Obama Is No Reagan: The Polish Lesson Ignored in Iran
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Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan.
One need look no further than President Obama’s cautiously timid
response to the demands of freedom from Iranians. Contrast this
with Reagan’s response to similar demands from Poles in the 1980s
and the miserable inadequacy of the Obama foreign policy is
thrust into a stark and shameful relief.
When Reagan took office in January of 1981, Poland had been a
Soviet satellite for almost four decades. The American foreign
policy establishment had long since settled into an acceptance of
moral equivalency between the United States and the Communists.
The policy was acted out in a thousand different ways ranging
from so-called “détente” (a relaxing of tensions) to a vast,
arcane arms control process which over time had substituted the
process itself instead of the unconditional victory of freedom as
America’s chief foreign policy goal.
Reagan had campaigned on a completely different idea, a very old
principle when dealing with an adversary. He phrased it this way
to his first national security advisor, Richard Allen: “We win,
they lose.” It was this goal that Reagan sought, and thus caused
him to speak bluntly about America’s adversary in the Cold War.
An “Evil Empire” is how he early-on famously described the Soviet
Union, completely horrifying the Obama-like striped-pants set in
the State Department and Establishment foreign policy circles.
When the Soviet Ambassador made an early call on the new
Reaganized State Department he was prevented from the cozy
physical access to the building previous administrations had
granted him. In times past he was driven into the basement garage
and then rode a private elevator to the seventh floor, the
location of the Secretary of State’s office. He was the only
diplomat in all of Washington accorded this special privilege.
The rest — some 150 ambassadors — had to be driven to the main
entrance, walk through the State Department public lobby and take
the public elevator. This practice ceased with the Soviet
Ambassador’s very first visit to the newly Reaganized State
Department.
Change was at hand, and the Ambassador — his limo driver forced
to quite publicly back out of the garage and go around to the
main entrance in full view of the press — was not happy.
One of the very first items that arose on Reagan’s watch was the
rising demand for freedom from the Polish people. On January 21,
his first full day in the Oval Office, word reached the White
House that a young shipyard worker and union leader named Lech
Walesa had informed the Communist government of Poland he had
called a series of strikes in four Polish cities, beginning the
next day. Within 24 hours hundreds of thousands of Poles in ten
cities — not four — were publicly defying the Polish Communist
dictator, General Wojciech Jaruzelski.
A fight for freedom was on — and Ronald Reagan had zero
intention of standing on the sidelines.
“In my speeches and press conferences, I deliberately set out to
say some frank things about the Russians, to let them know there
were some new fellows in Washington who had a realistic view of
what they were up to and weren’t going to let them keep it up.”
At his very first press conference he answered a question about
whether the Soviets could be trusted. “I said the answer to that
question could be found in the writings of Soviet leaders: It had
always been their philosophy that it was moral to lie or cheat…”
Liberals all over Washington paled. This, they insisted, was no
way to conduct diplomacy. One just does not say these things in
public. But Reagan had only just begun.
As Walesa and his fellow Poles demanded the most basic of human
liberties, Moscow responded by sending troops on maneuvers along
the Polish border, then installing a military government with
instructions to stop Walesa in his tracks.
Distinctly unlike Obama’s reaction to the demonstrators filling
the streets of Iran, Reagan looked at similar crowds in Poland
and said the sight was “thrilling.” Said Reagan: “I wanted to be
sure we did nothing to impede this process and everything we
could to spur it along.”
And so he did. In a stiff note to Soviet boss Leonid Brezhnev,
Reagan said that if the Russians kept up their thuggish response
to Poland they “could forget any new nuclear arms agreement.”
Gone too would be better trade relations, and in their place
would be the “harshest possible economic sanctions” if they even
thought of invading Poland as they had done with Czechoslovakia
in 1968 or Hungary in 1956.
The Russians responded. In December, Reagan later recalled,
without warning they shut down the Polish borders, shut off
communications with the outside world, arrested Walesa and his
fellow leaders of Solidarity (the union Walesa led), and imposed
martial law.
Almost immediately Reagan was told the stunning news that the
Polish Ambassador to the United States and his wife wished to
defect. Hesitating not a second, Reagan made certain that
American authorities got to the Ambassador before the KGB and
“spirited him away to a safe place.” Reagan wrote this in his
diary at the time:
I took a stand that this may be the last chance in our lifetime
to see a change in the Soviet Empire’s colonial policy re
Eastern Europe. We should take a stand and tell them unless and
until martial law is lifted in Poland, the prisoners were
released and negotiations resumed between Walesa and the Polish
government, we would quarantine the Soviets and Poland with no
trade or communications across their borders. Also tell our
NATO allies and others to join us in such sanctions or risk an
estrangement from us. A TV speech is in the works.
The now-defected Polish Ambassador was invited to the Oval
Office. It was the direct opposite of the response from the Ford
White House when the great Russian dissident writer Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn arrived in the U.S. and an Oval Office meeting with
President Ford was rejected for fear of antagonizing the Soviets.
Reagan said the Ambassador and his wife “had looks of
desperation…mixed with relief. Their faces brightened when I told
them I welcomed them to America as genuine Polish patriots….It
was an emotional moment…and left me with more disgust than ever
for the evil men in the Kremlin who believed they had the right
to hold an entire nation in captivity. Subsequently, I learned
Ambassador Spasowski had been condemned to death by the generals
who ruled Poland.”
