Requiem for the Reagan Doctrine

REQUIEM FOR THE_ REAGAN DOCTRINE Christopher Layne redictably, the Reagan Doctrine led the administration into a political and moral morass. Far more than a set of specific policy prescriptions, the Reagan Doctrine provided the intellectual framework— the Weltanschauung— that shaped the administration's external policies. As events proved, the Reagan Doctrine was an unsuitable basis for a viable post-Vietnam foreign policy because it failed to mobilize sustained support for American engagement abroad; it could not be implemented without circumventing established constitutional and political norms, and it ignored the shifting balance of world forces that underscored the continuing erosion of the United States' postwar political and economic hegemony. Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory rested in large measure on his pledge to arrest the country's declining prestige and to conduct a tough-minded foreign policy backed by a restored consensus. Yet, when the Iran-Contra scandal broke—severely crippling Reagan's presidency two years before his term expired—friends and adversaries alike regarded the United States as not only weak but also hypocritical. The administration's grasp of world politics, in its own way, was as flawed as the Carter administration's. The Iran-Contra hearings highlighted the administration's failure to rebuild the postwar foreign policy consensus that Vietnam had shattered. What was the Reagan Doctrine? How did it compare with the policies of other postwar administrations? What was wrong with it? The answers Christopher Layne practices antítrust law with Blecher and Collins in Los Angeles and is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute. He has written on foreign affairs for a number of publications. This article is based on a paper presented to the Cato Institute conference, "Assessing the Reagan Years," in Washington, D.C, on October 1-2, 1987. 1 2 SAIS REVIEW to these questions hinge in part on events that transpired before the Reagan administration took office. In 1976 an America disillusioned by Vietnam and Watergate sent Jimmy Carter to the White House. He brought with him a new foreign policy elite whose members were relatively young, with roots in the Democratic party's McGovern wing and a view of the world far different from that of the postwar establishment that had been broken by Vietnam. Carter's election symbolized the liberals' response to the costs of American intervention abroad; it reflected their determination never to pay such a price again. The United States, Carter believed, was a status quo power that needed to get on the right side of change by promoting human rights and supporting progressive movements that would deal with the root cause of Third World revolutions. Because the administration placed indigenous causes, not the East-West power struggle, at the root of Third World conflicts, U.S. military force was seen as an ineffective tool. In Carter's view the way to deal with such problems was to act in concert with others, to seek diplomatic solutions, and to provide economic aid. The Carter approach was not entirely without useful insights, but it was neither a viable nor a politically acceptable foreign policy. It overlooked Moscow's imperial ambitions— not the sole cause of regional conflicts, to be sure, but sometimes a relevant factor. Although vital U.S. interests were seldom at stake in Third World disputes, neither U.S. policymakers—including, ultimately, Carter himself—nor the public were willing to hold to Carter's laissez-faire approach in the face of the expansion of Soviet power and influence worldwide. The Iranian revolution undermined Carter's critical assumption that the forces of change could be managed and that change of a non-Marxist character would always be advantageous to the United States. Repeated crises reminded the United States that it indeed had national interests that could not always—or even often— be subordinated to the requirements of multilateral diplomacy and Alliance solidarity. Echoing neoconservative calls for rearmament, revitalization of containment , and renewed vigilance, Reagan's 1980 campaign caught the mood of an "assertive America" fed up with the Vietnam syndrome (which all but ruled out the use ofmilitary force to defend U.S. interests abroad) and disillusioned by the string offoreign policy setbacks that began with Angola and ended...