When President Richard M. Nixon entered office in 1969 he sought to pursue a policy of detente with the Soviet Union. This policy entailed establishing better relations with the USSR through trade and arms control; opening relations with mainland China; and ending the war in Vietnam. As part of this policy, the administration introduced the Nixon Doctrine, which stated that allies would do the fighting instead of U. S. troops. This doctrine was a response to the U. S. backlash to its involvement in the Vietnam War, and an outgrowth of the detente strategy of avoiding direct confrontation between the superpowers. Under this doctrine, the United States continued to support its allies, including the South Vietnamese government, through military and foreign aid.
While seeking better relations with the Soviet Union, Nixon continued a nuclear strategy of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD), in which the United States would be able to retaliate to any nation’s nuclear attack with nuclear weapons. At the same time, he sought to shift Soviet and U. S. nuclear weapons away from civilian targets. Nixon moved away from his predecessor’s defense policy of “flexible response” and toward a new defense policy of “strategic sufficiency.” This new policy replaced the goal of nuclear and military superiority, for which both superpowers had been striving for decades. “Strategic sufficiency” required the United States to have the nuclear capability to deter a nuclear attack launched by the Soviet Union. This was to be accomplished by convincing the Soviets that even after receiving a nuclear strike, the United States would still be able to retaliate with an unacceptable amount of nuclear force.
In 1972 the United States and the Soviet Union signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (Salt I). It limited both nations to a maximum of 200 antiballistic missiles (ABM) and two ABM systems. A separate agreement froze for five years the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). These treaties formalized a strategy of mutual deterrence, the view adopted by both sides as the surest guarantee against nuclear attack.
In pursuing the SALT agreement, Nixon pressured reluctant liberals in Congress to support the development of new weapons systems. Nixon gave the go-ahead to a new kind of missile called a “multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle” (MIRV). Each of these missiles carried three to 10 separately targeted warheads, so fewer missiles could launch more bombs. The introduction of MIRV technology, in effect, accelerated the arms race.
Coming into office in 1974, President Gerald R. Ford continued Nixon’s defense policy. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Ford, under pressure from Congress, agreed to cuts in defense. President Ford also dismissed James R. Schlesinger, who had served as secretary of defense in the Nixon administration, because he called for more money to be spent on defense. Schlesinger wanted the money to be allocated to conventional forces, which he believed were essential to American engagements in “limited” wars. Schlesinger also questioned the nature of the arms control policy being pursued by Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.
Meeting with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Vladivostok, Siberia, in late 1974, Ford made progress toward a new arms control treaty. The following year Ford and Brezhnev signed an accord in Helsinki, Finland, with 31 other nations, recognizing Europe’s post-1945 political boundaries and agreeing to respect human rights. The Helsinki agreement drew criticism from “hawks” in both the Democratic and Republican Parties because it agreed to recognize the Soviet regimes in Eastern and Central Europe. Furthermore, critics accused the Soviet Union of continuing to violate human rights by suppressing dissidents and Russian Jews.
Defense policy in James Earl Carter, Jr.’s administration is best described as equivalence and countervalence. President Carter worked toward the balancing of the United States and the Soviet Union in the nuclear arena. Initially Carter supported continued cuts in the defense budget with Congress. At the same time, Carter continued to rely on a nuclear capability based on a strategic triad of ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers. Yet within these parameters, fierce debates during the next four years would be sustained within the administration and in Congress over a range of defense issues, including the development of a new B-1 bomber; the best platform for delivering a new mobile ICBM, the MX missile; the development of a neutron bomb; and the deployment of Pershing II missiles in Europe to counter the Soviet Union’s deployment of mobile missiles in Eastern Europe.
In 1979 Carter negotiated a new arms control treaty, SALT II, with the Soviet Union, which called for further cuts in both nations’ nuclear arsenals. The treaty acknowledged essential “parity” in the nuclear forces. Agreement called for each nation to stop construction of new fixed ICBMs, to leave the fixed sites in place, and not to convert light ICBMs into heavy ones. In addition, each nation would limit the number of its MIRVs and cruise missiles. The Soviet Union would dismantle 200 MIRV’d ICBMs, while the United States pledged not to test cruise missiles with a range greater than 600 kilometers. The treaty was set to expire in 1985. A Joint Statement of Principles for SALT III called for further negotiations to set parity, while reducing overall levels of armaments.
When Carter submitted this treaty to Congress, however, he ran into strong opposition from members of his own party and Republicans who argued that the Soviets had not lived up to either the earlier Salt I agreement or the Helsinki Accords. Shortly before Carter signed the agreement, Senator Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) had declared that the treaty favored the Soviets and that to sign it would be “appeasement in its purest form.” Although the Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsed the treaty, one of their representatives on the negotiating team resigned and testified against SALT. In addition, outside Congress, the treaty drew heavy criticism. The Committee on the Present Danger, a lobbying group organized in 1975 against detente, attacked the treaty as representative of a “culture of appeasement.” Warning that it offered a means for the Soviet Union to achieve nuclear supremacy, through such loopholes as the absence of on-site inspections to verify that the agreement was being honored, Senate critics blocked the treaty from coming to a vote in 1979. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter withdrew the SALT II agreement in January 1980.
