Question

What term did historians apply to Reagan’s efforts on the economic front?

Answer 1

Welcome to OpenStudy!

Answer 2

Ronald Reagan summary: Ronald Reagan was the 40th president of the United States. He was born in Illinois in 1911. He attended Eureka College on an athletic scholarship, and received a job as a sports announcer for a radio station in Iowa. Reagan joined Warner Brothers Studios in 1937 under a seven year contract. He appeared in more than 50 movies, and he also served as a Screen Actors Guild president for several years. As an actor he is considered to have had a good career among B-list movies. As he aged and became interested in politics, Reagan became increasingly more conservative. In 1966, Regan ran as the Republican candidate for governor of California, and the won the election. He was re-elected in 1970 and served a second term.

Reagan was not successful in winning the Republican nomination in the elections of 1968 or 1976, but he was successful in 1980. He defeated Jimmy Carter in the election, and at the age of 69, became the oldest elected president. In 1981, an assassination attempt was made by John Hinckley, Jr., but Reagan survived the attempt. During his first term, Reagan was kept busy with the Cold War, and created the Strategic Defense Initiative to develop weapons based in space to protect the United States against Soviet attacks. He also took a strong stance against labor unions as well as ordered the Granada invasion. Reagan ran for re-election in 1984 and beat Walter Mondale. He is often seen pictured with his dogs as well as his horses in casual settings. Reagan died in 2004

Answer 3

Reagan did not merely react to these alarming events; he developed a broad counteroffensive strategy. He initiated a $1.5 trillion military buildup, the largest in American peacetime history, which was aimed at drawing the Soviets into an arms race he was convinced they could not win. He was also determined to lead the Western alliance in deploying 108 Pershing II and 464 Tomahawk cruise missiles in Europe to counter the SS-20s. At the same time, Reagan did not eschew arms control negotiations. Indeed, he suggested that for the first time the two superpowers drastically reduce their nuclear stockpiles. If the Soviets would withdraw their SS-20s, the United States would not proceed with the Pershing and Tomahawk deployments. This was called the ‘zero option.’

Then there was the Reagan Doctrine, which involved military and material support for indigenous resistance movements struggling to overthrow Soviet-sponsored tyrannies. The administration supported such guerrillas in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola and Nicaragua. In addition, it worked with the Vatican and the international wing of the AFL-CIO to keep alive the Polish trade union Solidarity, despite a ruthless crackdown by General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s regime. In 1983, U.S. troops invaded Grenada, ousting the Marxist government and holding free elections. Finally, in March 1983 Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a new program to research and eventually deploy missile defenses that offered the promise, in Reagan’s words, of ‘making nuclear weapons obsolete.’

At every stage Reagan’s counteroffensive strategy was denounced by the doves. The ‘nuclear freeze’ movement became a potent political force in the early 1980s by exploiting public fears that Reagan’s military buildup was leading the world closer to nuclear war. Reagan’s zero option was dismissed by Strobe Talbott, who said it was ‘highly unrealistic’ and offered ‘more to score propaganda points…than to win concessions from the Soviets.’ With the exception of support for the Afghan mujahedin, a cause that enjoyed bipartisan support, every other effort to aid anti-Communist rebels fighting to liberate their countries from Marxist, Soviet-backed regimes was resisted by doves in Congress and the media. SDI was denounced, in the words of The New York Times, as ‘a projection of fantasy into policy.’

The Soviet Union was equally hostile to the Reagan counteroffensive, but its understanding of Reagan’s objectives was far more perceptive than that of the doves. Commenting on the Reagan arms buildup, the Soviet journal Izvestiya protested, ‘They want to impose on us an even more ruinous arms race.’ General Secretary Yuri Andropov alleged that Reagan’s missile defense program was ‘a bid to disarm the Soviet Union.’ The seasoned diplomat Andrei Gromyko charged that ‘behind all this lies the clear calculation that the USSR will exhaust its material resources…and therefore will be forced to surrender.’ These reactions are important because they establish the context for Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascent to power in early 1985. Gorbachev was indeed a new breed of Soviet general secretary, utterly unlike any of his predecessors, but few have asked why he was appointed by the Old Guard. The main reason is that the Politburo had come to recognize the failure of past Soviet strategies.

