How the Reagan Doctrine Turned Containment Into Rollback

For the first thirty-odd years of the Cold War, American strategy had one big idea, and it sounded like a plumbing term. Containment. Keep the Communist world inside its borders, the way you keep water inside a pipe. If it leaked somewhere, patch it. If it leaked somewhere else, patch that too. It was careful, it was sensible, and it had a built-in defect that nobody on the cocktail circuit liked to mention: under containment, the other side only ever advanced. We held, they pushed, and the map moved in one direction.

Ronald Reagan looked at that arrangement and asked a question that sounds obvious now. Why is the front line always on our side? That question is the Reagan Doctrine, and the answers he gave, in Afghanistan, in Central America, in Africa and in a small island in the Caribbean, are still being argued over in Republican circles today. In this post I'll explain how the doctrine worked, where it succeeded, where it went wrong, and what the best objections are, with the conservative answer to each.

What containment was, and where it came from

Containment was the strategy the country adopted after the Second World War. Its intellectual father was the diplomat George Kennan, whose long telegram from Moscow in February 1946 and his anonymous article in Foreign Affairs in 1947 argued that Soviet power was expansionist but cautious, and that patient, firm resistance would let internal contradictions in the Soviet system do the rest. That is covered in George Kennan's Long Telegram and the Strategy That Won the Cold War. The Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Marshall Plan and NATO all flowed from it.

Republicans had objected from the start. In the 1952 campaign, the party platform and its foreign-policy spokesmen talked about liberation and rollback rather than mere containment. But when the Hungarians rose against Soviet rule in October 1956, and Soviet tanks crushed them, the Eisenhower administration did not intervene, because the risk of a general war with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union was too high. The rhetoric of liberation had met the reality of deterrence. For the next quarter-century, rollback remained mostly a slogan, and the map of the Third World gave the Soviets a long run of gains: Vietnam in 1975, Angola and Mozambique in the same year or soon after, Ethiopia, Nicaragua in 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

The label and the speech

The name came from a journalist. In a column in Time magazine on April 1, 1985, Charles Krauthammer wrote about what he called the Reagan Doctrine, a policy under which the United States gave open or covert support to anti-Communist insurgents and resistance movements on several continents. Krauthammer did not invent the policy, but he named it, and the name stuck.

The administration had already said as much itself. In his State of the Union address on February 6, 1985, Reagan said that the United States must not break faith with those who were risking their lives on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights that were ours from birth. That was the doctrine in a sentence. It said that the United States would help people who were already fighting Soviet-backed regimes and would do so openly, not merely as a hidden operation.

How did the mechanism work? In plain terms there were four parts. First, the United States identified a local movement that already existed and was fighting a government with Soviet or Cuban backing. Second, it supplied weapons, money, training or intelligence, often through a third country. Third, the aim was to raise the cost to Moscow of holding what it had won, since a regime that needs constant Soviet help is a drain on the Soviet treasury. Fourth, the hope was that the Soviets would eventually decide the price was too high. It was an indirect strategy: American dollars and equipment, local fighters.

Why this was different from the old talk of liberation

Republicans had been promising rollback since the early 1950s, so what changed? Four things, and they are worth listing because they explain why the idea had been a slogan under Eisenhower and a policy under Reagan.

First, the targets were different. In Hungary in 1956 the fight was inside the Soviet bloc itself, in Moscow's own backyard, where any American move risked a direct clash between nuclear powers. By the 1980s the fights were on the periphery, in places like Afghanistan and Angola, where Moscow had stretched itself thin and where local people were already doing the fighting. The risk of direct superpower war was lower.

Second, the policy was stated openly. A secret operation can be disowned and cut off the moment it becomes inconvenient. A declared doctrine, announced in a State of the Union address, told both friends and enemies that America was in it for the long haul, and told Moscow the bill would keep arriving.

Third, it was cheap in the way that matters to a taxpayer and a mother. No American division was sent to the mountains of Afghanistan. The cost in American lives was a small fraction of what a ground war would have been. Whatever else you think about the doctrine, that is a feature a conservative who counts costs should notice.

Fourth, the Soviet Union was overextended. Its economy was creaking, its leaders were aging, and it held commitments from Cuba to Vietnam to Ethiopia that drained its treasury. A strategy that adds cost to an adversary who is already straining is a very different thing from the same strategy against a rising power at the height of its strength.

Afghanistan: the textbook case

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began in December 1979, and the United States started providing covert aid to Afghan resistance fighters under the Carter administration. Under Reagan the program grew greatly. The aid flowed largely through Pakistan, whose intelligence service distributed it to Afghan commanders.

The turning point came in 1986, when the administration decided to supply the mujahideen with Stinger shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. The decision was contested inside the government, because of fears of escalation and of the weapons falling into the wrong hands. The Stingers were first used in the autumn of 1986, and by most accounts they hampered the Soviet helicopter gunships and aircraft that had given Moscow a tactical edge. In April 1988 the Geneva Accords were signed, and the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan on February 15, 1989. Gorbachev had called the war a "bleeding wound" in a phrase attributed to him, and for a country that was already struggling, it was one more drain.

Was it a conservative triumph? In the narrow sense of the Cold War, yes. A superpower had been defeated by poorly equipped fighters with help from outside, and the Soviet Union was left to explain to its people why thousands of its soldiers had died for nothing. But hold that thought, because the other side of the ledger is in the section on objections.

