Abstract
Ronald Reagan, like his predecessor Jimmy Carter, came to the presidency with little, if any, foreign policy experience, and with strong convictions about what was wrong with United States foreign policy. Reagan was convinced that the US had grown weak under Carter, in spite of the fact that Carter himself had undertaken a defence buildup in his last two years. The new President was determined not only that the US should undertake a $1.5 trillion defence buildup over a five-year period to correct the imbalance with the USSR, but also that it would deal firmly with the ‘the Evil Empire’ and resist every Soviet effort to expand its influence. The supposed loss of élan and patriotism at home was to be replaced by a reborn pride in the US as a great and good nation which would provide renewed leadership in meeting the challenge of Communist ideology and Soviet expansionism.
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Notes
A. Haig, Caveat (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984).
Secretary of State George Shultz, Fundamentals of U.S. Foreign Policy (US Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Washington DC, 1988) p. 1.
President Jimmy Carter, ‘A Foreign Policy Based on America’s Essential Character’, Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana, 22 May, 1977, Department of State Bulletin, June 13, 1977, p. 622.
D. Watt, ‘As a European Saw It’, Foreign Affairs: America and the World, 1983, Vol. 62, 1984, pp. 521–32.
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A. Dallin and G. W. Lapidus, ‘Reagan and the Russians: American Policy Toward the Soviet Union’, Chapter 7 in K. A. Oye, R. J. Leber and D. Rothchild (eds), Eagle Resurgent? The Reagan Era in American Foreign Policy (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1987) p. 235.
H. Culley, editor, GIST, Bureau of Public Affairs, US Department of State, September, 1988.
See L. I. Barrett, Gambling with History (New York: Penguin, 1984 pp. 314–15.
See R. Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
S. Hoffman, ‘Lessons of a Peace Epidemic’, New York Times, 6 September, 1988, p. 27.
M. M. Kondracke, ‘The World The Candidates Forgot’, The New Republic, 21 November 1988, pp. 24–7.
J. Hagstrom, Beyond Reagan: The New Landscape of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1988) p. 13.
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© 1990 Dilys M. Hill, Raymond A. Moore and Phil Williams
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Moore, R.A. (1990). The Reagan Presidency and Foreign Policy. In: Hill, D.M., Moore, R.A., Williams, P. (eds) The Reagan Presidency. Southampton Studies in International Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20594-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20594-3_9
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