Abstract
Of all areas of public policy, that of defence was perhaps the most important for the Reagan administration. The President came to office in 1981 determined to regenerate American power after a decade marked by external defeat and internal disarray. During the 1970s, the United States had lost a war, the presidency had been tarnished, and the Carter administration had talked of malaise. The new administration saw these problems as temporary and attributed them to what was characterised as a ‘decade of neglect’. The implication was that any decline in American power was the product not of long-term secular trends in the international system, nor of changes in the instruments of influence in international politics, but simply of the failure of the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations to devote sufficient resources to the maintenance of American military strength. Concomitantly, reversing the decade of neglect became a leitmotif of the new administration. The Reagan administration defined its main tasks as regenerating American power, reestablishing national confidence and vitality, and placing the United States in a position to negotiate from strength rather than weakness. The main purpose of this chapter is to consider the extent to which the Reagan administration succeeded in these tasks.
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Notes
D. Yankelovich and L. Kaagan, ‘Assertive America’, in W. Hyland (ed.), The Reagan Foreign Policy, A Foreign Affairs Reader (New York: Meridian for Council on Foreign Relations, 1987) p. 11.
W. W. Kaufmann, ‘A Defense Agenda for Fiscal Years 1990–1994’, in J. Steinbruner, Restructuring American Foreign Policy (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1987) p. 57.
H. Haftendorn, ‘Toward a Reconstruction of American Strength: A New Era in the Claim to Global Leadership?’. in H. Haftendorn and J. Schissler (eds), The Reagan Administration: A Reconstruction of American Strength (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988) p. 8.
F. Long, D. Hafner and J. Boutwell (eds), Weapons in Space (New York: Norton, 1986) pp. 351–3.
Quoted in J. Newhouse, The Nuclear Age (London: Michael Joseph, 1989).
On this distinction see A. L. Horelick and E. L. Warner III, ‘US Soviet Arms Control: The Next Phase’, in US Soviet Relations: The Next Phase (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) pp. 225–56.
B. W. Jentleson, ‘The Lebanon War and the Soviet-American Competition: Scope and Limits of Superpower Influence’, in S. L. Speigel, M. A. Heller and J. Goldberg (eds), The Soviet American Competition in the Middle East (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1988).
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© 1990 Dilys M. Hill, Raymond A. Moore and Phil Williams
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Williams, P. (1990). The Reagan Administration and Defence Policy. In: Hill, D.M., Moore, R.A., Williams, P. (eds) The Reagan Presidency. Southampton Studies in International Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20594-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20594-3_10
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