Grenada, Angola and Nicaragua

Grenada. The island's Marxist government had been building close ties with Cuba and the Soviet bloc, including a large airport project. In October 1983 a hardline faction overthrew and killed Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, and the island fell into chaos. Neighboring Caribbean states asked for help, American medical students were on the island, and on October 25, 1983, American forces landed, in a short operation. It was one of the very few times the United States actually removed a Marxist-aligned government by force, and the island held elections in 1984. The United Nations General Assembly condemned the action, and a good many of our allies kept their distance. It came two days after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 American servicemen, and critics said the invasion was a distraction. The administration said the timing was a coincidence driven by events on the island.

Angola. After independence in 1975, the country was torn between a Marxist government backed by the Soviet Union and Cuban troops, and the UNITA movement under Jonas Savimbi. Congress had barred covert aid in 1976 with the Clark Amendment, and it was repealed in 1985. American aid to UNITA followed. In December 1988 an accord was signed that provided for the withdrawal of Cuban troops and the independence of neighboring Namibia. Angola is the murkiest of the cases, because the civil war continued for years, and Savimbi was a controversial figure.

Nicaragua. The Sandinista government took power in July 1979 and aligned itself with Havana and Moscow. The Reagan administration backed the Contra rebels. Congress, controlled by the opposition in the House, passed a series of restrictions known as the Boland Amendments: the first, in December 1982, barred aid for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government, and a stricter one in October 1984 cut off military aid by the agencies involved in intelligence. The Sandinistas eventually lost an internationally observed election in February 1990 to Violeta Chamorro, after a regional peace process led in part by Costa Rica's president Oscar Arias. Supporters of the doctrine say the pressure helped make that election possible. Critics say the peace process did the work. Both claims have some truth.

The strongest objection: blowback and Iran-Contra

Here is the critics' case at its strongest. There are two main charges.

Charge one: blowback. The money and weapons we gave to Afghan fighters, they say, helped create the networks that later gave us the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Armed groups don't disband when the war ends. You win the battle and lose the century.

Charge two: Iran-Contra. In November 1986 it came out that the administration had secretly sold arms to Iran, in an effort to free American hostages in Lebanon, and that proceeds had been diverted to the Contras at a time when Congress had restricted such aid. A series of investigations followed. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh brought charges against a number of officials; some convictions were overturned on appeal, and in December 1992 President George H. W. Bush pardoned six people connected to the affair. Reagan himself said in March 1987 that the facts showed the arms sales had in practice turned into a trade for hostages, whatever his intentions. To the critics, this was a scandal about secret government, defiance of Congress and a President who either did not know or did not control his own staff.

The conservative answers, point by point

1. On blowback, look at who got the money. The record I am aware of shows American aid in Afghanistan going through Pakistani channels to Afghan commanders, not to the foreign Arab volunteers who came to fight. Osama bin Laden's organization took shape late in the war, and the claim that the CIA "created" al-Qaeda is much stronger in slogans than in the documented record. Historians still argue about the details, so I would say only this: it is an unproven charge, not an established fact.
2. The real error was walking away. After the Soviets left in 1989, American attention drifted, and Afghanistan was left to civil war. That was the mistake. The lesson is not "never help," it is "do not help and then leave the field to the worst actors."
3. The alternative was not peace. The alternative was a Soviet empire that kept expanding for free. The choice was never between aid and a quiet world. It was between supporting the people who wanted to resist, and leaving them to Moscow.
4. Iran-Contra was wrong, and a conservative should say so. This is the most important point. A good cause does not excuse going around the law. The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, and a President who works against its restrictions through secret channels is breaking the principle conservatives claim to defend. You can believe the Contra cause was just, and also believe the way it was handled was a serious abuse. Both are true.

What the argument means for the right today

The Reagan Doctrine is a living argument within the party. The hawks and the nationalists draw different conclusions from it. One side says it proves that backing resistance is the cheapest way to hurt a hostile power: no American troops, local fighters, a high cost to the adversary. The other side says it shows how easy it is to be drawn into other people's wars, with consequences nobody can predict. Both sides can cite the same decade. The comparison is laid out in Hawks, Restrainers, Realists and Nationalists on the Right, Compared, and the older party quarrel over the same question is in Taft Versus Eisenhower and the Republican Fight Over the World.

It also bears on the debate about covert action and the law, a subject explained in Who Does What in American Intelligence, Explained in Twelve Questions, and on the proper role of Congress in making war, which is covered in Who Declares War? What the Founders Meant and Where We Drifted. And if you want to see how the Reagan strategy fit into the larger story of how the Cold War ended, see Seven Myths About Reagan, Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War.

The bottom line

• The Reagan Doctrine was a decision to back people already fighting Soviet-supported regimes, so that the other side would pay for its gains instead of only the United States paying to contain them.
• It worked best where local fighters were real and the aid was open and sustained, as in Afghanistan, where the Soviets left in 1989.
• Iran-Contra was a genuine abuse. A conservative who loves the Constitution should say so without flinching, because the purse belongs to Congress.
• The mistake to avoid is helping and then leaving. A policy of resistance needs an endgame, or someone worse fills the vacuum.
• When you hear this debate on the right, ask two questions: who are the local fighters, and what happens the day after the war?