The early years of the administration of
President Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
witnessed a return to the harsh rhetoric,
if not all of the harsh practices, of
the Cold War. President Reagan’s anti-
Communist credentials were well
known. In a speech given shortly after
his election in 1980, he referred to the
Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and
frequently voiced his suspicion of its
motives in foreign affairs. In an effort to
eliminate perceived Soviet advantages
in strategic weaponry, the White House
began a military buildup that stimulated
a renewed arms race. In 1982, the
Reagan administration introduced the nuclear-tipped
cruise missile, whose ability to fly at low altitudes made it
difficult to detect by enemy radar. Reagan also became an
ardent exponent of the Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI), nicknamed “Star Wars.” Its purposes were to create
a space shield that could destroy incoming missiles
and to force Moscow into an arms race that it could not
hope to win.
The Reagan administration also adopted a more activist,
if not confrontational, stance in the Third World.
That attitude was most directly demonstrated in Central
America, where the revolutionary Sandinista regime had
come to power with the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship
in 1979. Charging that the Sandinista regime was
supporting a guerrilla insurgency movement in nearby
El Salvador, the Reagan administration began to provide
material aid to the government in El Salvador while
simultaneously applying pressure on the Sandinistas by
giving support to an anti-Communist guerrilla movement
(called the Contras) in Nicaragua. The administration’s
Central American policy caused considerable controversy
in Congress, and critics charged that growing U.S.
involvement there could lead to a repeat of the nation’s
bitter experience in Vietnam.
By providing military support to the anti-Soviet insurgents
in Afghanistan, the White House helped maintain
a Vietnam-like war in Afghanistan that would embed the
Soviet Union in its own quagmire. Like the Vietnam
War, the conflict in Afghanistan resulted in heavy casualties
and demonstrated that the influence of a superpower
was limited in the face of strong
nationalist, guerrilla-type opposition.
World History
