THE REAGAN DOCTRINE - POLICY SHIFT PRODUCES GAINS FOR DEMOCRACY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504120001-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 11, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 10, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
i Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/11: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504120001-2
ON PAGE
The Reagan
Doctrine
Policy shift produces
gains for democracy
By Don Mcleod
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The month of February, in the year 1986, was a rare
time in the history of U.S. involvement in the affairs of
the world. In a span of scarcely more than two weeks,
two dictators fell from power, departures that were pro-
moted and partly provoked by the U.S. government. This
may be the most dramatic revision of U.S. policy since
the early days of the Cold War.
For a full generation, the United States had seen one
friendly government after another fall under the spell
of forces hostile to democracy and to itself: From East-
ern Europe to China, from Cuba to Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia, from Nicaragua to Iran, one faulty regime
was often replaced by one even worse.
But since the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua
in 1979, no other avowedly Marxist-Leninist government
has taken control in a previously non-communist coun-
try. And though diplomatically friendly but despotic gov-
ernments have fallen in Haiti and the Philippines, pros-
pects for democracy and continuing U.S. friendship have
survived.
Between the U.S.-engineered ouster of Life President
of the Republic Jean-Claude Duvalier from Haiti and the
U.S.-promoted ouster of Ferdinand Marcos from the
Philippines, Ronald Reagan paid a commemorative visit
to the Caribbean island nation of Grenada, where U.S.
troops, two years earlier, had driven out a communist
government and its Cuban support.
Old-style protests against "gunboat diplomacy" were
remarkably absent; the U.S. president was welcomed as
a savior of the island and its people. Prime Minister
Herbert Blaize called Mr. Reagan "our national hero, our
own rescuer, after God."
After 39 years of Cold War policy, has the United
States finally found the secret of success? Future histo-
rians must answer that question, but for now, at least,
what appears is a Reagan Doctrine brought to fruition.
The Reagan Doctrine has been largely inchoate until
now. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer
coined the term in an April 1985 essay for Time mag-
azine. Still, the president had been developing it since
his June 1982 speech before the British Parliament de-
claring "abhorrence of dictatorship in all its forms." He
said "any system is inherently unstable that has no
peaceful means to legitimize its leaders. In such cases,
WASHINGTON TIMES
10 March 1986
the very repressiveness of the state
ultimately drives people to resist it, if
necessary, by force. While we must be
cautious about forcing the pace of
change, we must not hesitate to de-
clare our ultimate objectives and to
take actions to move toward them"
The basic tenets of his doctrine: "to
foster the infrastructure of democ-
racy - the system of a free press,
unions, political parties, universities
- which allows a people to choose
their own way to develop their own
culture, to reconcile their own differ-
ences through peaceful means."
Until recently, the Reagan Doctrine
had been thought of primarily in
terms of anti-communist insurgency.
Faced with Soviet-and-Cuban-backed
governments and their assaults on
pro-Western governments around the
globe, Mr. Reagan threw down the
gauntlet in his 1985 State of the Union
speech. He declared that the United
States, recovered from the season of
self-doubt brought on by the Vietnam
War, had "resumed our historic role as
a leader of the Free World. ... We
must stand by all our democratic al-
lies. And we must not break faith with
those who are risking their lives - on
every continent, from Afghanistan to
Nicaragua - to defy Soviet-supported
aggression and secure rights which
have been ours from birth."
The president asked Congress for
money to send aid, including arms, to
insurgents trying to overthrow Marx-
ist regimes or Soviet occupation. He
lost the vote for military aid to the
rebel forces in Nicaragua, but he did
get money for "humanitarian" assis-
tance.
Congress also approved some 250
million a year in "covert" aid for the
resistance to the Soviet-backed re-
gime in Afghanistan and repealed the
Clark men ment,_ which had for a
decade banned American aid to Jonas
Savimbi's Angolan rebels.
Secretary of State George P. Shultz
sharpened the picture when he said:
"The new phenomenon that we are
witnessing around the world - pop-
ular insurgencies against communist
domination - is not an American cre-
ation. In every region, the people have
made their own decision to stand and
fight rather than see their cultures
and freedoms quietly erased. They
have made clear their readiness to
fight with or without support, using
every available means and enduring
severe hardships, alone if need be. But
America also has a moral responsibil-
ity. The lesson of the postwar era is
that America must be the leader of the
Free World."
The other side of the Reagan Doc-
trine - defense of democratic princi-
ple even under harsh but pro-Western
governments - has a much longer
pedigree and was the centerpiece of
President Jimmy Carter's administra-
tion's human rights initiatives. The ac-
tions taken by the Reagan administra-
tion are "different from previous
interventions, not so much as a matter
of theory or principle but in the skill
with which these have been carried
out," says Donald Kagan, a Yale Uni-
versity historian.
"The Reagan Doctrine breaks
American foreign policy out of a sta-
tus quo, hold-the-line view of the
world and for the first time has the
potential to put America on the offen-
sive as a revolutionary power, which is
what American foreign policy should
be;' says a congressional source who
has been active in creating a Republi-
can Party consensus behind the doc-
trine.
