The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War.

• Author: Skinner, Kiron K.
• Position: Review

Beth A. Fischer, (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 176 pp., $27.50.

The orthodox line that Ronald Reagan knew little and did less, and that his foreign policy success was the result of unusual good fortune - particularly in the form of Mikhail Gorbachev's coming to power - is losing ground. It is gradually being displaced by the revisionist thesis that Reagan was a shrewd strategist who orchestrated events, wanted victory in the Cold War, and sensed that it was possible. Still, the burden on those seeking to make the latter case is heavy, because Reagan has for so long been presented in terms of a thin, insubstantial persona, little more than a political brand name for a kind of class-B Hollywood anti-Sovietism. What is revealed by a close inspection of the record, however, is that the revisionists not only make the better case, but may even be underestimating the man.

Three recent books make the case for Ronald Reagan's seminal role in ending the Cold War, arguing in their different ways that Reagan was an unusually strategic-minded politician. In The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War, Beth Fischer contends that in the span of ten weeks the Reagan administration completely reversed its Soviet policy. On October 31, 1983, Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Dam delivered a speech declaring that, through its military build-up and meddling around the globe, the Soviet Union posed the greatest threat to U.S. and global security. But in a televised foreign policy address on January 16, 1984, President Reagan went out of his way to stress the "common interests" of the superpowers, and to declare that the possibility of nuclear war was the most important security threat to both the United States and the Soviet Union. The January 16 speech, argues Fischer, "proved to be the turning point in his administration's approach to the Kremlin. With this speech, Reagan began seeking a rapprochement."

Fischer considers three domestic level explanations for the alleged policy change. One is that President Reagan moderated his Soviet policy in 1984 because it was an election year. Another is that by 1984, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and Secretary of State George Shultz had captured the supposedly passive President and implemented a more moderate approach to superpower relations. Fischer's third hypothesis is that the President himself led the reversal because of a genuine conversion. She finds this last thesis the most convincing.

Fischer argues that in the aftermath of the Soviet downing of Korean Air flight 007 in September 1983, the airing of the television movie "The Day After", which graphically depicted the effects of a nuclear war on the United States, and a Pentagon briefing on nuclear war, the President "had a turning-point experience." This experience tapped into his deep-seated and long-standing abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and his moral outrage over the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, which worked by holding civilization itself hostage before an act of mutual insanity. In addition to all this, the Soviet Union - apparently reacting to a major NATO training exercise (Able Archer) in November - upgraded the alert status of some of its nuclear-capable fighter aircraft. The superpowers had come too close to blundering into nuclear war for Reagan's comfort. According to Fischer, it was in response to this accumulation of factors...