Robert C. McFarlane, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser in 1983-85, reminisces about the “Star Wars” missile defense program, the historic arms-control meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Iran-Contra scandal, and Reagan’s foreign policy legacy.

McFarlane says, “On Reagan’s watch we ended the Cold War, brought down Marxism, and reduced nuclear weapons for the first time in history. Yes, not everything was so enlightened. We did have a squalid scandal about Iran and Nicaragua, but I think history will judge him very, very positively for the transformation of the Cold War equation.”

McFarlane, chairman of Energy & Communications Solutions, an energy development firm seeking to broaden cooperation between the United States and Russia, was interviewed on June 7, 2004, by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org.

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From 1982 to 1985, no one worked closer with President Reagan on foreign policy than you did. What typified Reagan’s approach to foreign policy?

The president had some fairly fundamental principles that guided him: no unilateral concessions, strength is better than weakness. The idea that we could only limit the pace of Russian expansion was anathema to him. I wouldn’t say that he believed we could bring down Marxism during his term, but he wanted to make a start at competing more efficiently and stopping the practice of providing the Soviet Union with any gain from its transactions with the West.

Three things guided his East-West relations policy: first, try to sell our ideas of democracy more aggressively over Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty; second, put stress on the Soviets economically as much as possible and deny them hard currency gains from export whenever possible; and third, challenge their expansion of the late ’70s and their support of freedom fighters, to use their term, in Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua by supporting our own freedom fighters when possible in an effort to roll back some of the gains the Russians made in the 1970s.

Reagan is known for making major arms-reduction deals with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and in effect starting the process that led to the collapse of the communist empire. During the first few years of his administration, Reagan was pretty tough on the Russians, but there seemed to be a quantum change when Gorbachev took office in 1985. Is that the way you remember it?

Yes. The president’s first term was devoted to putting us in a position to negotiate. In the late ’70s, we experienced a fairly significant decline in our military readiness and strength, and so Reagan believed that we probably couldn’t engage seriously with the Soviet Union until we had demonstrated that we had been able to restore the defense foundation for negotiations.

And we did that through a fairly significant expansion of defense spending in ’81, ’82, ’83, and ’84. However, toward the end of the first term, [Secretary of State] George Shultz and I talked to him [about negotiations with the Russians]. The president had fairly low expectations. He thought we should rearm and defend better, and he didn’t have any high confidence that the Soviets would agree to any significant concessions. But he said, “Well, let’s give it a go.” In Geneva in 1985, he got the first commitment by both sides for an actual reduction, which had been elusive in the previous 40 years.

Most observers, including most people in the press, didn’t think anything would come of the Geneva meeting. In an op-ed today in The New York Times, Gorbachev recalls those meetings very fondly. Did you detect a real change in the works then?

Yes. It was a watershed event, truly, at Geneva, from November 19-21, 1985. Gorbachev was a person without any pretense of truly understanding the United States, and yet he was a quick learner. In the run-up to that Geneva meeting, for example, at a session at the Kremlin [earlier that month], Gorbachev was putting forth the traditional rhetoric that the United States builds up its defenses because the entire economy requires it, and George Shultz, an economist in his own right, said, “Well, if we closed every defense establishment in the United States, it would affect 6 percent of our GDP [gross domestic product],” and Gorbachev said, “That cannot be true.” A few weeks later in Geneva [at the summit with Reagan], he had learned that it was true and had been sobered by the emptiness of his own intelligence community’s rhetoric about the West.

However, the more important kind of change in Gorbachev’s thinking came as a consequence of what he saw across the table in Geneva. Specifically, he saw a guy who came to Geneva with a 70 percent public approval rating, and with a joint resolution from the U.S. Congress that indicated that Reagan had the ability to get appropriations for his programs, Star Wars [strategic defense initiative or SDI] and all the other elements, And, finally, there had been an effort led by [British Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher at the United Nations General Assembly that year to have Thatcher, [Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro] Nakasone, [French President François] Mitterrand, [Italian Prime Minister Bettino] Craxi, and [German Chancellor] Helmut Kohl join hands and endorse the then forthcoming mission of the American president to engage with the Soviet general secretary.

