Editor’s note August 24, 2026: Ronald Reagan always affected a homespun aura, heavy on “darn,” “shucks,” and “gosh,” even as his foreign policy favored violent covert actions around the world. A trained actor, his sonorous voice served as the velveteen glove around a leathered fist that struck out erratically against far-flung countries such as Nicaragua, Grenada, Iran, Libya, and Afghanistan.
As foreign policy expert Scott L. Malcomson wrote, over four decades ago, while reviewing Jay Peterzell’s book Reagan’s Secret Wars, the then-74-year-old POTUS believed, without evidence, that many of our overseas entanglements had easy solutions, and that armed muscle, guided by a revamped C.I.A., could slice through the most knotty problems. Just as with Trump’s Iran boondoggle today, the Reagan administration’s “onward-through-the-fog” process only made escalating conflicts that much more likely.
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→ This article from the archives is part of an ongoing series celebrating the Voice’s Platinum Anniversary — 70 years! The first issue appeared on the streets of NYC on October 26, 1955. ←
War — Hide Yourself
By Scott L. Malcomson
Originally published: February 26, 1985
The thing about foreign policy is that sometimes it can be so darn complicated. President Reagan once explained to a group of congressmen that “land-based missiles have nuclear warheads, while bombers and submarines don’t.” In fact, they do have nuclear warheads, over 8000. But it isn’t surprising that Reagan forgot about them; his administration’s selling of the Soviet threat virtually depends on such lapses of memory. And besides, once you start figuring in SLBMs and missile throw-weight and the endless other arcana of arms control, policy making can become frustratingly complex.
What isn’t complex, at least conceptually, is covert military action. All it takes is a few guys with guns, and an enemy. As Jay Peterzell, a research associate at the Center for National Security Studies, argues in Reagan’s Secret Wars, simplicity has had great appeal for this administration. His account of the resurrection of the CIA since 1980, and his case studies of recent U.S. activities in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Chad, Iran, Libya, and Nicaragua, leave little doubt that the spooks are back in force. One official told Peterzell, “People at the top of this administration are fascinated with covert operations and find it easier to approve them than to discuss complicated diplomatic matters.” Another government source estimated that 800 positions have been added to the CIA since Carter left office.
Peterzell’s main argument is that the process by which the Reagan administration involves itself in conflicts abroad is characterized by mysterious motives, little apparent leadership, and almost no long-term planning. His critique is thus somewhat technical; he attacks the way policy is made rather than the policy’s “substance.” Peterzell’s own politics are on the left, but this comes through mainly in his tone.
The pattern that leads to U.S. involvement, as Peterzell illustrates it in his case studies, goes like this: first, the administration finds something happening in the world that it doesn’t like. Then, “constrained from following its real instinct,” it decides on a program of covert action. The CIA appears to have considerable independence in determining what forms these actions take. Soon, something emerges which eventually is called “U.S policy.”
As Peterzell makes very clear, this policy-making process has led to disastrous entanglements around the globe. The best-known example is Nicaragua, and recent developments — e.g., our deny-it-with-a-wink gunrunning policy in Honduras —don’t suggest that things are getting more coherent as we move into the second term. Among the other case studies, Peterzell presents a tightly argued analysis of American involvement in Cambodia. He traces the selective use of food aid as a device to support Son Sann’s KPNLF, and catches then-Under-Secretary of State James Buckley saying in 1981 that, contrary to stated policy, “We are supporting the forces of liberation, in terms of political and economic support.” He analyzes U.S. support for China, the main backer of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, quoting a Far Eastern Economic Review article that said then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig “fully agreed with the Chinese analysis that Vietnam should be bled militarily and economically starved until it is forced to give up its foreign and domestic policies and give up its alliance with Moscow.” In his painstaking reconstruction of American policy in Cambodia he repeats the onward-through-the-fog process from which that policy seems to have emerged. He points out that the U.S.’s declared goals in Cambodia are not its actual goals. Moreover, its actual goals — to bleed Vietnam and, behind it, the Soviet Union — are not much above the level of emotional urges, and are not even well served by present policies. The reason for this confusion, Peterzell argues, is that covert-war policy making is based on little more than a collection of prejudices and the unfocused but apparently irresistible urge to “do something.”
Do something about what? Peterzell doesn’t consider why the Reagan administration feels compelled to ensnare itself in so many conflicts, and in such a capricious fashion. He doesn’t speculate on the viability of evil-empire paranoia as the theoretical basis for foreign policy, though his concluding statement that the administration “is in the grip of an obsession” makes his own position clear. But Reagan’s Secret Wars is a valuable document, much more than a simple summary/exposé of American perfidy abroad. Peterzell shows how, from a technical standpoint, Reagan’s interventionist covert-war policy is poorly conceived and executed — and how, from a practical standpoint, it ends by leading us aimlessly into war.
Reagan’s Secret Wars
By Jay Peterzell
Center for National Security Studies, $3.95 paper
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