Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (147 page)

Nor was this the only forceful action the Reagan administration undertook as an unofficial world policeman and in defence of America’s legitimate interests. On 8 July 1985 Reagan had branded five nations, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua and Libya, as ‘members of a confederation of terrorist states’, carrying out ‘outright acts of war’ against the United States. They were ‘outlaw states run by the strangest collection of misfits, loony-tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich’. This statement, to the American Bar Association, was characteristic of the President’s robust style and much relished by ordinary Americans; it was part of his populism. He privately regarded Colonel Gadafy of Libya as the most dangerous of the ‘collection’, on the grounds that, ‘He’s not only a barbarian, he’s flaky.’
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As already noted, on 5 April 1986, a bomb exploded in a Berlin disco frequented by US sevicemen, killing one, and a Turkish woman, and injuring two hundred. US intercepts established beyond doubt that Libya had a hand in the outrage, and on 13 April Reagan authorized US F-111 bombers to carry out an attack on Gadafy’s military headquarters and barracks in Tripoli. It took place on the night of 14–15 April. Mrs Thatcher gave her permission for US aircraft to operate from their bases in Britain, but France and Italy refused permission to fly over their airspace, making necessary a 1,000-mile detour over the Atlantic and Mediterranean. The attack succeeded in its primary object: thereafter, Gadafy took a notably less prominent and active part in assisting international terrorism.

This growing willingness of the United States to assert its legitimate rights and use its power continued under Reagan’s successor, George Bush. On 21 December 1989, the White House, exasperated both by the treatment General Manuel Noriega, the dictator of
Panama, meted out to his democratic opponents, and by his participation in a narcotics ring which smuggled billions of dollars’ worth of drugs into the United States (Noriega was wanted on serious criminal charges in Florida), authorized an American military intervention. The immediate pretext was the murder of an American soldier in the US canal zone. Some two hundred civilians, nineteen US soldiers and fifty-nine members of the Panamanian forces were believed killed in the fighting. But Noriega himself was quickly overthrown, took refuge in the Vatican nunciature, surrendered and was flown to trial in Florida. In Panama, as in Grenada, democracy was restored and the American forces withdrew quickly. These police actions were much criticized by some members of the Western intelligentsia, but appeared popular among the public, and served to deter some, though unfortunately not all, Third World dictators from aggressive and antisocial behaviour. They also prepared both the American leadership, and public opinion, to meet a more serious challenge to world order, as we shall see.

In the early 1980s, however, President Reagan was more concerned with recovering some of the ground lost, in both a physical and a psychological sense, to the Soviet Union, her satellites and surrogates, during the collectivist 1970s. When Reagan became president, he discovered that the Soviet Union was spending 50 per cent more each year on weapons than the United States, and gaining ground in both the conventional and nuclear fields. Particularly disturbing was the large-scale deployment in Eastern Europe of intermediate-range, multiple-warhead ss-20 rockets. On 17 June 1980 Mrs Thatcher had negotiated with President Carter an agreement whereby, to counter the ss-20s, American Cruise missiles were deployed, in Britain. On the basis of this first move, Reagan and Mrs Thatcher were able to persuade other
NATO
members to provide sites for the Cruise network. In Europe the extreme Left organized coordinated demonstrations against the deployment: on 22 October 1983 some 250,000 were claimed (by the organizers) to have marched in London; a ‘human chain’ was formed across Paris; in Germany, the Left said a million had protested; at Greenham Common in England, where some Cruise missiles were based, a Women’s Peace camp was set up. But such protests were ineffective, and there is no evidence they enjoyed working-class support anywhere. The Greenham women, in particular, soon made themselves unpopular with the local inhabitants.

Deploying Cruise served to notify the Moscow leadership that the era of indecision in White House policy was over.
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At the same time, from the very first days of his presidency, Reagan launched an across-the-board rearmament programme. As he put it,
‘I asked [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] to tell me what new weapons they needed to achieve military superiority over our potential enemies.’ If it came to a choice between national security and the deficit, ‘I’d have to come down on the side of national defence.’
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Additional defence spending was soon running at the rate of about $140 billion a year. It included the expansion and training of rapid-deployment forces, de-mothballing World War Two battleships and equipping them with Cruise missiles, and the development of the radar-resistant Stealth bomber and a range of high-technology laser-guided missiles, including anti-ballistic weapons, known collectively as the Star Wars programme. Strategic planning and tactical training of all the
US
armed forces were redesigned around the use, for both nuclear and conventional purposes, of these advanced weapons systems, a change which was to prove of critical importance in 1991
.
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However, the principal impact of the rearmament programme was, as intended, political, and in two senses. Reagan was anxious, first, to show to the peoples of Western Europe (and indeed the satellite populations behind the Iron Curtain, who were beginning to look increasingly to the West), that America’s commitment to collective security was as strong as ever. This brought a positive response from most European governments.
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Equally important, however, was the calculated impact on Soviet policy-making. As Reagan quickly discovered from intelligence assessments, Russia was running into increasing economic turbulence in the early 1980s. The Afghanistan war was unpopular and expensive; and by supplying the rebels with small, highly-mobile anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, America was able to raise the human and financial cost of the war to Russia at little expense to herself. The Russian gerontocracy, the phalanx of elderly party managers and generals who had controlled the country since the Khrushchev era, was also running into severe leadership problems. Until the early 1980s, the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine was the basis of Soviet foreign and defence policy; this held that once a ‘Socialist State’, such as Cuba or Vietnam, had been established, any threat to its government was to be regarded as a threat to the Soviet Union’s vital interests. Whether the doctrine would have been enforced in every case is arguable; but it was never put to the test, and the principle itself seems to have died with the old man on 10 November 1982. He was succeeded two days later as Party General Secretary, and on 16 June 1983 as President, by Yuri Andropov, who had been head of the
KGB
for fifteen years. On 8 March 1983, Reagan took the opportunity of warning the new Soviet leadership of how he regarded their expanded system, and what he intended to do to resist any further encroachments. In
Orlando, Florida, he made what became known as the ‘evil empire’ speech. As he put it, he delivered the speech, ‘and others like it, with malice aforethought’ (and against the advice of his formidable wife Nancy) because ‘I wanted to remind the Soviets we knew what they were up to.’
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The much stiffer attitude of the White House, fully backed as it was by the Thatcher government in London, had repercussions in Moscow, where there was increasing uncertainty in the Soviet leadership. Seven months after he became President, Andropov died (9 February 1984), and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, hastily installed as General Secretary and President (13 February, 11 April), lasted little over a year, dying on 10 March 1985. The Soviet élite then took the momentous step of skipping a generation and electing the 52-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, a party
apparatchik
, born in the Caucasus but of Ukrainian descent (on his mother’s side), who had advanced under the aegis of Andropov.
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Gorbachev began to consolidate his position by making many thousands of personnel changes at all levels of the Soviet government, central and regional; but he never seems to have exercised the unquestioned authority which even Brezhnev had taken for granted. Increasingly, in the years 1987–91, his apparent orders were ignored or imperfectly executed, and actions took place without his sanction, or indeed knowledge. By the standards of the Soviet Communist Party, he was a liberal; but he dismissed the very idea of a multi-party system in Russia as ‘complete nonsense’. He toured the country extensively, making many exhortatory speeches: his theme was, ‘We have to change everything,’ but he added, ‘I am a Communist.’ He seems to have assumed that Communism could reform itself from within, without abandoning its basic doctrines, especially its Leninist principles of how the state and economy should be organized. But, as we have seen, it was Lenin’s system, not its Stalinist superstructure, which was at the root of Russia’s problems. Again on 7 November 1989 Gorbachev told Soviet
TV
viewers: ‘We have to advance faster and faster,’ without indicating clearly what the country was advancing to. He said he believed in introducing the market system, thus showing he had caught, or at least was aware of, the spirit of the 1980s. But what this meant in practice was a small extension of the area of land open to individual cultivation, and greater accountability for industrial enterprises. But the first move, under which 5 per cent of the land under cultivation (by smallholders) was soon producing 50 per cent of the food available in the markets, merely drew attention to the failure of the state farms and collectives, which remained intact; and the second, by reducing central subsidies to industry, led to an accelerating fall in output. Thus in the second half of the 1980s, and still more in the
early 1990s, goods available in Soviet shops diminished sharply, and a growing proportion of the entire economy operated by barter, not just individually but between factories and through the black market. Gorbachev introduced the policy of
glasnost
, or ‘openness’, whereby the press and, to some extent, state broadcasting were allowed to criticize and call the government to account. He restrained the activities of the
KGB
.
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Some archives were opened. Independent-minded Soviet historians became more daring. Mass graves, dating from Stalin’s time, were opened and publicized, and the number of Stalin’s victims was constantly revised upwards. Bukharin and nine others, judicially murdered in 1938, were rehabilitated. Fewer people were sent to prison or psychiatric hospitals for political offences.

