The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

James Fallows’s piece on “The New Celebrities of Washington” [NYR, June 12] contains a rather oddly appended meditation on my career. He finds in it yet another example of the corrupted state of Washington journalism. It seems I am guilty of two major Fallowian sins: highfalutin thinking (the Reagan Doctrine) and “trimming my sails” (Star Wars). I’ll take the more obnoxious charge first.

Fallows sets out to prove that I changed my mind on Star Wars. I had written two pieces on Star Wars, but only included one in my book. “The first derided the administration line, and vanished; the second praised it, and endured.” Fallows then concludes, more in sorrow than in anger, “This is not a way to use talent, settle arguments, or help choose policies.” The shame. Fallows does not say why this alleged change of views took place, but the implication of someone toadying up to power is clear.

To set the sinister tone, Fallows begins by saying that “Krauthammer’s collection of essays, Cutting Edges, omitted only one major article from his recent writings in The New Republic“—the first Star Wars piece. This is a stupid lie. Cutting Edges omits major New Republic pieces on the Lebanon war, interventionism, and the debt crisis, all written within six months of the first Star Wars piece and all featured on the cover of the New Republic. Moreover, Cutting Edges does not give preference to New Republic pieces, nor, for that matter, to recency. For reasons of space, I had to omit more than a dozen major pieces which were published elsewhere or earlier on pacifism, pornography, affirmative action, scientific imperialism, foreign aid, humanism, human experimentation, political theater—the list is long.

The lie is stupid because unnecessary. What is necessary is the distortions that follow, the central one of which is the characterization of my second piece, the one included in my book, as “praising Star Wars.” Praising? In the opening line of this hymn to Star Wars I say that “President Reagan’s Star Wars plan aimed at making ‘nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete’ is an illusion, and…the promise it holds out of repealing deterrence is a fraud.”

Fallows continues: “The first article said Star Wars was a ploy for sustaining the arms race; the second, a way to end it.” The distortion here is grotesque. In my second piece I argue that Star Wars is indeed a way to end the arms race—if abandoned at the arms control table. The whole point of the piece is to give the strategic rationale (from both the Soviet and American point of view) for a “grand strategic compromise” that would ban Star Wars in return for deep offensive cuts on both sides.

It is a compromise that I explicitly and urgently advocate. Which makes Fallows’s third statement an even nastier example of intellectual dishonesty. He writes: “The first [article] derided the administration line, and vanished; the second praised it, and endured.” The administration line was and is to refuse such a deal. What I advocate is precisely the opposite: “In fact, the Administration’s position heading into the Geneva talks with Gromyko seems to be that Star Wars will not be given up…. [If] the current hard line proves to be not a tactic but a fixed position, the Administration will have missed a historic opportunity.”

There is not a word of praise for the Administration line. The only Administration development I viewed hopefully was the fact that some second-tier officials “were changing their tune” and edging away from the President’s view of Star Wars. I also say that if—as some press reports at the time had it—the Administration was ready to give up Star Wars, and the stonewall was simply a negotiating ploy to get a better deal with deeper cuts, so much the better.

There is a difference between the two pieces. They address entirely different issues. The first deals exclusively with President Reagan’s vision of Star Wars as a population defense. It argues that such a defense is an illusion and a fraud. The second article begins by repeating that argument and then examines an entirely different idea: the idea of “point defense,” defenses that protect weapons (like missile fields), not people.

This distinction is absolutely crucial. Defenses that defend people and defenses that defend weapons have diametrically opposite effects on deterrence. The former weakens it; the latter strengthens it. Which is why Fallows makes no mention of the distinction: it would show that the two pieces, addressing antithetical aspects of the question of defenses, are not contradictory but complimentary. In fact, both articles deride population defense (then, as now, “the Administration line”). The only defensive system that I view favorably is a defense for defending weapons—a view expressed in both pieces. At the conclusion of my first article I say that point defenses might supplement arms control in providing the only avenue to the security promised by Reagan’s Star Wars illusion. The second piece takes up the issue of exactly how such systems for defending weapons play a role in promoting arms control.

I like the first piece. I think that it is correct. Fallows will find it reprinted in a volume of essays on Star Wars edited by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Promise or Peril: The Strategic Defense Initiative (Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, 1986). Fallows’s charge that I have tried to make it vanish is thus as false as it is malicious. As for Cutting Edges, I originally submitted both Star Wars pieces (and others mentioned above) to my publisher for inclusion. The first piece was cut only after his suggestion that the book was too long. In a collection where practically every piece is on a different subject, I had four on the nuclear issue and two on Star Wars alone. The choice was easy. I chose the later one because it had wider scope, was more original, and was more timely.

