On the Brink:
The Dramatic Saga of How the Reagan Administration Changed the Course of History and Won the Cold War
By Jay Winik
Simon & Schuster, 658 pages, $30
On Oct. 28, 1992, the great American diplomat George F. Kennan published an article in The New York Times titled, “Republicans won the Cold War?” Kennan’s opening sentence left no doubt about where he stood on the question. “The suggestion,” Kennan wrote, “that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic-political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish. No great country has that sort of influence on the internal developments of any other one.”
Someone, apparently, forgot to tell this to Jay Winik, who has written a massive book on how the Reagan administration won the Cold War. At first blush it is tempting to agree with Kennan and dismiss the question of who won the Cold War. But then you might miss out on this compelling, if somewhat exaggerated, account of American foreign policy in the last years of the Cold War.
“On the Brink” is a tale of triumph and celebration. Winik, an adjunct professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland, begins his narrative with President Jimmy Carter’s failed mission to rescue American hostages in Iran, in 1979. “That dismal failure in the desert,” he writes, “was to become emblematic of the decade that had preceded it, a decade of dashed American hopes around the globe, and the slow, relentless erosion of American power and prestige.”
It is not hard to see where Winik is going. As the 1980s opened, he tells us, the very survival of democracy seemed in doubt. Until, that is, Ronald Reagan and his conservative advisers came to power. Rejecting what they saw as the timid detente policies of the Carter and Nixon years, Reagan and his anti-communist visionaries embraced a host of policies designed to force the Soviet Union to compete with the U.S. in a costly arms race. In Europe, the Reagan administration dismissed the popular view that arms control was the only way to avoid nuclear holocaust and pressed for deep reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal. At the United Nations, American representatives vigorously promoted U.S. national interests and waged ideological warfare against the rogue Soviets. And in the Third World, most notably Central America, the new administration scoffed at Carteresque fears of another Vietnam and decided to thwart communist insurrections through prudent use of American economic and military might.
“Under Ronald Reagan,” Winik writes, “everywhere the Soviets had turned, their pressure was met by U.S. counterpressure.” These confrontational policies, Winik argues, fatally weakened the Soviet empire. “Eventually, when they could no longer compete, not militarily, not politically, not ideologically, not economically . . . (the) Soviets saw the inevitable, and then took the only feasible door left open to them, and, in turn, they too chose peace, even at the price of dismantling themselves.”
Winik describes in clear and cogent detail the intricacies of Reagan’s foreign policy. But what makes this story so dramatic is his account of Reagan’s foreign policy advisers and their epic struggle to implement, against powerful opposition, their hard-line anti-communist program.
Richard Perle, assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, led the way. In charge of the administration’s nuclear-weapons policy, Perle quickly established himself as a vociferous supporter of U.S. arms buildup. Perle thought America’s treaties with the Soviets were deeply flawed because they contained loopholes that allowed the USSR to expand its nuclear arsenal. Rejecting the so-called Establishment view of nuclear weapons, which held that the “arms control process must never be disturbed,” Perle and his cadre of loyal, “hard-headed” aides used their power to rebuild American defenses and “stand firm with the Soviets.”
Equally instrumental in America’s Cold War triumph was Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Kirkpatrick, perhaps more than any other American diplomat in the 1980s, embodied the Reagan administration’s hard-line stand against “the evil empire.” She continually denounced Soviet aggression and spearheaded the nation’s growing commitment to fight communism in Central America.
And then there was Elliot Abrams, Reagan’s young, pugnacious assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs. Fearful of growing Soviet influence in the region, Abrams, though limited by congressional restrictions on U.S. military aid, worked zealously in Nicaragua to help the anti-communist contras. His actions would eventually land him in the center of the Iran-contra affair, but not before, according to Winik, he helped stave off a Soviet takeover in Central America.
Abrams, Kirkpatrick, Perle and a handful of other key members of Reagan’s foreign-policy team were part of what Winik calls the counterestablishment. These modern-day Cold Warriors, many of whom were Democrats disillusioned with detente, found a home in Reagan’s administration and “won (the Cold War) without sacrificing battalion upon battalion of bright, young lives. . . . It was a marvelous thing,” Winik concludes, “and rightly a time for celebration.”
“On the Brink” is worth reading, if only for the sheer drama of seeing foreign policy unfold in the waning years of the Cold War. But two issues are conspicuously absent from Winik’s account.
First, and most importantly, there is no discussion of events in the Soviet Union. Reagan’s policies, by forcing the Russians to compete in a costly arms race, probably did hasten the collapse of the Soviet regime. But to argue, as Winik does, that American foreign policy was primarily responsible for the demise of communism ignores the USSR’s enormous internal economic and political weaknesses and seems an exaggeration, at best.
This also would have been a more persuasive book had it recognized some of the domestic costs of the Cold War. Winik suggests not only that the arms race marked the death knell of the USSR; he also implies that American military expenditures had few, if any, negative consequences. But whatever one thinks of the American arms buildup, it surely carried some costs, contributing to the national debt, diverting attention and much-needed resources from domestic ills, and creating a huge military-industrial complex that did little to improve the national infrastructure.
It is, ultimately, a good thing that Winik didn’t share Kennan’s dismissive attitude toward the question of who won the Cold War. If he had, we would have been deprived of this engaging, informative book. But other, more-judicious accounts are sure to come. And these, it is hoped, will take into account Kennan’s sober assertions that the U.S.-Soviet struggle “was a long and costly political rivalry” and that the end of the Cold War is not something for which “any American political party”–or presidential administration–can “properly claim credit.”
