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Source: US History. Authored by: P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Paul Vickery, and Sylvie Waskiewicz. Provided by: OpenStax College. Located at: http://openstaxcollege.org/textbooks/us-history. License: CC BY: Attribution. License Terms: Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11740/latest/

Unit 5: A New World Order?

Introduction In addition to reviving the economy and reducing the size of the federal government,

Ronald Reagan also wished to restore American stature in the world. He entered the

White House a “cold warrior” and referred to the Soviet Union in a 1983 speech as an

“evil empire.” Dedicated to upholding even authoritarian governments in foreign

countries to keep them safe from Soviet influence, he was also desperate to put to

rest Vietnam Syndrome, the reluctance to use military force in foreign countries for fear

of embarrassing defeat, which had influenced U.S. foreign policy since the mid-1970s.

THE MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL AMERICA Reagan’s desire to demonstrate U.S. readiness to use military force abroad sometimes

had tragic consequences. In 1983, he sent soldiers to Lebanon as part of a multinational

force trying to restore order following an Israeli invasion the year before. On October 23,

more than two hundred troops were killed in a barracks bombing in Beirut carried out by

Iranian-trained militants known as Hezbollah (Figure 31.11). In February 1984, Reagan

announced that, given intensified fighting, U.S. troops were being withdrawn.

Figure 31.11 The suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut (a) on April 18, 1983,

marked the first of a number of attacks on U.S. targets in the region. Less than six months

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later, a truck bomb leveled the U.S. Marine barracks at the Beirut airport (b), part of a

coordinated attack that killed 299 U.S and French members of the multinational

peacekeeping force in Lebanon.

Two days after the bombing in Beirut, Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz

authorized the invasion of Grenada, a small Caribbean island nation, in an attempt to oust

a Communist military junta that had overthrown a moderate regime. Communist Cuba

already had troops and technical aid workers stationed on the island and were willing to

defend the new regime, but the United States swiftly took command of the situation, and

the Cuban soldiers surrendered after two days.

Reagan’s intervention in Grenada was intended to send a message to Marxists in Central

America. Meanwhile, however, decades of political repression and economic corruption

by certain Latin American governments, sometimes generously supported by U.S. foreign

aid, had sown deep seeds of revolutionary discontent. In El Salvador, a 1979 civil-

military coup had put a military junta in power that was engaged in a civil war against

left-leaning guerillas when Reagan took office. His administration supported the right-

wing government, which used death squads to silence dissent.

Neighboring Nicaragua was also governed by a largely Marxist-inspired group, the

Sandinistas. This organization, led by Daniel Ortega, had overthrown the brutal, right-

wing dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1979. Reagan, however, overlooked the

legitimate complaints of the Sandinistas and believed that their rule opened the region to

Cuban and Soviet influence. A year into his presidency, convinced it was folly to allow

the expansion of Soviet and Communist influence in Latin America, he authorized the

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to equip and train a group of anti-Sandinista

Nicaraguans known as the Contras (contrarevolucionários or “counter-revolutionaries”)

to oust Ortega. (DN: Congress began limited aid to the Contras in 1982 and effectively

outlawed all aid to the Contras in 1984 due to concern over many human rights abuses

committed by the Contras.)

Reagan’s desire to aid the Contras even after Congress ended its support led him,

surprisingly, to Iran. In September 1980, Iraq had invaded neighboring Iran and, by 1982,

had begun to gain the upper hand. The Iraqis needed weapons, and the Reagan

administration, wishing to assist the enemy of its enemy, had agreed to provide Iraqi

president Saddam Hussein with money, arms, and military intelligence. In 1983,

however, the capture of Americans by Hezbollah forces in Lebanon changed the

president’s plans. In 1985, he authorized the sale of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to

Iran in exchange for help retrieving three of the American hostages.

A year later, Reagan’s National Security Council aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North,

found a way to sell weapons to Iran and secretly use the proceeds to support the

Nicaraguan Contras—in direct violation of a congressional ban on military aid to the

anti-Communist guerillas in that Central American nation. Eventually the Senate became

aware, and North and others were indicted on various charges, which were all dismissed,

overturned on appeal, or granted presidential pardon. Reagan, known for delegating much

authority to subordinates and unable to “remember” crucial facts and meetings, escaped

the scandal with nothing more than criticism for his lax oversight. The nation was divided

over the extent to which the president could go to “protect national interests,” and the

limits of Congress’s constitutional authority to oversee the activities of the executive

branch have yet to be resolved.

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THE COLD WAR WAXES AND WANES While trying to shrink the federal budget and the size of government sphere at home,

Reagan led an unprecedented military buildup in which money flowed to the Pentagon to

pay for expensive new forms of weaponry. The press drew attention to the inefficiency of

the nation’s military industrial complex, offering as examples expense bills that included

$640 toilet seats and $7,400 coffee machines. One of the most controversial aspects of

Reagan’s plan was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which he proposed in 1983.

SDI, or “Star Wars,” called for the development of a defensive shield to protect the

United States from a Soviet missile strike. Scientists argued that much of the needed

technology had not yet been developed and might never be. Others contended that the

plan would violate existing treaties with the Soviet Union and worried about the Soviet

response. The system was never built, and the plan, estimated to have cost some $7.5

billion, was finally abandoned.