The Soviet leadership, which initially dismissed Reagan’s promise of rearmament as mere saber-rattling rhetoric, seems to have been stunned by the scale and pace of the Reagan military buildup. The Pershing and Tomahawk deployments were, to the Soviets, an unnerving demonstration of the unity and resolve of the Western alliance. Through the Reagan Doctrine, the United States had completely halted Soviet advances in the Third World — since Reagan assumed office, no more territory had fallen into Moscow’s hands. Indeed, one small nation, Grenada, had moved back into the democratic camp. Thanks to Stinger missiles supplied by the United States, Afghanistan was rapidly becoming what the Soviets would themselves later call a ‘bleeding wound.’ Then there was Reagan’s SDI program, which invited the Soviets into a new kind of arms race that they could scarcely afford, and one that they would probably lose. Clearly the Politburo saw that the momentum in the Cold War had dramatically shifted. After 1985, the Soviets seem to have decided to try something different.

It was Reagan, in other words, who seems to have been largely responsible for inducing a loss of nerve that caused Moscow to seek a new approach. Gorbachev’s assignment was not merely to find a new way to deal with the country’s economic problems but also to figure out how to cope with the empire’s reversals abroad. For this reason, Ilya Zaslavsky, who served in the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies, said later that the true originator of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) was not Mikhail Gorbachev but Ronald Reagan.

Gorbachev was widely admired by Western intellectuals and pundits because the new Soviet leader was attempting to achieve the great 20th-century hope of the Western intelligentsia: communism with a human face! A socialism that worked! Yet as Gorbachev discovered, and the rest of us now know, it could not be done. The vices Gorbachev sought to eradicate from the system turned out to be essential features of the system. If Reagan was the Great Communicator, then Gorbachev turned out to be, as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, the Grand Miscalculator. The hard-liners in the Kremlin who warned Gorbachev that his reforms would cause the entire system to blow up were right.

But Gorbachev had one redeeming quality: He was a decent and relatively open-minded fellow. Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader who came from the post-Stalin generation, the first to admit openly that the promises of Lenin were not being fulfilled. Reagan, like Margaret Thatcher, was quick to recognize that Gorbachev was different.

Even so, as they sat across the table in Geneva in November 1985, Reagan knew that Gorbachev would be a tough negotiator. Setting aside State Department briefing books full of diplomatic language, Reagan confronted Gorbachev directly. ‘What you are doing in Afghanistan in burning villages and killing children,’ he said. ‘It’s genocide, and you are the one who has to stop it.’ At this point, according to aide Kenneth Adelman, who was present, Gorbachev looked at Reagan with a stunned expression, apparently because no one had talked to him this way before.



Reagan also threatened Gorbachev. ‘We won’t stand by and let you maintain weapon superiority over us,’ he told him. ‘We can agree to reduce arms, or we can continue the arms race, which I think you know you can’t win.’ The extent to which Gorbachev took Reagan’s remarks to heart became obvious at the October 1986 Reykjavik summit. There Gorbachev astounded the arms control establishment in the West by accepting Reagan’s zero option.

Yet Gorbachev had one condition, which he unveiled at the very end: The United States must agree not to deploy missile defenses. Reagan refused. The press immediately went on the attack. ‘Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Talks Collapse as Deadlock on SDI Wipes Out Other Gains,’ read the banner headline in The Washington Post. ‘Sunk by Star Wars,’ Time‘s cover declared. To Reagan, however, SDI was more than a bargaining chip; it was a moral issue. In a televised statement from Reykjavik he said, ‘There was no way I could tell our people that their government would not protect them against nuclear destruction.’ Polls showed that most Americans supported him.

