1990 Keeper of the Flame Award: Caspar Weinberger

Former Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger was honored by the Center for Security Policy with its first annual “Keeper of the Flame” Award. This Award recognizes individuals who have exemplified the ideals of freedom, democracy, economic opportunity and American strength to which the Center is committed.

Mr. Weinberger served with distinction as Defense Secretary during the first seven years of Ronald Reagan’s administration. He personified the Reagan mandate of 1980 to rebuild America’s defenses and to assume once again for the United States the role of leader of the Free World. Working closely with the President, Secretary Weinberger helped set the course that so dramatically contributed to the foundering of communism and the burgeoning of freedom in every corner of the world.

Secretary Weinberger will make a major foreign policy address on this occasion. In prepared remarks, he sharply challenges policies that inordinately align the United States and other Western nations with the communist rulers of the Soviet Union. He notes that, in so doing, the West is standing against the truly democratic forces in the USSR. In fact, it is actively abetting Mikhail Gorbachev’s effort to stave off needed systemic changes in the political and economic system.

In his speech, Mr. Weinberger says, in part:

“…The Soviet Union is in the early stages of an economic civil war, a conflict that will ultimately have massive political — and possibly even military — implications. Such a prospect confronts America and her allies with familiar, if daunting, choices. Now, as in the early 1980’s, we must decide: Will we do as Mr. Gorbachev demands — namely, “encourage reform” by giving money and technology to the central authorities he leads?

“Or will we, instead, throw our lot to the maximum extent feasible with his opponents who are the democratic leaders in the republics, the reformers and the free marketeers? These are the people who know Gorbachev best, have lived under his rule and are arduously seeking something better.”

The former Secretary of Defense urges that the West today adopt an approach similar to the one taken by President Reagan in 1981 and 1982 as Polish reformers under the leadership of Lech Walesa challenged the central authorities in Warsaw and Moscow. He recommends a four-point program that would, if adopted, put the United States and its allies squarely on the side of the democratic forces inside the Soviet Union and Central Europe and greatly increase the chances that such forces will succeed in effecting the necessary, systemic transformations.

Specifically, Secretary Weinberger calls for:

• Preparation of independent trade and credit agreements between the individual reformist republics of the Soviet Union and the United States and facilitation of their entry into major international economic and financial organizations;
• Immediate creation of a Contingency Energy Fund to assist the emerging democracies of Central Europe during a critical phase in their transitions to democracy and free market systems caused by the dual crises of increasing world oil prices and significantly reduced deliveries of oil and natural gas from the USSR;
• Agreement by the European Community in the GATT trade talks to radical reductions in agricultural subsidies that currently inhibit Central European nations from being able to use agricultural exports as a means of jump-starting their fragile economies; and
• A new diplomatic strategy, aimed at establishing and strengthening the United States’ political relations with the emerging democratic forces in the USSR — even if doing so entails less cordial ties with Moscow center.