Reagan Doctrine

Doctrines have been a prevalent form of foreign policy in U.S. history. This study seeks to explain their origins by examining the Reagan Doctrine, pledging aid to anticommunist guerillas in the Third World. Based on original research and interviews with numerous individuals in the Reagan administration, the author applies two alternative explanations: "realist" theory, focusing on the international level of analysis, and "elite beliefs" theory, focusing on individual political leaders and their beliefs. What he finds is that while each perspective is necessary to explain the Reagan Doctrine, neither is sufficient by itself.

The decade from 1981 through 1991 saw the remarkable transition from a renewed U.S. confrontation with the Soviet Union to the end of communist rule and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. This turning point is now history, history that is the foundation for what has been occurring between the United States and Russia and for what will evolve. In this book, one of America's foremost specialists on Soviet affairs provides a major contribution to our understanding of U.S.-Soviet relations. Raymond L. Garthoff picks up this story from his earlier account of the rise and fall of the detente of the 1970s. Covering the period of 1969 through 1980, Detente and Confrontation (first published by Brookings in 1985) studied American policy toward the Soviet Union under the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, and Soviet policy toward the United States. This new book turns to the final chapter of American relations with the Soviet Union in the succeeding decade, 1981-1991, bringing to an end boththe final period of American-Soviet relations and the story of the Cold War. The Great Transition features a detailed account of relations during the Reagan and Bush administrations and the Soviet leadership from the end of Brezhnev's rule through the revolutionary transformation of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. Through his unusual access to many formerly secret Soviet documents, declassified American documents, and interviews with key American and Soviet officials, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Garthoff provides a rare, authoritative analysis of recent events. He examines the turn from renewed confrontation in the early 1980s to a new detente in the late 1980s in the interaction of theUnited States and the Soviet Union. The interrelationships of domestic factors and foreign and security policies in both countries are examined, as are the involvements of both powers with other countries around the world that in

Did Ronald Reagan and his policies engineer the defeat of international communism, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the elimination of decades of nuclear confrontation? Or, did the Reagan presidency simply benefit from decades of bipartisan military, economic, and political opposition to Soviet policies? Both positions are explored by Reagan aides and leading scholars of the period.