for the country’s future.
That the Muj did the shooting and dying and experienced the literal pain of the front line should never be neglected. As one intimate observer put it, there are countless people breathing free today who have no idea of the contribution of a million “Afghan ghosts” who changed the world but have never been thanked.13 And yet, the Mujahedin would not have persevered without help from the Reagan team.
THE MOSCOW SUMMIT
Whether or not Moscow knew it, the loss in Afghanistan meant that around the world the death toll for the Soviet Union had begun to ring. It was in this atmosphere that Reagan met with Gorbachev in a fourth summit that began in Moscow on Sunday, May 29, 1988. The two met privately, with no cameras, in a one-on-one negotiating session. Long classified as top secret, the federal government only recently approved the mintues of this session for release. Their contents reveal a Reagan who did not shy away from reiterating in private what he had said in public, as he called on the leader of the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall.
Since his dramatic call for the destruction of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate a year earlier, Reagan had kept the rhetorical pressure on Moscow, as he routinely evoked the fall of the wall in many of his speeches—at least nine times since his address at the heart of divided Germany.14 In February 1988, during his “Address to the Citizens of Western Europe,” Reagan told the Soviet leadership that he had meant business, and was still waiting: “To the Soviets today I say: I made my Berlin proposals almost nine months ago. The people of Berlin and all of Europe deserve an answer.” Importantly, Reagan did not stop there; he went further than his first call: “Make a start. Set a date, a specific date, when you will tear down the wall.” He pressed: “And on that date, bring it down.” This would, he rightly affirmed, “be an impressive demonstration of a true commitment to openness” (“openness” was a direct reference to Gorbachev’s glasnost).15 He was calling on Gorbachev yet again: if glasnost was truly glasnost, Gorbachev should prove it by dismantling the wall.
At the May 1988 summit, Reagan leaned hard on Gorbachev, telling him that Americans were encouraged by the reforms in the Soviet Union. With all those changes, he added, “wouldn’t it be a good idea to tear down the Berlin Wall?” He noted that “nothing in the West symbolized the differences between it and the Soviet Union more than the wall.” He told Gorbachev that the wall’s removal “would be seen as a gesture symbolizing that the Soviet Union wanted to join the broader community of nations.”
Reagan made his proposal in response to Gorbachev’s request that the United States open up trade with the Soviet Union. Reagan responded to the general secretary by apparently suggesting a sort of linkage: increased trade might be possible if the Soviets bulldozed the wall.16 Though desperate for cash, Gorbachev still would not budge on the Berlin Wall. In the words of his interpreter, Igor Korchilov, Gorbachev “said he could not agree with the president’s view.”17
SUMMER 1988
Despite the improvements in U.S.–Soviet relations that were made at the Moscow Summit, Reagan’s verbal assault was unrelenting. He flew out of Moscow en route to London, where, on June 3, 1988, he spoke before an august audience at the dashing Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Six years earlier, also in June, he had given the Westminster Address, where he prophesied Communism’s doom. Now, he went further. He told his British audience about his pursuit of a U.S. policy that rejected the “permanency of totalitarian rule”— part of his “forward strategy of freedom.” “Quite possibly,” he said, “we’re beginning to take down the barriers of the postwar era”—the “totalitarian” barriers to “freedom.” “Quite possibly,” he continued, “we are entering a new era in history, a time of lasting change in the Soviet Union.”18
Standing within the Great Hall inside a venerable four-hundred-year-old Guildhall, Reagan articulated a future that looked beyond the fall of Communism. There he quoted those special words from the prophet Isaiah, as he did five years earlier in the Evil Empire speech, six years earlier in declaring a national day of prayer for Poland, and on many other occasions: “He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might, he increased their strength, but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary.”19
What Reagan did with that quote was eye-opening: “Here, then, is our formula for completing our crusade for freedom,” he said, capping his oration by invoking the “rendezvous with destiny” which he first called upon in his October 1964 speech for Barry Goldwater. That rendezvous, “that crusade,” said Reagan, was “well underway.” While this speech went far, a month later, on July 13, 1988, Reagan made another speech that went still further, declaring:
[T]he tide has been turned. Despite decades of suffering, the will to freedom is alive. It has survived its tormentors. It will outlast the Communists. And truly, I can think of no time in my adult life when the prospects for freedom were brighter than they are today…. The Communist idea is discredited and around the world new progressive forces are emerging as political change and liberation sweep the globe. America will continue to encourage the movement toward freedom, democracy, and reform by holding firm to our principles and speaking opening and truthfully about human rights and the fundamental moral difference between freedom and communism. And America shall light the path as the whole world climbs out of the dark abyss of tyranny to freedom. And within the Soviet bloc there are hopeful signs.20
As the summer of 1988 progressed, Ronald Reagan could see that his policies had begun to bear fruit.21 On August 15, he boasted that in the 2,765 days of his administration “not one inch of ground has fallen to the communists.”22 In the sixty-odd years prior to the start of the Reagan presidency, the Soviet Union had consistently advanced the frontiers of international Communism. There were dozens of countries that were part of the USSR, the Soviet Communist bloc, or were Soviet allies, satellites, or client states, a number that had increased each decade since the 1910s. The 1980s marked the first decade that halted that advance. Even more impressive was that the 1970s had been one of the busiest decades for Communist expansion, especially during the six-year period before Reagan’s presidency.
Reagan saw Poland as a major part of this success. In a statement proclaiming Polish American Heritage Month, issued on September 28, 1988, Reagan saluted a handful of famous Poles, including recent names like Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa. He asserted that the American people felt an “unwavering unity” with the Polish people, “now more than ever.” He urged that “Poland’s saga must be our own.” The eternal optimist claimed that, “The freedom loved and advanced so much through the years by loyal Poles and Polish Americans is on the march in every continent today, because freedom is a universal and eternal cause.”23
NSDD-320
While there was a clear consistency in Reagan’s anti-Soviet policy throughout both of his terms, the second term witnessed decidedly fewer of his NSDDs. In truth, much of the mechanics articulated through the NSDDs were implemented under Bill Clark from 1982 to 1983, and thus there remained little in way of NSDDs for the administration to accomplish in the second term. Though there were some notable NSDDs during Reagan’s second four years, few were as radical as those from the first term. Nevertheless, in November of 1988, two months before he would leave the Oval Office, Reagan still had one extraordinary NSDD left in him.
On November 20, Reagan signed NSDD-320, titled “National Policy on Strategic Trade Controls,” which is today still heavily redacted. It began by acknowledging that, “The efforts of this administration to stem the flow of strategic technologies to the Soviet Union and its allies have been vigorous and the results substantial.” The NSDD
