How the Reagan Doctrine Once Again Defeated the Russians

How the Reagan Doctrine Once Again Defeated the Russians
Today, in 2018, as we look back at the first Russian-Georgian War of the 21st century, which erupted 10 years ago, we can recall the extreme pessimism that many felt at the time. A decade ago, many believed that the United States would prove unable to do anything to thwart Russia’s resurgent adventurism. Indeed, a writer for a mainstream publication, Newsweek, went so far as to say that George W. Bush was practicing appeasement on the Russians. Today, of course, Newsweek is out of business, but the United States of America is as strong as ever.

Only now, with the proper perspective of time, can we see that the U.S. prevailed by reapplying the wisdom of Ronald Reagan.


Indeed, the Reagan Doctrine was revived and re-implemented by Washington within days of the August 2008 crisis. And the results of that mobilization have been paying dividends ever since, not only against Russian expansionism, but also against the ambitions of other countries, including Iran and China.

Still, historians agree that the U.S. was grossly unprepared for the Russian assault on Georgia, despite the in-country presence of hundreds of American advisers and technicians. And so were the Georgians, as well as their other key ally, Israel, which had also a substantial advisory presence in Georgia. It was obvious that the Georgians had no way of stopping the advance of Russian armor.

In fact, the Georgian resistance against the Russians in 2008 compared unfavorably to Hezbollah’s resistance against the Israelis in Lebanon in 2006. Unlike Hezbollah, Georgians never seem to have deployed landmines, or used other static defenses, to impede an enemy advance into their territory. In addition, although 14 countries (in addition to the U.S.) possessed the American-made Javelin anti-tank missile , Georgia was not one of them. And yet when military-minded observers noted long columns of Russian tanks and trucks snaking single-file through tunnels and mountain passes, they all agreed that a few Javelins for the Georgians might have slowed or even stopped the Russian thrust.

Unfortunately, the international political response was equally ineffective. The United Nations, of course, was thoroughly useless. But even the European Union and NATO, organizations which styled themselves as robust champions of human rights and democracy, refused to consider possible sanctions against Russia. And so all other political efforts, such as ejecting Russia from the G-8 club of nations, fizzled quickly.

Indeed, at the time, it seemed that the 43rd President, George W. Bush, was equally paralyzed. In the nervous days after the Georgian war erupted, Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer turned military pundit, was moved to lament, “Bush looks strikingly like Jimmy Carter when the Russians invaded Afghanistan.”

But in fact, the 43rd President in 2008, like the 39th President in 1980, was taking important steps behind the scenes. Carter began aiding Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet fighters in the waning months of his presidency, and so, too, Bush began aiding Georgia’s anti-Russian fighters in the last months of his presidency.

A direct military confrontation with the Russians over Georgia was, of course, out of the question. The U.S. was too committed to ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, needing to keep forces available for emergencies as they arose in Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Besides, the experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, beginning in 2001 and 2003 respectively, reminded American policymakers that it was always better, whenever possible, to let local forces do the fighting. That was the big difference between the Reagan Doctrine (arming local fighters to oppose America’s enemies) and the Bush Doctrine (using outside forces, primarily American, to fight for freedom): The Reagan Doctrine worked better.

Wise old heads, remembering the successes of the Reagan years, pressed the Bush administration to begin aiding the Georgians against the Russians. Those policy veterans pointed out that the key to success was not just aid, but lethal aid. They recalled that the turnaround in the Afghan fight against the Red Army, which stretched from 1979 to 1988, came when the Americans began supplying the Mujahedeen with the Stinger surface-to-air missiles that could shoot down Russian helicopters.

Yet when the American government reviewed its options for helping the Georgians, it was understood that Stingers and Javelins would not be particularly effective in undoing Russian aggression. Why not? One answer was that after the first “ceasefire” of August 2008, the Russians continued with “ethnic cleansing” policies that pushed most Georgians outside of the Russian perimeter. So the Russians didn’t have to worry about guerrillas melting into a sympathetic local population—because the local population was almost entirely Ossetians and Abkhazians, loyal to Russia.

Nonetheless, the U.S. did not want Russian aggression to stand unchallenged. As the 44th President said to his new team in his first meeting with the National Security Council, on January 20, 2009, “We have to make the Russians pay for what they did in Georgia. We don’t want World War Three, but we have to make them bleed.” That was the genesis of the ultra-classified Operation Casey-Wilson, after the two leading architects of the successful military support operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan, William Casey and Charlie Wilson.

