Action History, Declaratory History, and the Reagan Years

ACTION HISTORY,________ DECLARATORY HISTORY, AND THE REAGAN YEARS Richard A. Melanson From the beginning, our administration has insisted that this country base its relations with the Soviet Union upon realism, not illusion. This may sound obvious. But when we took office, the historical record needed restatement. So restate it we did. -Ronald Reagan, October 28, 1987 M, .ore than thirty years ago Paul H. Nitze published an influential essay, "Atoms, Strategy, and Policy," in Foreign Affairs, which offered a penetrating critique of the Eisenhower-Dulles nuclear strategy ofmassive retaliation.1 Most significant, however, was the conceptual distinction he drew between declaratory policy and action policy. Nitze defined declaratory policy as "policy statements which have as their aim political and psychological effects." Action policy was described as the "general guidelines which we believe should and will in fact govern our actions in various contingencies."2 Nitze argued that whereas the Eisenhower administration 's declaratory policy rested on massive retaliation, its action policy actually set in motion the doctrine of gradual deterrence. This sharp disjunction troubled Nitze because he believed that the psychological and political effectiveness of declaratory policy would be vitiated if it departed too greatly from action policy.3 1.Paul H. Nitze, "Atoms, Strategy, and Policy," Foreign Affairs, vol. 34, no. 3 (January 1956): 187-198. 2.Ibid., 187. 3.Ibid., 188. Richard A. Melanson is director of international studies at Kenyon College and a faculty associate at the Mershon Center, Ohio State University. 225 226 SAIS REVIEW Nitze's suggestive distinction can be adapted by introducing the concepts of declaratory and action history. Declaratory history refers to those public statements made by presidents and their advisors that use historical analogies, lessons, interpretations, parallels, anecdotes, and other historical material to defend or criticize current U.S. foreign policy, though the notion of declaratory history could be used to include other types of policy as well. These public utterances comprise an administration 's "official" history of important past events and policies, or, in this case, an "official history" ofU.S. foreign relations. In the service ofmodern "personal/rhetorical" presidents, this official history invokes unifying, emotive symbols designed to facilitate public support for their foreign policies. Action history refers to those historical analogies, lessons, trends, parallels, and so forth that policymakers invoke in their private policy deliberations. The political appointees of new administrations may initially articulate action histories that conform closely to their declaratory histories. But external, unanticipated events may challenge or upset these historical images and create significant gaps between an administration's declaratory, or official history and hard, new realities.4 Officials may minimize the discrepancies between their action and declaratory histories, find new historical materials to employ in policy discussions while continuing to publicize the same declaratory history, or simply muddle through, retaining their old historical views while coming to grips with a new environment and not worrying much about cognitive inconsistencies .5 This essay will argue that the Reagan administration's declaratory history of U.S. foreign policy emphasized two themes: (1) the cold war years as a golden age of U.S. strength, wisdom, steadiness, generosity, and restraint in which a stable and just international order was constructed ; and (2) the period between the mid-1960s and 1980 as an age of U.S. foreign policy weakness, timidity, confusion, and despair. But while these declaratory themes were not absent from policy discussions, the more salient action history of the Reagan administration consisted of lessons drawn from the Vietnam experience. 4.The literature examining the ways in which U.S. foreign policy officials employ historical analogies, lessons, parallels and the like in their private deliberations is notably scant. Best known are two works by Ernest R. May: "Lessons" of the Past: The Use and Misuse ofHistory in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and, with Richard E. Neustadt, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: The Free Press, 1986). 5.On the ability of President Truman and his senior advisers to accommodate large amounts of inconsistencies in their thinking about U.S. -Soviet relations between 1945 and 1948 see Deborah Welch Larson, Origins ofContainment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton...