The Honorable Caspar Weinberger
Former Secretary of Defense

"The Consequences of Our Weakened Defense and Our Failed Foreign Policies"

 Thank you very much, Tom [Jones].   That was an over-generous introduction, although it pointed out that I was never really able to hold a steady job for very long, but I do appreciate the nice things you said.  It is a great honor to be here and have the opportunity to see old friends.  This is a homecoming for me and an opportunity to pay tribute to the fine work that this organization has been doing for a very long time by making people aware of the importance of world matters such as foreign policy.  We have not, as a country, previously paid enough attention to [matters such as this]. 

These days with the global economy, the Internet and all of the things that are breaking down the borders and the boundaries of the world, it’s more vital now than ever to pay a great deal of attention [to international affairs], that we know a great deal about it and that we understand what an enormous effect it can have on all of us--just as what we do here has an enormous effect on all of the other countries of the world.  It's rather astonishing, and in many ways disheartening, to realize that more than 50% of the members of Congress do not even have a passport and that, I think, reflects to some extent the fact that they have not yet realized the vital nature of what is happening abroad and the fact that boundaries and borders are crumbling very fast as we move into the new technological wonders of this particular age.

All of this is preliminary to the fact that it is vital for every country, and certainly for the United States, to have the kind of foreign policy that=s coherent, clear, understood and decisive, and that we have the military capability to support that foreign policy so we can attract and keep the allies that we need.  I'm delighted that so many of these countries are represented here today with the Consuls General and it is an honor to speak before them.  We can’t do any of these things as a country alone. 

It is an odd thing: when you go abroad you hear a lot of anti-American sentiment based on the idea that America is trying to take over the world, trying to become the world=s policeman, and trying to involve itself in all these activities, and yet when you’re home you know how extraordinarily difficult it is to get many Americans to pay the slightest attention to what’s happening across the street.  Some have this idea that we are all heavily interested in dominating the world, whereas we really aren’t. 

We have a very modest agenda. Our agenda is not to acquire any more real estate, invade anybody, take any more territory, or do anything in the nature of involving ourselves in others= actions.  Our agenda is simple: we want ourselves and our allies to be able to live at home in peace and freedom--peace alone is not enough.  Peace and freedom are essential, and yet that very modest agenda requires very strong military forces.  It requires a clear understanding of what is going on in the world.  When we don’t have that, we have a weakened foreign policy, which almost inevitably follows a weakened defense capability.   Unfortunately, that is what is happening right now.

One of the most unhappy things for me, and I’m sure for President Reagan, is to see the state of morale in the military steadily falling.  It’s reflected in the recruitment and in the number of vacancies that we now have in the Navy, Army and Air Force.  These vacancies reverse the situation that we created a few years ago when President Reagan was in office.  At that time, we had come from what we called Athe decade of neglect,” ten years in which the military had been neglected and had fallen behind substantially.  This seriously opened major doubts between our own [military] capability [versus] the then-Soviet Union.  After a very fast start by President Reagan, we redeemed that capability by regaining the morale. 

When I was up for confirmation by the Senate in 1980 and early >81, the question was not whether we would have a draft, but rather when would we have a draft. We were not recruiting enough people, people were leaving the military in droves and it was a very unhappy situation.  The morale was low and there was a general feeling that the country was no longer respected, understood, or even willing to acknowledge the importance of the military. 

That changed virtually overnight when President Reagan took office.  We soon had a situation in which we actually had waiting lists at most of the recruitment depots around the country.  We had raised the intellectual capabilities from high school graduates, who were only about 40-50% of the military when we first came in, to something like 90-95%.  These were people who were joining the military not to make money--you don’t do that.  You join the military for various patriotic reasons.  Some people say, AWell, those were bad times and people couldn’t get a job anywhere else,” but that was wrong.  We had the best of good times under President Reagan, and the recruitment continued to rise and the waiting lists were there all the time for people who wanted to get in but couldn’t get in. 

You had this complete change, and with it you had strong morale.  One of the reasons for the strong morale and increased recruitment was the perception--a correct perception--that we were taking more and more of the nation’s resources and putting them into a kind of acquisition, a kind of training, a kind of scientific research and development, that produced one of the strongest military forces in the world--not for offensive purposes, but simply to be able at that time to deter any kind of attack upon us, or our allies.  We also spent a lot of time cultivating alliances, strengthening NATO, alliances in the Mid-East and Pacific--all of which we urgently needed, because we can’t and shouldn’t try to do any of these things alone.

That gave us the kind of strength that we needed, a kind of consistent foreign policy, and it was interesting to note that the Cold War, which is now of course being debated in most of the history books, was won after a long period of time in which there wasn’t an intent to win.  This, again, I think, was one of the things that marked the difference between President Reagan and his predecessors. 