Then the President did something that his predecessor, George W. Bush, had conspicuously failed to do: He ordered a substantial American technological and industrial mobilization for the effort. And he was willing to spend whatever it took to get the job done.

One area, of course, was energy policy. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Georgia, Americans were once again reminded that high oil prices were empowering our enemies. And so the new President launched a massive plan for lowering energy prices by expanding energy production. This successful effort, which badly undercut not only Russia but also Iran, has been detailed elsewhere, so there’s no need to dwell on it here.

In addition, the President worked to create the Liberation Corps, composed of volunteers, mostly from the ex-Soviet and ex-Soviet bloc countries, who volunteered to travel to Georgia to fight the Russian occupiers. The U.S. government maintained an official posture of aloofness toward the effort, also known as “plausible deniability.” And yet whenever Moscow complained too vehemently about the Liberation Corps—it was a standard Moscow line to say it was a CIA front group—Washington simply stuck to its denial, all the while increasing its commitment to ballistic missile defense, as a way of keeping the U.S.-Russian conflict contained in places such as Georgia and Central Asia.

And yet none of these efforts would have succeeded over the past decade—were it not for the extraordinary improvement in American military capabilities, some of which were then quietly shared with the Liberation Corps.

Displaying a knowledge of history that would make him an effective leader in perilous times, the President recalled successful military mobilizations of the past, including the Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb during World War Two. And yet he also recalled a less successful period in American history: the effort to build counter-measures against the plague of improvised explosive devices in Iraq. The President cited a story from the former American commander in the Middle East, General John Abizaid: “We asked for the Manhattan Project,” Abizaid quipped, “and we got the Peoria project.” Well, the 44th President concluded, that’s not going to happen again.

Determined to replicate the triumphant experience of the original Manhattan Project, and of World War Two overall, and not the murkier results of Iraq, the 44th President did what Franklin D. Roosevelt did: He called in the top leaders of science and industry for a serious discussion of what they could do for their country. That is, not just the usual handful of defense contractors, but also top executives and scientists from Silicon Valley. Big companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple had stayed mostly aloof from national security policy in past decades, but the new commander-in-chief told the high-tech executives, “Sitting on the sidelines is not an option.” The President reminded them that America achieved many technological breakthroughs in World War Two—not just the atomic bomb, but also radar, sonar, the bazooka, the jeep, and jet aircraft.

To be sure, some grumbled about the President’s arm-twisting tactics, but the President had Congress and the American people with him, and so, in the end, acquiescence and affirmation prevailed. Indeed, most Americans, including tech moguls and geeks, have always been proud to serve their country—they just have to be asked the right way.

From our perspective today, in 2018, we can see that many of the best ideas for the Georgia War were relatively far along in 2008. For example, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles were a mainstay of the U.S. Air Force long before 2008, but the major breakthrough came when those UAVs could be powered with solar energy and then miniaturized down to the microscopic level. As we know, the Russians never could come up with a counter-measure to these artificial “No-see-ums,” which could fly undetected over long distances—most were dispatched from bases in Ukraine—and then hover indefinitely till they found a suitable Russian target, anywhere on the Eurasian landmass.

As effective as these weapons were, they were eclipsed in effectiveness by True Stealth. Long a dream of science fiction writers and mad scientists, True Stealth, a technological paradigm-shift making weapons and even people invisible, came into reality early in this decade. All too often, the Russians never knew what hit them.

In addition, there were even more exotic wonder weapons to emerge from America’s new “skunkworks.” In its campaign against Russian aggression, the US and its allies—notably Poland and Ukraine, countries that had plenty of experience being mauled by the Russian bear—deployed an array of subtle but effective measures against Russia. For instance, undetectable nanobots to sabotage Russian oil and natural gas pipelines. New ways to gum up Russia’s telecommunications. And bold measures to hack into Russian databases. These and more techno-strategic initiatives—some are still classified—brought victory for the United States in the New Cold War.

As we all know now, the Russians were no match for this sort of technology. The Reagan Doctrine worked in the teens, just as it had in the eighties. The collapse of the Putin Empire was a welcome result, in which the freedom and security of Georgia were regained, and the freedom and security of other ex-vassals of the Soviet Union were secured as well. And not coincidentally, the 44th President, who put the anti-Russian effort together, was remembered as one of our greatest commanders-in-chief