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166 chapter 7 Enter Reagan The World of Ronald Reagan As he ran for the presidency, in 1976 and in 1980, Ronald Reagan sounded a simple theme: America was in decline, but this decline had subjective rather than objective roots. “Do we lack the power?” a prominent Reagan supporter asked. “Certainly not if power is measured in the brute terms of economic, technological and military capacity. . . . The issue boils down, in the end, to the question of will.”¹ America’s will had flickered during the Vietnam War, Reagan argued—not on the battlefield, but at home, when public opinion, misled by craven politicians and a misguided media, turned against a war that America’s soldiers were winning. The world had witnessed America’s humiliation with ill-concealed satisfaction. For Reagan, Richard Nixon’s détente had been naive—“a one-way street that simply gives the Soviets what they want with nothing in return.”² No one bore more responsibility for this than Henry Kissinger, with his pessimistic outlook on America’s future. Angola in 1975 had epitomized the poisoned fruits of détente . For the first time, the Soviets had dared to engage in a massive military intervention in Africa and had found the gamble painless and profitable. For the first time, the Cuban upstart had taken on a role that was rightfully reserved for great powers. Ford and Kissinger had flailed, unable to devise an effective response —“We blustered and made demands unbacked by action,” Reagan said.³ The debacle deepened the sense of malaise that haunted the American people. That Castro was behind it intensified Americans’ outrage and confusion. Carter’s election in 1976 dealt the already faltering and insecure America another blow. For the next four years the United States would be saddled with feeble and hesitant leadership. Meanwhile, an emboldened Soviet Union con- Enter Reagan 167 tinued its relentless arms buildup and resorted ever more blatantly to force and subversion. Terrorists were allowed to triumph in Rhodesia, South Africa was spurned as a pariah, and the Cubans—Moscow’s proxies—humiliated the United States in the Horn of Africa and spread revolution in Central America. But the Carter years, Reagan believed, had served as a catharsis. The national pain induced by those four years of humiliation helped the nation to purge its misplaced sense of guilt and to overcome the Vietnam syndrome. In the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan promised that a resurgent America would regain the military superiority over the Soviet Union that Carter had squandered and would reverse the Soviet gains abroad. For the second time in the Cold War, the theme of liberation was proclaimed in a presidential campaign. In 1952 the Republicans had promised “liberation” of the captive peoples of Eastern Europe and China—but it had been an empty slogan to liberate the White House from the Democrats’ clutches. Reagan, however, meant what he said: he would roll back Moscow’s gains. His focus was not Eastern Europe, where rollback would have meant war with the Soviet Union, but the Third World where the U.S. defeats of the 1970s had occurred: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, Grenada. The Reagan presidency would be defined by two major themes—military superiority over the Soviet Union and rollback in the Third World. There would be a shift in U.S. relations with Moscow in Reagan’s second term, roughly corresponding to the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. But there would be no shift in policy toward the Third World. Reagan rode into the White House at the head of a coalition that included mainstream Republicans (of the Nixon/Kissinger brand) and “Reaganites”— hard-line Republicans and neoconservatives. The latter were converted Democrats who had deserted a party that, they believed, had lost its faith in America’s greatness. From the outset there were important differences between the two wings of the Reagan coalition, and they would be amplified and emerge openly in Reagan’s second term—when there were fierce debates about how to deal with the Soviet Union as well as rollback in the Third World. During Reagan’s first term, the Soviet leaders believed that a surprise U.S. nuclear strike against the Soviet Union was a real possibility. As the careful study by a CIA analyst indicates, this perception was fueled by the aggressive rhetoric of the new administration and by a series of U.S. psychological warfare operations—air and naval probes...

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