Rep. James A. Courter, a New Jer-
sey Republican and a congressional
champion of the Reagan policy, says
giving it full credit for the recent
successes may be "giving Reagan too
much credit. It might have been tha,
events just took over." Another Repub-
lican congressional source says, "The
policy has come about almost by ne-
cessity."
But Carl Gershman, president of
the Reagan-initiated National Endow-
ment for Democracy, says it may
mean that "the United States under-
stands the need to get ahead of the
curve and to support democratic
forces as a way of pre-empting the
Soviet effort to take over countries.
Mr. Gershman says the U.S. tactic
in the Philippines and Haiti prevented
leftists from uniting with democratic
forces in opposition to unpopular re-
gimes and then pre-empting the ensu-
ing government leadership. "What's
happened in both cases," he says, "is
that the Marxist left has been out-
flanked"
Scholars and statesmen are quick
to point out the fact that Reagan did
not invent the idea of promoting de-
mocracy, not only ideologically but for
the sake of the national interest. It
was, for example, the foundation for
President Harry S. T uman's postwar
doctrine. In the late 1940s, Mr. Tru-
man simultaneously promised mili-
tary protection for vulnerable friends
of the United States and launched an
enormous program of financial assis-
tance. He said economic recovery was
the best antidote to communism, once
the military threat was blunted.
Mr. Truman said it would be U.S.
policy "to help free peoples to main-
tain ... their national integrity against
aggressive movements that seek to
impose upon them totalitarian re-
gimes" But he also argued that the aid
would "permit the emergence of po-
litical and social conditions in which
free institutions can exist."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/11: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504120001-2
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/11: CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0504120001-2
Coping with evidence of fraud in
the Philippine election of 1953, says
Robert Osgood of Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity's School of Advanced Interna-
tional Studies, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower "went on the air and said
we were impartial supporters of the
electoral process and the constitu-
tional system, and he warned against
corruption. I think he would have
played it about the same" as Mr. Rea-
gan did the Philippine election of
1986. Mr. Eisenhower's realpolitik
ideas led him to approve covert oper-
ations that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz
uzman in Guatemala and Moham-
med MoSsadeph in Iran: bot-F -Were
playing off the nascent anti-
Americanism the it Wor and
Mr. Eisen ower saw them as not only
an annoyance but a threat tote est.
(Indeed, one Cuban e ector has testi-
fied that Mr. Arbenz was under KGB
control.)
The anti-communist rhetoric of the
Kennedy administration was more
impassioned: "Let every nation know,
whether it wishes us well or ill, that
we shall pay any price, bear any bur-
den ... to assure the survival and suc-
cess of liberty," Mr. Kennedy said in
his oft-quoted inaugural address. Mr.
Kennedy talked big, but carried a
smaller stick; four months after inton-
ing those words, he sponsored the in-
vasion of the Bay of Pigs by exiled
Cubans but failed to provide promised
air cover. Historians such as the Hoo-
ver Institution's David Gress believe
that Western Europe's decision to take
a more conciliatory attitude toward
the Soviet Union was born of Mr. Ken-
nedy's refusal to tear down the Berlin
Wall in 1961.
More important, in 1963 Mr. Ken-
nedy moved against Ngo Dinh Diem,
the leader of Vietnam - an ally who
was not liberalizing his regime
quickly enough. This destabilization
of a friendly despot would seem to
parallel Mr. Reagan's moves against
Mr. Duvalier and Mr. Marcos, with
two exceptions. First, Diem was as-
sassinated. Second, his eventual suc-
cessor, Nguyen Van Thieu, was not a
democrat; he was, in a phrase popular
at the time, "our bastard"
The dry run for the Haiti move
came in 1965, when President Lyndon
B. Johnson sent U.S. troops into the
Dominican Republic to impose a truce
in a civil war and allow the reformist
military junta to estab-lish a provi-
sional government and sponsor demo-
cratic elections.
But such ideological motivations
gave way to the Nixon administra-
tion's - especially then-Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger's - realpolitik
arguments and actions.
The Nixon Doctrine promised ma-
terial support, though not necessarily
U.S: troops, for governments trying to
resist foreign or domestic communist
aggression. But the Nixon Doctrine
was quickly associated with support
for authoritarian, albeit anti-
communist, rulers such as the shah of
Iran.
Jimmy Carter, who spoke of the
need to overcome "our inordinate fear
of communism," directed his foreign
policy efforts at putting substantial
public pressure on friendly regimes
while pursuing aggressive detente
with the Soviet Union.
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick provided the
transition from the Carter Doctrine to
the Reagan Doctrine when she revi-
talized political philosopher Hannah
Arendt's distinction between totalitar-
ian and authoritarian regimes. Mrs.
