repressive Somoza regime, and many members of
Congress were reluctant to support the right-wing
army. Their reluctance only increased in 1984, when
the nation held democratic elections, in which the
Sandinistas were victorious. From 1982 to 1984, Rea-
gan was confronted with three separate defense ap-
propriations bills, each of which contained language
barring the use of U.S. funds to finance efforts to
overthrow the Ortega government in Nicaragua.
These bills also included the funding for Reagan’s
highest-priority defense projects, such as the Strate-
gic Defense Initiative (SDI). Because he was barred
by the U.S. Constitution from vetoing only a portion
of the bills, he had no choice but to sign them into
law.
Reagan continued to believe, however, that it was
the presidency, not the Congress, that ultimately
must determine the course of foreign policy for the
nation. In a series of controversial and arguably ille-
gal actions, two national security advisers (Robert
McFarlane and John Poindexter) and members of
the National Security Council staff, including Oliver
North, arranged covert funding mechanisms de-
signed to bypass the will of Congress so that the ad-
ministration could continue to support the Contras.
In November, 1986, U.S. attorney general Edwin
Meese III revealed that some of the money being
funneled to the Contras had come from secret sales
of arms to Iran. The revelation sparked outrage in
Congress, resulting in years of congressional hear-
ings, legal investigations, and criminal trials that
came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair.
The Weinberger Doctrine A general buildup of U.S.
military forces and the modernization of U.S. capa-
bilities defined the Reagan years, as well as the final
year of the decade, during which George H. W. Bush
assumed the presidency. This buildup was extremely
expensive. In constant 2000 dollars, the Reagan
administration spent almost $3 trillion to increase
U.S. military capabilities, funding and deploying
many new weapons systems. Despite the resulting
enhanced capabilities, it was rare for either Reagan
or Bush to employ U.S. military forces directly in
support of their foreign policy. Only twice were U.S.
armed forces deployed to remove from power an
anti-U.S. government: in 1983, on the tiny Carib-
bean island of Grenada, and in 1989, when Bush or-
dered the arrest and overthrow of President Manuel
Noriega of Panama. While each of these operations
swiftly accomplished its mission, the relative infre-
quency of such operations underlined the calibrated
choices preferred by both administrations.
This larger strategy was guided substantially by
the thinking of Reagan’s first secretary of defense,
Caspar Weinberger. In November, 1984, Weinberger
outlined several strict conditions that each had to be
met before the United States would deploy its armed
forces in combat. This Weinberger Doctrine de-
manded that U.S. armed forces be used only as a last
resort, that they be used only when vital interests
were at risk, and that, once committed, they be used
wholeheartedly and with the full support of Con-
gress and the American people.
World War II veteran Weinberger developed his
doctrine through hard experience. As defense sec-
retary, he reluctantly had presided over a deploy-
ment to Lebanon of U.S. troops. These Army and
Marine soldiers first arrived in Lebanon on August
25, 1982, to secure the evacuation of combatants of
the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had
been defeated by Israel. In the wake of that evac-
uation, an ongoing civil conflict inside Lebanon
sharply worsened. Within weeks, a new Christian
president, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated. In retal-
iation, Christian militias allied with the Israelis mas-
sacred over nine hundred unarmed Muslim civil-
ians. The mission of the U.S. Marines was forced to
evolve in response to these events, and the Marines
were instructed to train an indigenous army to sup-
port a new goverment of Lebanon. However, they
themselves had not been trained to accomplish such
a task.
In the late 1950’s, the United States had commit-
ted its troops to the area and had succeeded in forg-
ing a new, more stable balance of power in Lebanon.
By the 1980’s, however, many of the Lebanese fac-
tions perceived even this very limited U.S. military
presence as partisan, supporting one side or the
other in their civil war. Americans therefore began
to be targeted by Muslim extremists. In April, 1983,
the U.S. embassy in Beirut was bombed. Seventeen
Americans were killed, including the regional Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief, Robert Ames.
Then, in October, 241 soldiers and Marines per-
ished when their barracks at the Beirut airport were
struck by a suicide truck bomb. The resulting explo-
sion was at the time the largest non-nuclear explo-
sion in history.
After such anti-U.S. carnage, the American peo-The Eighties in America Foreign policy of the United States 389