After the meeting was over, Reagan went back to writing what was
supposed to be a Christmas message, deciding to use the occasion
to send another message altogether to the Soviets, condemning
them outright for their conduct in Poland: “We can’t let this
revolution against Communism fail without offering a hand,” he
wrote that day in his diary. “We may never have an opportunity
like this in our lifetime.”
Christmas or not, Reagan proceeded to write Brezhnev about the
“recent events in Poland.” Warned the President: “Attempts to
suppress the Polish people-either by the Polish army or police
acting under Soviet pressure, or through even more direct use of
the Soviet military force — certainly will not bring about long
term stability in Poland and could unleash a process neither you
nor we could fully control.” Reagan said the Soviets were
encouraging “political terror, mass arrests and bloodshed” and
they must either halt this behavior or “we will travel a
different path.”
On Christmas morning, Reagan had a heated, angry reply from
Brezhnev. Furious, he accused the President of “defaming our
social and state system, our internal order.” It was a charge,
Reagan said, “to which I pleaded guilty.” The rest of the
response from the Soviet leader was a rant. An angry Brezhnev
railed about “attempts to dictate your will to other states..”
The Soviet Union “repudiates the claims of anyone to interfere in
the events occurring in Poland…It is your Administration that has
already done enough to disrupt or at the very least undermine
everything positive which was achieved at the cost of great
effort by previous American administrations in the relations
between our countries.” Brezhnev also fumed over “the general
tone” of Reagan’s letter, snapping that it “is not the way in
which leaders of such powers as the Soviet Union and the United
States should talk with each other…”
Reagan’s response? “What a good Christmas present…I’d made my
point to Brezhnev.”
By New Year’s Day a steely Reagan was announcing sanctions
against both Poland and the Soviet Union. Negotiations on a
long-term grain-sale agreement were halted. Flights into the
United States by the Soviet airline Aeroflot were banned by the
Reagan Administration. An embargo was imposed on American-made
products critical to the Soviet Union, beginning with pipe-laying
equipment needed desperately for the construction of the
trans-Siberian gas pipeline.
The Europeans bucked at this latter penalty. “The reaction of
some of our allies suggested that money spoke louder to them than
principle,” Reagan said. He ignored them, saying tartly: “There
was a lot of talk about not having a set to with our allies. I
firmly said to hell with it.”
History records that Reagan’s decision to take a strong stand for
Polish freedom — and bringing down the Communist system itself
— was the right one. There was nothing timid about his behavior.
Indeed, his firm signals were consistent throughout whether he
was writing to Leonid Brezhnev, shutting off the once-privileged
access of the Soviet Ambassador to the State Department, helping
the Polish Ambassador to defect and then making a point of
greeting him in the Oval Office or making clear his support for
Lech Walesa and the Polish workers of Solidarity. He used every
tool at his disposal to push the Communist government of Poland
to collapse. And he succeeded.
Lech Walesa went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize and later become
the freely elected President of a democratic Poland. In 2007,
Walesa’s successor as President of Poland traveled to the Reagan
Library to present Nancy Reagan, who accepted on behalf of her
late husband, The Order of the White Eagle, the oldest and
highest honor within the gift of the Polish people. Today one can
visit Ronald Reagan Square in Krakow, a Reagan statue is planned
for Warsaw and Reagan streets and parks dot the country. He is
considered, in the words of the Polish president, the “architect
of democracy.”
This is a lesson that one realizes the Obama White House simply
doesn’t have the courage to embrace. As over a million Iranians
fill the streets of Tehran, the message from this President of
the United States is that he is afraid to be seen as “meddling”
— precisely the charge Reagan faced down from Brezhnev. Instead
Obama backs away from standing up for freedom, saying (as if Iran
were a free country): “It is up to Iranians to make decisions
about who Iran’s leaders will be. We respect Iranian sovereignty
and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of
Iran.” He does say he is “deeply troubled.”
As those Iranians who seek freedom are literally shot dead in the
streets, Obama observes cautiously that “the democratic process,
free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent — all
those are universal values and need to be respected.” Instead of
dealing with the mullahs of Iran in the fashion Reagan dealt with
Brezhnev and the Polish Communist puppets, Obama refers
deferentially to Ayatollah ali Khamenei, as the “Supreme Leader.”
Not from this president will you hear as one did from Reagan that
this latest thuggish leader is capable of lying and cheating –
an amazing thought when the subject at issue is a fraudulent
election and the serious potential of nuclear weapons in the
Middle East.
What must the Lech Walesa’s of Iran think as they bravely twitter
back and forth their demands for human liberty? Twittering and
blogging inside Iran suddenly demands the same kind of courage
Walesa displayed as a young Polish shipyard worker. What can
those Iranian protestors — the lineal descendants of those
Polish Solidarity workers — possibly think as they demand the
same human liberties Ronald Reagan went out of his way to make a
reality in Poland? Only to find that this time there is no Ronald
Reagan in the Oval Office but rather a timid man who responds to
desperate pleas for human freedom in the cautious and precise
tones of a law professor?
Both the American and Iranian people are learning Barack Obama is
no Ronald Reagan.
Dangerously, the rest of the world is learning it too. This does
not bode well.