Kirkpatrick combined realpolitik -
the need to accept alliances with au-
thoritarians whose actions we may de-
test - with ideology - the necessity
of combating totalitarianism because
of its uniquely barbarous character.
Writing in late 1979, Mrs. Kirkpat-
rick was thinking particularly of Ar-
gentina and revolutionary Nicaragua
- the former an authoritarian regime
that she predicted could move toward
democracy, the latter an emerging to-
talitarian state. The germ of the Rea-
gan Doctrine process is encouraging
democratic institutions, practices and
habits so that a viable democratic al-
ternative is available. This is where
Jimmy Carter failed, when dictator
Anastasio Somoza Debayle was top-
pling in Nicaragua.
Says Mr. Courter: "We proclaimed
it to be a legitimate revolution, a legiti-
mate effort by a coalition of groups in
Nicaragua to rid themselves of
Somoza, to rid themselves of an illegit-
imate dictator.
Says Michael Ledeen of
Georgetown University's Center for
Strategic and International Studies:
"Carter found himself trapped in a
continuum of his own device: He si-
multaneously refused to support a
friendly dictator and refused to fight
for the forces that we wanted to pre-
vail"
Active sponsorship of democratic
government within a friendly nation
began under Mr. Reagan with U.S.
pressures on President Jose Napoleon
Duarte to liberalize his rule in El Sal-
vador. In 1982, Salvadorans elected a
constituent assembly in the first free
elections in that country in 50 years.
And the democratic tide has contin-
ued apace. Mr. Ledeen says, "If you
look at Latin America alone, over the
last five to 10 years it's a fantastic
transformation - almost every coun-
try you can think of" has become sig-
nificantly more democratic.
The broader view of the Reagan
Doctrine encompasses measures to
encourage the trend throughout the
world, by creating, even behind the
Iron Curtain, the fertile soil for de-
mocracy that Mr. Truman sought. Part
of this effort is carried on through Mr.
Gershman's National Endowment for
Democracy. Although operating on a
modest budget - currently $18 mil-
lion a year - it has cooperated with
private organizations at home and
abroad in efforts that have built its
resources and programs.
The program is not without its crit-
ics. Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, South
Carolina Democrat, calls it a "pork
barrel," while Howard Phillips,
chairman of the 800,000-member Con-
servative Caucus, says these efforts
"seem to favor democratic socialist
governments," which he opposes.
Conservatives also express the fear
that the U.S.-nudged ouster of non-
communist dictators in Haiti and the
Philippines, while Marxist regimes
elsewhere remain largely unmolest-
ed, could be the beginning of a dan-
gerous trend.
At the same time conservatives and
moderates alike argue that if the
United States can intervene for the
sake of democracy in the internal af-
fairs of nations friendly to this coun-
try, it is difficult to justify a reluctance
to aid anti-communist forces in such
places as Nicaragua and Angola. Mr.
Phillips thinks even the Reagan ad-
ministration is softening its opposi-
tion to the Marxist dictatorships, de-
spite the raised rhetoric.
Mr. Courter, on the other hand,
leads the defense of the Reagan policy
on two grounds. "A lot of people say
it's important just for the United
States to help true democratic resis-
tance organizations and efforts in dif-
ferent parts of the world because we
have to make sure that the Soviet
Union knows that their adventurism
has a price;' he says. "That's a reason,
but it's not the most important one.
The most important reason is because
it's right and just to be consistent with
our own Declaration of Indepen-
dence"
Consistency is increasingly persua-
sive to congressmen. Democrats,
such as Rep. Dante B. Fascell of Flor-
ida, chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, supported both
the pressures that persuaded Mr.
Marcos to step down, and aid for the
Nicaraguan rebels. Others still make
distinctions. Rep. Lee Hamilton of In-
diana, second-ranking Democrat on
the committee, applauds the success
in the Philippines and Haiti but que$- ,
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/11: CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0504120001-2
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/11: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504120001-2
tions aid to the Nicaraguan resistance
(often called Contras).
From both sides of the congres-
sional aisle, however, there is general
agreement that the day of propping up
friendly dictators may be gone. Mr.
Courter says he's "in favor of putting
our actions where our mouth is in or-
der to be consistent with our princi-
ples."
"We've had so much trouble over
the years;' a congressional staff ex-
pert says, "because we try different
things: We try containment, we try
supporting right-wing or military-
oriented dictators, we try detente -
and all these are holding patterns that
are very difficult to build domestic
support for. Now, for the first time,
under Reagan we have a policy that
practices what we preach"
The bottom line in the debate over
the Reagan Doctrine may be the ques-
tion of principle, the principle of de-
mocracy across the board, even if
there is not total agreement. There
may never be. And the application of
principle to policy is not a new idea.
After all, it was Woodrow Wilson
who said of a neighboring dictator: "I
will not recognize a government of
butchers."
What may be new is a systematic
application of the principle to policy
over an extended period of time. Says
Mr. Kagan: "We've had 30 years of
experience since Eisenhower, and
that's why we're getting better."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/11: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504120001-2