November 9, 1999
. . . And How the East Was Won
By Caspar W. Weinberger, chairman of Forbes magazine. He was Ronald Reagan's secretary of defense.
I first saw the Berlin Wall when, as U.S. secretary of defense, I was meeting with our troops in Germany. All our guard posts and observation towers faced east, toward the invasion routes we expected the Soviets to use. But what was striking was that their towers and posts also faced east--to guard against escape.
That was the perfect illustration of the difference between us. The Berlin Wall was built not to prevent an invasion by the West. The Soviets built it to ensure that people in lands without freedom could not ever see what they were missing. We were defending against a foe determined to destroy the freedoms we and our allies enjoyed. Their highest priority was to maintain the internal slavery they imposed.
In Berlin we also saw the "dead area" (far too appropriately named) east of the Wall itself, running up to the Soviet-East German lines. Here there were grisly reminders of the punishments inflicted on those hardy souls who tried to run across this wasteland to freedom. When the Wall actually fell, on Nov. 9, 1989, it was to the inexorable forces of those crowding to be free.
Why did it take so long? Why did what the Wall symbolized last for more than 40 years? Primarily because until 1981 the West had no policy or plan to bring down the Wall and no plan to defeat Soviet aggression, repression and brutality.
The errors began at the Yalta conference, before World War II had been won. At Yalta the allies virtually abandoned Eastern Europe by agreeing to let the Soviets keep whatever they took in that unhappy area. This grievous error, condemning millions to the slavery imposed by the Soviets, was given respectability by writers such as George Kennan, highly regarded for his essays extolling the virtues of "containment." These writers opposed Communism, of course, but they counseled against actually fighting it.
Such thinking led to the corollary doctrine of détente, which required that we ignore communism's repression, its goal of world domination, and its bitter opposition to any human rights. The height of this folly was reached in 1972, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the infamous, unverifiable Antiballistic Missile Treaty.
This approach was finally set aside after Ronald Reagan's inauguration in 1981. He declared that the Soviet Union was an evil empire that must be destroyed. Howls of international outrage followed Mr. Reagan's repudiation of the long-held conventional wisdom. But Mr. Reagan went even further with his March 1983 decision to develop and deploy effective defenses against Soviet missiles.
The Cold War was won when we finally defined a clear moral objective--that communism and freedom could not exist together, and that freedom must win. The Wall came down because we adopted a clear policy to bring Soviet communism down and vigorously pursued the measures necessary to accomplish that.
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