office one of the most popular presidents in
American history. The economy continued to
respond and unemployment did not rise above 7
per cent; people felt good – at least, most of them
did. The darker side was there too: ethnic discrim-
ination and poverty, crime and drugs, the decay of
big cities, increasing indebtedness and an adverse
trade balance. Despite the Laffer curve, there is no
miracle cure. Reagan, in fact, was a big spender on
programmes other than defence. The only way to
bring the budget into balance was by raising taxes.
Reagan would not hear of it, nor would George
‘read my lips’ Bush during the presidential election
of 1988. It was one important reason for Bush’s
election victory that November over the Demo-
cratic candidate, who had been too frank. Yet the
spending spree of the mid-1980s came to haunt his
successor in the White House when the economy
once more turned down.
If there was less of a revolution in US domestic
policies than was thought at the time, a real rev-
olution did occur during the Reagan years in
America’s role and standing in global politics. As
recently as 1988 distinguished academics were
vying with each other to analyse the reasons
for America’s terminal decline. ‘Overstretch’ of
America’s ‘imperial’ global responsibilities was the
favourite diagnosis. How the picture has changed
since then! No doubt academics will catch up.
Reagan certainly began his years in the White
House as an outspoken enemy of communism the
world over. Russia was an ‘evil empire’, and the
‘focus of evil in the modern world’. The spread
of communism, especially in what Reagan per-
ceived as America’s backyard, Central America
and the Caribbean, he saw as a direct threat to
the security of the US, because communist victor-
ies in Nicaragua and El Salvador could spread to
Mexico and so to the very borders of the US. The
domino theory was revived. Behind the global
dangers, the administration did not doubt, was
the hand of the Kremlin. The condemnation of
the Soviet Union reached its peak when a Soviet
fighter in September 1983 shot down a Korean
civilian airliner that had strayed over militarily
sensitive Soviet territory. Many lives were lost,
including those of Americans.
But there was always a positive side to the
administration’s and Reagan’s policy calculations.
The Soviets were rational. If the US did not flinch
from confrontation, from spending whatever was
necessary to ensure potential military dominance,
the basis would eventually be reached for an
accommodation, and for disarmament, especially
of the nuclear arsenals. When Reagan launched
his Strategic Defence Initiative, or Star Wars as it
was popularly known, in March 1983 he knew
that the Soviets could not afford to keep pace.
SDI would, it was hoped, enable the US ultim-
ately to defend itself against nuclear attack far
more effectively than the Soviet Union could.
The thinking was that there was not the remotest
possibility that the US would be the aggressor in
a superpower war, so the world would be safe
from nuclear war. Once the Soviet Union could
also be persuaded to accept that the US was not
likely in the future to become an aggressor, the
huge nuclear arsenals would become redundant.
Serious disarmament could be given a chance,
with nuclear and other weapons serving as a
limited deterrent insurance. The great change
occurred in the Reagan era of the 1980s.
The transformation in US–Soviet relations
would not have happened but for events outside
Reagan’s control, the changing leadership in the
Kremlin and the Soviet Union’s worsening eco-
nomic plight. When Gorbachev became the
Soviet leader in March 1985, the scene was set
for a pas de deux that began with each leader
keeping a careful distance from the other and
ended in an embrace, with Reagan strolling
cheerfully around Red Square in the spring of
- Perhaps only a president with Reagan’s
impeccable anti-communist credentials could
have persuaded Congress to accept that the Soviet
Union could be trusted to abide by the agree-
ments reached and that it had ceased to be an ‘evil
empire’.
During his first administration, Reagan’s cru-
sading rhetoric castigating communism and the
Soviet empire never really matched the administra-
tion’s actual policies. Although not ratified by the
Senate, the SALT II treaty provisions were
observed; this in the end proved to be to America’s
advantage. The scope for using American military
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