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THE REAGAN DOCTRINE AND GLOBAL CONTAINMENT: REVIVAL OR RECESSIONAL Roger D. Hansen Ahi IE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION TOOK OFFICE with a singular purpose in the foreign-policy arena: to restore and revitalize a strategy of global containment of the Soviet Union. It endorsed a form of containment that assumed undifferentiable national interests, the availability of unlimited means to oppose the direct and indirect expansion of Soviet power and influence, and the inadvisability of negotiation with the Soviet Union until a rearmed America could once again bargain from a position of strength.1 As a student of containment noted in 1983, "One would, in fact, have to go back to the later Truman administration to find a comparable emphasis on the accumulation of military hardware and a corresponding degree of skepticism regarding negotiations."2 By the end of the Reagan administration's first term it had substantially failed in its efforts to revitalize global containment. Ironically, however, if the first half of 1985 vividly illustrated those failings, it also witnessed the emergence of what is presently claimed to be a significant opportunity to overcome them. In his 6 February 1985 State of the Union address, the president first publicly set forth what others were soon to call the Reagan Doctrine: 1.These assumptions distinguish global containment from the strategic conceptions of its critics, such as George F. Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Robert W. Tucker. Each stressed the notion of limitations on the strategy of containment. By the 1980s Tucker's preferred strategy of "limited containment" appeared to involve no more— and no lessthan the maintenance of a geopolitical equilibrium. Tucker's use of the term containment is somewhat misleading in that containment as "balance" is potentially quite distinct from containment as preventing any and all extension of Soviet power and influence. 2.John Lewis Gaddis, "The Rise, Fall and Future of Detente," Foreign Affairs, 62:2 (Winter 1983-84), 367. Roger D. Hansen is the Jacob Blaustein Professor of International Organization at SAIS. His books include The Politics ofMexican Development (1971) and Beyond the North-South Stalemate (1979). 39 40 SAIS REVIEW Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few, it is the universal right of all God's children. Look to where peace and prosperity flourish today. It is in the homes that freedom built. Victories against poverty are the greatest and most secure where people live by laws that ensure free press, free speech, and freedom to worship, vote and create wealth. Our mission is to nourish and defend freedom and democracy and to communicate these ideals wherever we can. We must stand by all our democratic allies. And we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth. Within six months of this speech Congress reversed itself and voted to resume humanitarian aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, first approved overt financial support for the rebel resistance in Cambodia, and publicly supported "humanitarian relief for the Afghan rebels. At the same time Congress repealed the Clark Amendment, which had banned aid to Angolan insurgents for over nine years, leading the way to congressional support for aid to Jonas Savimbi's UNITA insurgency by early 1986. Within one year of the speech, Reagan's declaration of the American duty to support "freedom fighters" against "Soviet-supported aggression" had purportedly become the central element in the administration's effort to revive global containment. For as it is interpreted by its neoconservative architects and supporters, the Reagan Doctrine commits the United States to global containment and then some. It requires the United States not only to resist new Soviet and "Soviet-supported aggression," but also to subvert Soviet power and influence through the support of anti-Soviet insurgencies throughout the Third World. In its fullest flowering the doctrine is interpreted as symbolically representing the acceptance of the U.S. -Soviet conflict as a "clash between two civilizations" —the perspective urged upon the administration by neoconservativism's most prominent shaper and spokesman, Norman Podhoretz, ever since 1981. And the perspective is apparently shouldered enthusiastically, since'many of...

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