In short, he saw a guy across the table who was a very powerful political figure with his own people, his own Congress, and his own allies. And though Gorbachev tried valiantly to persuade Reagan to reduce SDI or do away with it, after two or three hours when Reagan was unrelenting, Gorbachev, you could see palpably, slumped back in his chair and said, “I disagree with you on just about everything you said, but I will reconsider.” And that was a turning point, but it only could happen because Reagan had done such a good job in the run-up to that by not only studying the books and all, but building the key constituencies needed to demonstrate that he was a very powerful political figure whom the Soviet leader could not ignore.

I know you weren’t in office when they met again in Reykjavik in October 1986, but could you talk about that meeting? Before the meeting, everyone was told it was a preliminary for Reagan’s trip to Moscow in 1987, and instead, the leaders came to the cusp of abolishing all nuclear arms.

It was a breathtaking three days. I watched it from Washington. It didn’t surprise me in the sense that Reagan’s view was not really a romantic view; it was more a moral one. But being moral left him detached from the imperatives of allied relations, and the deal came unstuck because of the traumatic impact it could have had, in the short term, on allied relationships and the implausibility of it to our own military. However, it was a very strong, earnest intent that, I think, sobered our allies in London, Paris, and Bonn, and accelerated the pace of thinking in those capitals as well as our own, and made possible, before long, the INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force] agreement and then a more focused, step-by-step approach on START [the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty], and ultimately, that succeeded.

For readers who don’t recall the Reykjavik meeting, could you describe it?

It was a near agreement for the abolition of offensive nuclear weapons that included all three legs of the triad [nuclear weapons based in bombers, land-based ballistic missiles, and submarine-based ballistic missiles], as well as the subordinate intermediate-range nuclear weapons and, in the terms proposed by the Soviet side, the abolition of weapons in space. That last item, however, caused the unraveling of the deal because President Reagan was totally devoted to assuring against any cheating or accidental launch against the United States and would not leave any agreement on the table that involved the continuing risk of a ballistic missile attack against the United States, So it came unraveled and, over time, was put back in place, step-by-step, although it has taken 18 years to now begin to dismantle that arsenal.

Talk a bit about the Star Wars program. For the public, that came as a bolt out of the blue. How did that arise?

The Star Wars program was announced in March of 1983, and that date is kind of the derivative of what happened in the two years before it. The core issue was that offensive deterrence, or MAD [mutually assured destruction], required that we maintain some kind of balance, which had declined quite a lot in the 1970s. After two years of trying to restore that balance primarily through deploying land-based MX missiles [the “Peacekeeper” ICBM], we had failed. And three basing schemes, one known as “dense pack” [close grouping together of hardened missile silos], one known as “big bird” [maintaining an airborne fleet of ICBMs based on cargo planes], and a derivative of President Carter’s “race track” scheme [the use of railways and underground tunnels to shift nuclear missiles], had been shot down by Congress.

In short, by the end of 1982, the United States was proving unable to restore the ICBM warhead balance, and the stability of deterrence relied upon it. I began to wrack my brain in late ’82, and concluded that if we couldn’t get the Soviets to reduce unilaterally and if we could not build up to restore the balance on our side, the only way to cope with that imbalance in warheads was to try to prevent them from coming into the United States.

What was your role then? Were you the deputy national security adviser?

I was. I had been the deputy since January of ’82 when [National Security Adviser] Judge [William] Clark came over with me from [the] State [Department]. Thinking of the political impediments to getting an ICBM force in the field, I began asking around in the scientific community whether there had been enough change in the technology of computers, propellants, and guidance systems to make it plausible to revisit the idea of a defensive missile system. And I talked to TRW people and Hughes and the people who had the relevant scientific knowledge, and they all said that there had been enough to warrant another look.

That’s all I needed; to me, the reaction of the Soviet Union was predictable. If the United States began to do what we do best, develop technology, the Soviets would expect that we would discover some truly dramatic, innovative technology, and whether or not it actually worked as a defensive system, it would expose them as a backward nation and eventually lead to something that did work, whether it was a missile shield or not.

I presented it to the president. My arguments about its impact on Soviet thinking were really germane to his motive, which was the morality of the issue. He was quite keen to get on with it and was supportive of it. And there began a fascinating dichotomy between us and the Soviet Union in which the American administration was promoting a defensive shift with the president intent on doing it, come what may, and his Cabinet, George Shultz and I, primarily, committed to launching it but in the expectation that we would never have to build it because the Soviets would come our way in the arms control setting.

