethiopia). Both the subject and the method are particularly appropriate for several reasons. First, the Reagan Doctrine has been described as the "distinctive" (Tucker 1989, 14) or "signature" (Lagon 1992, 40) policy of the Reagan administration. Even President Reagan (1989) and certain of his advisers (e.g., Shultz 1993) called attention to it as one of the administration's most significant efforts. It was thus a key strategy in the last phase of the cold war.
Second, as a strategy, the Reagan Doctrine had several distinct applications, or policy implementations. Only six cases were covered by the Reagan Doctrine: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. This means that it is possible to examine the entire universe of Reagan Doctrine cases in one volume. Moreover, the problem the strategy was created to solve required a sustained policy of some duration (the entire two-term Reagan administration at the least), offering a long-term window into policy making.
Third, the cases themselves should reveal general patterns and lessons of American foreign policy making, since they cover a range of issues. For example, while they fall primarily into what Ripley and Franklin (1991, 22-24) and Ripley and Lindsay (1993, 18-22) termed "strategic policy" (long-term, noncrisis policy which identifies the basic goals and tactics of the United States toward other countries and organizations and develops the basic strategies toward achieving those objectives), the cases also exhibit aspects of crisis (short-term reactions to a high-threat situation) and structural policy (which includes procuring and locating personnel and materiel and providing funds for assistance and other programs).
Although this strategy and its application are significant enough to warrant careful analysis, any broad conclusions or inferences about American foreign policy or policy making must be drawn carefully. It is possible that unique or idiosyncratic factors may limit its generalizability, such as the international setting (the end of the cold war), the Reagan administration, President Reagan's management style, or factors stemming from the particular characteristics of the Reagan Doctrine and its application (e.g., that it relied on U.S. financial assistance and thus congressional appropriation). If, in the end, the patterns or themes that emerge from these cases are limited, the background, context, process, and idiosyncratic features of the Reagan Doctrine and the policy makers who formulated and implemented it are an adequate reason for conducting the study.
Two distinct threads in this analysis can be identified: substance and process. The first, focusing on the policy substance, concerns the origins, nature, and consequences of the Reagan Doctrine itself. The second, focusing on the policy process, concerns the actors and their roles in the formulation and implementation of the policy.
The Origins, Nature, and Consequences of the Reagan Doctrine
Six substantive characteristics of the Reagan Doctrine emerge from this study. First, the observers and former administration officials who have argued that no such strategy was developed prior to 1985 or that the Reagan Doctrine was simply a post hoc attempt to justify aid to the con-tras in Nicaragua are wrong. Although the Reagan Doctrine received its title in 1985, the strategy originated early in the first Reagan term as an intentional, planned initiative devised by high-level members of the executive branch. Just a few months into 1981, the National Security Planning Group (NSPG), a top-level "executive committee" for the National Security Council, proposed to aid rebels in several countries, including Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Angola. After several drafts, the White House made this strategy official in National Security Decision Directive 75, written in 1982 and signed in January 1983 (see Chapter 2). To be sure, rebels in Afghanistan were already receiving U.S. aid pursuant to a decision made in 1980 by the Carter administration. Nevertheless, it was the Reagan administration's strategy that provided the basis for expanded assistance, linked this ongoing program to several new efforts—which eventually included those in Nicaragua (late 1981), Cambodia (mid-1982), and Angola (early 1986)—and also prompted a debate over the application of the strategy to Mozambique (1985-87).
Second, this strategy stemmed from the long-standing conservative aversion to Containment (see Chapter 2 and the other case studies). Hence, the precursor to the Reagan Doctrine was the "rollback" argument of the 1950s, which found supporters in the "true believers" in the Reagan White House and the National Security Council. It was these hard-line advisers who were principally responsible for formulating the strategy, gaining President Reagan's endorsement, and seeking its uniform application as a means to combat Soviet expansionism. Therefore, the hard-liner ideology formed the basic foundation on which the strategy rested.
Third, these zealots failed in their effort to create a universal doctrine. Instead, four different variants of the doctrine emerged, and U.S. policy developed as a compromise among them. Hard-liners inside and outside the administration saw the Reagan Doctrine as a way to roll back communist expansion, and some, such as William Casey and the foreign policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, desired to use the rationale to create anticommunist rebel movements in several countries where none existed. In contrast, some less hard-line policy makers embraced a version that combined Reagan Doctrine aid with diplomacy to win negotiated settlements, some endorsed another that contemplated aid (along with diplomacy) only if foreign combat troops were stationed in the potential target, and still others supported a version that considered aid only if the Soviet Union itself employed combat troops on the target's soil. These diverging views rested on differing assessments of the threat involved and disagreement over the appropriate instruments of foreign policy. The consequence was a case-by-case approach rather than a doctrinaire application of the strategy.
Fourth, the Reagan Doctrine was unevenly applied. American foreign policy makers agreed in only one case—Afghanistan—and applied the strategy consistently only there. Aid to rebels in Cambodia was limited to nonlethal supplies (both covert and, after 1985, overt) and began in earnest only after 1985. Discord among U.S. policy makers, both within and outside the executive branch, contributed to a sometimes contradictory policy toward Angola and southern Africa. Ultimately, while the Reagan Doctrine was applied in Angola, it required five years of internecine struggle to generate enough support to do so. There was even greater disagreement over U.S. aid to the rebels in Nicaragua. The divisions among U.S. policy makers had their greatest impact there, and disputes over the seriousness of the threat and the utility of a U.S.-backed guerrilla war led to an on-again, off-again application of the Reagan Doctrine that was finally suspended as a result of the Iran-contra affair. Finally, in Mozambique, where virulently anti-communist rebels opposed a leftist regime, most U.S. policy makers considered the threat minimal and endorsed the use of diplomacy and inducements to "wean" the regime from its pro-Soviet leanings.