As tensions had mounted with the Soviet Union over its nuclear buildup and its involvement in Africa and Central America, Carter had urged increases in military expenditures. With the invasion of Afghanistan, Carter escalated defense spending, which had begun to increase shortly before the invasion. In June 1980 President Carter announced a countervailing strategy meant to convince the Soviet Union that the United States had the capability and the intent to launch a counterattack against the USSR that would yield unacceptably great destruction of targets such as political and military control establishments, military forces, and the industrial areas of the Soviet Union. This shift toward selecting civilian targets reversed Nixon’s declared policy of targeting only military sites. President Carter also continued to push European North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members to increase their defense spending and thus their share of responsibility.
When President Ronald W. Reagan took office in 1981, he set out to enhance the ability of the United States not only to win a nuclear war but also to survive one. Throughout his first term, Reagan and his secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, continued to call for the largest peacetime military buildup since the outbreak of World War II in Europe. In his first year as president he announced his five-point plan for increasing U. S. capabilities: improvement of communications, command, and control systems (C3); modernization of the strategic bomber; new SLBM deployment; improvement of survivability and accuracy of new ICBMs; better strategic defense of the United States. Under this plan, he ordered production of 100 B-1 bombers and 100 MX-ICBMs, and called for the development of a stealth aircraft and the Trident II SLBM, as well as the enhancement of U. S. air-surveillance systems and anti-satellite systems (ASAT). President Reagan repeatedly fought Congress, which did not want to appropriate the money for funding these programs.
In March 1983 Reagan called for a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derided by its critics as “Star Wars,” a science-fiction fantasy movie. SDI called for a 20-year research and development project, with costs ranging from $100 billion to $1 trillion. While this proposal was being debated, the Reagan administration went ahead with plans made at the end of the Carter administration to deploy medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles in Europe. As a consequence, the Soviets withdrew from arms control talks.
Also during his first term, President Reagan aggressively employed U. S. troops in developing countries to halt the spread of regimes that were unfriendly to the United States. He sent troops into Grenada in 1983 and bombed Libya when the nation was found to be responsible for an international terrorism incident.
In his second term, Reagan appeared to reverse his defense policy toward the Soviet Union. In the next four years, Reagan had more meetings with the leader of the Soviet Union than any of his predecessors. He met with Mikhail Gorbachev, who had became party chairman in early 1985, at summits in Geneva in November 1985; in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986; in Washington in December 1987; in Moscow in June 1988; and in New York that same year. As a result, detente was revived. More important, in December 1987 the two leaders signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty in which the two powers agreed to withdraw and destroy all intermediate-range missiles deployed in Europe. The following year, December 1988, in a speech before the UN General Assembly in New York Gorbachev announced that Russia would unilaterally reduce its military forces by 500,000 men and 10,000 tanks over the next two years.
President George H. W. Bush came into office at the end of the COLD war. The significant changes in world affairs led the Bush administration to reformulate U. S. foreign and defense policy away from an ideological approach, as dictated by the cold war, toward a more pragmatic attitude. President Bush saw the beginning of a new era of defense planning when ethnic hostilities erupted across the world as the cold war ended. Conflicts became increasingly local, resulting in decreased justification for international defense. Beginning in fiscal year 1992 defense budgets began to diminish. This caused the subsequent closing of hundreds of military bases and a decrease in the number of U. S. servicemen stationed in Europe.
As the dominant military power now in the world, the United States under Bush assumed a greater role as an “international policeman”—working cooperatively with western European allies and the United Nations to preserve international stability. Often this meant military intervention into local areas. For example, in December 1989 Bush deployed U. S. troops to dethrone an unfriendly regime under dictator Manuel Noriega in Panama. In this intervention, 55 Panamanian National Guard troops and 23 U. S. soldiers lost their lives in 72 hours of fighting. The United States captured Noriega and placed him on trial in Miami, where he was convicted and sentenced for drug trafficking.
The Bush administration confronted a major international crisis on August 2, 1990, when Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, invaded his oil-rich neighbor, Kuwait. Bush organized an international coalition to oust Iraq from Kuwait. The United States led the United Nations to pass a series of resolutions demanding that Iraq withdraw, while at the same time the United States assembled a military force of 700,000 from 28 countries, stationed in Saudi Arabia. After the expiration of 12 UN resolutions calling for Iraq’s withdrawal, Bush launched military action in what became known as the Persian Gulf War. After six weeks of bombing, UN forces launched a ground assault that liberated Kuwait, within 100 hours, on February 27,
1991. Although Hussein remained in power, he promised to allow arms inspectors into his country to ensure that all weapons of mass destruction, specifically nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, had been destroyed and were not being developed. The UN continued an arms and economic embargo on Iraq, but Hussein soon was creating problems in the region by his refusal to cooperate with UN inspectors and his support of international terrorists.
