Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Conclusion

Ronald Reagan has been described as the great communicator. This was due to his ability to sell his administrative policies to Congress and the American people in simple terms. These initiatives were to emphasize military strength and at the same time provide for a reduction in taxes. Reagan’s policies came to be known as Reaganomics and while his administration was instrumental in the Soviet collapse under Bush, (--even though the CIA had failed to predict the demise of the USSR,) as a long term economic philosophy it ultimately failed to be solvent. In international affairs Reagan’s militarization platform increased arms proliferation among the Soviets with his SDI Star Wars proposal, however, this phantom program is credited with finally bankrupting the USSR.

Between 1981-1986, Reagan increased the military budget to 300 billion dollars annually. (Major problems in American Foreign Relations, 728) In part this was an effort to outspend the Soviet's whose economy had long since stagnated and declined since the 1970's. However, few noticed for In the 1970’s this problem did not appear as so acute, Communism was on the rise and indeed it was the West and the US that looked ineffectual after Vietnam. The communist party institutionalized its control over society replacing gulags with cronies of the party. In terms of the standard of living, the period between 1958-1971 saw soviet infant mortality rates halved from 40.6 to 22.9 deaths per 1000 infants. Indeed after WWII The Soviet Union economy grew at an average rate of 6% a year. However, after 1970 economic development began to stagnate and while the Soviet Union was committed to heavy industry while it could not begin the transition to an emerging high tech economy that had begun to evolve in the west. While the USSR attempted to increase production it lacked the means, i.e., spare parts and came to be increasingly dependant upon foreign trade in raw materials. USSR economic growth fell to 5.5% between 1971-1975, and then fell to 2.7% between 1976-1980, and then 1.9% from 1981-1985. Soviet manufacturing began to lose its foreign market demand and hence exports declined as well. "Perestrokia simply disrupted production and led to severe shortages of goods."(Goldstone, 264)

Reagan also tried to implement arms reduction talks and redefine the SALT II agreements which allowed the Soviet's to keep 300 large nuclear missiles. This as Lafeber maintains demonstrated Reagan's lack of knowledge concerning Soviet missile technology in that their conventional nuclear warheads maintained the same technology put in place by soviet nuclear engineers in the 1960's, and as such could not afford to implement the technological overhaul demanded by SALT II.

Reagan's SDI 'Star Wars' plan was envisioned as providing a laser shield in the event of a nuclear attack. It relied on the theory that satellites could be outfitted with lasers to shoot down soviet nuclear missiles. However, SDI had no practical applications outside the realm of academia. However, during 1983-1992 Congress earmarked a total of 30 billion dollars on Star Wars related research. Lafeber describes the psychological implications SDI had on American lawmakers. "During Reagan's term Star Wars seemed to be the answer to the problems that had become prominent during the 1970-1971 years: it promised to provide Americans with absolute security..."(American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 158) Furthermore this view advanced the notion that SDI would decrease US dependance on the political whims of its European allies. The search for global security, unilateral action, and mortgaged debt were to typify the Reagan presidency.

In 1982 Reagan reasserted America's role as that of the world's policeman by intervening in Lebannon and later in Grenada. Reagan sent 1400 marines to intervene in the Syrian-Israeli conflict in Beirut of which the former was a client state of the USSR and the latter supported by the US. This action seemed ostensible at the time however, it provoked the terrorist bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut, October 23, 1983, resulting in the deaths of 239 soldiers.

To divert public opinion from this fiasco Reagan sent troops to Grenada ostensibly to depose the pro-Cuban government. The invasion plan was drawn in such haste that it relied on tourist maps. The limited success of this mission was more psychological in its effect rather than establishing clear cut military objectives in the Caribbean. Rather the overall effect of this intervention along with Desert Storm under Bush, was the permanent rest of the US's defeat in Vietnam and characterized what Lafeber described as the resurgence of 'militant patriotism' "Americans gloried in the episode as a sign that they were overcoming their Vietnam inspired fear of using military force."(American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 158)

Between 1984-1985, Congress earmarked 1 trillon dollars to be spent on defense related programs. However, Americans had to contend with deficits unbeknownst to consumers at the time until the recession of 1989, in which that deficit was increasing by 100 billion dollars annually. This also resulted in extreme cuts in social health and welfare programs. The US economy, especially domestic manufacturing was faltering especially in the failing auto industry. The US attempted to compensate for this by providing Corporate Welfare as an incentive for US corporations to maintain production facilities on US soil. However, as a caveot emptor: the US spent a billion dollars to bail out the Chrysler Corporation only to lose Chrslyer to Germany's Daimler Benz in 1997. By 1985 the US was in debt to the rest of the world and by 1987 it had become the largest debtor nation. Even today it has struggled to pay its UN dues.