I don’t mean to get arcane about it, but we were quite clear with the president about what we thought would happen, and he was quite clear that he didn’t care what would happen, he wanted to build it, come what may. And of course, the politics of it were very compelling. The president, who could sell the idea that he was committed to defending the American people, evoked a very solid grassroots interest in strategic defense that was fed back into the Congress and enabled us to get appropriations that had the intended effect in Moscow.

And after two years of appropriations, we gathered in Geneva with the real power behind the president that I mentioned a moment ago. The effect on Gorbachev in seeing a president with an arms buildup program that was for the first time in a long time focused on high technology, was immediate. He saw what it would cost them to compete with us and realized that they simply could not do it. It is a legacy that the president truly deserves a huge amount of credit for. It was an instrument that changed the course of history.

One thing that always surprised me during the Reagan years was how little was accomplished in the Middle East. There were early efforts in Lebanon, but then we cut and ran from when 241 U.S. Marine peacekeepers were killed by a terrorist bombing on October 23, 1983. Were you disappointed by the lack of anything happening in the Middle East on your watch?

All of us for two generations have wrung our hands about that. The opportunity for negotiations usually presents itself in the wake of a war, as you know. And after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, I thought we could have consolidated some gains there at a time when Syria had been defeated by the Israeli Air Force. What did W.C. Fields say, “You should never kick a man unless he’s down”? That was the time for the United States to have made a serious effort to get the withdrawal of Syria and Israel from Lebanon and then to launch an effort at a Syrian-Israeli agreement. Well, we were, I think, persuaded, unfortunately, by the Lebanese to do a peace treaty with Israel.

I remember Shultz negotiating a treaty that the Syrians quickly quashed. We wasted a lot of time on that, didn’t we?

We wasted eight months, which allowed the Syrians to rearm. We were negotiating with a president who was not Bashir [Gemayel, who had been assassinated in September 1982]. It was [Bashir’s brother] Amin Gemayel, and there was never any prospect that any agreement that was concluded could be carried out by Amin Gemayel. So we really wasted eight months of time, and it was unfortunate. And that was really the last opportunity. After Syria had rearmed, there was no prospect there.

Of course, the Reagan administration was very concentrated on Central America during those first years, and that led to Iran-Contra. In hindsight, was that a mistake?

I believe that the idea of nurturing democracy in Central America was certainly a worthy purpose, and it was a piece of the Reagan Doctrine, which called for trying to roll back Soviet gains, wherever possible, by relying on freedom movements in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. The purpose was quite sensible; unfortunately, we were facing a fairly substantial Soviet effort, about $400 million a year being put into the [Daniel] Ortega-Sandinista [camp] in Nicaragua.

We had no conventional strategy, because it would not have been politically sellable to have launched an invasion and topple the government. So our means were limited to covert activities, which were never going to be funded at more than about $30 million or $40 million a year, and you just simply cannot compete at that level.

We were, nevertheless, making some gains. The Boland Amendment [the 1982 amendment to the 1973 War Powers Resolution that barred the U.S. government from supporting the overthrow of Nicaraguan government] had led to the on again, off again funding. However, that was just not a sustainable program. I realized and concluded that by the end of 1985 we were going to have to get a conventional, non-covert funding arrangement or we were going to have to be quite honest with the Contras and say that they shouldn’t continue to take risks if the United States could not carry its end of the funding equation.

I left the administration at that time, and then the episode involving the continuation of the Iran initiative, which I thought would be shut down after I left the administration, led to the continuation of the Iranian dialogue—

This initiative was the sale of weapons to Iran in return for cash and the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon? And the money for the weapons was turned over to the Contras.

That’s certainly what it became after December of 1985. My original purpose was different, but there’s no question that’s what it became after December of 1985 after I resigned, and then it evolved into a decision, I don’t know quite how it happened, to divert that money to the Contras in Nicaragua. It was not only still inadequate, but it was the mixing of two covert action programs, which is just terribly unwise. You’re just asking for trouble when you do that.

Reagan, despite some political setbacks, seemed to survive that problem. Was that because of his immense popularity?

I think, to be fair, people were seeing concrete gains on important matters that truly outweighed whatever unwise ventures occurred. When you stop today and look back, you say, on Reagan’s watch we ended the Cold War, brought down Marxism, and reduced nuclear weapons for the first time in history. Yes, not everything was so enlightened. We did have a squalid scandal about Iran and Nicaragua, but I think history will judge him very, very positively for the transformation of the Cold War equation.