We heard for a long time at the end of World War II--when everybody was rather dismayed that the Soviet Union did not seem to be disarming but, on the contrary, was gaining strength by moving into other countries and starting to dominate the areas right around themselves--that in the name of their own security they had to extend their buffer zones and borders.  Well, those buffer zones got well out into the Pacific and into the center of Europe, and we then began to worry a little bit.

At that time the ruling idea was that we shouldn’t try to confront the Soviet Union.  We should simply contain it.  We should try to take the policy of not allowing it to expand too much, not confronting it, nor provoking any kind of clash with them of any sort.  This was the George F. Kennan philosophy, which thought that the Soviet Union would ultimately, because of its inherent weaknesses, collapse upon itself.  When he was asked how long [it would take], he said, “It would be roughly eighty or ninety years.”  That seemed quite a long time to have to wait, and President Reagan--while a patient man--was not much interested in anything that would be a danger that long, particularly a policy which was not producing better results. 

Other voices were heard, and instead of containment there was talk of “convergence.”  Convergence meant that the two systems would come closer together and ultimately it would be perfectly possible for the two to exist together and work together, and that that would produce the kind of stability and the kind of rough peace that is sort of an equilibrium.  Then there was another school that started talking of another word, “equivalence.”  Really, there were two policies here that were trying to do the same thing.  You could live together and you could work together and create a detente, but it was not until President Reagan took office that this changed. 

It was one of the great, and I think, unsung achievements of his policies: we recognized that the two systems couldn’t exist together.  There was nothing compatible about watching a strong-armed, militant Soviet Union with the desire to dominate the world by moving farther and farther into various areas of the world, while we sort of stood by and kind of wrung our hands when they went into Afghanistan, got some resolutions passed by the United Nations and were told that we weren’t going to play in the Olympic Games if they behaved like that.  However, none of that was effective, and it wasn’t until we dropped all of these convergences and equivalences and recognized the two systems: one for human freedom, for the idea of releasing all of the best that was in each individual, allowing each individual to rise to the top of his or her talents as far as their talents would take them, aided by education provided by the state and based on the rule of law, the other based upon a rule by an all-powerful state that did all of the planning and arranged all of the details as to where everybody was going to work and had no respect whatsoever for anything like dissent, and felt that any kind of variations had to be crushed immediately.  You could not have those two systems work together or live together, and it was recognized that that could not be done. 

President Reagan made clear statements that produced waves of horror among the conventional wisdom people because he once called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” which was a very shocking statement because it meant that we were confronting them rather than trying to work with them.  You all know the end, and the end was when the Cold War was won.  It was won when that policy was changed, when we had the intention to demonstrate that the democratic free open system of government was better.  It was the only one that people could live with.  While it was considered a dangerous deviation from the conventional wisdom, it was only one of many that President Reagan took. 

One of the other [policies] that he challenged during that period was to completely repudiate this very strange idea that had found expression in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty: the notion that if we and the Soviets agreed not to have any defense to nuclear missiles, then neither side would acquire any, and as long as both were perfectly vulnerable, both were going to be completely safe.  I remember talking with President Reagan about this when he was governor.  It was not a philosophy to which he ever subscribed, and when he had the chance he took us out on the path of trying to develop an anti-ballistic missile, a defensive against ballistic missiles, recognizing that that would ultimately mean we would have to end our adherence to the ABM Treaty, which provided an effective defense.  

Well, we still adhere to the ABM Treaty.  President Clinton calls it the “cornerstone” of our security, but we have not done anything effective with the strategic defense against these missiles.  We have finally, with Congress changing hands, started the research.  Just a week ago we had a successful experiment in which a missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base hit a missile launched from Kwajalein and destroyed it.  Now, that is what we can do.  We started in 1983 with President Reagan; we ended it in 1993 with President Clinton.  We lost 10-12 years when we could have been helping to arm and defend ourselves and defend our allies against the most lethal weapons invented.  So, it is important to have the kind of foreign policy that recognizes that sometimes confrontation is important and sometimes the ability to prevail and the desire to win must always be there.

One of the problems with the Vietnam War was that we committed 560,000 troops to a war that we did not believe was important enough to win.  That is a very terrible thing to do to the men and women in the armed forces, to ask them to commit their lives to a cause we did not think was important enough for us to win.  President Reagan believed very strongly that we should win the Cold War.  He believed that after that we should do our best to secure peace with a policy of working together with a revised and remodeled Russian government, and he started with the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Treaty.