Reykjavik, Margaret Thatcher said, was the turning point in the Cold War. Finally Gorbachev realized that he had a choice: Continue a no-win arms race, which would utterly cripple the Soviet economy, or give up the struggle for global hegemony, establish peaceful relations with the West, and work to enable the Soviet economy to become prosperous like the Western economies. After Reykjavik, Gorbachev seemed to have settled on this latter course.

In December 1987, Gorbachev abandoned his previous ‘non-negotiable’ demand that Reagan give up SDI and visited Washington, D.C., to sign the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. For the first time in history the two superpowers agreed to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.

The hawks were suspicious from the outset. Gorbachev was a masterful chess player, they said; he might sacrifice a pawn, but only to gain an overall advantage. Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus even charged Reagan with ‘fronting as a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.’ Yet these criticisms missed the larger current of events. Gorbachev wasn’t sacrificing a pawn, he was giving up his bishops and his queen. The INF Treaty was in fact the first stage of Gorbachev’s surrender in the Cold War.

Reagan knew that the Cold War was over when Gorbachev came to Washington. Gorbachev was a media celebrity in the United States, and the crowds cheered when he jumped out of his limousine and shook hands with people on the street. Reagan was out of the limelight, and it didn’t seem to bother him. Asked by a reporter whether he felt overshadowed by Gorbachev, Reagan replied: ‘I don’t resent his popularity. Good Lord, I once co-starred with Errol Flynn.’

To appreciate Reagan’s diplomatic acumen during this period, it is important to recall that he was pursuing his own distinctive course. Against the advice of the hawks, Reagan supported Gorbachev and his reforms. And when doves in the State Department implored Reagan to ‘reward’ Gorbachev with economic concessions and trade benefits for announcing that Soviet troops would pull out of Afghanistan, Reagan refused. He did not want to restore the health of the sick bear. Rather, Reagan’s goal was, as Gorbachev himself once joked, to lead the Soviet Union to the edge of the abyss and then induce it to take ‘one step forward.’

This was the significance of Reagan’s trip to the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987, in which he demanded that Gorbachev prove that he was serious about openness by taking down the Berlin Wall. And in May 1988 Reagan stood beneath a giant white bust of Lenin at Moscow State University, where, in front of an audience of Russian students, he gave the most ringing defense of a free society ever offered in the Soviet Union. At the U.S. ambassador’s residence, he assured a group of dissidents and ‘refuseniks’ that the day of freedom was near. All of these measures were calibrated to force Gorbachev’s hand.

First Gorbachev agreed to deep unilateral cuts in Soviet armed forces in Europe. Starting in May 1988, Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan, the first time the Soviets had voluntarily withdrawn from a puppet regime. Before long, Soviet and satellite troops were pulling out of Angola, Ethiopia and Cambodia. The race toward freedom began in Eastern Europe, and the Berlin Wall was indeed torn down.

During this period of ferment, Gorbachev’s great achievement, for which he will be credited by history, was to abstain from the use of force. Force had been the response of his predecessors to popular uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. By now not only were Gorbachev and his team permitting the empire to disintegrate, but they even adopted Reagan’s way of talking. In October 1989, Soviet foreign ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov announced that the Soviet Union would not intervene in the internal affairs of Eastern Bloc nations. ‘The Brezhnev Doctrine is dead,’ Gerasimov said. When reporters asked him what would take its place, he replied, ‘You know the Frank Sinatra song ‘My Way’? Hungary and Poland are doing it their way. We now have the Sinatra Doctrine.’ The Gipper could not have said it better himself.

Finally the revolution made its way into the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, who had completely lost control of events, found himself ousted from power. The Soviet Union voted to abolish itself. Leningrad changed its name back to St. Petersburg. Republics such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine gained their independence.

Answer 4

tl;dr - Reaganomics