How Reagan beat the neocons
By John Patrick Diggins

ALMOST everywhere in the press, one reads that President George W. Bush sounds an awful lot like Mr Ronald Reagan. Commentators and politicians alike have drawn the comparison between Mr Bush's 'muscular' foreign policy and the Reagan doctrine.

However macho and aggressive Mr Bush's foreign policy may be, when it came to the Soviet Union, Mr Reagan's was anything but.

In 1985, Mr Reagan sent a handwritten letter to Mr Mikhail Gorbachev assuring him that he was prepared 'to cooperate in any reasonable way' to facilitate withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan. 'Neither of us,' he added, 'wants to see offensive weapons, particularly weapons of mass destruction, deployed in space.' Mr Reagan eagerly sought to work with Mr Gorbachev to rid the world of such weapons and to help the Soviet Union effect peaceful change in Eastern Europe.

This offer was far from the position taken by the neoconservative advisers who now serve under Mr Bush. Twenty years ago in the Reagan White House, they saw no possibility for such change and, indeed, many of them subscribed to the theory of 'totalitarianism' as unchangeable and irreversible.

Mr Reagan was also informed that the Soviet Union was preparing for a possible pre-emptive attack on the United States. This alarmist position was taken by Team B, formed in response to the more prudently analytical position of the Central Intelligence Agency and then composed of several members of the present Bush administration. The team was headed by Mr Richard Pipes, the Russian historian at Harvard University, whose stance was summed up in the title of one of his articles: Why The Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight And Win A Nuclear War.

Not only did the neocons oppose Mr Reagan's efforts at rapprochement, but they also argued against engaging in personal diplomacy with Soviet leaders.

Advisers like Mr Richard Perle, Mr Paul Wolfowitz and Mr Donald Rumsfeld, now steering our foreign policy, held that America must escalate to achieve 'nuclear dominance' and that it could deal only from a 'strategy of strength'. Mr Reagan believed in a strong military, but to reassure the Soviet Union that America had no aggressive intentions, he reminded Mr Leonid Brezhnev of just the opposite.

From 1945 to 1949, the US was the sole possessor of the atomic bomb and, yet, Mr Reagan emphasised to Mr Brezhnev, no threat was made to use the bomb to win concessions from the Soviet Union.

The Star Wars missile defence system advocated by Mr Reagan is often regarded as the final nail in the coffin of communism, as a military system that the Soviets could not afford and only fear. The first assumption was right, the second, dubious. Mrs Margaret Thatcher, who urged Mr Reagan to regard Mr Gorbachev as 'a man we can work with', also gave him blunt advice on Star Wars: 'I'm a chemist; I know it won't work.' Like Mrs Thatcher, Soviet scientists regarded it as fantasy, and thus they were hardly impressed with Mr Reagan's offer to share it with them once it was perfected. (It still hasn't been, nearly two decades later.)

Those advisers in the Bush administration who regard themselves as Reaganites ought to remember that Mr Reagan ceased heeding their advice. According to former US secretary of state George Shultz's memoir, Turmoil And Triumph, Mr Reagan would become uneasy when his hawkish advisers entered the Oval Office. In his own memoir, An American Life, Mr Reagan ridiculed the 'macabre jargon' of warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles and kill ratios. He thought the figures sounded like 'baseball scores' and dismissed his pesky advisers.

Mr Reagan rejected the neocons; Mr Bush stands by them no matter what.

The difference between Mr Reagan and Mr Bush's militant brain staff is that he believed in negotiation and they in escalation. They wanted to win the Cold War; he sought to end it. To do so, it was necessary not to strike fear in the Soviet Union but to win the confidence of its leaders.

Once the Soviet Union could count on Mr Reagan, Mr Gorbachev not only was free to embark on his domestic reforms, to persuade his military to go along with budget cuts, to reassure his people that they no longer needed to worry about the old bogey of 'capitalist encirclement', but, most important, he was also ready to announce to the Soviet Union's satellite countries that henceforth they were on their own, that no longer would tanks of the Red Army be sent to put down uprisings.

The Cold War ended in an act of faith and trust, not fear and trembling.

But many neocons came to hate Mr Reagan, saying he lost the Cold War since he left office with communism still in place. Some even believed that the Cold War would soon be resumed. Mr Dick Cheney, as Mr Bush's defence secretary, dismissed perestroika (restructuring) as a sham and glasnost (opening) as a ruse. He insisted that Mr Gorbachev would be replaced by a belligerent militarist and warned America to prepare for the re-emergence of an aggressive communist state.

Mr Reagan gave us an enlightened foreign policy that achieved most of its diplomatic objectives peacefully and succeeded in firmly uniting our allies. Today, those who claim to be Mr Reagan's heirs give us 'shock and awe' and a 'muscular' foreign policy that has lost its way and undermined valued friendships throughout the world.

The writer is a professor of history at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York and the author of the forthcoming book, Ronald Reagan: Morning In America. Copyright: New York Times Syndicate

-- and now the neocons are in charge...

President Reagan was known for giving "family" days off - essentially shutting down the federal government - for instance the friday following Thanksgiving (which is traditionally on a thursday). If July 4th, was a tuesday or thursday, he'd make the monday or friday a holiday as well.

My response was mostly to just say: Bang on correct, Simon. I completely agree.

But then my eyes blew out of my head on the long response above from is there still hope, so I will just look at shiny things for a little while and get the world to stop spinning.

Even if it was a billion $ it is miniscule to an 11 TRILLION $ economy. Reagan gave us more than that in gains in any given month during his presidency. With interest.

Also, you are assuming shutting down the US government COSTS us. Actually, I would argue it is a net gain. One less day for the government to do us harm. When the US was started it was assumed that the Fed government would work 3-4 months per year at most.

I think the figure is actually overstated. I suspect in many cases the work missed gets made up over the course of the next few days (it's not like civil servants are notoriously effecient or over worked) and business and market trading volumes increase to make up for that which was missed during the closure. On the otherhand, what is the measure of the economic effect of money spent -- say -- shopping or traveling over the long weekend by those who would otherwise be working?

I think Ronald Reagan put it best:

"It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?"