After his reelection in 1984, Reagan began to moderate his position toward the Soviets.

Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and

was willing to meet with the president. Reagan found he was able to work with the Soviet

leader once Gorbachev distanced himself from the traditional communist policies. The

new and comparatively young Soviet premier did not want to commit additional funds for

another arms race, especially since the war in Afghanistan against mujahedeen—Islamic

guerilla fighters—had depleted the Soviet Union’s resources severely since its invasion

of the central Asian nation in 1979. Gorbachev recognized that economic despair at home

could easily result in larger political upheavals like those in neighboring Poland, where

the Solidarity movement had taken hold. He withdrew troops from Afghanistan,

introduced political reforms and new civil liberties at home—known

as perestroika and glasnost—and proposed arms reduction talks with the United States.

In 1985, Gorbachev and Reagan met in Geneva to reduce armaments and shrink their

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respective military budgets. The following year, meeting in Reykjavík, Iceland, they

surprised the world by announcing that they would try to eliminate nuclear weapons by

1996. In 1987, they agreed to eliminate a whole category of nuclear weapons when they

signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty at the White House (Figure

31.12). This laid the foundation for future agreements limiting nuclear weapons.

Figure 31.12 In the East Room of the White House, President Reagan and Soviet general

secretary Mikhail Gorbachev sign the 1987 INF Treaty, eliminating one category of

nuclear weapons.

“NO NEW TAXES” Confident they could win back the White House, Democrats mounted a campaign

focused on more effective and competent government under the leadership of

Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. When George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice

president and Republican nominee, found himself down in the polls, political advisor Lee

Atwater launched an aggressively negative media campaign, accusing Dukakis of being

soft on crime and connecting his liberal policies to a brutal murder in Massachusetts.

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(DN: The ad noted here focused on the case of William Horton. The ad referred to him as

“Willie,” but he has never used that name for himself. The next reading has more on the

ad and a copy of the ad itself. Lee Atwater was a key advisor in the Bush campaign and

worked earlier with Reagan. He gave an offensive, and infamous, interview off-the-

record in 1981. It was recorded, and he can be heard describing campaign strategies from

the 1980s and before. He said, “You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.”

By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh,

forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re

talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic

things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut

this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more

abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”)

More importantly, Bush adopted a largely Reaganesque style on matters of economic

policy, promising to shrink government and keep taxes low. These tactics were

successful, and the Republican Party retained the White House.

Although he promised to carry on Reagan’s economic legacy, the problems Bush

inherited made it difficult to do so. Reagan’s policies of cutting taxes and increasing

defense spending had exploded the federal budget deficit, making it three times larger in

1989 than when Reagan took office in 1980. Bush was further constrained by the

emphatic pledge he had made at the 1988 Republican Convention—“read my lips: no

new taxes”—and found himself in the difficult position of trying to balance the budget

and reduce the deficit without breaking his promise. However, he also faced a Congress

controlled by the Democrats, who wanted to raise taxes on the rich, while Republicans

thought the government should drastically cut domestic spending. In October, after a

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brief government shutdown when Bush vetoed the budget Congress delivered, he and

Congress reached a compromise with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990.

The budget included measures to reduce the deficit by both cutting government

expenditures and raising taxes, effectively reneging on the “no new taxes” pledge. These

economic constraints are one reason why Bush supported a limited domestic agenda of

education reform and antidrug efforts, relying on private volunteers and community

organizations, which he referred to as “a thousand points of light,” to address most social

problems.

When it came to foreign affairs, Bush’s attitude towards the Soviet Union differed little

from Reagan’s. Bush sought to ease tensions with America’s rival superpower and

stressed the need for peace and cooperation. The desire to avoid angering the Soviets led

him to adopt a hands-off approach when, at the beginning of his term, a series of pro-

democracy demonstrations broke out across the Communist Eastern Bloc.

In November 1989, the world—including foreign policy experts and espionage agencies

from both sides of the Iron Curtain—watched in surprise as peaceful protesters in East

Germany marched through checkpoints at the Berlin Wall. Within hours, people from

both East and West Berlin flooded the checkpoints and began tearing down large chunks

of the wall. Months of earlier demonstrations in East Germany had called on the

government to allow citizens to leave the country. These demonstrations were one

manifestation of a larger movement sweeping across East Germany, Poland, Hungary,

Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, which swiftly led to revolutions, most of them

peaceful, resulting in the collapse of Communist governments in Central and Eastern

Europe.

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In Budapest in 1956 and in Prague in 1968, the Soviet Union had restored order through a

large show of force. That this didn’t happen in 1989 was an indication to all that the

Soviet Union was itself collapsing. Bush’s refusal to gloat or declare victory helped him

maintain the relationship with Gorbachev that Reagan had established. In July 1991,

Gorbachev and Bush signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which

committed their countries to reducing their nuclear arsenals by 25 percent. A month later,

attempting to stop the changes begun by Gorbachev’s reforms, Communist Party

hardliners tried to remove him from power. Protests arose throughout the Soviet Union,

and by December 1991, the nation had collapsed. In January 1992, twelve former Soviet

republics formed the Commonwealth of Independent States to coordinate trade and

security measures. The Cold War was over.

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Introduction
THE MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL AMERICA
THE COLD WAR WAXES AND WANES
“NO NEW TAXES”