The Reagan Doctrine: Monroe and Dulles Reincarnate?

HE RECENT TALK OF A REAGAN DOCTRINE in support of anti-Soviet "democratic revolution" must be examined in the light of enduring principles and past manifestations of the underlying impulse before it can be applied meaningfully to an analysis of U.S.-Soviet relations. Insofar as it is a dynamic version oftraditional containment, it recallsJohn Foster Dulles's strategy of rollback-cum-liberation. Only this time the net is cast out wider: the theater is no longer limited to Eastern Europe but encompasses the Third World at large. The means, too, have been enlarged, from propaganda only in the 1950s, to propaganda plus military assistance and "humanitarian aid" in the 1980s. At the same time the ambition has dwindled: regaining Angola for democracy does not rate liberating Poland from communism. Neither is Central America worth East-central Europe, when the criterion is the balance of world power and the impulse is more than parochial preoccupation with one's backyard. With attention focused on Central America, we are back in the strategic universe of the Monroe Doctrine. Although U.S. power has grown well beyond dependence on the Royal Navy for implementing it, a diminution is again in evidence: the globally imperial America, which fought Hanoi's regional imperialism in Southeast Asia, has shrunk to something resembling the regionally imperialistic United States of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The analogy of Vietnam has been invoked by both the opponents of the current policy and its supporters. The former see the Central American policy as fraught with the threat of military involvement, the George Liska is professor of political science at TheJohns Hopkins University. This is the third in a series of articles on U.S.-Soviet relations for the SAIS