(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in RealClearDefense. The Blame America First Syndrome)
When Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick explained in 1984 that America’s severest foreign policy critics “always blame America first” she identified a narrative that continues some four decades later. There was and continues to be a reflexive anti-American bias in much of the criticism of President Reagan’s security policy. This enables critics to avoid serious reflection as to the seriousness of security threats to the U.S.. If our security threats were much of our own doing, then the totalitarian threats from Russia and China could be dismissed. Simply change U.S. administrations and magically our adversaries turn into the friends they always were! Correct U.S. policy and threats conveniently disappear.
However, Kirkpatrick knew such a narrative was wrong and dangerous. With the dawn of the Reagan Presidency the United States faced major threats, all of which had grown significantly in the previous decade.
First was a reckless Soviet Union, often partnered with Communist China, engaging in major across-the-board arming of guerilla wars aimed at regime change. Although the Soviet expansion campaign centered in eastern Europe immediately following World War II, the Soviets followed with the North Korean cross border invasion of 1950. But its failure led to a switch to guerilla war, particularly in Indochina from 1959, Central America from 1958, and ironically culminating in the return to cross border invasion with Afghanistan in 1979.
Under Soviet direction, centers of state sponsorship of terrorism grew in Syria, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Iran, along with terror agents such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Hezbollah, the FMLN, FARC, and the Red Brigades and Bidar Meinhoff gangs. Ironically, during the supposed decade of détente, nearly two dozen American allied governments fell to or were systematically attacked by communist subversion.
After the 1980 election, the U.S. turned the tables. The U.S. rejected détente and sought rollback. The U.S. went after Soviet terror states in Afghanistan, Grenada and Nicaragua and worked to defeat terror proxies in Columbia and El Salvador. All part of an economic war on Moscow that aimed to make the cost of the Soviet empire unsustainable. And for the first time since 1917, the free world took back territory from the communist empire with the liberation of Grenada in 1983.
The second major threat President Reagan faced was a massive Soviet theater nuclear buildup, including the deployment of thousands of nuclear armed SS 20 medium range ballistic missile in Europe and Asia, targeting both the Atlantic and Pacific allies of the United States.
The third major threat president Reagan faced was a parallel Soviet nuclear buildup of deployed strategic nuclear weapons from a few thousand in 1972 to over 10,000 by the 1980s, all under the SALT treaties of 1972 and 1979. Treaties that gave the good arms control housekeeping seal of approval to Moscow’s buildup that had as its key purpose to coercively blackmail the United States and our allies to stand down in the face of Soviet aggression. Nuclear weapons were the umbrella under which Russian third world aggression would remain in a sanctuary.
Here is where we come back to Ambassador Kirkpatrick’s 1984 remarks. How did the United States reverse the Soviet buildup of nuclear weapons and end the Soviet empire? Kirkpatrick explained that too many critics of U.S. policy blamed the United States for Soviet aggression and nuclear building. The argument was because the U.S. supported dictators in Nicaragua, Vietnam, and Cuba, why was it a surprise guerilla campaigns emerged to change such governments? Similarly argued critics, NATO was created on the doorsteps of the USSR so why should we be surprised Moscow responded with the deployment of SS-20 missiles aimed at European NATO??
Even when the USSR empire came crashing down, there were three common explanations that gave credit not to Reagan but even to the Soviets themselves, Reagan’s domestic critics or some cosmic inevitability.
A common explanation was that the Kennan policy of restrained “containment” practiced by nine successive American Presidents helped bring down the Soviets, but nothing special from the Reagan White House. The idea of containment of Soviet aggression was originated by State department official George Kennan who coined the term in a long telegram from Moscow and in a subsequent essay in Foreign Affairs signed by “X.” But Kennan himself disliked the term containment and often declared it did not describe what Kennan had advocated after the end of World War II. He opposed Truman sending American troops to defend Korea, and repeatedly opposed Reagan’s security agenda, most particularly the administration’s nuclear and missile defense modernization agenda.
The second and often parallel narrative was that the collapse of the Soviet empire was inevitable, and again nothing special from President Reagan had any serious effect on the outcome. Containment may have worked but that was coincidental. Again, the common narrative was that nothing America did had much to do with the outcome of the Cold War.