The decline in economic power by both superpowers was brought on by increased sacrifice of opportunity costs afforded by their mutually antagonisitic and anachronistic militarization programs. The Cold War ended because the two superpowers could not afford the costs associated with militarization, and while America won the propaganda war, it is still having to pay for its success in far excess of its intial strategic net gains as the following data demonstrates.

While the US was able to later claim victory in winning the cold war, the effect was more of a propaganda coup than an actual long term gain. According to Thomas G. Paterson, in his essay, "Superpower Decline And Hegemonic Survival,' "Alliance building, military expansion, clandestine operations and interventionisim spawning galloping defense budgets amounting to trillions of dollars over four decades. US military spending stood at 13.5 billion in 1949, averaged 40 billion a year in the 1950's, rose to 54 billion in 1960 and 90 billion in 1970 (largely because of the Vietnam War) and soared to 155 billion in 1980. By 1988...more than 300 billion...the defense department was spending an average of 28 million an hour..America's massive military spending chipped away at the nations infrastructre, contributing to the relative decline of the United States and stimulating the movement toward Soviet - American detente. Defense spending demanded capital, which the Federal government had to borrow, forcing up interest rates...federal debt, which stood at 257 billion in 1950, 286 billion in 1960, 371 billion in 1970 and 908 billion in 1980. By 1986 the debt had reached a staggering 2.1 trillion.

"The compelling point is that the Cold War was exceedingly costly. With finite resources the US government had to make choices. Money spent on the military and foreign interventions was not spent on building america at home..Defense spending became Keynesianisim on steroids..nations that spend heavily on armaments, such as the US and UK, have forfeited valuable gains in industrial productivity and economic growth..Measurable economic decline compelled American foreign policymakers, however, reluctantly at times, to take steps towards ending the Cold War."

('Major Problems In American Foreign Relations,' 4th edition, V2, pgs. 728-31)In 1986, 19% of the federal budget went to debt servicing, while 28% went to defense related expenditures, 11% went to Health, and only 3% of that budget was alloted to education.

***

"We in no way aspire to be the bearer of ultimate truth." -December 1988, Gorbachev to the General Assembly of the United Nations. This statement has been regarded as the first act of ideological surrender by the USSR, source: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The CIA's Credibility," The National Interest (Winter 1995/96), p. 111. For the full text of Gorbachev's speech, see FBIS-SOV-99-236, 8 December 1988, pp. 11-19.

In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev replaced Breznechev as the new soviet premiere. Unlike the Soviet leaders before him Gorbachev had a statesman education and was not ideologically driven to the hard line like his predecessors. These former Russian leaders had to contend with a longstanding feud between Tsarist-Bolshevik and European monarchs, that dictated thematic links between Russia's imperial phase of expansion and its cold war definition of security power blocs. Gorbachev had experience with western diplomatic negotiations and understood that the USSR could not keep with western 'high tech' industrialization and trade consolidation that was fast disentegrating traditional notions of territory and power blocs. Gorbachev's accomadation to change was to implement his twin policies of perestrokia and glasnost, i.e., economic liberalization and openess of disclosure in the market and in the government.

The Reagan Doctrine was directed primarily at keeping the Soviet's out of the Third world and dispatching troops or supporting coups and anti-communist movements in countries that had real or nominal soviet influence and support. The US would extend itself into the Angolan Civil War, support Afghanistan rebels in their 'Vietnam like war' with the Soviet's as well as implementing a scaled down version of flexible response in Cambodia, against Pol Pot's, Maoist Khmer Rouge. Reagan maintained that containment in this fashion could be done in a cost efficient manner via deficit spending and massive military spending on new technologies that could undercut Soviet troop strengths. The new American military machine was to act as a 'deterrence to unprovoked aggression' as Reagan's vice president, Bush would later state as justification for US intervention in Iraq in Desert Storm in 1991.

