Of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher said her great friend and ally could be summed up in this sentence: “He won the Cold War without firing a shot.”
One disputes the Iron Lady at one’s peril. And about the winning there’s no argument. Reagan entered office after the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and as it seemed poised to do the same in Poland.
Nine years later, the Berlin Wall came down.
Mrs. Thatcher notwithstanding, it didn’t come down without a shot. It’s just that when it came to the shooting, America reserved its own fire for Soviet lackeys (Cuban troops in Grenada) while providing those willing to shoot Russians (the Afghans) the wherewithal to do so. And of course during the Reagan years we shot at others, from the Libyans to the Iranians.
There’s a lesson here for President Obama, especially as he deals with the fait accompli Vladimir Putin has handed him in Crimea. Reagan understood that direct military confrontation with the Soviets, where the risks and costs were high and the outcome uncertain, was not his best hand. Instead, he squeezed them at their pressure points — moral, economic and geopolitical — all the while burnishing his credibility as a leader willing to act on what he believed.
Critics wrote him off as a cowboy. But despite missteps such as the disastrous deployment of Marines to Lebanon, Reagan proved himself adept at working the chess board to his advantage. Whether he was collaborating with the AFL-CIO’s Irving Brown to support Solidarity in Poland, challenging Mikhail Gorbachev to let Soviet Jews emigrate or growing our economy so we could afford his military buildup, Reagan forced Moscow to react to Washington’s pressure rather than the other way ’round.
In retrospect it all looks easy — and inevitable. At the time, it provoked bitter protest, from mass demonstrations in Europe and a nuclear-freeze movement in America to the constant denigration Reagan endured in the press.
His first big move came with the air-traffic controllers. When they went out on strike, Reagan gave them 48 hours to return. This wasn’t easy, because Reagan risked being blamed in the event of an aircraft disaster. Plus, the controllers’ union was one of the few that had endorsed him in his race against Jimmy Carter.
Reagan held firm and fired the strikers. The Politburo took note. As his national security advisor said, breaking that strike was Reagan’s “first foreign-policy decision.”
There would be more to follow. Before his first year was out, Reagan announced a major military buildup that included the B-1 bomber and MX missiles. Later he would invade Grenada, deploy the Pershing II missiles in Europe, launch his plans to develop a space-based missile-defense system and arm the contras fighting the Soviet-backed Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
Every such action met with derision and jeers. To take but one example: The day after Reagan called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, Anthony Lewis denounced it in The New York Times as “primitive” and “dangerous.”
In the Soviet forced labor camps, there was a different reaction: Natan Sharansky says when he learned of Reagan’s words, it was his “brightest, most glorious day” in the gulag. In his prison block, inmates burst into loud celebrations.
There were other Reagan demonstrations of resolve. After a wheelchair-bound US citizen, Leon Klinghoffer, had been thrown into the Mediterranean by Palestinian terrorists, Navy pilots intercepted the plane carrying them to Tunisia.
Reagan also ordered air strikes on Libya after learning of its involvement in the bombing of a Berlin disco that killed two American soldiers. Just as important, he walked away from a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik when the latter demanded the abandonment of SDI as the price of his agreement.
And when he gave Afghans support, it wasn’t just enough to fight. The stingers he gave the Afghans helped them prevail, because it let them blow out of the sky the Soviets’ most feared weapon: the Hind helicopter, essentially a flying tank.
Today Vladimir Putin seems bent on re-establishing the old USSR, even if he’s replacing the Marxist-Leninism of the old Soviet order with the market-Leninism of today’s Russian oligarchs. Even so, he has his own vulnerabilities: world oil prices, the distrust of almost all his neighbors, NATO, a weak economy at home and his craving for international respect.
President Obama’s most immediate Crimea challenge isn’t how to get the Russians out of Crimea. It’s how to get the hard men in Moscow — and Tehran and Pyongyang and Damascus and Beijing, not to mention the Islamic terrorists still plotting their attacks — to begin taking him seriously.
Unless he does, his own sentence will be: “Without firing a shot, Barack Obama made the world a far more dangerous place.”