Reagan's Foreign Issues

At the heart of Reagan's foreign policy was the prevention of communist expansion. This was demonstrated in the Western Hemisphere by the strong financial and military support of the Contras against the communist Nicaraguan government, the aid given to the government of El Salvador in their fight against the communist guerrillas, and the U.S. invasion of Grenada when that nation was perceived as falling under Cuban domination in 1983, and the support given to rebels fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan. While effort for peace in Central America faltered, the Soviets announced the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan in 1988, ending their futile eight year war.

Soviet Relations and the Cold War

When Reagan became President he had only one well-defined foreign policy goal: containing the Soviet Union, or the "evil empire" as he once referred to it. He primarily wanted to stop the USSR from growing larger (as it tried to do when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979) and to keep other non-Communist countries from becoming Communist. He disliked the decade-long Detente begun by President Nixon and continued by President Ford intended to ease relations with the Soviets. Reagan firmly believed that the USSR was using Dtente and the SALT talks to take advantage of the United States. The "window of vulnerability" was fast approaching, Reagan insisted, when Moscow would be able to launch a preemptive first strike against Washington and destroy the US nuclear defensive systems. Reagan believed that the nation should negotiate with the Soviet Union from a position of strength. To such an end, the administration embarked on a strategic modernization program which included the production of intercontinental missile and a feasibility study for the Strategic Defense Initiative. He believed that only through military preparedness could the world achieve a stable peace. His Secretaries of State, General Alexander Haig and George Schultz, as well as his Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, among others, assisted Reagan in developing this Cold War strategy. During Reagan's two administrations, the US military increased to unprecedented peacetime levels. The administration also spent billions of dollars on defense contracts to research and develop new weapons and military technology. The military increased production of nuclear arms and deployed them throughout the Western world. The exorbitant amount of money Reagan spent on defense contributed to the enormous national deficit during the 1980s. The most notorious of the programs Reagan invested in was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more commonly known as the Star Wars program in reference to the popular 1980s science fiction film trilogy. The SDI was designed to be a national defense network of missiles that could target and destroy any incoming enemy missiles before they reached the United

States. Unfortunately, Star Wars was mostly a fantasy-prototypes of the seekand- destroy technology often failed the trial runs miserably. Worse still, SDI's estimated price tag totaled nearly $1 trillion dollars, a figure that concerned many Democrats and American citizens during a decade of recession. Many Americans also feared that Reagan's conservative, Cold War ideology would only lead to war. The increase in military spending, and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Soviet Union at the beginning of Reagan's second term, opened a new era of relations between the two superpowers. For the first time since the beginning of the Cold War, a Soviet leader approached the United States to seriously discuss a possible peace. This initiative took the Reagan administration completely by surprise, but Reagan quickly responded in kind. Numerous summits between top Soviet and American officials were held during Reagan's second term. Eventually, even Gorbechev and President Reagan themselves sat together in both Washington and Moscow on a number of occasions to hammer out agreements. Many concessions were made on both sides: in 1987 Gorbechev agreed to withdraw most of its nuclear arsenal and troops from the Soviet-controlled states in Eastern Europe and to withdraw from Afghanistan while Reagan eventually abandoned his Star Wars plans and agreed to reduce the number of American nuclear weapons. After a number of meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev, the two men signed an Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty at the Washington Summit in December, 1987. The agreement promised to eliminate an entire class of intermediate-range nuclear missiles and was the first arms control agreement in history to reduce the nuclear arsenal. In addition, the administration began the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) which would reduce the strategic nuclear arsenals by 50%, including large multiple warhead missiles. Gorbechev initiated so many reforms that within three or four years after Reagan left office, the Soviet Union collapsed and disintegrated into individual states, effectively ending the Cold War.

Haiti and the Philippines

When pro-U.S. dictators in Haiti and the Philippines appeared on the verge of being toppled from power, Reagan engineered their safe removal from their countries, ensuring bloodless coups and new government which, he hoped, would be friendly to the U.S.

