Dr. Norman A. Bailey died after a long illness on August 18 in Greensboro, N.C. He was 95. A longtime public servant, educator and foreign‑policy strategist, Bailey was a key member of the small Reagan administration team that helped craft the policies credited with hastening the end of the Cold War.
Bailey joined the Reagan effort early and was part of a determined group at the National Security Council that rejected the fatalism then common among Western foreign‑policy elites. He predicted in 1981 that a combination of U.S. economic recovery and military rebuilding could bring about the collapse of Soviet communism within a few years — a forecast he slightly mistimed but which reflected the boldness of the administration’s approach.
Within the NSC’s compact staff, Bailey and a handful of colleagues pushed ideas that many experts considered implausible. Central among these was a renewed emphasis on conventional and technological superiority, and a countermove to Soviet strategic advantages in missiles by promoting a defensive posture built on advanced technology — the initiative that became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. Bailey later argued that SDI’s most immediate effect was psychological and strategic: it convinced Soviet leaders that the United States had both the will and the resources to invest in frontier military technologies beyond Moscow’s capacity to match.
Bailey worked closely with senior policymakers who championed an assertive posture toward the Soviet Union. He credited collaborations within the NSC and with figures such as Edward Teller, whose stature in the scientific community helped lend SDI credibility. Advocate William Clark’s NSC team backed missile defense, and proponents of that strategy argued it could shift the strategic balance away from offensive nuclear arsenals and toward defenses — an idea that, combined with other pressures, helped create the conditions for the arms‑reduction negotiations later in the decade.
In addition to his role on strategic deterrence, Bailey shaped U.S. responses to the Latin American debt crisis of 1982–83. Fluent in Spanish, Portuguese and French, he argued that sharply higher U.S. interest rates posed economic and strategic risks in the region and helped lay intellectual groundwork for the debt reorganizations that emerged later in the 1980s.
Bailey left the NSC in 1983 after policy clashes over how to handle the debt crisis. He then founded a strategic consulting firm and later returned to public service briefly at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2006–2007. He taught at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, a graduate school for national security professionals and diplomats, and at the University of Haifa.
A prolific commentator and author, Bailey contributed essays and analyses to a range of publications, including Asia Times, and published a 1988 monograph on the strategic plan he helped advance. He remained an outspoken and sometimes acerbic voice on international affairs through his final illness.
A scholar as well as a policymaker, Bailey was erudite and cosmopolitan. He spoke five languages fluently and produced the authorized English translations of plays by Luigi Pirandello that continue to be performed. He wrote and lectured on Byzantine history, one of his abiding intellectual passions. In his eightieth year he converted to Judaism and observed the faith thereafter.
Those who served with him remembered him as blunt, intense and fiercely committed to what he saw as America’s national interests at a perilous time. The small team he helped lead at the NSC played a disproportionate role in shaping the Reagan administration’s posture, and many of its ideas about defense, diplomacy and economic pressure were influential in the decade that followed.
He is survived by his wife of 25 years, Dr. Barbara Billauer, an attorney and epidemiologist; four children; and numerous grandchildren.
David P. Goldman was business editor and columnist at Asia Times and served on the policy planning staff of the U.S. State Department.
