Farewell to Reagan: New Beginnings Are Not Needed

«very new president comes to office determined to provide the nation with a foreign policy that he can legitimately call his own. This temptation has been all the more irresistible since 1948, as most election years have coincided with international crises that left the country with a sense of danger or a taste of failure: Soviet interventions in Czechoslovakia in March 1948 and Hungary in October 1956, the aborted Paris summit in May 1960, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident in September 1964; wars in Korea and Vietnam in 1952 and 1972, the Tet Offensive in January 1968, and hostilities in Afghanistan and Iran in 1980. Accordingly, every four to eight years, presidential campaigns bring to the foreign policy agenda promises of "new beginnings" designed to escape present dangers or reverse past failures. In 1980 Ronald Reagan's call for a new beginning readily captured the attention (and votes) of the nation. His eloquent evocation of America's economic recovery and political unity — at no explicit, or explicitly defined, cost — served to resurrect the once traditionally held images of national prosperity and confidence. His vigorous campaign against detente and arms control — both denounced as fatally flawed—helped display an assertiveness and a pride that the country had apparently found lacking in prior years. These, remember, were to be the years of renewal. Reagan's immoderate optimism about U.S. potential and values, and his blunt pessimism about Soviet realities and ideology, aimed at ending a