History
Book Club
Wednesday,
July 27, 2016
American Foreign
Policy
Sadat,
Carter, Begin at Camp David, Sept. 17, 1978
Stephen
E. Ambrose and Douglas G. Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign
Policy Since 1938, Ninth Edition, 2011.
In this current
election season there’s a lot of talk about who’s qualified to be President.
How does any man, or woman, prepare for the job of leading the American people?
In particular, how do you prepare for conducting relations with countries all
over the world? Including countries who
are absolutely opposed to us? And
including organizations like Daesh, or the Islamic State?
Stephen
Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley’s excellent book traces the story of American
foreign policy from 1938 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been President for
five years, right up to 2010, when Barack Obama was President.
Imagine
what Roosevelt faced in 1938 when Hitler was annexing Austria, and swallowing
up Sudetenland. And then September 1939
when Hitler marched in to Poland, and then Great Britain and France declared
war on Germany; 1940 when German troops marched in to Western Europe,
conquering Denmark, Norway and France. Great Britain’s Churchill began urgent appeals
to Roosevelt, because all of Europe was about to fall under the heel of Hitler.
FDR
made a lot of mistakes during that war, but thank God, he did a lot of things
right, and so when he died in April 1945, Germany was within one month of
surrendering, and Japan surrendered four months later.
As a naval officer aboard U.S. Navy
ships and submarines, and serving in Tehran, Moscow and Japan, I was far down
the chain of command, but from the time of Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan,
it was possible to see what the President knew, and what he did, and what
meant the difference in life and death for people all over the world.
As a
young officer aboard a destroyer, we were ordered to patrol the Straits of
Formosa to defend little Taiwan against the Chinese Communists during the days
of Eisenhower (1958). Months later, as
we arrived home to Long Beach, CA, we were ordered to load more ammunition and
head for the Panama Canal and on to Lebanon, when things were heating up in the
Middle East.
A
couple of years later, John Kennedy was President, and the Cuban Missile Crisis
(1962) threatened a nuclear war with the USSR. The submarine I was on was part
of a barrier spread all across the Atlantic, to oppose the Soviet submarines
that we expected would be heading our way.
One
of the negotiating points that ended that crisis was for the Russians to pull
their missile launchers out of Cuba, and for us to remove our missiles,
targeted at the Soviet Union, from Turkey.
My Polaris submarine was ordered to sail to the waters off Turkey to
replace that missile coverage. During
that patrol, we received the message that Kennedy had been assassinated (1963).
A few hours later, we got the message to get ready to launch missiles. In those hours after the killing, we didn’t
know if World War III was starting, or what.
Turned out it was just a readiness exercise, and we stood down.
Nixon
visits Shah, Tehran, May 31, 1972
A few
years later, when Richard Nixon was President, I was serving in Iran, advising
the military staff of the Shah. The Shah
was a close ally of the United States, but when Nixon came to visit (1972),
there were minor bombings all over Tehran, and a U.S. Air Force general was
injured by a terrorist bomb attack, and two Iranians were killed. We were just learning that there was a lot of
anger. That anger boiled up into
revolution a few years later.
According
to Ambrose and Brinkley, the CIA in Iran never really grasped what was
happening in Iran during these days, so the eventual revolution came as a
surprise.
Next
I commanded a destroyer making gunnery raids against North Viet Nam as Nixon
started his massive Christmas bombing of Hanoi. Months later, I was commanding
an ammunition ship carrying munitions to supply the Israelis during the Yom
Kippur War.
Then,
just as Ronald Reagan relieved Jimmy Carter as President, Iran released the
American hostages it had been holding. I
was sent to the Soviet Union as a naval attaché, collecting intelligence all
over the country, and working with a network of NATO officers that gathered and
shared intelligence about the Soviet bloc.
Reagan
and Gorbachev in Reykjavik, 1986
Finally,
during my last year in uniform, I served in the Pentagon when Reagan met with
Gorbachev in Iceland and the two leaders made a bizarre agreement to eliminate
missiles that caught everyone by surprise. That resulted in a December 1987
agreement (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) which was hailed as a great
breakthrough in arms reduction.
When
I hear Donald Trump dismiss foreign policy with the casualness of some barroom
blowhard, I cannot believe he actually has a chance to be our President.
He claims that he already knows more about ISIS than those generals and admirals;
that his experience running international beauty pageants taught him a lot
about working with foreigners. He
emphatically states that NATO has outlived its usefulness, when he has no way
of knowing how NATO works, and the myriad ways that we have worked with fellow
officers of other countries for decades, learning and teaching better
warfighting techniques, and gaining intelligence that could not be obtained
from our own people. [Even in Moscow, NATO attachés gathered often to discuss intelligence findings. We learned much from French, West German, Italian, Norwegian, Japanese, British and Canadian attachés, as well as Swedish and Swiss.]
Ambrose
and Brinkley have a lot to say about every President, and how they conducted
foreign policy, from FDR to George W. Bush and a little about Barack Obama. I’d
like to focus on two Presidential administrations.
Jimmy
Carter brought very little exposure to foreigners with him when he became
President in 1977. Although he had graduated from the Naval Academy and served
aboard the first nuclear submarine, he soon left the Navy and became a peanut
farmer and then Governor of Georgia.
Carter
was a religious man, and he meant to defend human rights in his
presidency. When we hear Trump talking
about “making America rich again” and “Killing families of terrorists” and
instituting torture, it is such a jarring contrast with this really good, but
naïve, man. Ambrose and Brinkley wrote that Carter was the least-experienced
president in the post-World War II era.
