(6 of 17)
At times, too, Reagan has talked of the Soviet Union as a phenomenon that a resolute West could cause to disappear. In a 1982 speech to the British Parliament, he borrowed a phrase that the Bolsheviks had used against their opponents and predicted that Soviet Marxism would wind up on "the ash heap of history." Speaking at a Notre Dame commencement in 1981, and again to evangelicals last March, he called Marxism-Leninism a "bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
Moreover, Reagan's closest aides say he consistently speaks exactly this way in private. At one National Security Council meeting in September 1982, Reagan advised Negotiator Nitze on a way to present an American position in the Geneva INF talks that both men knew the U.S.S.R. would find unacceptable. Said he: "Well, Paul, you just tell the Soviets that you're working for one tough son of a bitch."
The Soviets initially did not believe that Reagan meant what he said. In 1980 they actually seemed to welcome his election. They had by then become fervent members of the Anybody-but-Jimmy-Carter Club, voicing criticisms that might have been taken from Reagan's campaign speeches: Carter was so vacillating and unpredictable that no one ever knew what he might do. Moscow at that point viewed Reagan as a standard Republican conservative whose more strident anti-Soviet proclamations were just campaign oratory. The Soviets recalled that Richard Nixon had won political prominence by talking stern antiCommunism, but in the White House turned into the prime American architect of U.S.-Soviet détente.
Shortly after Reagan took office, though, the Soviets concluded that they had been wrong about him. Americans often remark that Reagan's bark has been worse than his bite. After all, he lifted the embargo that Carter had clamped on U.S. grain sales to the Soviet Union following the invasion of Afghanistan and proposed only mild and ineffectual economic sanctions in response to the imposition of martial law in Poland. But the Soviets have come to take Reagan at his word. Says a Kremlin specialist on American affairs: "With Carter, it was always interesting to read a speech and say, 'Aha, [former Secretary of State Cyrus] Vance wrote this one' or 'Here's a paragraph from [Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski.' But we have done what you might call content analysis of Reagan's statements over the past couple of years, and we feel quite sure that the man speaking was Reagan." To Soviet ears, the President seems not only to be denying the U.S.S.R.'s coveted claim to equal status with the U.S. as a superpower, but even challenging its right to exist as a legitimate state.
In particular, Reagan's $1.6 trillion military buildup has shocked the Soviets. To Americans, that reaction might seem sheer hypocrisy. Nothing did more to destroy détente than the Kremlin's insistence throughout the 1970s on piling up weapons far in excess of any legitimate Soviet defensive needs. During the decade the U.S.S.R. put in place thousands of nuclear missiles and expanded its oceangoing war fleet while