The Reagan administration

As the 1980s opened, few predicted that it would be a decade of unprecedented progress in superpower relations. All pretense of détente had disappeared in 1979, and the election of 1980 brought to the White House a conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan, who was more determined to compete vigorously with the U.S.S.R. than any president had been since the 1960s. He bemoaned an “arms control process” that, he said, always favoured the Soviets and sapped the will of the Western allies and a détente that duped gullible Americans into acquiescing in unilateral Soviet gains. Reagan sounded like Dulles when he denounced the Soviet Union as “an evil empire,” and he echoed John F. Kennedy in calling for America to “stand tall” in the world again. Like Kennedy, he cut taxes in hopes of stimulating the stagnant U.S. economy, expanded the military budget (a process begun in Carter’s last year), and stressed the development of sophisticated military technology beyond the means of the U.S.S.R. Reagan insisted that history was on the side of freedom, not Communism, and together with his close friend British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher he sought to dispel the “malaise” that had afflicted the United States during the late 1970s. To be sure, Reagan had to work within the constraints caused by growing federal deficits, Soviet parity in nuclear arms, and congressional limits on executive action. Hence his actual policies resembled more the cautious containment of the Eisenhower era than the aggressive interventionism of the Kennedy–Johnson years. The one novel means adopted by the administration for combatting Soviet power and influence was to extend aid to irregular forces engaged in resisting pro-Soviet governments in the Third World. Such “freedom fighters,” as Reagan termed them, in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua seemed to offer hope that the United States could contain or even overthrow totalitarian regimes without getting itself involved in new Vietnams. This Reagan Doctrine was thus a natural corollary of the Nixon Doctrine.

As American diplomacy recovered its self-confidence and initiative, Soviet foreign policy drifted, if only because of the advanced age of Brezhnev and the frequent changes in leadership after his death in November 1982. Early in the decade a recurrence of serious unrest in eastern Europe, this time in Poland, also kept the attention of the Kremlin close to home. During the period of détente the Polish government had expanded an ambitious development plan financed largely by western European credits. Economic performance foundered, however, foreign debt mounted to $28,000,000,000, and the state imposed successive price hikes on staples. By 1979–80 a popular protest movement had grown up around the officially unsanctioned Solidarity trade union and its charismatic leader, Lech Wałęsa. The strong Roman Catholic roots of Polish popular nationalism were evident in the movement, especially in light of the accession in 1978 of Karol Cardinal Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 456 years, who in 1981 survived an assassination plot probably hatched in Bulgaria, a Soviet satellite. As unrest mounted in Poland, NATO countries warned against a Soviet military intervention, holding in reserve the threat of declaring Warsaw in default on its debts. In December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law, sparing Poland a Soviet invasion at the price of military rule and the suppression of Solidarity. The United States responded by suspending Poland’s most-favoured-nation trade status and blocking further loans from the International Monetary Fund. Reagan held the Soviet Union responsible for martial law; his attempts to extend the sanctions to an embargo on high-technology exports to the U.S.S.R., however, angered western Europeans, who feared losing access to eastern European markets and who were in the process of completing a huge pipeline from Siberia that would make western Europe dependent on the U.S.S.R. for 25 percent of its natural gas. In both the debt and pipeline issues, it seemed that the web of interdependence woven during détente served to constrain Western countries more than it did the U.S.S.R.

Brezhnev’s successor as general secretary of the Communist Party, the former KGB chief Yury Andropov, declared that there was no alternative to détente as the Soviets understood it. He denounced Reagan’s “militaristic course” as a new bid for U.S. hegemony. It was Reagan’s image of the U.S.S.R., however, that seemed confirmed when a Soviet jet fighter plane shot down a civilian South Korean airliner in Soviet air space in September 1983, killing 269 people. Some in the West supported the Soviet claim that the plane was on a spy mission, but they produced no persuasive evidence to that effect. Andropov’s demise after a year and a half elevated Konstantin Chernenko, another member of the older generation of the Politburo who would himself survive only until March 1985. Given these frequent changes in leadership and the drain on Soviet resources caused by the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the Kremlin was even less able than the White House to mount new initiatives in foreign policy until late in the 1980s.