The third narrative flowed from the first two. It was not America but the Soviets themselves that ended the Cold War. It was the reforms of General Secretary Gorbachev that ended the Cold War as the General Secretary anticipated the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Empire. All Reagan did was as one recent retired U.S. President claimed was to allow those reforms to take place without trying to extend the Cold War.
When a dozen and half nations slip behind the Iron Curtain in little more than a decade, it hardly makes sense to then pretend at the end of the subsequent decade the USA and its ally’s abject failure to “contain” the Soviets, meant that containment itself “worked.” And simultaneously led to the end and not the expansion of the Soviet Union!
As Ambassador Kirkpatrick explained, the blame America firsters complained the Soviet Union would have collapsed even faster if the United Stats had not been so aggressive. Reagan‘s political opponents held that his tough foreign policy made things worse, particularly with respect to describing the USSR as an “evil empire,” developing SDI and deploying MX missiles, arming the Contras and Mujahadeen Northern Alliance while saving Solidarity. To the blame American firsters, our adversaries had to take defensive actions to protect their own security. It was America that was at fault—having both caused the outbreak of the Cold War and perpetuated its continuance.
This acute tendency to, as the Ambassador explained, always blame America was key to understanding the alternative strategy often being pushed by the progressive left. If the United States and it’s supposed aggressive security policy was responsible for triggering bad Soviet behavior, then of course the removal of such U.S. security policy and its architect (Reagan) would magically change Moscow security policy to one far more benign. In short, detente would work. The pillars of former Vice President Mondale’s 1984 campaign were to stop SDI, freeze the deployment of America’s Pershing and GLCM missiles in Europe, kill the MX missile and other U strategic nuclear initiaitives, and end all military aid to the contras in Nicaragua and the government of El Salvador.
Here the ironies are too delicious to ignore. A frequent object of leftist or progressive scorn during the decade of the 1970s was Henry Kissinger. But Kissinger was the architect of the SALT agreement that allowed a huge Soviet nuclear build-up, the ABM treaty that eliminated missile defenses, the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, and the entire edifice of the strategy of detente. For the left, what was there not to like?
But as Kirkpatrick pointed out, for the progressive left, if the origin of Soviet behavior was intrinsic to the very nature of Russian paranoia, a restrained American security policy would be an invitation to the expansion of Soviet aggression, which is precisely what occurred during détente.
It is true that in 1980 after the invasion of Afghanistan the Carter administration announced that it had misinterpreted the Soviet embrace of détente and been mistaken in declaring the U.S. had to get rid of its inordinate fear of communism. And if simply changing U.S. foreign policy back to détente and restraint would induce a benign Soviet subsequent conciliatory security policy, then of course, progressive critics of President Reagan could justify their opposition to peace through strength, SDI, the full up modernization of American nuclear forces, the arming of the resistance in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the take down of Grenada, and the arming of our nation state allies in El Salvador, the Republic of Korea and NATO.
Similarly if today the turmoil in the Middle East was caused by America’s ally Israel, as is being claimed by much of the progressive left, just as they claimed an aggressive USA policy caused the Cold War, then it’s simply a matter of stopping Israel. And preventing Israel from securing arms necessary to continue its apparent too aggressive security policy would be a good place to start. Stop Israel, stop the war. Peace blossoms!
Senator Sanders (I-Vt) thus can blame Israel for “genocide” in Gaza and pretend Hamas and Hezbollah are on the side of the angels. And consequently, offer an amendment in the Senate to stop all USA arms sales to Israel, that received 40 votes, 39 of which were from the 45-member democratic caucus.
How simple Middle East security policy could be if we all just “blamed Israel first” for “tricking” the United States into war against Iran. Like the Cold War and the Soviet empire, ending the Iranian nuclear program, stopping the deployment of its long-range missiles, keeping open Hormuz, and ending proxy terrorism can be simply a matter of changing U.S. administrations. We can all be for “peace,” need not take up arms against the genocidal regime in Tehran, because as critics claim, it is Israel and the USA that “chose this war” not an Iran that for nearly half a century has been at war with Western civilization.
Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
