Caspar Weinberger

Caspar Weinberger, Defence Secretary in the Reagan administration, died yesterday. Weinberger's political career was overshadowed by the Iran-Contra scandal, and his conservative views were far from my own position. But I shall remember and value his public service for two reasons.

First, he was a committed anglophile in an administration that at an important point threatened, through the pursuit of an ideological canard, to undermine the transatlantic alliance. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, the initial instincts of President Reagan were to mediate rather than to side with Great Britain in repelling an act of aggression that was clearly in breach of international law. This was worse than a Carter-like feebleness: it was directly related to a mistaken idea that inspired the initial foreign policy vision of the administration. Reagan's first ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, wrote a celebrated essay in Commentary magazine (link requires fee), in November 1979, entitled 'Dictatorships and Double Standards'. In it, she urged:

... realism about the nature of traditional versus revolutionary autocracies and the relation of each to the American national interest. Only intellectual fashion and the tyranny of Right/Left thinking prevent intelligent men of good will from perceiving the facts that traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies, that they are more susceptible of liberalization, and that they are more compatible with US interests. The evidence on all these points is clear enough.

Kirkpatrick greatly overestimated the durability of Communist tyranny, but I do not criticise her for that. Almost all commentators made the same mistake, and most were less clear than she was about the malignancy of Communist totalitarianism. What was wrong in Kirkpatrick's diagnosis was the implication that authoritarian regimes (I deliberately do not say 'governments') were or could be inherently reliable allies, even friends, of liberal democracies. Fortunately that view was not consistently pursued by Reagan, and (as I have argued in a recent book) it is a great advance that US strategic doctrine now aims at the expansion of democracy rather than the maintenance of balance of power. One notably perceptive figure in the debate in the 1980s was the sinister neconservative ideologue Paul Wolfowitz, then ambassador to Indonesia, who pressured the administration to abandon support for President Marcos of the Philippines, a plainly illegitimate ruler who had rigged the country's elections in 1986.

In the first half of Reagan's first term, however, the administration was trying to cultivate good relations with Argentina's military dictatorship on the premises that Jeane Kirkpatrick (who sided more or less openly with the junta over the Falklands) had argued. It took a certain amount of diplomatic pressure, domestic and foreign, for President Reagan to abandon the attempt to broker a settlement, and to accept that the US had no principled course but to ally with and assist the British campaign to retake the Falklands. Caspar Weinberger was an important influence in establishing a reputable course for the administration. As he recalled in his political memoir Fighting for Peace (1990, p. 152): 'Most important of all, the British success in the Falklands told the world that aggression would not be tolerated and that freedom and the rule of law had strong and effective defenders.'

Secondly, Weinberger played an important and principled role in the 1980s in expounding the importance of collective security. In the same book I have just quoted he also refers (pp. 117-8) to a public debate in 1984:

I had long been committed to a debate at the Oxford Union Society of Oxford University. The subject was 'Resolved, there is no moral difference between the foreign policies of the US and the USSR', and my opponent was to be Professor E.P. Thompson, a prominent Marxist (his own designation) and Oxford Professor. [Weinberger was mistaken on the second point. Thompson was not a Professor, and was careful to correct opponents who addressed him that way, nor was he at Oxford.]

Our Embassy in London and several others warned me that this was a foolish risk, that such a debate could not be won and that the loss would be a big story, at least in Europe. I felt fully committed, however, by my agreement with the students and went ahead with it, although I had only been on my feet in the Union five minutes when I knew the Embassy was absolutely right.

In his later memoir In the Arena (2003), Weinberger reproduced a long extract from his speech on that occasion (and also mischievously recalled a Union officer of radical left-wing views, who appeared later to undergo a change of heart, one Andrew Sullivan). He argued for a fundamental difference between an open society and a totalitarian one, and concluded: '[Y]ou can't have a moral foreign policy if the people cannot control it.'

I was in the audience that evening, and well recall the speech. Weinberger was outstanding; he clearly won the argument, and to everyone's astonishment, won the vote as well. It took place in the term I was Chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club, when Labour, with disastrous electoral consequences and indifference to its traditions, was formally committed to expelling US nuclear bases from the UK. Thompson, it is worth recalling, was supposedly one of the more reasonable nuclear disarmers, in that he was not actually among the pro-Soviet elements within that movement. Instead, he expounded a view, which he called 'exterminism', that both sides in the Cold War were committed to a supposed ideology of nuclear weaponry as a means of intimidating popular dissent. It was as comprehensively refuted a notion as any in recent history when it became clear, with the collapse of Communism, that nuclear weapons were not a cause of international discord, but symbols of irreconciliable ideological differences. Removing the cause of that discord meant defeating Communism with the idea of liberty. When that happened, the underlying shift in relations between states robbed the nuclear issue of its salience that it was accorded in the Cold War. Weinberger argued the case with skill and eloquence; I'm relieved to recall that, while a man of the Left (as I still am), I voted on his side in that debate.

The struggle against totalitarianism was a clash of ideas more than of states. Weinberger was an unusual statesman in being willing to argue publicly with his critics. He deserves credit for his contribution to the most successful liberation movement in history, the Atlantic alliance of liberal democratic states.