Latin America
The Reagan administration also became heavily committed in various hotspots throughout Latin America, particularly in those areas where the fight against Communism still raged.

Throughout his first term in office, the federal government under Reagan financed anti-Communist guerillas and politicians in the small state of El Salvador. Reagan also sent 10,000 US troops to the island of Grenada in 1982 to combat the few hundred village warriors who tried to overthrow the government and establish a Socialist state. As soon as the American soldiers arrived, the conflict was over in a few hours. Surprisingly, the American public strongly approved of Reagan's decision to send in the US Army. Reagan sent the troops just two days after the 239 Marines in Beirut had died, and an American victory in Latin America only boosted public spirits. Reagan's primary concern in Latin America, though, was Nicaragua. In 1979, President Carter had supported the Socialist Sandinista movement when it overthrew Nicaragua's dictator. Reagan, however, vehemently opposed the Sandinistas's claim to power and the organization's Communist ties. In 1981, Reagan authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to train an army of 10,000 Nicaraguan "freedom fighters," or Contras, to fight the Sandinistas. Congress quickly became outraged and worried that Reagan might inadvertently lead the US into another horrible anti-Communist war in Nicaragua as Kennedy and Johnson had in Vietnam. Congress passed the Boland Amendment to ban US assistance to the Contras for the next several years. Nevertheless, the Reagan administration ignored the order and secretly continued to support the Nicaraguan Contras. The US Navy mined the harbors surrounding Nicaragua and destroyed the nation's oil reserves. The administration ordered Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North to continue covert fundraising efforts to help the Contras. Over $30 million was sent into the country. Ironically, a large portion of that money actually came from Iran, one of the US's most dangerous enemies: Colonel North agreed to sell Iran several million dollars worth of weapons in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian agents. - SEE IRAN CONTRA AFFAIRS BELOW

Middle East
In Middle East affairs, Reagan reported in his inaugural address that the 52 American hostages held in Iran for 444 days were at that moment being released and would soon return to freedom. In the 1980s, US relations with many states in the Middle East were contentious at best, primarily because Reagan continued to pledge support for the fledgling Jewish state of Israel at the expense of the many Muslim Palestinians living in the region. Almost every other Middle Eastern state opposed the existence of Israel and supported the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or PLO, headed by Yasir Arafat. When Israel attacked the PLO headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1982, President Reagan dispatched several thousand US Marines to the country to serve as peacekeepers. In retaliation, a pro-Palestinian suicide terrorist bombed the US Embassy in Beirut and killed 239 Marines. The US immediately retreated.

President Reagan did not back down from the Libyan terrorist attack on US forces in Germany, however. Libya, too, disliked American involvement in the Middle East and funded many terrorist organizations that pledged to destroy the United States. After learning of the attack in Germany, Reagan launched a missile campaign on Libya, and even bombed the personal residence of Libya's ruler, Muammar Qaddafi. Qaddafi survived the attack, but backed away from anti-American terrorist movements. Reagan's peacekeeping force in war-torn Lebanon experienced tragedy in 1983 when a truck bomb killed 241 soldiers. Tragedy struck again in 1987 when a missile from an Iraqi warplane killed 37 sailors aboard the U.S.S. Stark, part of a U.S. naval taskforce which had been sent to the Persian Gulf to keep that waterway open during the Iran-Iraq war.

Iran-Contra Affair
The darkest hour of the Reagan administration would become known as the IranContra affair. After lengthy, nationally televised hearings, a special congressional hearings review board reported that Reagan authorized the sale of arms to Iran in exchange for help in freeing U.S. hostages in Lebanon. It was revealed that the money gained from the arms sale illegally diverted to aid the Contras, opponents of the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. The congressional report criticized Reagan for his detached, hands-off style of management. In the aftermath of the affair, National Security Advisors Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter, as well as National Security Council aide Colonel Oliver North were indicted by a federal grand jury and convicted of lying to Congress.