When William J. Clinton won the presidency in
1992, he blended the use of military force and moral suasion in his defense and foreign policy. Confronted with the complexities of the post-cold war world, the Clinton administration was hesitant to deploy American forces unilaterally. During his eight years in office, Clinton continued to experience an uneasy relationship with the American military, in part because of his emphasis on multilateral military intervention, his downsizing of the military, and because of what critics said was his avoidance of military service during the Vietnam War. Furthermore, when he first assumed office, he ordered the military to include gay men and women in its ranks. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, was so upset with this policy that six months later, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin issued orders forbidding the military to inquire into the sexual orientation of service personnel. This “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy satisfied neither advocates nor opponents of including homosexuals in the military. Relations between the military and the administration did not get any better under Aspin, who failed to develop a rapport with the heads of the uniformed services. In late 1993 Aspin was fired, after 18 American marines lost their lives during a firefight in Somalia.
Aspin was replaced by William Perry, who served as the next secretary of defense between 1994 to 1997. He established a closer working relationship with the armed services and provided leadership as the military adopted a new generation of lighter weapons and more maneuverable ships, planes, and armored vehicles. In his second term, Clinton appointed Republican senator William Cohen to serve as secretary of defense.
During Clinton’s tenure in office, the United States for the first time in its history had military forces in 100 nations around the globe. Under Clinton, American military troops were increasingly used to promote human rights abroad. These military interventions had mixed results. In the East African country of Somalia, the Clinton administration inherited a major U. S. military humanitarian operation. Shortly before leaving office, Bush had dispatched 28,000 U. S. ground troops to create what he called a “secure environment” for food distribution in this war - and famine-ravaged country. When Clinton came into office, however, he turned this relief effort over to a UN force, so that by July only 4,000 U. S. troops remained in Somalia as part of a “nation-building” force. On October 3, U. S. forces became engaged in a firefight with Somali warlord Muhammad Farah Aideed, leaving 18 marines killed. By the end of 1993, Clinton had withdrawn the remainder of the U. S. force. One major consequence of the failure of this mission was that the Clinton administration did not respond to a genocidal war by the Hutu-dominated government against the Tutsis in the East African country of Rwanda.
Clinton’s efforts to restore the democratically elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti with the threat of UN-backed American military action proved more successful in 1994, although subsequent Haitian governments proved less than democratic. In a rigged election, Aristide returned to power for a second term in June 2000.
The Clinton administration also became militarily engaged in the former Yugoslavia to promote human rights. In 1991 civil war had broken out in Bosnia, a province of Yugoslavia. The Bush administration avoided getting involved in conflict in the Balkans region, although it supported an embargo on exporting arms to the warring parties, which included Orthodox Christian Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians. The conflict intensified in the summer of 1995, precipitated by a Serb attack on the Muslim town of Srebrenica, which led to ethnic cleansing and the rape of thousands of Muslim women and girls. The Clinton administration joined NATO allies in launching air strikes against the Serbs, who were forced to withdraw to Yugoslavia. On November 1, representatives of Yugoslavia and the newly independent former Yugoslavian province of Croatia met at the U. S. Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, where on November 21 the Dayton accords were signed, lifting the siege of Sarajevo and creating the independent state of Bosnia. The United States agreed to lead an International Implementation Force (IFOR) of approximately 60,000 soldiers to maintain peace in Bosnia. The United States contributed 20,000 troops to this mission. Although Clinton pledged that these troops would be withdrawn by 1996, by 2000 the United States still had 8,000 troops in the area.
In March 1999 further troubles came in the region when Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevics refused to withdraw his armed troops from the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Because the United States feared that Milosevics would initiate an ethnic cleansing program against Albanian Muslims in this province, the United States and European members of NATO launched a bombing campaign against Milosevic’s troops. Although Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger believed that the air campaign would force Milosevics to surrender in a matter of days, Milosevics sent the Yugoslav army on a rampage inside Kosovo. Moreover, the bombing of Yugoslavia appeared to unite the Serbs around Milosevics. Only on June 10, 1999— after seven weeks of intensive bombing—did Yugoslavia accept defeat. More than 60,000 troops from the United States and NATO entered Kosovo to supervise the return of refugees and to keep peace, but deep and historic hatreds remained between the Muslims and the Serbs. Few within the administration supported the end of the Kosovo war because it had lasted much longer than expected, and critics claimed that the war was “a perfect failure” that made conditions worse in Kosovo through military intervention. Few claimed it was absolutely successful, although Clinton defenders said that Kosovo was a much better place than it would have been absent NATO intervention.
World History