Jimmy
Carter took over relations with Iran as developed by Richard Nixon. In 1977, as
he took office, he declared that “human rights is the soul of our foreign
policy.” Also that year he stated that Iran is an “island of stability” in one
of the more troubled areas of the world.
At the start of his administration he declared that the U.S. had paid
too much attention to the USSR, and not enough to arms reduction and to
opposing the repressive right-wing dictatorships around the world.
Ambrose
and Brinkley found that Carter’s goals were wildly impractical, they aroused
resentment in the USSR and contributed to the downfall of America’s oldest and
staunchest ally in the Middle East. Instead of reducing nuclear arms, they
increased at about the same rate as his predecessors.
Riots
began in Iran in 1977 and in February 1979 the Shah left the country. Shortly
afterward, Ayatollah Khomeini, brought back from exile in Paris, took over. Carter
and his aides did not have a clue how to handle this. Ambrose and Brinkley
wrote that Carter saw danger where there was none, and didn’t see it where it
existed.
On
November 4, 1979, Iranian “students” took over the American Embassy in Tehran,
and took 100 hostages. Carter’s statements elevated their importance in the
eyes of the Iranians, and the hostage crisis dominated the American news for
the rest of Carter’s administration.
On
April 25, 1980, upon Carter’s orders, American forces initiated a mission (Operation
Eagle Claw) to rescue the hostages that was a colossal screw-up. The world was watching as events unfolded. It
turned out that Carter had demanded such absolute secrecy that the various
participants in the mission did not coordinate with each other. Obviously they
had not used Iranian experts to assist, because they attempted to land aircraft
and helicopters in the famous Dasht-i-Lut desert in southeastern Iran, and
encountered violent sandstorms. Any Iran expert could have warned them about
“the wind of 120 days”. Shortly after
the fiasco our Atlantic Fleet Commander told us in an audience at the Naval War
College that the Pentagon plucked helicopters from one squadron, took pilots
from another, flew them onto an unfamiliar carrier, all to carry Delta Force on
one of its first missions. Because of secrecy there was almost no coordination.
Helicopters fitted for desert operations should have been fitted with sand
filters; these were not. Also there
should have been more redundancy of equipment to overcome the unexpected.
Carter
pursued peace in the Middle East and made a major foreign policy achievement
when he got Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel to agree on a
peace treaty in 1979. Henry Kissinger had tried so hard to get this, but Carter
did it.
The
Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty was signed in Washington March 26, 1979, following
the 1978 Camp David Accords. Sadly, it infuriated the Arab world so much that
Sadat was assassinated in 1981.
This
peace treaty should have been the most notable success in Carter’s presidency,
but it was overshadowed by the Iranian Hostage Crisis and the debacle in the
desert. Carter’s poor handling of the Iran crisis was instrumental in handing
him the worst defeat of an incumbent president, even including Hoover in 1932,
wrote Ambrose and Brinkley.
As
Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as President in January, 1981, word came
in that the aircraft carrying the 52 American hostages had cleared Iranian
airspace and was en route home. This was the first indication Americans got
that this would be a different presidency.
Where
Carter continually projected the wrong “optics”, the former movie star was
expert: Carter carrying his own suitcase.
Carter talking to the nation with a sad face, and wearing a cardigan
sweater. Reagan always looked upbeat. His
“It’s morning in America!” projected his infectious optimism.
Where
Carter tried to push his “human rights” agenda, and ended up being repeatedly
embarrassed by the Soviets, Reagan approached them with a stern visage that
conveyed the idea that he would take no foolishness from them. He really was no
expert at dealing with Russians, but his natural approach was to talk to them
as one would talk to a mule.
Wherever
I went in the USSR, Russians would ask me, “Does Reagan want war?” He definitely had their attention.
Reagan
struggled mightily to defeat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and hold back
communism elsewhere in the Americas; he got in a lot of trouble with his shady
Iran-Contra Affair, when his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North became the
man of the hour, in a deal that involved having Israel ship banned arms to
Iran, and payments going to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.
Margaret
Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain when Reagan was President, credited
him with ending the Cold War. Ambrose and Brinkley were not so generous,
granting that luck was with him. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union began to
implode, partially because they could not and would not keep up with an arms
race made tremendously more expensive by Reagan’s strategic defense initiative.
In
the end, Ambrose and Brinkley noted that Reagan is considered one of America’s
top ten presidents with lasting influence on history.
-end-
HISTORY BOOK CLUB TOPICS FOR 2016
Wednesday, August, 31,
2016: Germs and Plagues: A history of epidemics in the world. Plague of Athens (429 BC), Plague of Justinian
(541 AD), “Black Death” in 1346, Cocoliztli Epidemic in Mexico (1528),
Wampanoag Smallpox in 1616, 1918 Flu Pandemic, more.
Wednesday, September
28, 2016: Scaremongering and Witch Hunts in America.Salem Witch Trials, House Un-American
Activities Committee; McCarthy Investigations; more.
Harry Truman holds Chicago Tribune that reported Dewey's "Victory"
Wednesday, October 26,
2016: Political Parties in America. Whigs, Know-Nothings, Federalists,
Copperheads; Communists, Socialists, Republicans, Democrats, more.
Wednesday, November
30, 2016: Colonization in America. Jamestown, Plymouth, Gloucester, St. Augustine, Junipero
Serra, Roger Williams, Quebec, Nieuw Amsterdam, more.
December: No
Meeting
