Requiem for the Reagan Doctrine

Abstract

redictably, the Reagan Doctrine led the administration into a political and moral morass. Far more than a set of specific policy prescriptions, the Reagan Doctrine provided the intellectual framework— the Weltanschauung— that shaped the administration's external policies. As events proved, the Reagan Doctrine was an unsuitable basis for a viable post-Vietnam foreign policy because it failed to mobilize sustained support for American engagement abroad; it could not be implemented without circumventing established constitutional and political norms, and it ignored the shifting balance of world forces that underscored the continuing erosion of the United States' postwar political and economic hegemony. Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory rested in large measure on his pledge to arrest the country's declining prestige and to conduct a tough-minded foreign policy backed by a restored consensus. Yet, when the Iran-Contra scandal broke — severely crippling Reagan's presidency two years before his term expired— friends and adversaries alike regarded the United States as not only weak but also hypocritical. The administration's grasp of world politics, in its own way, was as flawed as the Carter administration's. The Iran-Contra hearings highlighted the administration's failure to rebuild the postwar foreign policy consensus that Vietnam had shattered. What was the Reagan Doctrine? How did it compare with the policies of other postwar administrations? What was wrong with it? The answers