The net result was to remove, to some extent, the climate of fear in which the Soviet Union had lived for seventy years. But that, in turn, relaxed the discipline, based on fear, which alone kept the Soviet Communist system working at all. Absenteeism increased. Strikes became common. There was a huge increase in crime, in illicit vodka distillation and hence in drunkenness. Gorbachev first imposed a limited form of prohibition; then, faced with a collapse of state revenues from vodka duties, he abandoned it. There was a series of demoralizing disasters, both natural and caused by human failure and carelessness. On 26 April 1986, one of the nuclear reactors at Chernobyl, near Kiev in the Ukraine, blew up, constituting the worst calamity in the history of nuclear power, with casualties, fallout and long-term effects over a huge area. Four months later, on 31 August, the Soviet passenger liner
Admiral Nakhimov
sank in the Black Sea, with the loss of over 400 lives. Five weeks later, on 6 October, a Soviet nuclear submarine, with sixteen multiple nuclear warheads, disappeared without trace in mid-Atlantic. In December 1988, an earthquake in the Armenian districts of Soviet Transcaucasia killed over 20,000 people and devastated an entire region; the relief services functioned badly. On 4 June 1989, an explosion of gas from a leaking Siberian pipeline, which should have registered on the monitoring system, blew up two passing passenger trains, killing over 800, including many children on holiday.

These and many other incidents provided evidence of a system which was showing signs of general breakdown, and which Gorbachev’s economic reform programme, which he called
pere-stroika
or ‘remodelling’, in some respects aggravated. The CIA and other agencies had been reporting to the White House, with growing conviction, evidence of economic and technological failure in the Soviet Union since the early 1980s. It was affecting all areas of life, including public health. Even in the field of energy, once a
major source of Soviet strength because of its abundant natural resources – the USSR remained the world’s largest oil exporter even in the early 1990s – difficulties were growing, on account of inefficient extraction and other technological failures.
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To some extent, the Soviet military-industrial complex was isolated from the worst of Russia’s economic difficulties by receiving absolute priority in supplies of materials and skilled manpower. But part of the object of Reagan’s rearmament programme was, by raising the pace of high-technology development in the arms race, to turn the screw on the Soviet economy generally, and force the leadership to ask itself hard questions. Was it prepared to match the US high-tech military effort at the expense of the civil economy, at the very time the Soviet people were being promised change and improvements? Could it, indeed, match the US effort, even if it wished? The answer to both these questions was no. A third question then arose: was the Soviet leadership prepared to respond to the American arms build-up by agreeing to come to the negotiating table and engage in realistic disarmament negotiations? The answer to this was yes. On 19 November 1985 Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva for the first of what was to prove a series of summit meetings. Reagan proposed monitored arms reductions, using the Russian phrase,
Doverey no provorey
, ‘trust but verify’, and warned Gorbachev that the alternative was continuing the arms race, ‘and I have to tell you if it’s an arms race, you must know it’s an arms race you can’t win.’
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