forces was limited by a law passed by Congress
after the Vietnam War to restrict the president’s
freedom of action: this was the War Powers Act of
- The president as commander-in-chief was
still able to use armed force when he thought it
necessary, but he had to inform Congress within
forty-eight hours of their deployment abroad and
would have to withdraw them after sixty days
unless Congress specifically directed otherwise.
There were other realistic restraints. The Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 had led
to the retaliatory American grain embargo. But the
US farmers came first; their plight induced the
Reagan administration to lift Carter’s embargo on
the sale of wheat in April 1981 and to follow this
up with further huge sales in 1983. That in turn
made it difficult for the US to dissuade West
European firms from supplying the apparatus to
the Soviet Union for oil and gas pipelines.
Meanwhile public opinion in the US and Western
Europe was becoming ever more hostile to further
nuclear escalation. Reagan declared that he was
committed to arms control, but negotiations with
the Soviet Union made no progress during his first
administration. Meanwhile, the Russians became
increasingly bogged down in Afghanistan. For the
US it was a Vietnam in reverse. With Pakistan as an
ally, it was able to arm the desperate mujahideen
in Afghanistan, who inflicted casualties on the
Soviet troops, which proved unacceptable in an
unwinnable war.
US involvement in the Lebanon and a Middle
East peace process likewise made little headway.
The US was not willing to use all its power to
coerce Israel and the Arab nations, and in any case
it was extraordinarily difficult to make much
progress on the Palestinian question. That part of
Carter’s Camp David agreements remained a
dead letter. Reagan sent 2,000 marines to the
Lebanon as part of an international peacekeeping
force after Israel’s invasion in 1982; in October
1983, 241 marines were killed in their barracks
by a fanatical Muslim. There was an outcry in the
US, and after a decent interval the marines were
withdrawn in 1984. The Middle Eastern prob-
lems were now too great, and US policy too inde-
cisive, for the US navy in the Mediterranean and
a few hundred marines to provide a solution.
The liveliest area of foreign policy was in
Central America and the Caribbean. In October
1983 marines were sent into the island of
Grenada to remove an illegitimate left-wing
regime. Since Grenada was a member of the
British Commonwealth, Margaret Thatcher was
much annoyed. More serious was US intervention
in Central America. Here Reagan and Secretary
of State Alexander Haig (and later his successor,
George Schultz) were fighting communism most
actively. The Sandinista victory in Nicaragua had
brought a communist-style government to power,
and the US had cut off aid; in El Salvador there
was a left-wing insurrection. The Reagan admin-
istration sent increasing quantities of military and
economic aid to the El Salvadorian government,
despite its appalling human-rights record. A war
by proxy was being waged in Nicaragua, with the
Soviet Union supplying the Sandinistas, and the
CIA from 1981 funding the opposition forces,
which became known as the Contras, operating
from bases in El Salvador and Honduras. With
memories of Vietnam still vivid, however, Reagan
faced strong public opposition, which was re-
flected in Congress. Most Americans cared less
about the excesses of the Sandinistas and the left-
wing rebels in El Salvador than about the possi-
bility that young US soldiers would be dragged
into the conflict, many of them to come home in
body bags.
Reagan’s convincing victory in the 1984 elec-
tion strengthened his hand considerably. In the
course of his second term he was to meet the new
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev five times. At
their very first meeting in Geneva in November
1985, the ice was broken. Reagan was a great
believer in the power of personal relations to
overcome set ideological positions. He came to
share Margaret Thatcher’s view that Gorbachev
was a new kind of Soviet leader with whom it
would be possible to negotiate on a more trust-
ing basis. The various on-and-off arms-reduction
negotiations had achieved very little so far. On
the table since 1981 was Reagan’s ‘zero option’:
if the Soviets withdrew their SS20 and other
intermediate-range missiles in Eastern Europe,
the US would not counter them by sending over
Pershing and Cruise missiles to Britain and other