As I explained to Fallows, the first piece was limited because it dealt only with population defense. At the time the piece first appeared it had some originality. It was one of the first to demonstrate exactly why such a defense was illusory. By the time my book appeared a year and a half later, this demonstration had been done by many others. By then it was somewhat intellectually disreputable to support the President’s idea of a population defense. Even some Administration officials, I noted, were edging away from it.

By mid-1985 when the book was put together, the paramount question had become the relation of Star Wars to arms control. Why? Something important happened between the writing of my first and second piece, an event I emphasized to Fallows and which Fallows characteristically neglects to mention. The first article was written in May 1984. The second in January 1985. What changed in the interim? In the interim, the Soviets ended their boycott of arms control talks, dropped all previous preconditions and agreed to return to Geneva. Their new position was to offer large reductions in offensive weapons in return for the abolition of Star Wars. Gorbachev had made Star Wars the condition on which all arms control progress hinged. It still hinges on that issue.

Hence relevance. As I explained to Fallows, I chose the second piece because I thought that the question of the day was, and would continue to be, the relation of Star Wars to arms control and, specifically, what to do about the Soviet offer of offensive reductions in exchange for curbing defensive systems.

A gossip in search of ad hominems is not impressed by such thoughts. I read, therefore, from the lead headline, front page of The New York Times, June 1, 1986: “Moscow Proposes Reduction in Arms but Gives Warning…Offers Cutbacks if ABM Treaty is reaffirmed….” Reaffirming the ABM Treaty is shorthand for curbing Star Wars. My second piece is an examination of what is, in fact, today’s Soviet arms control position—exactly as I anticipated when choosing it for the book. The second article can be read today as an answer to two crucial questions about the Soviet offer: 1. What is the Soviet motive? (Fear of an American point defense); 2. What should we do? (Accept the offer).

(My view differs from Moscow’s principally in one respect. I see no reason not to amend the ABM treaty to permit more than the one site currently allowed, because, deterrence fundamentalist that I am, I believe that a “tightly limited and partially effective local defense of missile fields would be highly stabilizing” [second piece] and “The only real alternative [to Star Wars] is the very deliberate, unsatisfying path of arms control, supplemented perhaps by mutually agreed technological advances in point defenses” [first piece].)

One other matter, the Reagan Doctrine.

Fallows’s conceit in his “Celebrities” article is his pose as the upholder of the standards of the old journalism, marked by “exposure to detail,” against those of the corrupted new journalistic celebrities “high on erudite-sounding opinion.” Example? Fallows quotes my statement that Reagan’s great talent is in launching new ideas. I list four: small government, supply side economics, strategic defense, and the Reagan Doctrine, each of which, I say, has “radically changed the terms of debate” in its field. Fallows considers this an example of “grand overstatement.” His deflation consists in pointing out that, in fact, Reagan has not cut government. Nor did I say he did. Details, Mr. Fallows. I spoke only of changing the terms of debate. There is a difference between setting a national agenda and enacting it.

As it happens, I am rather antipathetic to two of Reagan’s ideas (small government and Star Wars) and skeptical of another (supply side economics). But will Fallows deny that in these four areas Reagan has changed the terms of debate? Would he deny that the overriding political argument in Washington today is how best to cut the budget? That since the President’s Star Wars speech of 1983, the nuclear debate has been turned on its head from discussions of offensive to defensive weaponry? Or that for the first years of the 1980s the debate about supply side economics, hardly a blip on the horizon before Reagan’s victory, dominated discussion of economic matters?

As for the Reagan Doctrine, Fallows ridicules the notion that it “turns geopolitics on its head.” But the reversals it entails are obvious. For forty years the United States has found itself consistently opposing, sometimes fighting against, guerrilla war. Suddenly we are supporting four of the world’s major guerrilla wars. In the early sixties, Khrushchev proclaimed the legitimacy of “wars of national liberation.” That doctrine has now been embraced by the President of the United States as a way to roll back recent Soviet acquisitions. People may disagree with the Reagan Doctrine as a program for foreign policy. But its power as a unifying idea is established. Established, in part, by its opponents, for whom the term is now common usage, and who have contributed to a bibliography on the subject that, after little more than a year, is extensive (cf. Stephen Rosenfeld’s sharp critique of the Reagan Doctrine in the current issue of Foreign Affairs).