Written by William Jones
A conventional version of the Cold War’s end, by which Reagan provoked, Gorbachev blinked, and the Western order triumphed, is widely taught and recycled. But Clark Johnson, a historian better known for his work on the Great Depression and subsequent monetary developments, has always wanted to know the structure of events: why did the Cold War continue when it did? Why did it end?
In Uncommon Arguments on Common Topics (2022), Johnson revisits the Cold War’s chaotic middle years: Berlin, Congo, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam, Indonesia. While the Eisenhower, LBJ and Nixon-Kissinger Administrations saw battles on the world’s periphery as extensions of, or as “linked” to, the US-Soviet confrontation, JFK’s effort (1961-1963) was nearly the opposite: to keep the Cold War out of those conflicts. (Johnson credits exchanges with Richard Mahoney, now at NC State, for his premise that Kennedy’s diplomacy fundamentally diverged from the mainstream Cold War pattern.) Now, in a chronological continuation, Johnson turns focus to the Cold War’s final act. Not to Reagan’s most iconic public moments, but to across-the-board tamping down of East-West tensions managed by his Secretary of State, George Shultz.
Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s foreign policy consigliere, wrote in the 2024 New York Review that the Reagan Administration championed freedom only when it served anti-Communist purposes. Rhodes asserted that Reagan’s celebrated 1986 State of the Union speech invoked “freedom” in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, and El Salvador, countries where U.S. proxy forces in fact enabled authoritarianism in the name of anti-Soviet resistance. To many, this framing felt evident. But Johnson argues that Rhodes’ reading misses the broader tapestry of the Reagan years, particularly after Shultz emerged as a leading figure.
In Turmoil and Triumph, Shultz’s 1993 memoir, he recounts a conversation a few months after taking office in 1982 with Spain’s Foreign Minister about a failed coup the year before. "This [exchange] made a special impression on me, reinforcing the importance of our effort to make freedom a centerpiece of our diplomacy." Spain was not a front in the Cold War. Shultz’s premise, Johnson argues, would likely not have been Kissinger’s or Mearsheimer’s. “Freedom” as a policy lodestar did not fit easily into a “realist” vs “idealist” binary. In the Philippines, Chile, and South Korea, Shultz and Reagan helped to force out strongmen Marcos, Pinochet, and Chun Doo Hwan, all three of them anti-Communists.
Johnson comments that the US intervention in Afghanistan during the 1980s succeeded in driving out the Soviet army and facilitating return of refugees, and in fact left a Soviet-friendly government in power in Kabul. Alas, during the first Bush, and then Clinton, Administrations, the US government lost interest in the region, and by default outsourced 1990s Afghan policy to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The very Islamist ISI enabled Gulbudden Heckmatyar's forces, then the Taliban, and finally Al Qaeda. This neglect damaged US interests, but it had little to do with anti-Communism; and Shultz and Reagan had decamped to California long-before. Johnson notes that Shultz typically balanced lots of moving parts -- in his words, “cruising along invisibly.” He wielded covert assistance, military pressure, economic aid, unexpected negotiating positions, and UN resolutions as leverage. He usually sought not regime change (unlike some in the Administration), but changes in regime behavior –-- in Central America, in southern Africa. He sought to create new realities: no subversion beyond borders, elections within borders, and regional stability paired with receding Cold War confrontation.
In Central America, the plot opened when rightest Nicaraguan dictator Somoza was overthrown by a broad coalition (business, the Catholic church, La Prensa, civil society groups, and the leftist the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)) in 1979. The FSLN promised the Organization of American States to carry out free elections. But hardline Communists soon consolidated control, outlawed dissent, and tried to export insurrection. President Carter, who initially welcomed the new government, cut off US economic assistance before leaving office in January 1981 -- a decision confirmed by successor Reagan. By May, FSLN was receiving Soviet and Cuban support, and publicly aligned with the Soviet Union. Some earlier Somoza defenders came together as “Contras” and combined with excluded elements from the 1979 FSLN coalition. Shultz’s subsequent effort was usually in support of the central American Contadora process, initially including Mexico, Colombia, Panama and Venezuela.
For Shultz, more controversially, aid to the Contras was the essential leverage in US regional strategy. The goal was to reduce the size of Nicaragua's army, hold national elections to include Sandinistas and Contras, and end FSLN support for guerillas in next-door El Salvador. In return, the US would end military support for the Contras, and resume economic assistance. (Johnson suggests there is a thought here for what might-have-been a different US approach to Castro and Cuba during 1959-1963, and again toward Allende and Chile during 1970-1973.)
In 1986, Costa Rica’s newly-elected President Oscar Arias took leadership of the Contadora agenda. In a UN speech in September, he called out Nicaragua’s betrayal of its revolution and for bringing East-West conflict into Central America; later that year, Arias was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. While NSC hawks in the Reagan Administration mocked the Contadora process, Shultz held fast, boosted the Contras despite Congressional opposition, and steered U.S. diplomacy toward elections in Nicaragua. The 1990 vote, which the FSLN lost, was, in Johnson’s reading, less about Cold War confrontation than about democratic and regional resilience – as policy rejected both the hard-left and hard-right alternatives that were usually on-tap.
Next, consider southern Africa. Shultz, working with Assistant Secretary Chester Crocker, introduced a web of policies that would contribute to the end of “colonialism” in Africa, and then to the fall of apartheid, both by early 1990. Namibia’s independence, departure of Cuban troops, South Africa’s racial reckoning, and Mozambique’s slow departure from Soviet orbit: all of these unfolded with carrot-and-stick negotiations – including covert support for Jonas Savimbi’s home-grown but sometimes unsavory UNITA forces in Angola. The Shultz-Crocker vision advanced against internal Reagan Administration opposition. Johnson notes that CIA Director Bill Casey routinely sided with South Africa’s apartheid government. In 1985, in contrast, Shultz gave an “under-reported” speech denouncing both apartheid and U.S. support for it.
While JFK more than once got UN forces to deploy in the Congo to deflect a US-Soviet confrontation, Shultz used UNSC Resolution 435 (1978) to put pressure on South Africa to withdraw from Namibia. On a broader canvas, JFK, with Soviet leader Khrushchev’s tacit collaboration, stitched together the 1963 European settlement that ended the five-year Berlin crisis and mostly ended fears that the Cold War would turn nuclear. 25 years later, the Reagan Administration negotiated an effective end of the Cold War, largely with Soviet leader Gorbachev’s cooperation. The historical parallel is between Shultz and Kennedy, only tenuously between Reagan and Kennedy. Kennedy led US policy in new directions in the early 1960s; Shultz and his State Dept led policy in Central America and southern Africa during the 1980s, for which they struggled to keep both Congressional Democrats and Reagan himself on board. Shultz-managed efforts finally bore fruit in both regions. Johnson concludes that Shultz rescued at least that portion of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy legacy.
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