Obama Needs a Quick Refresher Course in Cold War History

May 22, 2008
Obama Needs a Quick Refresher Course in Cold War History

KT McFarland

Recently, Sen. Barack Obama reiterated his pledge to meet with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, among other rogue leaders, without preconditions, suggesting his approach would be consistent with the best, and strongest, American foreign policy of the past century.

"Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries," said Obama. "That's what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That's what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That's what Nixon did with Mao."

Not so fast. I was in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and I can attest that those Presidents understood the danger of prematurely forcing top-level meetings without sufficient preconditions. Neither Richard Nixon nor Ronald Reagan would sit down for face-to-face meetings with their counterparts in enemy nations until America had some realistic - and playable - bargaining chips. They recognized that negotiating without leverage isn't negotiating, it's begging.

Nixon and his brilliant national security adviser Henry Kissinger knew that to end the Vietnam War, they would have to cut off North Vietnam's supply chain, which came from the Soviet Union through China. What leverage could Nixon get with the Soviets and the Chinese? China needed training and technology to enter the modern world - as well as breathing space from foreign threats in order to modernize its economy. Nixon calculated that, taken together, these were more important to China than fighting a proxy war in Vietnam.

Nixon also recognized the Sino-Soviet Communist alliance was cracking, and we could exploit it by being China's great power counterweight to the Soviet Union. The threat of a loose Sino-American alliance gave us the leverage we needed to get the Soviets to the negotiating table on arms control. Nixon met with Mao Zedong only after he had the leverage needed to negotiate.

Similarly, Reagan waited until his second term to deal with the Soviets. He used the first term to line up the leverage necessary to negotiate from a position of strength. He rebuilt America's defenses, which had atrophied after Vietnam. He reached out to allies in Europe and strengthened our alliances worldwide. He knew the Soviet economy was a sham; the Kremlin was heavily dependent on hard currency from selling oil abroad. So Reagan worked to drive down the international price of oil, which weakened the Soviet economy from within.

And when all those elements had been put in place, Reagan delivered the coup de grace and introduced his Strategic Defense Initiative, the missile defense plan that challenged the Soviets to a nuclear arms race Reagan knew they could neither afford nor win.

Obama said recently that Reagan's negotiations with Gorbachev "led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war, and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall."

He's got it turned around. Reagan built up the leverage first, and then negotiated. He didn't believe we could talk the Soviets into anything they didn't want to do, nor trust them without verification. Reagan was a man of considerable persuasive powers, but he didn't defeat communism and win the Cold War because he was able to charm and cajole Gorbachev during direct negotiations. He won it because by the time he sat down to negotiate, America held all the cards.

I don't disagree that the next President needs to talk to the Iranians. Dealing with them will be an essential step in ending the war in Iraq, stabilizing the Middle East and pressing Iran to dismantle its nuclear program.

The question is who, when and how. We all have the right - indeed, the obligation - to ask exactly what leverage a President Obama would carry with him to the negotiating table, and how he plans to get it.