5 Reagan's Worldview and Management Style

5 Reagan’s worldview and management style Introduction This chapter will focus on the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan. It begins by placing the Reagan administration in historical context. Late 1970s US foreign policy was marked by arguments over the idea of American decline and Soviet resurgence. The election of Ronald Reagan offered a strong counter to these arguments and generated support for increased American assertiveness in international relations. The chapter then moves on to look at the development of Ronald Reagan’s worldview, particularly his view of American power and the Soviet Union, his vision for American foreign policy and how this shaped his attitude to executing the functions of the office of the presidency. It addresses several ques- tions. Why was Reagan so strongly anti-communist? What impact did this have on his foreign policy? This chapter argues that Reagan’s worldview was formulated as a result of his direct experience of working with American communists in Holly- wood in the 1940s and his dislike of the policy of containment. As a result, Reagan entered the White House with a desire to increase the military capabilities of the United States to counter what he viewed as the advances made by the Soviet Union in the developing world, leading directly to the development of the policy of roll- back. This provides evidence to support the argument that presidential worldview is central to setting the US foreign policy agenda. The second part of the analysis focuses on Reagan’s management of the executive branch and bureaucracy. It will be shown that, as with all pre- sidents, the operation of the executive is a direct consequence of the management preferences of the president. Although Reagan was keen to involve himself in formulating the long-term strategic goals of his administration, he was less willing to actively participate in the details and day-to-day complexity of foreign policy-making. It will be shown that Reagan adopted a formal management system, but complicated matters by delegating a large amount of authority to his subordinates when it came to the actual implementation of policy. The chapter will argue that Reagan’s management weaknesses directly contributed to the bureaucratic confusion that existed during his administration. In particular, it will focus on Reagan’s inability to manage the relationship between his National Security Council staff and the State Department, the 102 Reagan’s worldview and management style relationship between the national security advisor and the secretary of state, and the divisions between the hardliners and moderates within his administration. In doing so it will show how important the president’s management style is to the functioning of the foreign policy-making process. The historical context of the Reagan administration and Reagan’s worldview US foreign policy faced several difficulties in the late 1970s. The legacy of the Vietnam War had produced a strong sentiment amongst the American popu- lation flatly opposed to deploying US troops in large numbers anywhere in the world unless there was a threat of the highest order to US national security. This domestic restriction on US military intervention left policy- makers questioning the limits of American power. There was a widely held perception that the US was in decline and was faced with the growing threat of a resurgent Soviet Union. The Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had served to many as examples of American weakness. This was coupled with domestic economic stagnation as a result of the oil crises. The foreign policy of Jimmy Carter hinted at the lessening of containment, acceptance of the Soviet Union and attempted to incorporate new ideas of multilateralism and the promotion of human rights as US goals.1 The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 offered a striking alternative to this feeling of malaise. Reagan rejected any notion of American decline and promised to restore America to its rightful place as the most powerful (and greatest) nation on Earth. Reagan believed American foreign policy should be based on the strongest view of American exceptionalism. He argued that Jimmy Carter had given in to liberal defeatism and it was now his job to lead a conservative revolution that would replace the pessimism of Carter with faith in the unlimited potential of American greatness. At his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Reagan stated, ‘They say that the United States has had its day in the sun; that our nation has passed its zenith … that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities … My fellow citizens I utterly reject that view’.2 For Reagan, there was a simple prescription to be followed to restore the US to her former glories: ‘the “simple answers” were: free enterprise, dereg- ulation, the ending of self-doubt, rearming in the face of Soviet aggression, and rejuvenation of the national democratic (and messianic) purpose’.3 The focal point of US foreign policy was the Soviet Union. Reagan viewed US– Soviet Union relations in simple good versus evil terms. At a television conference in January 1981, Reagan proclaimed that the Soviet leaders ‘have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognise is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that’.4 As will be shown later in the chapter, this dichotomy influenced almost every level of US foreign policy during his administration. Reagan’s worldview and management style 103 Reagan had been a staunch anti-communist since his time spent working as the leader of the Screen Actor’s Guild in the Hollywood movie industry in the late 1940s where he came into direct contact with communist activists.5 Writing in his memoirs, Reagan described his experience dealing with left-leaning Conference of Studio Unions and the movie industry strike of 1946: These were eye opening years for me … Now I knew from firsthand experience how Communists used lies, deceit, violence, or any other tactic that suited them to advance the cause of Soviet expansionism. I knew from the experience of hand-to-hand combat [with the union leaders] that America faced no more insidious or evil threat than that of communism.6 Reagan’s view of communists and the Soviet Union was cultivated further over the next 20 years during his employment with General Electric. He was hired as a company spokesman and spent most of the 1960s giving speeches to conservative and business groups attacking communism and refusing to acknowledge the right of the Soviet Union to exist.7 On entering office, Reagan based his Soviet policy on several assumptions about the nature of the bipolar structure of the international system. The first was that the Soviet leaders were adherents of Marxist-Leninist ideology and thus the foreign policy of the Soviet Union would inevitably seek the destruction of the liberal democratic capitalist countries and the creation of a one-world communist state governed from Moscow. At a television conference in January 1981, Reagan stated: I know of no leader of the Soviet Union since the revolution, and including the present leadership, that has not more than once repeated in the various Communist congresses they hold their determination that their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state, whichever word you want to use.8 If the Soviet Union was planning world domination, then the US had no choice but to do all it could to halt this advance. This produced the second assumption, that the US and the Soviet Union were engaged in a zero-sum conflict. Gains for the Soviet Union were by definition losses for the US. Defeat in Vietnam and Soviet advances into Afghanistan and other developing countries posed a security threat to the US in the eyes of Reagan and his administration. Here we can clearly see the link between Reagan’s worldview and the ori- gins of his Soviet policy. His dealings with communist workers in the film industry during the 1940s had provided him with an ideological lens through which he interpreted Soviet foreign policy over the previous 40 years. It should be noted that Reagan was obviously not the only American policy- maker who held staunch anti-communist views. However, what is important to note is that Reagan’s views of the nature of the Soviet Union and its 104 Reagan’s worldview and management style foreign policy were based in large part on his dealing with American workers over four decades previously. Rather than attempting to grapple with the complex realities of Soviet power, geostrategic interests and communist ideology, Reagan often fell back on over simplified assumptions. Of course, as discussed in Chapter 1, it is inevitable that policy-makers will develop simplifications of reality to cope with the complexities of foreign policy decision- making. However, these are often based on experiences of dealing with simi- lar situations or learning from others who have such experience.9 Where Truman suffered from a famously weak understanding of history and often deployed poor choices of historical analogies,10 Reagan relied too often on inappropriate personal experiences and projected these simplifications onto reality and his decision-making suffered as a consequence. This in large part stemmed from the fact that Reagan had had almost no contact with anyone from the Soviet Union. He had never travelled to the country, had never met any of its people, and had only met one Soviet leader when Richard Nixon invited Reagan, then Governor of California, to meet Leonid Brezhnev.

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