I think it is important to look at the treaty that he signed in November 1987 with the Soviets, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that is now going to the Congress, which may or may not be voted on today.  President Reagan submitted the INF Treaty in 1981.  It was called the AZero Option,@ and it was a very simple treaty because it was the first one that provided for the actual elimination of one complete set of nuclear weapons, the Intermediate Range weapons, not arms reduction as they were called before the START Treaty.  When he submitted that in 1981 there was a great deal of scornful laughter from everyone from the intelligentsia and from the strategic think tanks.  They said: AThat is just an excuse for putting up a treaty that they know the Soviets won’t sign.  You can’t do that.  You have got to have a treaty and a proposal that you know both sides will sign if you want to get an agreement.@ 

We have seen these kinds of treaties.  They were not treaties that reduced arms.  They allowed the rate of increase to go a little slower than it had been thought previously it would do. However, they were not the kind of victories that President Reagan wanted, and so it was essential, I think, that we again persisted with that treaty as we did. 

Six years later that treaty was signed, almost exactly in the form that it had been submitted in 1981.  And what had happened in the meantime?  What happened was we’d regained our military capability and our strength, and we had a leader whose desires and wishes were not only known but had been tested.  It was at Reykjavik in Iceland when Gorbachev offered all these glittering prizes to President Reagan if he would only give up work on the strategic defense. He refused completely, and this was one of the turning points of the Cold War when Gorbachev--as he said later--understood the kind of man he was dealing with.  We went ahead with the development of this and the Soviet Union decided that they would indeed have to sign the treaty because that was the only thing they were being offered and that was a way of getting rid of not only their own missiles, but the missiles that had been deployed against them contrary to all predictions that it could ever happen.  And so that one was signed. 

Now, in the case of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty we have a treaty that is designed to ban the actual testing of nuclear weapons.  The theory behind it is very high-minded, of course.   The idea is that you can’t really develop nuclear weapons unless you can test them; so, if countries agree not to test them, then there would be a gradual elimination of these weapons and the proliferation would stop and everything would be fine.

We went in with a reasonable enough proposal some years ago.  The proposal basically said that we could test things during a limited period of time in the case of an emergency or new developments, or in order to add more safety to the weapons stored.  President Clinton abandoned all of these positions, every one of them.  He abandoned them because he said that by insisting on those provisions we couldn’t get a treaty.  So we had about as naked and clear a demonstration of the idea that the agreement is far more important than the content.  That’s essentially what the philosophy was.  If we could get an agreement, if we could have a signing ceremony in the East Room and a big photo opportunity and hand out prizes for peace, and so on, then you’ve accomplished something.  But you have to look at the contents of the treaty, and that wasn’t done.

Now the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty’s contents are interesting.  It’s important to examine this treaty, and that is why several of us have opposed it.  When you oppose it, it sounds as if you’re all for nuclear weapons and you hope that nuclear weapons will someday hurt children.  That’s the way it’s always painted in the press when we oppose a treaty like this.  You should bear in mind that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty does not ban testing.  All it bans is the most effective means of testing, which is to explode them underground where the radiation cannot spread, to see if they work.

These nuclear weapons are extraordinarily complex devices.  They have 9,000 - 10,000 moving parts, all of them made by the lowest bidder, and you have to know whether they’re going to work or not.  They erode, corrode and degrade just as all other inventions and constructions of man do.  Therefore, they have to be tested if you want to rely on nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war, as we are doing and have done.  You have to know if they work. 

A treaty that gives up all of the safeguards that we had in our original negotiating position is a treaty that cannot be in the best interests of the United States.  When you look at the governance of that treaty--being in the hands of a large committee and all the rest--you realize that this is not going to reduce the construction of nuclear weapons or their proliferation, but rather reduce our own ability to insure our security.  These are the things that I think we need to worry about and this is the evidence--in my mind--of a weak foreign policy, accompanied by--and these are the two combinations that are particularly bad--a deliberate weakening of our military and an adherence to a treaty that forbids us to ever get or deploy any kind of effective defense against the most deadly weapons that have ever been invented. These are the reasons why I think it is important that we understand how important foreign policy is to our future--and not just our security but also the security, of our lives and, indeed, the lives of people in other parts of the world. 

The best force for peace is a strength and willingness to fight to keep the peace and the capability of peace, and when you destroy those two things, or weaken them severely, and when your foreign policy is weak and wavering and our friends and allies despair because they never know what precise position we are going to be taking, then, I think, it is vital that we realize that we have to have this as a major issue before the country.  This is why I think it is so enormously important that organizations such as yours take the time and the willingness and the effort to study these matters, to become familiar with them and to realize how vitally important they are for our future.  It is heartening to see so many people who have occupied and do occupy such influential positions in this very important community willing to take the time and the effort to study and become familiar with and have an influence upon these problems and how they affect the United States and the world.

I’m particularly honored to appear before you and I appreciate being given the opportunity to come home again. 

Thank you.