The Reagan doctrine in reality only worked in Afghanistan and it was to be developed in a wider context of limiting weapons proliferation among the two superpowers. Reagan and Gorbachev were able to conduct arms reduction summits in which both sides agreed to limit production of nuclear weapons culminating in a US brokered, Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988. Both the US and the USSR were severly hampered by deficits imposed by 50 years of vigilant military mobilization, and weapons proliferation. Politically, and economically this bipolar balance of power system could not maintain the free flow of international commerce through this framework of two competing global power blocs.

The worst failing of the Reagan doctrine happened in Latin America. The Iran-Contra affair and the ensuing scandal was key in bringing down key members of the administration as had Watergate had done for Nixon's administration. In 1981 the CIA began a system of covert ops to overthrow the Sandinista government which had come to power in 1979 after deposing a US-supported regime. In 1985 the CIA assembled a group of rebels known as the Contras who were to be supplied with weapons (and according to Gary Webb, possibly supply Crack Cocaine to LA) in their fight with the Leftist Sandinistas. However, the operation faced numerous pitfalls in organization and by no means did the contras enjoy popular support. With the Reagan Administration hardpressed to come up with additional funding, Lt. Col. Oliver North working for the NSC arrived at a plan in which funds could be derived from 'other sources.' The resulting plan culminated in the arms for hostages deal in which the administration sold weapons to Iran in return for hostages and diverted the profits to the Contras. Oliver North and his hidden superiors would later conceal or destroy documents when Congress began to delve into the sources of Contra Human rights violations. This scandal marked the end of the Reagan Presidency.

Reagan left the Bush administration with a huge deficit and a reccessionary economy. However, as John Gaddis maintains, he presided over the thawing of the Cold war and was instrumental in securing concessions from the USSR at a time where US Soviet relations exceededeven Nixon's detente strategies.

Enter George H.W. Bush as the new president in 1988. As a former director of the CIA under Ford and texas congressman, orginally from Conneticut, was somewhat the last of Cold War decommissars. However, when he assumed the Presidency the Cold War vanished, and the Soviet's now Russians, were full blown capitalist advocators. East Germany was given the right to democratize and the Berlin Wall itself, long an enduring image of a divided globe was torn down. In 1990 the two germany's were reunited after 45 years of seperation and Allied occupation. In 1991 a military coup led by Boris Yeltsin toppled Gorbachev and Soviet Communisim from power in Russia almost altogether, consiging once powerful hardliners to irrelevant positions in the Duma. The Cold War ended when the statues of Lenin and Stalin were torn asunder from their foundations. In 1991, a test to America's new found singular superpower status would come when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Iraq, Once a former Soviet and American ally during the last twenty years of the cold war, now found himself shunned by his former patrons at the UN Security Council. In less than a year US and European coalitional forces defeated Saddam's Iraqi republican guard in a regional bloc once solely beholden to Soviet hegemony. With the US's quick victory in this campaign, came along with it the ideological view that it had finally recovered from its Vietnam Syndrome.The Russians accepted chaos capitalism instead of ordered statist socialism and so thus began a new phase of US interventionism in the newly reconstituted multipolar world.

In describing the fall of the USSR one is reminded of Gorbachev's famous statement, "..on 25 October 1989, as Communist governments began to tumble in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev's spokesman, Gennadii Gerasimov, coined the most memorable phrase of all, when he told reporters with Gorbachev in Helsinki, Finland, that the "Frank Sinatra Doctrine" had replaced the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Soviets, referring to the singer's signature ballad, "I did it my way."Russia determined the means of its own fall due to it's over reliance on social science models that had few applications outside the ideological realm of academia. This nexus also existed in US Cold War foreign policy, essentially, policy formulated out of ideology that was endeared to the bipolar balance of power, as sure as the defense contractors on both sides of the curtain had ready supply schedules as well. Rational policy versus the irrational or a-rational variants were seldom few if not found rarely in between the dichotomies, of militarization and containment, or of American Foreign Policy itself.

CONCLUSION

 Epilogue