The Reagan Doctrine: Monroe and Dulles Reincarnate?

THE REAGAN DOCTRINE: MONROE AND DULLES REINCARNATE? George Liska HE RECENT TALK OF A REAGAN DOCTRINE in support of anti-Soviet "democratic revolution" must be examined in the light of enduring principles and past manifestations of the underlying impulse before it can be applied meaningfully to an analysis of U.S.-Soviet relations. Insofar as it is a dynamic version of traditional containment, it recallsJohn Foster Dulles's strategy of rollback-cum-liberation. Only this time the net is cast out wider: the theater is no longer limited to Eastern Europe but encompasses the Third World at large. The means, too, have been enlarged, from propaganda only in the 1950s, to propaganda plus military assistance and "humanitarian aid" in the 1980s. At the same time the ambition has dwindled: regaining Angola for democracy does not rate liberating Poland from communism. Neither is Central America worth East-central Europe, when the criterion is the balance of world power and the impulse is more than parochial preoccupation with one's backyard. With attention focused on Central America, we are back in the strategic universe of the Monroe Doctrine. Although U.S. power has grown well beyond dependence on the Royal Navy for implementing it, a diminution is again in evidence: the globally imperial America, which fought Hanoi's regional imperialism in Southeast Asia, has shrunk to something resembling the regionally imperialistic United States of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The analogy of Vietnam has been invoked by both the opponents of the current policy and its supporters. The former see the Central American policy as fraught with the threat of military involvement, the George Liska is professor of political science at The Johns Hopkins University. This is the third in a series of articles on U.S.-Soviet relations for the SAIS Review. An earlier treatment of this material appeared in Jiri Valenta and Herbert J. Ellison, eds., Grenada and Soviet-Cuban Policy. 83 84 SAIS REVIEW latter see it as the corrective to "appeasement." Both are incorrect. The comparison to Vietnam is not valid in terms either of the military risks or the geopolitical stakes. A military intervention in Nicaragua would be not another Vietnam scaled down but another Grenada scaled up. In the political and diplomatic equations, little Cuba is playing the role of China as the third corner of the triangle. There is a price to pay for reducing the ambition and the burden. Miniaturizing the volume of armed power deployed in Vietnam also meant demeaning what in concept and purpose had been a "noble" effort* to repel regional aggression and engaging instead in an attempt at financing the subversion of a local revolution. To bring the message home to an unfriendly Soviet client (Nicaragua) in America's traditional sphere of interest, the United States stooped to the methods of the pilloried rival superpower after using disproportionate force on a threadbare pretext elsewhere in the region (Grenada). As the administration dug in and sought to show its vigor, the demonstrations of military might in the Western Hemisphere conformed to its apparent belief in the sufficiency of limited intervention to fuel a worldwide "democratic revolution." To be sure, in certain instances (Lebanon) no attainable ends to the application of force were to be discerned, in others (Libya) the stated objectives were so wide-ranging and varied as to preclude demonstrable failure. It is against this background that the Nicaraguan imbroglio can be most comprehensibly projected. ALL MAJOR POWERS INTERVENE at one time or another in their spheres of influence against disturbing developments or alien encroachments. Dating from time immemorial, this is practically an inalienable right. Such actions are routinely clothed in pious rationalizations that do not usually succeed in obfuscating the real reasons behind the intervention. The U.S. incursions in Grenada and Nicaragua and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan are similarly transparent in intent. Yet the question remains , Was the mode and the scope of the great-power action commensurate with the provocation implicit in the disturbance? The judgment rendered on this score will determine whether an intervention will eventually come to be accepted as an unavoidable — if perhaps regrettable — act, a natural phenomenon of the political world...