The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California houses millions of pages of documents from Reagan’s time as president. He was in office from January 1981 to January 1989. The library also contains some materials from the times before and after his terms in office.
Dr. Kiron Skinner, a professor and researcher, was granted access to some of the documents which are not normally available to the public. She spent several years reading thousands of pages, wrote books and articles fueled by that reading, and has become known as a scholar specializing in, among other topics, Reagan’s presidency.
In a 2012 interview, which was subsequently transcribed for print, she noted that “Reagan was deeply influenced by” a book written by Laurence Beilenson and titled The Treaty Trap. Beilenson argues that in the long run, treaties have little value or effect, although in the short run, they can be useful as two or more nations grope and fumble their way toward an equilibrium.
Reagan was not averse to signing treaties, but he had no illusions that these treaties by themselves would create a stable equilibrium in global diplomacy or institute a new world order. He signed significant treaties, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987, the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT) in 1988, the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty (PNET) in 1988, the Montreal Protocol in 1987, and the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement in 1988.
Two of those treaties, the TTBT and the PNET, were already negotiated and signed by previous presidents, but Reagan re-negotiated them, adding verification protocols.
In addition to signing those treaties, he negotiated and drafted the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE), and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), all three of which would be signed by subsequent presidents.
But Reagan did not view these treaties as creating a stable equilibrium between the United States and the USSR. Instead, he saw them as milestones or timing tactics toward such an equilibrium. Ultimately economic and military realities, not words on paper, would create an equilibrium and thereby peace.
This understanding of the nature of treaties marked a difference between the U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s and the U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s, as Kiron Skinner writes:
An attorney named Laurence Beilenson found that every treaty that has been signed throughout world history has been violated. That really influenced Reagan because he felt that treaties were not the goal; [rather] the objective should be to transform the international system by the strength of the United States as the predominant power in the world. He had a very different view than the prevailing view in the 1970s, the period of détente when, under Nixon and Kissinger, the United States accepted the Soviet Union and believed that the Cold War was an enduring bipolar system that would last ad infinitum. Reagan didn’t feel that way. He didn’t feel that treaties — that is, signing treaties codifying the Soviet status in the world — was something the U.S. ought to be doing. The principle behind [his thinking] was right: treaties aren’t the way to get countries to change.
Because Reagan saw the economic and military realities as primary to shaping international cooperation and the global balance of power, and treaties as secondary, he used the phrase “peace through strength” to describe his policy. The phrase had previously been used for decades both in Britain and in the United States, but is now mostly associated with Reagan’s policies.
Reagan conceptualized this policy with four major points. First, that the USSR drew most or all of its leverage from its military occupation of eastern Europe and was otherwise rather weak; second, that the Soviet economy was weak, and the U.S. could topple it by placing competitive stress on it; third, that the U.S. economy was strong enough to place massive stress on the Soviet economy; fourth, that the U.S. citizenry would accept a massive military buildup if it understood that the buildup was not intended to start a war, but rather to avoid one.
The goal of “peace through strength” was a peaceful end to the Cold War brought about by causing the Soviet economy to collapse, as Kiron Skinner said:
When he talked about peace through strength he meant four very theoretical hypotheses: One was that the full force of legitimacy of the Soviet Union in the Cold War was the Red Army’s occupation of Eastern Europe. Pull the Red Army out, and the countries would go their own way. That’s really what happened after 1989.Second, that the Soviet economy was so weak that it could not sustain a technology race with the United States. [Reagan] was saying this in the 1970s, and [it was] heresy. No one believed it. Many, including some in our intelligence community, felt the Soviet Union could go on for decades.
Third, [Reagan] argued that the American economy was so strong that it could sustain a technology race with the Soviets and recover even if there was some deficit spending.
And then, finally, Reagan argued that the American public was prepared for peace through strength. It was prepared for massive peacetime rearmament — if, in fact, leaders would explain that rearmament was part of a strategy for a very different goal, which was mutual cooperation on our terms.
That, basically, I think, captures Reagan’s view of the Cold War and how it should be fought, and that’s what he meant by peace through strength. It was very clear what Ronald Reagan was saying. And no one else was saying it. He said it in the 70s and implemented it in the 1980s.
Reagan had a vision for what the world could, should, and would be after the end of the Cold War. This future would be based not on merely defeating the Soviet Socialists, but on changing Russia into a freedom-oriented nation: a “liberal” nation in the strict sense of the word. This freedom would be personal, economic, and political.
A Russia thus transformed could be a partner among the western European nations, the U.S., Canada, and the other countries which made up what was loosely called the “free world.” Reagan did not wish to subjugate Russia, but rather to make Russia into a teammate, as Kiron Skinner phrased it:
He wanted to get to a very different world. He wanted a world in which there was mutual cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union — he just defined mutual cooperation quite differently, which was the Soviets abdicating power and joining the West in a community of free states.
Reagan’s terms in office ended too early for him to be a part of shaping the post Cold War era, but he had this vision for it. He also envisioned a nuclear-free world. He reckoned that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would be a next logical step to completely disassemble the world’s nuclear arsenals. In the late 1980s, only the U.S. and the USSR had large nuclear stockpiles. Other nation-states had only small caches.