Fifth, the combination of disagreement in the foreign policy community and the uneven application of the strategy that ensued makes the impact of the Reagan Doctrine uncertain. Detailed evaluations follow each case study presented in this book, and an overall evaluation is given in the concluding chapter. In general, these appraisals suggest two broad themes: (1) the Reagan Doctrine had its greatest success in Afghanistan, where the evidence suggests it made a direct contribution to the Soviet Union's decision to withdraw its troops, and had a significant impact on broader changes in Soviet foreign policy. (2) While the rhetoric of the strategy may have persuaded Soviet policy makers that the cost of further adventurism would be too steep, the doctrine's other applications were of limited effectiveness. Some limited benefits can be identified in the strengthening of the noncommunist faction of the Cambodian resistance, and even more limited contributions occurred in the establishment of a stalemate that led to a negotiated settlement in Angola. It is difficult to find a positive contribution in the case of Nicaragua, and the doctrine was not applied in Mozambique—where, it might be noted, U.S. policy succeeded in curbing Soviet influence in the absence of the Reagan Doctrine. Moreover, to the extent that the Reagan Doctrine proved useful, it contributed chiefly to the withdrawal of foreign troops. In no case did this strategy precipitate the overthrow of a regime facing international opposition. In fact, the application of the doctrine to Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, to Angola after the withdrawal of the Cuban troops, and to Cambodia after the withdrawal of the Vietnamese proved costly, problematic, and self-defeating, and may be judged as having failed. In Nicaragua, where no foreign combat troops operated, reconciliation occurred only after Reagan Doctrine aid to the contra rebels was halted.
Sixth, while the purpose of the Reagan Doctrine makes it irrelevant in the post-cold war period, the strategy itself has several substantive implications for future American foreign policy. The foundation of the Reagan Doctrine provides insight into the necessary requirements of any attempt to establish a post-cold war doctrine. This foundation, based on the wedding of strategic and moral justifications, suggests that both a statement of U.S. interests and an articulation of the ethical and moral bases underlying action will be necessary to develop any consensus. Moreover, the underlying features of the Reagan Doctrine suggest a reliance on several deeper themes in American foreign policy that will continue to be relevant in the post-cold war period. Among these are the U.S. penchant for unilateralism and the broad cultural belief in the innocence, benevolence, and exceptionalism of the United States in its world role. In addition, the Reagan Doctrine suggests that, other than serving as rhetorical devices and opportunities for presidents to set a foreign policy agenda, "doctrines" provide little practical guidance for U.S. foreign policy. Even at the end of the cold war, policy proceeded on a case-by-case basis. In the post-cold war environment, with the absence of a clear threat and disagreement over the proper role of the United States in the world, a case-by-case approach is still the most probable course of action.
The Formulation and Implementation of the Reagan Doctrine
This study of the Reagan Doctrine also provides three broad lessons about American foreign policy making. First, the doctrine emerged from the interaction among four circles of actors: the president and his chief advisers, the Foreign policy bureaucracy, Congress, and a group of nongovernmental actors. The president and his advisers—the group studied by most analysts—played a key role in every case. In particular, President Reagan and his chief advisers were the initial authors of the strategy, and while they did not take the lead in every case, they made the initial choice on policy toward Nicaragua during 1981 and key decisions regarding Afghanistan in 1985 and 1986. The role of the president and his top aides in the development and application of the Reagan Doctrine depended primarily on the president's position as the chief executive. He and his circle commanded the executive branch and thus had access to its expertise, information, and capabilities for implementing policy. Moreover, the ability of this group to set the agenda, seize the initiative, mobilize opinion, set the bureaucracy in motion, exert pressure on Congress, and force it to react—in addition to such powers as are bestowed on the commander in chief, chief executive, chief diplomat, and chief legislator of the U.S. government-provided opportunities to shape, if not lead, policy making.
The Foreign policy bureaucracy circle consists of the State Department, Defense Department, Central Intelligence Agency, NSC staff, and other agencies created by statute to provide advice and executive policy. The bureaucracy's expertise and control of information consistently placed it in a position to shape the formulation of Reagan Doctrine policy. Moreover, the various agencies of the foreign policy bureaucracy shaped the initiative because of their primary role in its implementation. In both roles, disagreements among officials and agencies affected both the nature of the policy and the process by which it was formulated and implemented. The role of this circle was greatest in the Angola and Mozambique cases, in which it exercised policy leadership. In every case, however, it played a role, and therefore general features of the bureaucracy, including its propensity for risk avoidance, routinization, division, disagreement, and "turf wars" among different agencies, are critical for an understanding of U.S. policy.
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Table of Contents
Preface ix1. Introduction 1
2. The Reagan Doctrine: Challenging the Soviet Union in the Third World 14
3. Afghanistan: Consensus, Cooperation, and the Quest for "Rollback" 40
4. Cambodia: Disinterest, Dual Tracks, and the Search for a Settlement 82
5. Angola: Dissensus, Competing Agendas, and the Struggle over Constructive Engagement 112
6. Nicaraguas: Polarization, Stalemate, and the Contra War 152
7. Mozambique: Factions, Fights, and the Rejection of the Reagan Doctrine 193
8. Conclusions: The Nature and Lessons of the Reagan Doctrine 213
Notes 255
References 269
Index 317