Christopher Hitchens on U.S. Foreign Policy Under Ronald Reagan and the Media (1983)

• published: 17 Mar 2014
• views: 2680

The foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration was the foreign policy of the United States from 1981 to 1989. It was characterized by a strategy of "peace through strength" followed by a warming of relations with the Soviet Union, and resulting in an end to the Cold War when Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power. As part of the policies that became known as the "Reagan Doctrine", the United States also offered financial and logistics support to the anti-communist opposition in central Europe and took an increasingly hard line against socialist and communist governments in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua. The invasion of the Caribbean island Grenada in 1983, ordered by President Reagan, was the first major foreign event of the administration, as well as the first major operation conducted by the military since the Vietnam War. President Reagan justified the invasion by stating that the cooperation of the island with communist Cuba posed a threat to the United States, and stated the invasion was a response to the illegal overthrow and execution of Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop by communist rebels. The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) appealed to the United States, Barbados, and Jamaica, among other nations, for assistance due to the ongoing military rule in the country. In the end, U.S. forces suffered nineteen fatalities and 116 injuries, as the defenders were said to be well prepared, but the United States was victorious. Grenada's Governor-General, Paul Scoon, announced the resumption of the constitution and appointed a new government, and U.S. forces withdrew that December. While the invasion enjoyed public support in the United States and Grenada it was criticized by the United Kingdom, Canada and the United Nations General Assembly as "a flagrant violation of international law." The date of the invasion is now a national holiday in Grenada, called Thanksgiving Day. According to David Remnick in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost reforms opened Pandora's Box of freedom. Once the people experienced reforms, they wanted more. "Once the regime eased up enough to permit a full-scale examination of the Soviet past," Remnick wrote, "radical change was inevitable. Once the System showed itself for what it was and had been, it was doomed." Without a tyrant in control anymore, like Gorbachev's predecessors, nothing could hold the Soviet Empire together anymore. In December 1989, Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush declared the Cold War officially over at a summit meeting in Malta. The Soviet alliance system was by then on the brink of collapse, and the Communist regimes of the Warsaw Pact were losing power. On March 11, 1990 Lithuania, led by newly elected Vytautas Landsbergis, declared independence from the Soviet Union. The gate to the Berlin Wall was opened and Gorbachev approved. Gorbachev proposed to President George H.W. Bush massive troop reductions in Eastern Europe. In the USSR itself, Gorbachev tried to reform the party to destroy resistance to his reforms, but, in doing so, ultimately weakened the bonds that held the state and union together. By February 1990, the Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year-old monopoly on state power. Soviet hardliners rebelled and staged a coup against Gorbachev, but it failed. Boris Yeltsin rallied Russians in the street while Gorbachev was held hostage. By December 1991, the union-state had dissolved, breaking the USSR up into fifteen separate independent states. Boris Yeltsin became leader of the new Russia. In her eulogy to Ronald Reagan at his funeral, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whom Reagan worked very closely with during his tenure in office, said, "Others hoped, at best, for an uneasy cohabitation with the Soviet Union; he won the Cold War — not only without firing a shot, but also by inviting enemies out of their fortress and turning them into friends.... Yes, he did not shrink from denouncing Moscow's 'evil empire.' But he realized that a man of goodwill might nonetheless emerge from within its dark corridors. So the President resisted Soviet expansion and pressed down on Soviet weakness at every point until the day came when communism began to collapse beneath the combined weight of these pressures and its own failures. And when a man of goodwill did emerge from the ruins, President Reagan stepped forward to shake his hand and to offer sincere cooperation." For his role, Gorbachev received the first Ronald Reagan Freedom Award, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_policy_of_the_Ronald_Reagan_administration